Umbral

Except that you're asking for the specific utility of a set that has already used up a rather large amount of development time to be expanded without expanding the utility of every other set out there. You can't simply say that DP needs more ammunition toggles without similarly suggesting that other sets should get something commensurate. Otherwise, the devs are providing a direct benefit for only a minute quantity of power combinations.

Except that that logic doesn't exist anywhere within the set. The set doesn't get any spectacular advantage for being able to swap out secondary effects and damage types. If anything, it pays too much, but that's a completely separate balance concern that has nothing to do with "let's add more!"

Except that you're suggesting an entire addition to the game that only serves to bolster a single set in a single mechanism. Even if the ammunition type were only useful in a single situation ever, you would still be increasing the power of the set because you'd be making it more useful. You simply add something and then arbitrarily expect it to be balanced. The ability to have an additional option automatically makes it more powerful than it would otherwise be because you're giving additional options to change it on the fly.

Except that you're asking for it to only be applied to a single power set. I can assure you that there have been similar suggestions throughout the life of this game to give additional damage type options to other sets: toggles that would change some lethal damage sets to get a bit of energy damage or fire damage or what have you. These were tossed out specifically because they are too specific of a mechanic that can't be applied to other players. Every temp power out there can be used by every character in the game. If you start putting in temp powers or craftable items that can only be used by a single powerset within just 3 of the archetypes in the game, you're asking for a general improvement to a specific powerset.

The problem is not in the implementation. That it could be implemented without much effort I am reasonably confident (though it would generate a huge reservoir of empty space for a those powers for a vast majority of the time). The question is whether it is both worthwhile and needed. Having prestige ammunition types doesn't fit either of those descriptions in my opinion because it involves the generation of a whole slew of temp powers and balancing calculations just to ensure that every once in a while some characters of a specific powerset within three archetypes can shoot five different ways rather than four. Four is plenty. We don't need another 3 different ammunition types that you have to unlock or craft for whatever reason just to give the set something even fancier than everyone else has.

The only way I'd support this is if there were a similar mechanism by which other powersets could get prestige mechanisms that provide a similar parallel benefit. Considering that that would require a crapload of work (though I'll be pleasantly surprised if that's what Posi is working on for his endgame), I doubt it would happen. They're not going to give Dual Pistols even more options than everyone else when they've already got that market cornered.

If you actually looked at Dark Nova or Bright Nova and understood what was going on, you'd realize that you have no clue what you're talking about.

First off, Dark Nova and Bright Nova can only be slotted for Endurance Modification, Endurance Reduction, Tohit Buffs, and Flight Speed. Black Dwarf and White Dwarf can only be slotted for Damage Resistance, Endurance Modification, Endurance Reduction, and Leaping. You cannot slot them for range, damage, or accuracy.

Enhancing the powers does nothing to the powers that you use while in those forms. Enhancing them for Endurance Reduction simply reduces the cost of the toggle itself.

There is no current way for enhancements to provide enhancement benefits to specific powers. The only way for a power to affect another power is either for a flag to be activated or for a global attribute of the player to be modified. The ammunition toggles only serve to provide a flag that increases the proc chance of the amalgam of effects in the Dual Pistols powers to 100% when the specific ammunition type is active.

The ammunition toggles do no have any effect upon the size or duration of the secondary effects in the powers. In fact, the size of those effects is governed exclusively by the slotting you have in that power. You enhance the size of the Incendiary Ammunition DoT when you slot any power for damage. It doesn't affect any power but the one you just slotted, but it does effect that DoT.

What you're suggesting has nothing to do with how the ammunition toggles work. Please shut up and learn what you're talking about first.

Except that you're misreading what I'm saying. They're not changing how the procs operate. All we know is that turning the toggle on switches something and modifies the proc rates of the powers themselves.

When you bring up the SO/IO difference, this is exactly what I'm talking about. IO builds completely outclass SO builds. If they didn't, there wouldn't be much point. You can run with an SO build, but you're going to be doing much worse than an IO build. Of course, an IO build takes either a long time or a lot of money (and oftentimes both) in order to put together. Unless gaining these prestige ammunition types was as difficult and costly as putting together an IO build, adding in additional ammunition toggles that are completely optional would make it so that the other ammunition toggles become completely defunct.

