Obitus

Elec is great, but it can't stack eleven billion Confuse mags on an AV. For specific high-end shenanigans like soloing the Phalanx in the LRSF, I can't imagine that Elec performs as well as a Mind does (on a Dominator). In that same scenario, I doubt that Static Field is as effective as Mass Hypnosis - though the former generally beats the latter in normal content. Elec as a whole set generally beats Mind in normal content, though Elec isn't exactly an AoE monster either. Confused mobs can still run out of e.g. damage patches. This was a source of annoyance for me on my Mind Dom, which couldn't find a way to consistently leverage Rain of Fire. When it comes to AoE kill speed, taunt auras and/or hard controls are pretty much irreplaceable. Blasters without either of those can mostly compensate through sheer brute-force burst damage, but even they will occasionally see scatter that slows them down. This is also why Brutes are generally preferred over Scrappers, for AoE kill speed; Scrappers don't have consistent access to taunt auras. I'm not married to any of my suggestions for Mind Control. Others in this thread and elsewhere have put forward good ideas. The main thing I wanted to emphasize with my suggestions is that you don't have to completely revamp the set's feel to make it perform significantly better. Just reducing Mass Confusion's recharge timer would be a huge boost. Giving the set consistent access to Containment, likewise, would help the average Mind player enormously, without substantially increasing the set's damage potential (which would remain the same in teams where Containment is already provided). On a similar note, I'm all for replacing Telekinesis outright with something that is both easier to use and consistently powerful, but the devs might not be on board with that; some people would complain about losing the flavor that the power provides.

Mind is anywhere from good to great on high-end Dominators, depending on your play style preferences. The set's strengths and the AT's mesh well; Mind offers a nearly unmatched variety of control effects, which Domination boosts to mag 6+, and then of course the Dominator's secondary offsets Mind's relative lack of damage output. If you want a character who can solo insane challenges, or a character who can solo all NPC factions with only minor variations in difficulty, then it's hard to beat Mind Doms. (Illusion Controllers are quite possibly the only real contender for "better than Mind Doms" at soloing things like hard TFs.) If, on the other hand, you want a build with great AoE clearing speed, you should pick something else. Or if you want something that will perform well without copious IO bonuses. On Controllers, Mind, well, it's hard to put this nicely; Mind blows on Controllers. What's funny is that for the first phase of the game's development cycle, everyone hated Mind because it didn't have a pet. That was the sticking point. "Controllers suck until they get pets, and Mind never gets one." So the devs listened to the pet-themed complaints and gave us ... Containment! But Mind sucks at setting up Containment too. It has a decent single-target rotation against hold-able foes, but virtually zero AoE Containment options. It also sucks at preventing scatter, which is hugely important on any non-melee AT (really any build without a taunt aura) that aspires to kill multiple targets in a timely fashion. I go back and forth about what the solution to these problems should be. If you give Mind an AoE immobilize (or another consistent anti-scatter tool), then you take away a crucial part of the set's flavor; you also arguably take away the major trade-off for having such a vast diversity of control types at its disposal. On the other hand, it isn't fair that MInd should lack both a pet and a consistent means of setting up Containment. On the other other hand, Mind's variety of controls is somewhat dampened by Mass Confusion's indefensibly long recharge timer; you basically have to alternate it with the AoE hold, which is fine until you run into a faction that's resistant to hold or confuse. So what I'd do is any/all of the following: Halve Mass Confusion's recharge timer. In a game that features Seeds of Confusion and Synaptic Overload, there simply is no rationale for MC's current state. Add some sort of flag/debuff to Sleep powers that will set up Containment even after the targets have awakened - say for 10 or 20 seconds. I don't know how feasible this is from a code standpoint, but it would help Mind builds deliver more consistent damage without completely freeing them of any scatter concerns. This buff also has the benefit of not scaling up much, if at all, in a team environment. Or add Containment to fear effects. Or give Terrify an Immobilize. Do something with Telekinesis. Again, I don't know how feasible it is to outright replace the power, given the cottage rule, but do something with it. If you can't change the fundamentals of the power (the unwieldy repel + hold), then at least consider adding a debuff that persists after the power's detoggled. Or maybe the player could be flagged with a synergy buff, similar to the effect Boxing/Kick have on Cross Punch, in return for simply taking Telekinesis (e.g. Total Dom lasts longer or has a shorter recharge if you have TK). Or maybe just increase the radius of the effect, so that TK doesn't constantly push secondary targets free of itself.

