Author: RonJ73
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A Guide to Enhancements – Post Issue 6 (Enhancement Diversification)
One of the cool things about City of Heroes is that you can customize the effectiveness of your powers through the use of Enhancements. These enhancements drop off enemies and you can also purchase them in stores. Different enhancements make certain aspects of certain powers more effective.
Since Issue 6 went live, the developers have implemented a “diminishing returns” system on enhancements, making them a little more complicated to deal with. But as with most things, we’ve found ways to make it work.
Lets start by introducing you to the various enhancement classes types and what they do. They will be broken up into 4 classes, which will be explained later.
Class A:
Accuracy: This will increase your chance to hit a target.
Confuse: When used on a power with the confuse ability, like the Illusion Controller’s Deceive power, this will increase the duration of the confuse effect.
Damage: This will increase the damage output of your attack.
Defense Debuff: On powers that result in a debuff to defense, such as the Radiation Blast powers, this will lower the target’s defense even more.
Endurance Modification: This enhances both the ability to drain endurance and your ability to recover endurance. Certain powers that both drain AND recover endurance will benefit in both categories from this enhancement.
Endurance Reduction: This will make the enhanced power cost less endurance to cast.
Fear: This will increase the Fear duration on powers that have a fear effect, such as Fearsome Stare.
Fly Speed: This will allow you to increase the flight speed on powers that enable you to fly, like Fly and Hover.
Heal: This will make your healing powers heal more hit points.
Hold Duration: This will enable your hold powers to contain your targets longer.
Immobilize Duration: This will enable your immobilize powers to contain your targets longer.
Intangible: This will enable your intangibility powers to last longer (like Phase Shift)
Jump: Powers that increase your ability to jump will allow you to jump higher (Hurdle, Super Jump, Inertial Reduction)
Recharge: This will decrease the recharge rate of powers.
Run Speed: For powers that increase your running speed, this will increase it more. (Sprint, Super Speed, Swift)
Sleep: This will increase the duration of powers that cause their victim to fall asleep.
Stun: This will increase the duration of Disorient effects.
Taunt: This will increase the duration of Taunt effects.
To Hit Debuff: This will increase the effectiveness of Accuracy Debuff powers.
Class B:
Defense Buff: This will increase the effectiveness of powers that buff Defense.
Damage Resistance: This will increase the effectiveness of powers that buff Damage Resistance.
Range: This will increase the range of certain powers. This cannot be used in Melee powers.
To Hit Buff: This will increase the accuracy bonus granted by powers that increase the target’s accuracy.
Class C:
Interrupt Reduction: This decreases the amount of time that an interruptible power can be interrupted. NOTE: This will NOT decrease the activation time, just the window of opportunity that the power can be interrupted.
Class D:
Knockback: This will increase the distance that a foe will be knocked back by a power that has the knockback effect.
Now for the numbers: These numbers can also be found online at: http://home.comcast.net/~veggiemedley/ED.htm
DUE TO FORMATTING ISSUES ON THE FORUM, CLICK THE ABOVE WEBSITE TO SEE THE CHART.
As I mentioned earlier, the enhancements were broken down into “Classes” each class of enhancements affects powers with different values. Most enhancements fall into Class A, with a few Defensive enhancements in Class B. Class C and D only contain 1 enhancement type each at the moment.
Class A # of Slots TO DO SO
Accuracy 1 8.325% 16.66% 33.33%
Confuse 2 16.65% 33.32% 66.66%
Damage 3 24.975% 49.98% 95%
Defense Debuff 4 33.3% 66.64% 100%
Endurance Mod 5 41.625% 81.97% 105%
Endurance Red 6 49.95% 95% 110%
Fear
Fly
Heal Run
Hold Sleep
Immobilize Snare
Intangible Stun
Jump Taunt
Recharge To Hit Debuff
Class B 1 5% 10% 20%
Defense Buff 2 10% 20% 40%
Damage Resistance 3 15% 30% 56%
Range Increase 4 20% 40% 59%
To Hit Buff 5 25% 49% 62%
6 30% 56% 65%
Class C
Interrupt 1 10% 20% 40%
2 20% 40% 80%
3 30% 60% 112%
4 40% 80% 118%
5 50% 98% 124%
6 60% 112% 130%
Class D
Knockback 1 15% 30% 60%
2 30% 60% 120%
3 45% 90% 168%
4 60% 120% 177%
5 75% 147% 186%
6 90% 168% 195%
What does all this mean?!