No, I'm suggesting that it will either be substantive or fractional. If the additional ammunition types provide a substantive benefit, bad things happen. If the additional ammunition types provide an insignificant advantage or only provide a significant advantage in a tiny number of situations, bad things happen. In the first case, bad things happen because will start having people complain that they need the new ammunition toggle at all times while other people complain that DP is getting a benefit from this, why not every other set? In the second case, it becomes an issue of "why bother?". You're not providing a spectacular aesthetic benefit because the ammunition variants aren't really all that different in appearance (minor coloration changes).

Which isn't really much of an advantage. In order to take advantage of it, you have to weigh the loss of Incendiary Ammunition's DoT and Standard Ammo's Piercing Rounds' -res against the damage resistances of every target they come across. That's not really an advantage when it requires that you have a near encyclopedic knowledge of enemy damage resistances and the ability to weigh your existing addition damage mechanisms against the damage you could be doing without them by using a different damage type.

Don't ever claim that something could be easily balanced, especially when you're referring to the ability to change damage type and secondary effects on the fly, especially as it applies to the capabilities to should be allowed access to beyond the basics of a set. There are so many variables associated with this (ease of acquisition, ease of use, specific capability, general capability) that you can't simply state "it will be easy to balance".

The core mechanic of Dual Pistols is already one of the least quantifiably balanced mechanisms in the game because no one, I doubt even the devs, have decided upon a universal value that they place on the ability to shift damage types and secondary effects.

Multi-axial balance is one of the most complex things out there and is oftentimes only able to be handled in a heuristic manner in which numbers are tossed out the window and everything is based on feel. If you want to see what "balancing based on feel" looks like, just ask anyone that played in the early days of CoX: it was pretty imbalanced and virtually all of the changes were big, nasty, and generated massive discrepancies. Heuristics are notoriously unreliable, which is why I'm glad that the devs have decided that numerical analysis is the way to go.

Except that Swap Ammo is the entire gimmick of the set. You may as well claim that no one needs to take the mez toggle in an armor set or can play a set to its fullest capabilities without the use of the secondary effects. Ammunition switching is the secondary effect of Dual Pistols. You can't simply add more options at any point without taking into consideration what that does to the balance of the set as a whole.

Technically, we don't know. All we know is that the ammunition toggles change the proc rate of the specific powers in DP in the specified manner. For all we know, it could be a binary change that simply modifies powers in a binary manner (either the proc chance is on or off). You can't draw the conclusion that just because the ammunition toggles modify the proc chances they can modify every proc chance in the game. If anything, that's less than likely (though, considering the work the devs intimated, it might be). I would put my money on the conservative bet that doesn't mean that every proc chance in the game is now a controllable variable.

Don't act as if the fact that a new system was designed in order to accomplish what Dual Pistols is accomplishing is going to open up the windows for all kinds of crazy stuff to happen. We're not even sure what the capabilities of the set are or whether they can affect powers that don't already have existing pre-programmed proc chances that are specifically designed to include that functionality. For all we know, it may be a specific mechanism designed exclusively for Dual Pistols to the exclusion of all others.

What you don't seem to be realizing in all of this is that the weapon customization has no effect upon game balance or how a set plays. It's purely cosmetic. Suggesting that just because you can switch a mace out for a wrench or because you can unlock a really kewl laser sword, you should be able to get an additional tactical benefit that would actually grant a specific, unique advantage that no other set gets access to is out of that domain. Weapon customization (which DP already has since you're able to change the model you're using to shoot with) is purely aesthetic. What your suggesting is not. There is no applicable precedent for this anywhere in game.

If the devs made it so that players could get additional temporary powers that would power up a specific powerset in a specified manner, they would be opening Pandora's Box because then they would need to do it to every set to maintain equity. Dual Pistols doesn't need new and interesting ammunition types. It already has 4, which is 3 more than any other set and 2 more than most people use. Adding in additional ammunition types that you have to unlock is simply a bad idea.