I only got interested in farming about two weeks ago, mostly as a build-optimization exercise (trying different builds to see how close I could come to the inf/minute record). Maybe I jinxed everyone, because the nerf came down right after I started paying attention. Anyway, prior to the nerf I was getting ~51 million per arc (5 missions), using @brigg's Comic Con Fire Farm (#2915). That was with the exemp + patrol experience "exploit." After the nerf, I'm getting a consistent 27.6 million for the same arc. The exact amount of the nerf will vary a little depending on the mix of minions to lieuts to bosses you kill over a given farming session, but half seems like a fair estimate. (The patrol XP exploit buffed INF gains by roughly 30%, so this latest patch nerfed even non "exploit" INF generation by ~30%, or 1 - (27.6 / (51 / 1.3)) = 0.2964.) More detailed numbers follow below the spoiler: But of course even those numbers don't quite tell the whole story, because farmers also get drops. Most of those drops aren't worth the effort to sell, IMO, but you do occasionally get valuable PvP recipes and/or a purple, along with some rare salvage. I'd guess, purely based on my gut feeling, that drops are worth an average of ~10 million over and above the 27.6 million INF I earn from kills, over the course of a single 5-mission arc, which takes a little less than 25 minutes for top-end farm builds. The bottom line is that farming will still be quite viable as a money maker, but speaking as someone who always made his money on the market, I can understand why people would be discouraged. The gains from marketeering can be much more impressive, certainly on a INF-per-time-played basis, though marketeering can also be tedious in a way that farming probably isn't, to most people. As for the net effect on the market, it's really hard to say. In principle, though, I'm glad that the HC devs are working proactively to counter inflation.

I'll echo Coyote and Hjarki here: Aurian's build isn't bad by any means, but it's what you might call "off-meta" at the moment - no procs to speak of, and even if you did use procs, the Spiritual Alpha would make them worse. Procs are particularly important on low-damage ATs like Controllers. In this case, you're missing even the low hanging fruit of a proc'd out Tesla Cage, which could easily do 300+ damage per cast. (400+ if you slotted for damage and/or used the Apocalypse proc in the power, but IMO Apocalypse is best in Lightning Storm here.) (Without Spiritual, you're not at perma-Hasten levels, which means that your build could, in fact, use the extra recharge from an FF proc or two. It might allow you to switch your Alpha slot.) Storm craves Musculature or Intuition Radial (probably the latter on a Controller), as Tornado's damage is only buffed through enhancement boosts, and LS could always use more damage too, of course. We had a very long and productive discussion about various Storm builds on the Defender forum a few months back; it's a worth a read: Also worth exploring the proc system, which is a bit obscure: Anyway, like I say, Aurian's build will perform well. There are approaches that will work better, but the OP probably won't be disappointed either way. I wouldn't have commented at all if it weren't for the wildly inappropriate tone of one of the responses above.

