CoV NDA has been lifted.

Except that that is not how it works at all. ED affects total percentage of an enhancement of a given effect on a power, it has nothing to do with reducing the effects of individual enhancements at all. And it would be a serious mistake to think that it does so. Also the 100/100/85/15/15/15 method doesn't hold at all for any example I've seen, or even match the in game numbers. It in fact sometimes overstates and sometimes understates vs the in game numbers by a significant margin.

There are 4 types of enhancements described by Positron as follows:

For each Schedule listed above there are two reduction points listed. And these points are important because they indicate the points at which the total value of an enhancement effects begin to reduce.

For example, looking at Schedule A, those reduction points are 70% and 100%. What happens is this. If you have a total enhancement effect valuation of less than the first reduction point, there is no reduction. It is when the total valuation goes above the reduction points that reduction occurs. The type of enhancement does not matter in terms of reduction (TO/DO/SO). Just the total valuation.

The portion of the total valuation between the first two reduction points (70% and 100% for Schedule A) is reduced by a small percentage. But the portion of the total above the second reduction point is reduced by a very large percentage.

My use of numbers from in game has shown that the fall off rates differ for Schedule A and Schedule B (C&D to me are who cares items), and they differ depening on the total valuation as well. A total valuation above RP1 and below RP2 will have its portion above RP1 less affected than if the total valuation were above RP2 would have its portion between RP1 and RP2 affected.

Damage is affected because there's not much gain to slot beyond 3 slots. But if you have fewer attacks slotted to use 3 Dam, 1 End, 1 Recharge, 1 Acc you can come real close to your older 1 Acc, 5 Dam slotting's DPS (Damage Per Second).

Accuracy is not affected much, as I don't think there are any powers worth putting more than two Accuracies in even today.

RES is affected, but is also not worth slotting beyond 3.

DEF is somthing however that there is still value in slotting for 6 DEF. Why? Consider that we will be in a situation of what I call slot-glut (having more slots than we know what to do with). Slotting those 3 more slots will net you 1.7% DEF. Now this is less than pool defenses, but consider that Powers and Pools are still left at a precious commodity level. So that while you could get Stealth, Hover, Combat Jumping and Weave you're giving up all your power pools and 6 powers to do this. Whereas you'll have extra slots that you'll need to use somewhere. And 1.7% more DEF can let you get some other pools, for the cost of some slots.

The Endurance reduction makes you net about the same on End usage vs End Recovery if you take Stamina and only 3 slot it.

I disagree on Aid-Self. For it to be useful you need to be not getting hit, which well since you'll get hit more... and Aid-Self has an interrupt time. It won't help in combat.

I agree with most of the rest of what you say.

Circ, that was the most awkward explanation of this I think I've seen to date.

Okay... ED in a nutshell

For DOs, there isn't any noticable change until the 6th slot, and even that's not too big a deal.

First two SOs, work fine, just like always.
Third one works at 85% of full power, according to the numbers I've seen. A bit of a drop off, but not all that noticable.
Anything beyond that works at 15% of expected power. Which is a bit less than a fully powered Training Origin.

+s and -s change things up a bit, but not too much. The concept is still the same.

In other words, anything beyond a third SO of a given type in a power gives practically trivial returns.

What this means:

For damage. You lose quite a bit of your front-loaded damage as you swap out damage for recharge and endurance, but over time, it kinda comes around, in more frequent, cheaper attacks. You still come out losing a bit, but it's not the shattering blow you expect. No matter what States thinks, not many people are going to rush out to slot the secondary effects like slows and defense debuffs, and for good reason. Build-Up and Aim will become a Blaster's new best friends, if they weren't already. They need a way to get that boss on his back in a hurry, before he squishes them flat.

For defense. Spin it however you want, it's another nerf. Most toggles will be 1 or 2 End/3DEF or RES, and passives will be 3END or RES, anything beyond that is not really going to have any noticable effect, with defenses as weak as they already are. 6-slotted Aid Self is probably going to be very popular, especially among the Defense-oriented sets. (Ice Tankers, SR)

For Hasten. No more perma-Hasten. Now you've got room to slot a Recharge reducer to make up for it, but unfortunately, there's been no sign that the ultra-long recharge powers are getting some relief to make up for this, or the fact that anything past the third recharge in a power gets greatly diminishing returns, on top of the fact that recharge enhancers already naturally have diminishing returns.

For Stamina. 3 slots is pretty much the limit. We are getting a bit of an endurance break to make up for this, but a lot of the post-ED builds are giving most powers an END enhancer, to make up the rest of the difference.

With regard to more powerful enhancements, it is a neat idea. Basically, they let you get to the virtual cap (3 SOs worth of enhancement) faster. Instead of 3 SOs though, you'd only need 2 50% enhancers to get the same effect, freeing up slots for something else, either to be moved to a new power, or another enhancer of a different type in that power. You could add a 3rd 50% enhancer, but it's going to be subject to the same diminishing returns as a 4th SO.

You could end up with 1ACC/2DAM/2REC/1END, and pretty much cap your Damage and Recharge in an attack, with a few 50% enhancers, or slot a Reistance toggle 1END/2RES, and be at max defense, and have another slot to put elsewhere, if you've got a way to move it.

All around, I'm not happy with ED. It accomplishes little at great expense. It doesn't balance the power sets, or discourage standardized templating, just gives the new standard templates a bit more variety in the type of enhancements used. It removes options in the name of diversity, and that seems a very foolish thing to do.