Except that you're making the existing powers substantially more complicated than they already are for a very fractional benefit. The existing mechanism works because you get access to the all of the modes that you use naturally. The power set is complete because you don't need anything external in order to see everything that the powerset does. Forcing players to go outside of the powerset in order to see what else a power can do is either going to force players to do that or piss people off because they'll want it from the very beginning.

Look at how pissed off some people get just because they can't have a costume piece at level 1. Now consider what will happen when you start doing that with things that actually have a substantive effect on gameplay.

It's not a question of "is it possible?". It's probably rather easy, though I'm not sure what mechanic the devs use to modify the proc chances of the special effects of the Dual Pistols powers, which might be rather complex (they had to program in a new one to do just that, which kind of boggles my mind when you consider that they could have just done the same exact thing by using combat modes like Dual Blades did). The appropriate questions are "is it worth it?" and "will this actually benefit the game?"

4 types of ammunition (Standard, Incendiary, Cryo, and Chem) are probably enough, especially since most people that actually care to analyze the set have already come to the conclusion that it's Standard or Incendiary. Unless the benefits of the additional powers are going to be more than either of those (at which point you approach the problem of it making other ammunition toggles pointless), it becomes a pure flavor addition or a hyper-specialized tactical option that is only useful in a small number of situations (which is what is currently happening to Cryo and Chem rounds thanks to the reduction in damage you experience by choosing them).

The problem is that adding these powers would require a decent deal of work. The Ammo toggles don't actually add the damage to your DP attacks themselves. What they do is set up a flag to modify the chance of your Dual Pistols attacks to do certain things.

Essentially, when there is no ammunition toggle active, your attacks have a 0% chance to do fire damage, a 0% chance to do the fire DoT, a 0% chance to do toxic damage, a 0% chance to do -dam, a 0% chance to do cold damage, and a 0% chance to do -spd and -rech, an (insert chance based on each power here) to knock the target down, and a 100% chance to deal lethal damage in addition to the base lethal damage. When you turn on Incendiary Ammunition, you reduce the chance of the knockdown/up the target to 0%, decrease the chance to deal the additional lethal damage to 0%, and increase the chance of the Fire DoT to occur to 100% (which means that it's a 100% chance for the 80% chance rolling DoT) and increase the chance of dealing fire damage to 100%.

Adding in a variety of new temp and/or prestige ammunition types would involve adding an entirely new suite of attributes to every Dual Pistols power just for a few powers that exist outside the set. Of course, this also means that you're supporting adding in specific benefits to a single power set that has a not-insubstantive effect upon game balance (an insubstantive effect would be just changing the visual effects of something, such as is accomplished with weapon customization).

This would be along the same lines as adding in various temp or prestige combos to Dual Blades. It requires a decent bit of work for a single set and has the ability to impact gameplay beyond aesthetic enjoyment.

The problem would be how to add it in a balanced manner while maintaining the enjoyability of the power. If they were going to add it, I think they would probably either add it as a temp power (whether craftable or as a reward for some TF/mish/whatever) or as an inherent power you get as part of a booster pack. Either is fine by me. The bigger problem is assigning the power numbers commensurate with the effect. If it did damage on par with Shield Charge, it would probably need to be on the same level of recharge as [Self Destruction]. Lower damage (maybe on par with Spin) would probably allow you to take the recharge down to 5-10 minutes.

In my design for Dark Blast (which was only tangentially mentioned), you're losing Torrent for a real tier 3 blast, losing Dark Pit for Aim, and losing Night Fall or Tenebrous Tents (i.e. one of the existing AoEs) for Dark Obliteration, which is a substantially more effective AoE for Blasters. Essentially, you're losing out on a bit of mitigation that would be out of place in a Blaster primary for a good amount of both ST and AoE damage that would be.

You're also ignoring the fact that I'm saying that just because something that is being gotten rid of in the primary that something in the secondary should be buffed to compensate. This makes no sense. You might as well argue that when IH got nerfed that Dark Consumption should have gotten a heal aspect to make up for it. Primaries and secondaries are designed to be exclusive of one another. Suggesting that the something in the secondary get buffed to make up for something that the primary is losing is simply idiotic.

