Umbral

It's still largely applicable to Defenders and Corrs, but it gets a bit fuzzier when you start getting into stacking debuffs. Cryo ammo is still largely pointless thanks to the general uselessness of -rech in PvE, but Chem ammo can do some completely crazy things when properly stacked. Where damage is concerned, Incendiary Ammo is still on top by a substantial margin but, against single hard targets, you're definitely going to want to go with either Chem (for -dam) or standard rounds (for -res from Piercing Rounds) because of the lower base damage and higher secondary effect mods for those ATs.

Nope, I'm taking the concept you had and then applying a gains oriented mentality to it to see how poorly it would actually work out. Just look at AE and all of the stuff that has happened to it. Any system that provides you with a method of acquiring more by altering how you play or who you play with is going to be exploited beyond all imagining.

You're proposing a system that would encourage veteran players to have new players on their team. Just being on a team with a vet (especially one that would actually care about any additional in-game benefit for having a non-vet on a team) will do nothing to teach a new player about the game so it's not encouraging the desired behavior. If anything, it would get new players onto teams with vets that are more interested in rewards than onto teams with vets that are actually interested in teaching people (whether new or old) how the game works because the reward focused individuals are going to go out of their way to get new players on their team (to maximize rewards) while the altruistic players are more likely to just go about their normal playstyle and assist new players in their traditional manner (because they're not out for the massive payout).

Actually, they're not. Human beings are actually quite predictable. This is why psychology can actually predict behaviors rather than just plot them on a graph.

Please note that nowhere did I actually use any absolute terms so your attempt to lecture me on statistic is completely pointless. I assure you, I know statistics. I do statistics for fun. I also do psychology, so attempting to lecture me there is similarly pointless.

The problem with your entire concept is that you're assuming a lot about how players would actually use the system.

The first problem is, quite explicitly, that you're attempting to attach a definitive in-game reward for something that the players that you're attempting to encourage are already doing largely due to altruistic motives that wouldn't be substantially bolstered by attaching an in-game reward to it. By attaching an in-game reward to it, you're not making it any more likely that the people that already do it with altruistic motives will continue to do so. The only people that you're really going to encourage to perform this behavior are those people that care about maximizing rewards.

The second problem is that you're not encouraging the correct behavior. The only behavior you're encouraging is having new players on team. There is a very big difference between simply having new players around and actually teaching them about the game. Just look at the AE and all that it did to the new player base.

If you honestly want to design a reward system, you have to look at the behavior you're rewarding in the first place. You haven't. If you had, you would actually realize how bad this idea actually is.

There is a rather large difference between "being welcomed" and "vet players looking to maximize their rewards grabbing you and telling you to stay put while they destroy this map because it increases their rewards". The system you have in mind wouldn't do anything to make vet players welcome new players any more than giving level 50s greater rewards for having lowbies on their team.

Honestly, I've never seen much in the way of an anti-newbie sentiment (which is not the same as an anti-noob sentiment) amongst the CoX player base. In general, as long as someone is willing to admit that they're new to the game and want to learn about the strategies and mechanisms involved in the game, most players will teach them everything they need to know. The only times that I ever see veteran elitism are when running content and the newbie in question is an AE/farm baby (which generally tend to be players that obviously have no grasp of how the game actually works and stubbornly insist that they are the most intelligent people on the planet despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary) or the team is question is attempting to do a speed or master run (which a newbie shouldn't really be on in the first place). Other than those conditions, it's generally more along the lines of "You're new? Here, let me help you. You really want this power, this power and this power. That one is rather pointless. Try doing this instead of that while you're fighting. How are you slotted? Try this slotting mentality. You don't have the money? Here's a few million to get you started."

I was actually speaking in general terms rather than specific terms.

Regeneration debuffs are not the major achilles' heel of Regen anymore, not since the set began depending on click powers more than passive regeneration. Do you honestly believe that most people that know */Regen care about regen debuff resistance any more than people that know */Fire care about end drain resist or slow resist? The more important debuff resistance would be recharge debuff resistance for pretty much the exact same reason that DDR is important to defense based sets: it stops a single debuff type from rendering an important mechanic of the set null.

