endurance causes more imbalance w/mage shield (in General)

or with AC, prot, AMF, EC, TSA, VA, MH/BoTH/...

Now that ranged damage and WA is down and overwhelming is much harder.

Agreed!

Endurance by itself is already absurd. A ToE grants enough aura to reduce damage less than or equal to 53.3% of its level by 75%, and 66.7% of the minion that it's on. ToE would be a lot more balanced if it was capped at 50% of the damage.

I concur.

Which is why I would like the aura from the ToE reduced 10% and see how that works.

But, get a CoC mage to melee and it quickly overwhelms the ToE. Look at Little Devil for an example. High level ToE vs high level IF/CoC. Who wins?

Yes, they are the extreme but it is high level vs high level.

CoC always beats Endurance.

The change that caused the problem was the reduced ranged damage.

I third that. ToE is the new RoBF as it stands now.

Is it really possible for anything OTHER than CoC to break through a ToE? I'm doing 1M a round maximum in ranged to unarmored minions with an x3750 ELB, 1.2M ST, and +13 BGs. To fully cap this damage, the target needs a level 1.88M ToE with aura, or 1.5M without. My tat is easily over 1.88M. With the introduction of AC and the mage shield, it becomes even easier to trim the damage down to subcap levels. Even above the cap, a 1.5M tattoo is trimming 600-750K. Per hit. It becomes even worse with spreadfire, since the aura, like the SoD, is completely unpenalized for multiple minions. A 1.5M tat can cut a 2.55M damage CoC down to a quarter of its original power. Without touching a mage shield. Toss in a TSA and you have the equivalent of a constant damage reduction tacked onto a massive percentage reduction. *cough*ROBFAMF*cough*.

How about turning the ToE reduction into some kind of the % curve that AMF has? Say scale that curve down by 75% to match the max reduction, then if the ToE level equals the amount of damage, then there's a 37.5% reduction (not 75% currently), reduction % is lower for higher damage and the % goes up (but slowly to 75%) if the ToE overwhelms damage.

That might require adjusting the level ToE grants though.

Let's get rid of the binary overwhelm/underwhelm concept of the ToE. Wouldn't that work even better?

OR, weird idea, make the aura just be continuous, but let the wearer have it be based on current overwhelm/underwhelm step-wise characteristics. That way, when stacking the aura with, say, an MgS, it wouldn't be so powerful. It would also make the position of the ToE more important = fun/tough choices!