First off, I am not recommending any loss of -tohit except that which is required by Blaster attribute mods and changes in dam/rech/end formulas which already exist. I have never suggested that the -tohit be replaced with -acc, and I said that I would suggest that Dark Blast lose either Tenebrous Tentacles or Nightfall (though I would probably get rid of Tenebroud Tents personally because an AoE immob in a blast set is kind of off).

The question is not whether "less burst for more mitigation" has precedent. It does exist (though if we're debating primaries rather than secondaries, it would be more appropriate to bring up Ice Blast). The question is whether there is precedent in proliferating a blast set like Dark Blast, as it stands now. Considering what the devs did to Psychic Blast when they brought it over, chances are that Dark Blast, if/when it gets proliferated, will look substantially different than the Defender and Corrupter versions because Blasters have a substantially different playstyle than Defenders or Corrupter do that requires certain things that Dark Blast doesn't have.

One of the reasons that Dark Blast is so powerful is because it isn't like other Blast sets. It's more focused on support and mez than it is on dealing damage. This approach works for Defenders and Corrupters because they've got decent mods for these types of things and that's their designated role in teams (with Corrs placing more emphasis on damage than Defenders but still providing a bulk of support to teams). It's for the same reason that we're not likely to see Illusion Control get ported to Doms without some very hefty changes or Dark Miasma ported to Controllers without some very hefty changes. There is a certain degree of standardization that a set has to go through before it is kosher to be used by another AT. The things I am pointing out are part of what I would do to implement that standardization and impinge upon the uniqueness of the set as little as possible.

Except that you're not losing something and gaining nothing. You're getting a specific benefit in exchange for other attributes (gaining Aim, etc.). Saying "the primary is losing some minor mitigation so we should give it to the secondary" doesn't even logically apply anyway.

The question is whether it would be a better functional fit for the AT than Build Up. I'd argue that it isn't because you really need to be able to survive for a more substantive period of time in melee than Blasters can.

Eh... I'd still say BU is a better option. Tar Patch would be rather... bad... with Blaster mods, not to mention that using it still draws aggro using it, which isn't particularly good if you're attempting to alpha strike.

I'm kind of curious where the 45% chance for KD/KU is coming from. The original Dark Pit doesn't have anything resembling that.

Standard Code Rant, otherwise known as, "it would take some serious coding in order to do this." Depending on how they did this, it might not actually. At most, it would require combining recall friend with Shield Charge/Lightning Rod. You target your ally, click the power, pick the location you're throwing him/her to, and then you deal damage to everything nearby.

It could work. It would be kewl. The question is whether there is actually a need for it, honestly.

I doubt that Dark Blast would make it to Blasters with Dark Pit in it. I'm more than confident that if/when it's proliferated, it's going to be modified in the same way that Psychic Blast was. Taking out Dark Pit for Aim, Torrent for Aim a more substantive tier 3 blast, and Night Fall or Tenebrous Tentacles for Dark Obliteration would probably be pretty likely. Everything else could remain as it is, modified for AT mods. There isn't any precedent for a control power as powerful as Dark Pit in any Blaster primary.

I still argue that Soul Drain doesn't fit into a manipulation set. It works as a replacement for BU for more survivable ATs, but it doesn't work when the best use is to provide a heavy alpha strike against an enemy group. Soul Drain would be about as effective for Blasters as it would for Stalkers, and you'll notice that Stalker Dark Melee has BU instead of Soul Drain.

Hurl Scrapper? I like it!

Well, it depends on which time you're referring to.

In I1, Integration had no +regen and what regen it had was still in IH. All of the +regen was fully enhanceable. Some time later, I believe I2, some of IH's +regen was pulled out and placed in Integration. A wee bit later, I believe I3, IH and Integration both got hit with the nerf stick when IH's values were reduced a bit and both IH's and Integration's +regen was split so that some of the value wasn't enhanceable and some of it wasn't. Then, in I4 if I'm not mistaken, IH was made into a click power with the same values as the toggle, only without being able to be made perma.