As to whether there is a logical reason to provide some debuff resistance to */Regen, I think the better question is to ask whether there is a reason for */Regen to be the only set out there without any debuff resistance. Every other set has some degree of debuff resistance to both primary (DDR in sets with native +Def) and secondary (-rech resist in sets with sets with 1 click power) attributes. What makes */Regen so different that it's assumed that it should have absolutely none (not even any substantial pseudo-debuff resistance like +def)? Is there any logical foundation for */Regen to not have debuff resistances? */Regen doesn't even have any of the exotic protections that sets with few debuff resists sport (like confuse prot, fear prot, +per) that would equate to roughly the same thing. While every other set in the entire game got debuff resists over the course of the years, */Regen was pretty much ignored. Is there actually a reason why or is it just a feeling that */Regen doesn't deserve buffs because it was awesome way back when?

That's always been something that bothers me. If they know there is a discrepancy, why don't they take measures to address the discrepancy rather than waiting for data mining to catch up to what is already known (and, yes, they have to wait for the data to be created so that they have something to datamine in the first place)?

I'm not even entirely sure that average leveling speed is even a decent measure of performance for specific sets within an AT anyways since leveling is so often done in a group and therefore minimizes the differences between the sets in question (due to dilution of importance while on a team), especially if it can somehow be used as evidence for not buffing a set that is known to be underperforming and has been known for a long enough time to make it largely common knowledge (pre-MA buff, I had met pugs that agreed that MA was rather limp wristed). Average leveling speed is useful for things like inter-AT balancing, but I honestly have to wonder how applicable it is for intra-AT balancing.

Take Swap Ammo and always leave Incendiary Ammo on. Incendiary Ammo provides you with substantially more damage even in the worst conditions for it than any other ammo type out there and you cannot get access to Incendiary Ammo without taking Swap Ammo.

The only reason it is hard to justifiably buff */Regen is because, from the calculated survivability models we've got, */Regen looks really good. The problem with this, as I said before, is that the weaknesses of */Regen are downplayed while the the strengths are built up within these models. The reasons you actually posit for not buffing Regen aren't even largely true, anyways.

The same thing applies to any other set out there. Mez effects and -tohit and +def help out everyone and, in the case of -tohit and +def, help out other sets more than Regen because Regen doesn't have gobs of defense to stack up with it.

I'm not entirely sure how you got here, but that's a very strange place to arrive from "DA/Parry are awesome for Regen". DA/Parry is awesome for every single set in the entire game. It's not something exclusive to Regen. Reassessing Regen could quite easily be done exclusive of Kat and BS, if only because the devs don't make an assumption that anyone that rolls Regen is going to roll with BS or Kat.

Because DA/Parry causes a reduction in outgoing damage, Kat and BS still perform perfectly well for sets that don't need additional defense because it allows the user to focus entirely upon dealing damage. It's largely the same reason that Siphon Life's +heal is still useful to a Regen or a WP even though it's a drop in the bucket compared to what they're already getting.

You really need to start paying attention to the state of the game if you honestly believe this. Regen gets the least out of IOs than almost any other set in the game largely because, of the things that IOs provides gobs of (+rech, +def, +regen, +recov, +hp), Regen only really benefits from +rech and +def. Every other set out there benefits from every single one of those (with a few sets not really seeing much out of +recov or +hp), and a number of those sets see a helluva lot more from +def because those sets are actually capable of softcapping whereas Regen can, at most, hope for 30-35% with very heavy +def slotting. IOs are one of the areas that Regen loses ground, and it loses a lot of ground there.

As far as I know there has been no dev commentary on the lack of debuff resists in Regen. I know that Arcanaville has made some comments (generally along the lines of "it's not needed" or "debuffs are the set's weakness", neither of which has settled well with me), but, as far as I've been able to tell, Castle has been steering clear of Regen despite the regular commotion that ensues any time that debuff resistances or the differences between WP and Regen are brought up (which happen with almost lunar regularity).

I can recall one substantial buff since the nerfs of bygone dev eras: the MoG change. It used to be a completely useless power that only ever served to assure you of a death a few minutes after you activated it. Now it's one of the hallmark powers of the set that, if people don't take it, we scream at them for it. It's the only one I can really think of, and I'm pretty sure every other set has seen more love since then, but it's unfair to say that the devs have simply left */Regen fallow when they haven't.

That's actually wrong. So very, very wrong. Both sets get Fast Healing at the exact same values (WP gets the added benefit of Regen debuff resist /shakefist) so that's a wash. The only real difference is between Integration + IH compared to RttC.