Oedipus sums up my feelings on the matter. I don't think Incarnate powers' availability will or should be significantly changed at this late date, but it's worthwhile to discuss how exactly Incarnate powers affect gameplay. What's interesting is that there's almost an inverse relationship between Incarnate powers' usefulness to the individual, and their ability to trivialize content: Judgment has a 90-second timer and has just enough oomph to clear even-con minions. On its own, this isn't a game changer; solo players probably just treat it as gravy or flavor - but put 8 Judgments on a team and suddenly most normal AoE powers feel superfluous. Lore has ten minutes of downtime for every 5 minutes of pet goodness. These pets can put out obscene DPS, but the recharge timer encourages solo players to ration their use. You can't use them, for example, to raise your difficulty settings on a consistent basis. The pets are also quite likely to die if you're a solo player facing large spawns of foes. In teams, none of these caveats apply; 8 Lore-wielders means an average of 2.67 Lores deployed at any given time. Destiny is probably the closest thing we have to a power that is both strong enough on its own for individual players to plan around, and yet also scales well in teams; we all know that CoH has always heavily favored stacked buff/debuff - but even stacked Destinies don't come close to the visceral qualitative effect of stacked Lore and Judgment, in large part because Destiny doesn't really offer much in the way of stackable offensive strength. Sure, you can stack Ageless for copious +recharge and +recovery, but there are limits to how much practical benefit you can get from either. All of the other Incarnate powers, Alpha, Interface, Hybrid are strong on an individual basis - arguably much stronger than Judgment or Lore - but they're little more than noise at scale. The same thing is true of IO set bonuses, which can increase the overall strength of an individual build immensely (mostly via +DEF and +recharge), but a team of eight IO'd builds doesn't drastically increase kill speed over and above the average team's at the same level. An extremely well tuned IO build can allow one or two players to carry a team, and that's huge, but those benefits don't scale up in the same way that Lore and Judgment do. One little note/correction: Assault Radial Hybrid does not double damage. What it does is rather complicated; this thread describes it in detail - but for our purposes it's fair to say that T4 Assault Radial adds slightly more damage than a single purple damage proc would. Half of the time. It's strong, particularly in short-term DPS tests (e.g. Pylon runs), but it isn't that strong. Reactive's DoT (at T3+) adds probably about the same amount on average, given that it has no downtime.

Unless there's some trick to it that I haven't grasped, this no longer works: (Disregard; I had a big brain fart here. Thanks for the thread!)

This is well said. I'll also add, in reply to Zepp, that AVs resist the living crap out ToHit debuffs. Hurricane is scarcely relevant in that context - and in fact it's less appealing than ever even in normal gameplay, these days. That isn't a knock on Hurricane so much as it is a commentary on how the other powers in the set (and various other things, like IO DEF bonuses) have changed. Hurricane is more of a situational utility power now than the crown jewel it used to be. As Hjarki said, Storm is basically a ranged set. Hurricane can help you stay at range, but it's usually not worth trying to leverage its debuff proactively, anymore. At least not at the high end. (Of course it can be ludicrously fun to herd mobs around with Hurricane, and it's worth noting that characters with AoE Immobilize powers have a much easier time doing that. I love Hurricane, truly; the ranged playstyle just wins, handily, in terms of efficiency.)

My problem with the high listing fee prompt is that the threshold is too low; what is it, something like 200k? I always disable the warning immediately, because it's a nuisance. It would be fantastic if we could configure the threshold ourselves, or maybe there could be multiple thresholds out of the box.

Yeah, TW also has limited thematic appeal in a comic book setting. Just about all of the following sets are more comic booky, or so I would think, than weapon-that-outweighs-protagonist, or giant-sword-like-that-one-dude's-from-Final-Fantasy: Bold mine. Cloud Strife beats out Captain America, Batman, Wolverine, and the Mighty Thor in a super-hero game? I'm not knocking people who enjoy TW's aesthetic, just pointing out that its popularity is surprising, suspiciously so. Super Strength is more or less in the opposite position, WRT to thematic appeal. It will always be popular, regardless of how well it plays. And it plays extremely well at the top end, and with supplemental pool attacks, but as a whole the set could use a fair bit of work. Rage, specifically double Rage, is overpowered. KO Blow and Footstomp are great powers. Everything prior to that ranges from terrible to just decent (and it's all single target damage); players have to spend an awful lot of levels watching paint dry before they get to the good stuff. TW is in a vastly different category even from Rage-stacked SS at its IO'd and Gloom-enhanced best. For a long time I ignored TW because I just don't care for the set's looks. I figured, yeah, it's a single-target DPS monster; who really cares? What I didn't realize until recently is how much of that single-target DPS is also AoE, which is preposterous. I understand that TW can be janky to play, but that's only further evidence that the set's current design is a poor fit for all concerned. We shouldn't have a whole different league of performance, gated behind niche aesthetics and frustrating mechanics. Hypothetically, if there were a powerset that performed at 300% of everything else, but required the player to suffer an electric shock every 3 minutes, the answer would be to correct both of those things, not to use one to justify the other.