You're thinking Hail of Bullets. Executioner's Shot has a base acc of 1.25, compared to the rest of the set that has a 1.1 base acc.

Piercing Rounds really shouldn't be considered an AoE. It's best to consider it a single target attack with the ability to hit another target on occasion, just like Golden Dragonfly and Headsplitter for Scrappers. It's substantially easier than it used to be to catch additional targets in there, but the max targets is 3, so it's not like you can really capitalize on it all that much.

Let me help you out with this because you obviously don't know how Defiance 2.0 operates. There is a specific formula that the devs use that assigns the size of the +dam buff from Defiance based on the animation times of the attacks. The durations are also manipulated so that they last exactly 7.5 seconds after the attack finishes animating so that you can actually take full advantage of them. This was done so that, as long as you're saturating your attack string, pretty much every Blaster is getting the exact same +dam buffs. It's remarkably interesting actually.

Acting as if the set is somehow weaker because it's designed to get the exact same +dam buffs as every other blast set, not to mention that it's not just a Blaster set, is simply facepalm worthy. DP doesn't get anything special from Defiance that any other set doesn't already get. Defiance is something that they can tack on to any existing set in order to provide the Blaster bonus damage. It's not something that requires full rebalancing for lower damage.

Considering you thought that looked like gibberish rather than a correction of your incorrect information, I'm going to have to go with "you have no idea what's going on".

Well, it would probably help. I mean, you could always look at the in-game numbers or other sources of information and see if/when they sync with the existing information so as to make your information seem correct.

1. You're talking about being surrounded in a farm. That's not really the "normal" gameplay that this game is balanced around.

2. I never said anything about it being impossible to hit more than 2 targets. I said that you can get 3 on occasion. The only way to actually get to the cap and treat GD as a "real" AoE is to stack the enemies up (which is possible, if difficult). The AoE capability is a secondary benefit of an AoE power, which is why it doesn't follow the AoE damage formula.

3. If you can really find a pick of you hitting 10 targets with a single application of Golden Dragonfly, feel free. I'm game for seeing that. I'll still say that you can't compare them on the same level because the amount of target manipulation required to get 10 targets into the tiny area of GD is almost infinitely more than is required for FSC and Shield Charge. You can't simply assume that every attack on the planet that can hit multiple targets will have saturated targets, especially when it's literally impossible to fit that many targets in the area of effect without a bug.

The only times it lies near the middle are in SO grade damage comparisons using Incendiary and Standard Ammo. Incendiary gets competitive damage thanks to the rolling DoTs. Standard Ammo gets competitive damage because it get -res from Piercing Rounds (an attribute which does not apply when using any other ammunition). Cryo and Chem rounds actually do substantially less damage because they do not have any bonus damage, nor do they have -res, so all they have to work with is the base damage attributes of the set, which are only capable of less than average damage.

Now, consider this: if a set's base damage capabilities are supposed to be ignorant of damage type (because we don't penalize any damage type for being "better" like Fire or Energy, even though there are more enemies that have lower resistances for it) and ignorant of secondary effects (except for Sonic Blast, which would have to because it's throwing out -res), Dual Pistols has below average damage because the only times that the set is capable of achieving average damage is either by using its bonus damage secondary effect, which should allow it to achieve better than average damage because it's sacrificing secondary effect debuffs for additional damage, or its standard secondary effect, which only allows it to achieve average damage thanks to the specific mechanisms of a single power that serves as a force multiplier on a reasonably low recharge.

The best way to handle the entire thing would, honestly, be to just give PR's -res to every single ammo type, but I'm not entirely sure that's likely to happen. That way, ammo type only serves to control a small portion of your damage and which secondary effect you're generating rather than a great swathe of your damage capability that isn't even substantially better than simply sticking with your standard ammo.

Redraw doesn't have any effect upon the speed with which you can call up powers outside of the set (or, more accurately, powers that don't use the same weapon as the attack you previously used). What it does affect is the speed with which you attack with your weapon after you used that power from outside of the set. DP already has long animations. The redraw animation is little over a second long. Essentially, whenever you use a power outside of the set, you're forcing your next DP attack to take an extra second to animate. Do you really want your already slow attacks to take longer?