Integration provides 245% +regen when fully slotted (.5 + (1 * 1.95)). With a single target, RttC provides 244% +regen when fully slotted ((1 + (.25 * 1))* 1.95). That's close enough to simply call it equal. It doesn't require saturated RttC to equal Regen's +regen. It requires but a single target.

Saturated, slotted RttC provides 683% +regen ((1 + (.25 * 10))* 1.95. Slotted Integration + Instant Healing provides 1235% +regen (2.45 + 6 + (2 * 1.95)). The question as to which set is better at +regen depends entirely upon 2 variables: how many targets can you maintain around you to feed RttC and how low of a downtime can you manage on IH? The fact that it's so much easier to saturate RttC than it is to get the massive amounts of +rech required to get IH down below a 180 second recharge, I generally state, rather unequivocally, that WP has the better +regen capabilities (the question as to which set has the better damage recovery set up is an entirely different question that definitively answers in favor of Regen).

It really depends on what the point of your build is and how tight it is. The AV combo is still capable of putting out respectable AoE DPS while being substantially more useful against hard targets thanks to Sweeping Strike being a cone. The difference is largely in the fact that, in order to get much use out of Sweep, you have to take 2 more powers and slot up 3 more than you would otherwise (assuming you took Power Slice as a default and either ignored or set muled it like most do). Sweep is a nice combo, but when you're talking tight builds that can only manage to take 5 attack powers at most, Sweep can get left out due to build constraints.

Considering that the only thing that Regen really needs is some debuff resistances along the same lines as they've given every other set in the game, the "it was strong back then so we shouldn't touch it now" logic doesn't really stand (and any argument that */Regen is designed around having debuffs as a weakness can stuff it considering how friggin' common debuffs are nowadays).

There's also the fact that, even if Regen got a little bit of a buff, it still wouldn't be the most powerful set out there thanks largely in part to the new sets that have been made: WP and Shield (and possibly Fire now as well). WP does everything Regen does, plus more, without requiring any skill to accomplish anything. Shield is just ridiculous for effective contribution. And neither set really has an appreciable weakness.

The biggest problem that I've seen in any attempt to numerically justify buffing Regen is that, in every survivability model out there, damage recovery mechanisms are massively overvalued (or straight up mitigation mechanisms are undervalued, either or). Regen is a set that survives almost entirely based off of damage recovery so any numbers that you get from those types of analysis are going to reflect that flaw. Even more so, the existing survivability constructs that I've seen have no real way of attaching any real value to those things that Regen needs most (debuff resistances) so you can't really claim that Regen is somehow handicapped by a lack of debuff resistances that every other set out there has (which seem to really be handed out largely arbitrarily as token gestures of powering up specific powers, except in the cases of defense sets that need it to avoid cataclysmic defense debuff cascade).

It is not necessary to use the combos to get any use out of Dual Blades and, if you have the massive levels of recharge required for it (more than perma-Hasten levels, iirc), it's actually optimal for you to ignore the combos in favor of a better attack string. However, for a vast majority of play, it's going to be better for you to make sure that you get some use out of the better combos (Sweep, Attack Vitals). You can pretty easily get away without touching the earlier, crappy combos (Weaken, Empower) because they don't really generate much of a payout for the use of suboptimal attacks.

The regen rate limit is 2000/2500/3000% depending on AT (support at the bottom, brutes/tanks in the mid-range, and scrappers/stalkers at top) while the recovery cap is substantially less (800/650/500%, iirc, with the same order as before).

That's not really true in the slightest. Rest has a 6 second animation time that you must complete before you see any gains from using it. You then have to wait up to 12 seconds after that to see the gains. If you are at 50% endurance at the end of a fight, you will have to wait for 12 seconds in order to get back to full. If you are at 90% endurance, it's 7.2 seconds.

This entire argument also ignores the entire issue of endurance sustainability within combat. It's incredibly easy to run out of endurance while in the middle of a fight, even with Stamina, if you're not spec'd heavily for end redux. Rest would do nothing for in-combat resource recovery.

Considering games that actually use such a model, the ability to recover a vast majority of your resources after combat by enforcing a non-combat downtime hasn't discredited the use of in-combat resource recovery mechanisms because, if you have only out-of-combat recovery, you are forced to take breaks from play on an almost constant basis. If you have in-combat recovery mechanisms, you can keep on going at little to no loss of real effect.