yeah the whole point of procs is that they're agnostic about the power's damage. Either you think the proc damage at a given level of recharge is reasonable, or you think it isn't. Whether you attach that proc damage to a high-damage power or not doesn't matter, because the procs contribute the same amount regardless. I'll also point out, again, that if you gut the proc damage on powers like Char, then you're also hurting high-damage ATs. Ranged Blasters basically need a procced out Char (or an analogue, like Ice Arrow) to compete with melee ATs in single-target DPS, as crazy as that sounds. It isn't as if the current system is a boon only to low damage ATs who should "get back in their damn lane," or whatever, as the earlier discussion about Defenders vs Corruptors implied. If the complaint is simply that the benefits of damage procs are too unevenly applied, then that's reasonable, but it's also something you could address by, say, making more damage procs available to different power types. You don't have to redo the whole formula. And if we're complaining on behalf of Brutes specifically, it's worth noting that Brutes have intrinsic advantages when it comes to damage proc slotting: their defenses make it easier to justify skimping on defensive IO set bonuses, and Fury makes skimping on damage slotting easier to justify. On top of that, melee damage powers tend to have more proc options than ranged attack powers do. To use Auroxis' example, KO Blow is an absolute beast under the current proc system; it can slot two purple damage procs and Force Feedback - and it has a long enough base recharge timer to fire the latter consistently. Super Strength as a whole set benefits immensely from proc slotting, and not just because procs allow SS builds to do more than stand around holding their genitals during Rage crashes. One of the things that concerns me about any wholesale change to the proc system is that the proc system currently allows players to compensate for a lot of major, long-standing and frankly unexplainable inter-AT and inter-powerset DPA disparities, particularly with regard to ranged damage dealers of all stripes. I guess this is just a different way of saying what I did earlier, that procs give us build flexibility, but allow me to reframe it: I'd rather have a slightly broken system that allows smart players to make bad powersets sing, than a less broken system that leaves subpar powersets out in the cold, waiting for a comprehensive balance pass that may never come.

Right, and worth noting that Synapse reversed his proposal to include recharge buffs (including IO bonuses) in the formula a mere three hours later. I don't think that proposal should carry much weight, in other words. If the HC devs think it's a good idea on its own merits, then sure; it's their game, but Synapse clearly wasn't attached to it. That he said it therefore isn't all that relevant.

Yeah, we can argue til the cows come home about whether the game as a whole is challenging enough, but it's pretty clear that the aggro cap, if anything, adds challenge where it's relevant: if your team pulls more than 17 mobs' aggro, then the non-tanks will have to take some of the heat. I don't see how that's a bad thing. And as much as I enjoyed herding 300 mobs into a dumpster and hitting them all with KO Blow*, back in the day, the fun was short-lived. Let's not even think about going back to that. (* - when Gauntlet was first introduced, there was a bug that allowed Tankers' single-target attacks to hit an unlimited number of mobs all at once, provided that those mobs were all packed into a single hit box. Hilarious.)

First I want to thank you and the Homecoming team for all of your hard work. You do it free, and I'm sure there are days when reading complaints on the forums really chaps your hide. I also think it's clear that if the game hadn't died in 2012, further adjustments to the PPM system would likely have happened at some point. In any MMO, change is an inevitability - and in this case, we're talking about a period of nearly 8 years. So I don't dispute that part of your argument. Still, I don't read Synapse as having a stated intention to nerf PPM relative to what we have now on the Homecoming servers. Yes, in the post you quoted, he talks about a proposed tweak to the system, which includes (among other things) adding global recharge to the formula. But here are two of his posts from later in the same thread (quoted below the spoiler): https://web.archive.org/web/20120906115457/http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showpost.php?p=4215290&postcount=251 https://web.archive.org/web/20120906120102/http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showpost.php?p=4215484&postcount=286 As far as I can tell, that last Synapse post contains the PPM formula as we have it on Homecoming, today. And as far as I can tell, the system as we know it was in fact his final intention. Again, I won't argue that the game should proceed on a strict "originalist" basis - with the idea that the game's balance as of i25 is sacrosanct and must never change. If you guys feel that the game warrants a change, then so be it. I just wanted to contextualize your implication that Synapse intended to nerf the PPM system (as we know it) into the ground in 2012, because that doesn't seem to be the case. Specifically with regard to global recharge affecting proc rates, that notion may have been quickly considered, but it was explicitly and forcefully discarded not too long afterwards. (In fact, the time stamps say that Synapse reversed himself a mere three hours after he wrote the post that you quoted.) For my own part, I feel that the PPM proc system (again, as we know it) does way more good than harm, because it adds trade offs to character building that weren't present before; it adds a new tension between offense and defense. I won't go into a long screed about that here, because I already wrote one in a different thread.