Ok, so as a really short version of what all this means, the developers have made it so that once you reach a point where you’re approaching 100% effectiveness of an enhancement, it’s going to start working less. Most of our enhancements are going to fall in Class A and Class B. Class C consists of only Interrupt Reduction, Class D contains only Knockback.
Based on the numbers here, Training Enhancements aren’t affected at all. They don’t offer enough of a bonus to get anywhere near the “cap” that the developers have cooked up. So at your early levels, before you can use Dual-Origin or Single-Origin enhancements, slot the Training enhancements up as much as you want.
The complications begin as you start using Dual-Origin and Single-Origin enhancements.
For Dual-Origin enhancements, you can slot up to 4 in the Class A enhancements without seeing a noticeable drop off of effectiveness. In Class B, you will start noticing a drop off when you get to 5 enhancements. The game was supposedly balanced using DO enhancements as a guide. So DO enhancements really didn’t take much of a beating from the Enhancement Diversification in Issue 6. In general, while using Dual-Origin enhancements, slot your powers however you would like. For the most part, each enhancement will be just as effective as the last, up to 5. The 6th enhancement in each power, if it’s the same as the other 5, will have a noticeable drop off of effectiveness.
Single-Origin enhancements are where the controversy bubbled up. For some bizarre reason, while developing the game, the developers didn’t think that all the players were going to max their powers out with SO enhancements. We did. This is where you’re going to see a marked drop off as you get into slotting more than 3 of the same type of enhancement in each power.
When slotting 3 of the same SO enhancement, you’ll see a slight drop off of effectiveness. Before Issue 6, 3 Class A SO Enhancements would yield a 100% increase in effectiveness. After Issue 6, that increase is 95%. The difference at that point is negligible. However, this is where it becomes ugly. Any MORE enhancements of the same type places into a power will make the drop off EXTREMELY vast. Pre-Issue 6, 4 Class A SO Enhancements would yield an increase of 133.33%. Now, with Issue 6, that same configuration will yield a 100% increase.
What’s that going to do?
Well, the vision the developers had for this is that it would make people more inclined to use a variety of enhancement types in powers that accept a bunch of different types. For example, where a lot of Blasters were slotting their attacks with 6 Damage SO enhancements, now they would be inclined to slot a couple Accuracy enhancements or something that helps the secondary effect of their powers (knockback, slow, etc).
The problems this causes are powers that only accept one type of enhancement, such as Stamina, Health and Resist Physical Damage. It comes to a point where there’s just no point in slotting more than 3 Single Origin enhancements in one of these powers. However, this is only in the late game (Post level 22, when SO Enhancements become available). The downside of this is that many players won’t want to put more than 3 slots in these powers, thus making the EARLY game quite a bit more difficult. Resist Physical Damage, for example, is nice to have 5 or 6 slotted with DO enhancements early in the game. However, after level 22, you’ve now basically wasted 3 of those slots, unless you RESPEC your character.
So what do we do?
Well, the bottom line of this guide is that you should look into alternate means of making your powers more effective. If you tended to “6-slot” damage in the past, you might consider 3-slotting damage, 2-slotting accuracy and 1-slotting recharge. This will bring your power back more often and you’ll hit better. If you’re a healer, and you’re concerned that your heals will be less effective, add a recharge and an endurance reduction to your Heal Other, or add an Accuracy to your Twilight Grasp for you Darkity Dark Defenders. There are always ways to make these powers effective, no matter how “nerfed” they feel.
As much as this is a pain to deal with, especially for those of us used to the “old way”, there are still tons of options for slotting your powers. Use your RESPEC on the Test Server and test things out to see how well they work for you.
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