How long does a normal fight generally last? 30 seconds or thereabouts? If you expend all of your resources in that fight, your fight "cycle" is going to be roughly 40 seconds (30 seconds of fight, ~10-12 seconds of downtime). If you invest in recovery mechanisms, you'll have greater staying power in the fight and, even if it takes longer to defeat the target, you're still going to make out like a bandit because your fight cycle is faster because you're not having to recover all of your resources after every fight.

What people are arguing for isn't the simplified fight or die model that you seem to be interpreting them as arguing for. Rest, even with an instant recharge, still represents a loss of time (which is exactly what death is). If you survive with 100% of your resources intact, you can can head to the next fight without waiting. If you survive with 10% of your resources intact, you have to spend the next 17 seconds using Rest. The use of Rest is, in and of itself, a cost that you are having to pay. If you manage your health and endurance intelligently, you won't have to pay the cost in downtime as often, which still provides a reason for you to take powers that supplant Rest as a primary source of after combat recovery while those same powers still provide you with in combat recovery capabilities. Removing the recharge wouldn't somehow remove the impetus to make a character more self-sufficient. All it would do would be to make Rest a viable but still suboptimal alternative, which, unless the devs honestly want everyone to take Stamina and/or a powerset with an endurance assistance power (which I think they've outright said they don't want to do), would be an intelligent thing to do.

It was pushed for in beta, but Castle didn't put it in because the only way he could do it without making it too convoluted was to have the FE portion of the damage crit independently of the normal damage. I would have been perfectly happy with that, but apparently Castle wasn't.

Well, all that I'm talking about is giving the [Swap Ammo] power the Aim functionality, not the name or animation (there actually is an animation for Swap Ammo that was removed when they changed it). The in-set justification would be that you swap in a magazine of superior rounds of some kind (hollow points, dumdum). The power "Aim" suggests that you're aiming, but it doesn't have to be named the same thing, especially on a set where Aiming isn't really thematically appropriate (just look at Sonic and Psy).

While FE is active, all of your AT's primary and secondary attacks (and possibly APP/PPP attacks as well, not sure) have a 100% chance to deal roughly 45% of their base damage as additional fire damage. Anything that would increase your base damage (i.e. any source of +dam) is going to increase the amount of damage that FE contributes. Because of how it works, whatever +dam you have in the power that you are activating augments the damage that FE "provides".

For example, imagine an attack that normally deals 100 lethal damage. With no +dam and FE active, it would deal 100 lethal damage and 45 fire damage. With 95% +dam and FE active, it would deal 195 lethal damage and 87.75 fire damage. Essentially, FE provides you with roughly a 45% increase in your total DPS because it simply makes you attacks deal more base damage.

As I said before, those powers are pseudo pet powers which operate by summoning a single entity and then having that entity spam numerous separate attacks throughout its lifespan. While it appears to a player as a single DoT because it ticks like crazy, it is not in fact the same thing because each tick is, in fact, a separate attack. The DP "DoTs" are single powers that tick multiple times so the Scourge is only checked once (at the time of activation) for all ticks rather than individually for each tick, so it is no better for Scourge than a non-DoT standard attack.

You explicitly said in your "radical idea" that you believed Dual Pistols wasn't designed with Blasters in mind. Designing with a specific AT in mind is assuming that there was an intentional design decision to build it around the capabilities of a specific AT. You can't say that it was designed with a specific AT in mind (stating that it was intentional) and then claim that it doesn't matter whether it was intentional or not.

Depending on which mechanism you're referring to, you're either very wrong or very correct. The tech to alter chances for effects to occur based on powers affecting you had to be built from the ground up. The tech to grant multiple powers with a single power pick has been around since issue 3 (Kheldian form powers grant the form attacks upon taking the power).

The reason I always saw even from the devs themselves was that enough players complained about the cycling annoyance of the single click power that they changed it. The exploit might have been one reason, but if they honestly wanted to leave it as a cycling click power, they probably would have simply kept it that way. I base my claim on the fact that, from the very beginning, beta testers were complaining about the cycling Swap Ammo and the fact that, when asked about it, Synapse specifically said they were looking in to it and, eventually, that players would likely enjoy what was coming next. To me, that says that the devs changed it due to player desire for a different effect. They might have changed it due to the exploit as well, but I'm pretty confident that the bigger reason what the fact that so many players disliked the cycling ammo set up.