If the set were balanced around having lower damage, the set wouldn't follow the standard dam/rech/end formula. If you actually look at the numbers rather than what you want to believe about them, you'd see that. All of the attacks in DP (with the exception of HoB because it follows a different rule system) follow the standard dam/rech/end formula. Now look at Sonic Blast. Those attacks contribute -res so the damage is actually lower than would be indicated by the dam/rech/end formula. Sonic Blast pays for superior secondary effects with lower damage. Dual Pistols does not. The secondary effects are designed to be balanced exclusive of the damage of the set.

What hurts DP's DPS isn't the fact that it has a variable secondary effect with the ability to modify 30% of its damage type (which, comically enough, the devs have admitted doesn't have a substantive quantification as far as powerset design is concerned, which is why Psychic Blast follows the same dam/rech/end formula as Fire Blast and Archery); what hurts DP's DPS is the fact that the animations for all of the attacks are significantly longer overall, slowing the entire set down and reducing its damage over time. The fact that the set pointlessly sacrifices Aim in order to get access to what it should have from the very beginning (imagine having to take a power to get access to Fire's rolling DoT or Cold's -rech) is a secondary concern, because Aim doesn't have a significant effect upon damage. The primary usefulness is actually in the additional survival afforded to frontloading damage in a fight.

No, what I'm trying to create is a set that is well balanced, aesthetically appeasing and interesting to play. I have no designs on it being turned into "Archery 2". I'd much rather the set was simply capable of achieving the same level of average performance as we've come to expect from other sets and shouldn't lose any functionality just to have access to a trait that is fundamentally ingrained into the set.

Except that I'm not uniquely capable of seeing how the set doesn't work. A large number of people that actually know the numbers and have checked them out empirically rather than simply relying on gut reaction observation and "feel" that has as much to do with aesthetics as it does legitimate balance agree with me that DP is doing too little damage and isn't capable of enough utility to account for that lower damage. The only advantages that DP has, at the moment, are shiny newness and pretty animations. The ability to vary one damage type is a rather minor advantage because it forces you to change your secondary effect, lose out on PR's -res benefit (unless you change on the fly, which is demands a good deal of frenzied clicking), and have a commanding knowledge of enemy resistance types that you can call upon on the fly in order to take advantage of it.

Personally, I think it is. On most of my newer builds, I've made efforts to devote a slot to having it around. It just hurts really bad that */Regen has absolutely no debuff resistance and -rech debuffs hurt */Regen really hard. 20% resistance to */Regen's achilles' heel is completely worth a single slot as far as I'm concerned.

If I'm having to tweak an existing build to put it in, I generally just co-opt a slot from a power that used to have a 3 piece BotZ set. AoE defense isn't needed as much as the ability to reduce recharge debuffs, as far as I'm concerned.

Mids' doesn't handle rolling DoTs correctly. FSC really has a base damage of 121.44.

Mids' also doesn't have the proper damage on Shield Charge because it wasn't increased to account for the AT mods change. SC really has a base damage of 200.2 damage.

Golden Dragonfly deals 164 base damage in a 10' long, 20' arc. You can get 2, at most 3, target with a single application of GD and it requires a decent bit of placement. The hard cap on the number of targets is 10, but it's literally impossible to fit that many targets into the area of the effect so that number is pretty useless.

FSC, SC, and LR are all PbAoEs with 10' and 20' radii respectively. FSC can easily target all 10 targets for its target cap and SC and LR can easily target all 16 of their targets.

Don't attempt to compare a power that has a tiny bit of AoE capability as a tangential asset with powers that are legitimately AoE powers. You're comparing apples to oranges in an attempt to make the question of balance irrelevant. Welcome to the required Straw Man facepalm. If you're going to do it the same way next time, at least try to make it a bit harder to tell along with actually getting the numbers right. Maybe use Shadow Maul instead of Golden Dragonfly, because at least Shadow Maul is intended to hit multiple targets.