Did some testing with T4 Ageless. Same setup otherwise. first run clocked 142 seconds, for 397 DPS second run clocked 145 seconds, for 392 DPS third run clocked 135 seconds, for 411 DPS The video for that last run follows in the spoiler: Made quite a few execution errors, but I suspect the proc and ToHit-roll gods were with me even so. Just a final note on Reactive that I forgot to mention earlier: Degenerative Core is generally the accepted best for Pylon runs, but for this particular build Reactive Radial is better, IMO, certainly in normal content and possibly also against Pylons. The extra DoT damage, and massively larger DoT probability, are key during Rage crashes. Reactive Radial's -RES debuff is an afterthought; can't reliably stack it anyway. Interface DoTs were broken for a long time. Now they're awesome again. Oh, and because I didn't make it explicit earlier: Ageless is just for Pylon shenanigans. Rebirth is the daily driver.

It's definitely workable; it just wasn't consistent enough for my taste. Arachnos, for example, with their autohit -DEF debuffs and various other shenanigans, were more difficult on the Bio than the Elec. Things like Paragon PD would likely be trouble. On the Elec, I have yet to find a villain group I couldn't comfortably solo on +4/x8 with minor inspiration use - carnies, arachnos, PPD, Rularuu, Malta; even Knives of Vengeance aren't too bad, with their toxic DoTs. You can pretty easily get 90% RES to S/L/E/F/C/Psi, and even Negative if you really chase those bonuses. Toxic will rip you up, but heavy toxic damage is very rare. (My build skimps a little on F/C/N Resistance; I actually had to drop 6 points of F/C to slot the Fury of the Gladiator proc, which isn't a very important loss in most content, but I do wonder how much good that proc really does outside of Pylon contests.) I think Bio is stronger on paper, but it's more prone to sudden failure and offers a less consistent performance curve across the game's content. This principle is sort of exemplified by the set's capstone power, which will make you virtually invincible in target-rich scenarios, but which also maxes out at something like half uptime. (This reminds me of another factor in my comparison: Bio encourages me to take all of its powers, whereas I can skip the last two on Elec, guiltlessly.) But again, I should emphasize that I'm talking about a specific build type with tons of procs crowding out defensive set bonuses. Bio is a fine tanking set; it just wasn't as good as Elec in this particular instance, and for my purposes. I do love the way you can turn DNA Siphon into a mini-nuke, though, and the Adaptation mechanic is great. Great score man, and I appreciate all of your work testing builds. I ended up using Cross Punch almost by accident. At first I only took it to make leveling more pleasant. Despite its strength at the high end, SS kind of sucks for newer players; whittling away mobs with Jab, Punch, and Haymaker for the first ~35 levels is like watching paint dry. (Yes, I know you get KO Blow at 20, but until you can get the power frankenslotted at the very least, and ideally supplement that with +recharge bonuses, it isn't a routine-use attack power, more like an occasional novelty.) Anyway, Cross Punch is in there to replace Punch now. Its DPA is a little lower than Haymaker's, thanks to Haymaker's higher proc chance, but it hits a good bit harder than Punch, can hit multiple targets, and it can slot Fury of the Gladiator, so I kept it. But of course, this choice prevented me from taking Taunt. Someone who's less stubborn about taking Fly and Afterburner could wring more performance out of the build than I have. (I had a build on the test server that didn't take Punch or Cross Punch at all, just rolled with Dark Obliteration, Gloom, Haymaker, and KO Blow. That build was surprisingly workable even in a Pylon context. There were gaps, but it still managed ~330 DPS with Ageless Destiny's help, and in normal content you scarcely notice the gaps anyway; what matters most is that sweet AoE damage from procced out Footstomp + Dark Obliteration. My Bio/SS build with the same Punchless setup scored 392 DPS.)