I can tell you quite explicitly why Dual Pistols doesn't have Aim: Swap Ammo took its place.

Back in Ye Olde Dual Pistols Beta, Swap Ammo was a click power that caused you to cycle between the various ammo types with each activation (cryo>incend>chem>off, iirc). With that system, the devs wouldn't have been able to fit in Aim functionality without removing another power from the set (which wasn't likely to happen since it's a blast set and needs blasts to do its job). The lack of Aim wasn't really an issue because it was assumed that the combined effects of the the higher base acc andl increased damage from incendiary ammo would make up for the lack of Aim (here's a hint: it didn't). Eventually, there was enough player outcry that the devs switched to the current system (take Swap Ammo and you get the 3 separate toggles). In doing so, the entire reason why the set didn't have Aim (Swap Ammo did something and was taking up that slot) was removed.

As to whether the set was designed for Corrupters and Defenders rather than Blasters is up to debate. There has been no evidence from a reliable source that give credence to that position. There is some circumstantial evidence (in the lack of Aim and reliance on secondary effects) that it could have been true, but the same can be said of Sonic Blast (quite possibly more so since Sonic Blast is almost entirely reliant on the secondary effect whereas Dual Pistols is only tangentially reliant on it) and we know that Sonic Blast was designed by Cryptic knowing that they wanted it on both ATs available at the time. Considering Dual Blades and Kinetic Melee (which were both prolif'd to Brutes even though the devs explicitly stated that they weren't really Brutish sets because they didn't want to go through the hassle of making Brutish versions of the set, whether with new numbers or simply new animations), it could be true that, very early in the development of the set, it was intended for Defenders and Corruptors (which doesn't really make sense since Maelstrom is a Blaster and uses DP), but likely such AT exclusivity was largely scrapped when numbers started getting tossed around.

Your other reasons are rather vague regardless.

Of first note, I'm not entirely sure that Scourge applies on a per tick basis after the attack actually lands. I know that the Rains can utilize Scourge for each tick, but that's because each "tick" is actually a separate iteration of the power cast by the pseudo pet. From what it looks like on the power information, the Scourge condition is determined at the time of activation rather than on a per tick basis.

Weaker secondary effects are just simply part of being a Blaster, so saying that they have weaker secondary effects is like saying that Willpower is designed for Tankers because they get better values out of it.

Crashless nukes are no more useful for Defenders and Corruptors than they are for Blasters. While Blasters may see some more use out of crashing nukes than Defenders or Corruptors do, they still see very little use regardless. Crashless nukes are simply a new design step the devs have taken because it makes sense within the confines of the overall design of the set (i.e. crashless nukes actually get used whereas traditional nukes see a painfully small amount of use considering their position).

The fact that the debuffs stack well (and, only then, the -dam debuff is the only one that stacks particularly well thanks to increasing comparative returns rather than diminishing comparative returns for the other effects) is just part and parcel with the fact that there are debuffs and non-Blasters get better value from them. The same argument as applies to the secondary effects before applies here: Blasters don't stack as well because they don't get values as high. It wouldn't matter if it was a set designed for Blasters or Defenders or Corruptors: the debuffs would stack better on the support oriented ATs simply because those values are higher. You could make the same argument for any set with debuffs (i.e. anything that isn't Arch, Fire, or AR), and I'm more than confident that none of those sets were designed without Blasters explicitly in mind.

The only real point you make is that the set doesn't have Aim, which isn't an issue of intended AT but rather one of an economy of powers, as I stated before. They could only fit 9 powers into the initial player tests of it. Swap Ammo took the place of Aim not because it was designed for Defenders and Corrupters over Blasters (Synapse actually explicitly stated that DP/MM was his favorite DP combo) but rather because they didn't want to pull out an actual attack for Swap Ammo.

In summation, it's really up in the air and you can make arguments for either side. I don't think the devs will ever tell us outright whether they intended Dual Pistols to be released for one specific AT and not for another. I don't think it really matters anyway. Dual Pistols has been released and whether it was intended to be for one AT or another, it's been proven rather well that it underperforms (to what extent it underperforms depends on who you talk to) for all of the ATs in question (compared to the other available options). Whether the intent was to make a set that is better for Defenders and Corruptors than it was for Blasters is irrelevant: if it sucks for one AT, it should be tweaked to make it a viable numeric option regardless of the original intent.