With that in mind, at this point, I know it's 90% certain to go in. Some things I think need to be added to make this work:

More enhancement types. Damage Buff Enhancer, Resistance Debuff Enhancer, Recharge Debuff Enhancer, Recharge Buff Enhancer. The best secondary effects are ones we can't slot for. The ones we can are usually pretty trivial, or only occur a small fraction of the time. A few Damage Buff Enhancers in Build-up and Aim would be a godsend to Blasters looking to front load damage better. A sonic blaster with a few powers slotted out for Resistance Debuff wouldn't do much damage himself, but he could possibly turn the rest of his team into a wrecking crew.

A change to Defense and Resistance Sets to reclaim some lost ground. Scrapper secondaries aren't too bad off, only because they're already marginalized to the point they may as well not exist anyway, but the Tanker hate has got to stop. It was hard enough to find good Tankers without driving them to quit en masse with continuous nerfing.

A reexamination of recharge times, now that perma-Hasten is no longer a factor, and 3 recharge reducers is pretty much max.

A massive change to the respec system. For when that Invuln tanker hits his mid 20s and realizes all those slots he put in RPD and Temp Invuln are doing no good at all. Or when someone adds a 4th slot to Stamina or Health expecting it to actually, you know, do something useful. Even if they do a good job telling people how this system works (and I'm not holding my breath on that one), it still creates a lot of chances for people to be misled into making inadvertant bad decisions, and they need a way to change them, once they're made.

That's a fairly loaded question.

Currently there are two basic types of enhancements, those that follow an 8.35%, 16.66%, 33.33% progression per enhancement for Training (TO), Dual (DO), and Single (SO) respetively, known as Schedule A. And those that follow a 5%, 10%, 20%, Schedule B.

For starters, they're adding in two new enhancement schedules, one for Knockback and one for Interrupt Reduction. I personally think no one really cares about those two, because I can't see anyone realistically slotting more that two of either of those, ever. In most cases, one of either is likely more than enough - especially with the new schedules for them.

From there the question becomes how are Schedules A and B affected as those changes affect the game as a whole.

Basically its like this, currently Schedule A effects that are increasable effects (Damage, Acuracy, Hold Duration, etc.) start out at 1/3 of their maximum power and can be increase to 2/3 of full power with 3 SOs and full power with 6 SOs.

By contrast a Schedule A decreasable effect (Recharge, Enduance Reduction, etc.) starts at full power, and with three SOs can be decreased to 1/2 of full power, and with 6 SOs it can be increased ton 1/3 of full power.

Schedule B, I believe, has only increasing effects (Defense, Damage Resistance, etc.) These effects start at 1/2 of their full power and can be increased to 3/4 with 3 SOs, and full power with 6 SOs of the same effect.

The problem is that the devs felt what I'm referring to as "full power" above as being too powerful. They felt we could do too much damage, be too accurate, spend too little end, get too much defenses, use our powers more often than they were intended to be used, etc.

So they toned down what full power is.

3 SOs of the same type will get you about 96% of the same net effect they got you before using 3 SOs. For Schedule A that means doubling or halving your base effect (well 96% of halving or doubling). For Schedule B that means multiplying your base effect by 1.5 times (well 96% of 1.5 times).

After that, any additional SOs you might slot for that affect will raise the boost by roughly a total of another 10% to 15%. Which means you can no longer triple or third your Schedule A effects or double your Schedule B effects. So slotting beyond 3 SOs for most effects becomes questionable at best.
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Circeus, Friendly/Neighborhood/Site/Admin
Starmaster, Mutant/Blaster/Energy/Fire
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Seriously, I hate math. It's not that I can't do it, I just find it really trivial and boring and I wish I could get more excited about it. That being said, about the only time you will get me to do it is when money is involved and I need to crunch numbers for my personal gain. Games, no matter how great, have never drawn me into using math other than for the necessary mechanics of the game (which is almost always kept at the fundemental level).

My reason for explaining this is that I have no idea what that spread sheet means exactly. Yes, I understand the new cap that they are intending and the value of decreasing returns for the over-using of same type enhancements for any given power, but what I haven't been able to decipher is the degree to which this change will affect game play.

While I understand that we will do less damage, have lower defenses, and hit opponests less, how noticable will this be? When thinking of that answer then, how will these changes reflect in the hints that we were just given about stronger enhancements (Am I wrong on that) to allow us to have a more rounded power system in regards to diversifying the enhancement structure of our individual hero's build.

What I mean is, do the decreases in the most common enhancers that people use (Damage, Accuracy, Defense, End Reduction, ect...) become offset when I can attack from farther away, knockdown foes more frequently, hold/stun/disorient longer, ect, ect, ect...

Before I am ready to complain and cash in my chips, I would like to know the answers to that. Can anyone help with this?

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Check Out My Blog: The Comic Book Observatory
Herodotus Frost-- Magic/Blaster; Electric/Cold
Creon-- Natural/Scrapper; Darkness/Super
Bow Hunter-- Tech/Blaster; Archery/Devices

And if anyone wants to see a battle vs the Ghost of Scrapyard...

Its not the best demo, and I think it was killing the Sharkhead Isle server while we were doing it:

http://www.net-marks.com/cohstuff/scrap.zip
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Circeus, Friendly/Neighborhood/Site/Admin
Starmaster, Mutant/Blaster/Energy/Fire
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Enhancement Diversification Spreadsheet:

http://www.net-marks.com/cohstuff/edcalcs.zip

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Circeus, Friendly/Neighborhood/Site/Admin
Starmaster, Mutant/Blaster/Energy/Fire
Mighty Quinn, Magic/Tanker/Ice/Stone