When I first clicked on this thread, I expected to have to take a contrarian position. I was happy to discover that my position has been stated here, several times. But just because, I'll restate it below: The current proc system certainly isn't perfect, and yes it can do some pretty wild and superficially unbalanced things, but it also provides a huge extra layer of build choice and diversity. Prior to PPM, there were very few meaningful trade offs between offense and defense in the IO system; grab a certain amount of +recharge, cram in as much +DEF as you could find, and that was it. +Damage buffs are/were too small to chase. I think few people really appreciate how much you give up, in terms of set bonuses, to take full advantage of the PPM proc system. There's a tension now, in every build, that simply wasn't present before. Sure, you can say that procs disproportionately benefit certain ATs/powersets, but that's true of everything, in this game - and procs are strong enough to help everyone, if they're willing to take the trade off. RE: Corruptors, FWIW I spent ages - dozens, maybe even hundreds of hours - testing various */Storm Corruptors against analogous Storm/* Defenders a few weeks ago. My conclusion was that the Corruptors were slightly better. I reached that conclusion because the Corruptors not only have slightly higher damage output (higher still in teams), but also because they have better ATO procs. The +end proc in Freezing Rain, for example, allows my Ice/Storm Controller to run more-or-less perpetually without Ageless Destiny (but with Conserve Power), whereas an otherwise identical Storm/Ice Defender often finds itself gasping. This might sound like a minor difference, and it is, but it's enough to allow me to use Clarion Destiny on the Corruptor, which IMO is non-negotiable on a high level squishy. (The Defender's defensive advantage was significant, but never to a point where I couldn't massage the build to make it functionally irrelevant. Any extra damage procs you might manage to squeeze into the Defender build are at least partially offset by the aforementioned +endurance disparity, and by the Corruptor's access to an extra purple damage proc, one that is attached to a spectacular set bonus.) Point being that build discussions are complex. They hinge on your use case and concept preferences. Whereas before, there used to be a more or less definitive "best answer" for most builds, now there really isn't. That's a good thing. If you're concerned about general damage power creep, then sure, I get it, but that horse left the barn long before PPM procs arrived. If you want to rein in offense at the high end, particularly in a full-team environment ... well, first of all, good luck, lol, but if you really are interested in reining in high-end team offense, then your first stop should probably be Incarnate powers - and not the one game system in recent memory to introduce meaningful trade offs in building. Character builds are the entire point of the game, to a lot of people.

Elec/SS Tanker: Initial test conditions: T4 Musculature Core, T4 Assault Radial Hybrid, T3 Reactive Radial, no Destiny/Lore, no Fury of the Gladiator proc. 192 seconds for 327.5 DPS 181 seconds for 339.6 DPS Next test: Same Incarnates, added Fury of the Gladiator Proc to Cross Punch: 156 seconds for 373.6 DPS Next, swapped in T4 Reactive and T3 Ageless Core: 151 seconds for 381 DPS (NB: In order to reach these numbers, I did wait to stack Rage before engaging the Pylon.) At some point I'll grind out a T4 Ageless Destiny to test more thoroughly; my results on the test server showed a fairly significant gain from the extra recharge, which helps to smooth the gaps in my janky attack chain, which relies on inconsistent Force Feedback procs. The extra endurance is also helpful in a protracted single-target scenario, but in normal content, the Performance Shifter proc in Lightning Field (along with Energize, naturally) keeps me reliably topped off. That said, I'm happy with these results as they are. Electric Armor, or at least the tank version, seems to synergize unusually well with this sort of proc-heavy build. It has built-in +recharge (Lightning Reflexes) to help compensate for the loss of offensive set bonuses, and it doesn't require many defensive set bonuses to achieve durability that is plenty "good enough" to tank pretty much all of the game's content, save scenarios where there is heavy Toxic damage. But of course, resistance builds have a weakness, and that is debuffs. If you don't have appreciable +DEF, then you will get hit with mountains of debuffs. Electric Armor fairs pretty well here too: It features near-immunity to end drain and recovery debuffs, a large innate resistance to slow/recharge debuffs (40%, which I increased to 90% with minimal slot investment), and of course, damage resistance itself resists resistance debuffs. (Say that five times fast.) DEF debuffs still hurt, of course, but this build isn't sensitive to them in the same way that most IO +DEF builds are - and obviously, Rage crashes my DEF every ~70 seconds anyway. My original plan was to go Bio/SS to push offense, but for all of its vast advantages, Bio just didn't cut it for me in normal game play scenarios, based on experimentation on the test server. Bio's layered approach to durability is very effective; don't get me wrong, but it doesn't play particularly well with Rage's crash, and of course inconsistent layering also makes you more sensitive to debuffs. Still, worth noting that Bio's Offensive Adaptation is worth quite a bit in extra DPS. Wouldn't surprise me to see numbers 50+ points higher than mine. (I'll also note that a previous experiment in making a high-durability Bio/SS resulted in my falling asleep before I could dent a Pylon, even while using Offensive Adaptation. The procs really do make that big a difference. Ok, that's hyperbole, but I really did quit in disgust when 8+ minutes had passed and IIRC only half of the Pylon's health was gone)

I'd like to echo everything Nihilli's said in this thread. For context, I'll also add that 280-340 DPS is actually a very large number, in absolute terms. It may not win you any awards in the Pylon thread, these days, but it wasn't that long ago (in terms of the game's development cycle) that ~250 was top-tier performance. We've had a lot of power creep since then, some of it unevenly distributed (e.g. the proc meta tends to favor melee sets, all else being equal), but I think we should all try to remember that 250 DPS is still more than enough to cruise in most any content. In fairness, I'll note that I have an Elec/SS tank that can hit 370 DPS. Amusingly though, the tank buffs did nothing to help him achieve that. A huge chunk of that performance comes from procs, which means that the loss of Bruising may even be a net nerf. You might say, "See? If Tankers can do that much DPS, then Sentinels must be hugely underpowered!" But my ranged Fire/Temporal Blaster hits roughly the same number against a Pylon. If we're just looking at DPS comparisons, the Blaster has a far bigger beef. Regardless, Nihilli's point here is well taken. High-DPS tank builds are outliers. Intra-AT balance issues may well plague Sentinels more than other ATs, but that issue affects everyone to some degree. The Sentinel is in an awkward place, balance wise. I understand why people are dissatisfied, and I don't dispute that the AT could use some adjustment - particularly to its offensive powersets, which seem to have been thrown together without much rhyme or reason, and which also inherit a number of long-standing imbalances from legacy blast sets (e.g. huge DPA discrepancies). But comprehensive mez protection and near-Scrapper-level durability are huge advantages, which I think a lot of people on this forum underestimate. Blasters' ability to slot IO +DEF bonuses does not, in fact, make them as survivable as Sentinels; nor can Blasters as a whole class routinely and effortlessly annihilate Sentinel damage output. In most cases, I suspect the Blaster/Sentinel damage comparison is quite a bit closer than most people realize.

This is an irony that made me chuckle as I was rambling through that post, last night. Sentinels are (by far) the beefiest "ranged" AT in the game (disregarding our VEAT friends, at least), but they have probably the least reason to be in melee. Still, even Sentinels benefit a great deal from, say, adding an Epic-pool melee attack to their chain. They can also have e.g. PBAoE nukes. I don't disagree with that last line. The defense issue just seems like such a small thing; I'd prefer Sentinel defensive powers to have the same values simply because it'd be one less thing to have to think about. As for offense, if we take, say, Fire Blast as the baseline, then Sentinel damage is mostly fine. The problems are that: Most blast sets kinda suck in terms of DPA/DPS potential, and To the extent that blast sets are balanced now on other ATs, fast snipes do a lot of the heavy lifting, and Sentinels don't get snipes. This is why I'd prefer to see some sort of blast-set rebalancing effort rather than a simple boost to the Sentinel AT scalar. There's no reason that Sentinels couldn't have a fast-snipe analogue, even if the design docs mandate that Sentinels can't have snipe-tier range. Likewise, there's no reason that, say, Ice Blast should have its single-target DPS knee-capped (Freeze Ray) on Sentinels. If the blast sets were balanced better, and if they had a better inherent, Sentinels would neither need nor deserve a flat damage boost. Sentinels do have intrinsic advantages over Scrappers/Blasters; the latter should maintain some sort of offensive advantage to reflect that. It's just that right now Sentinels without the right primary (and without abusing the hell out of Epics/procs) feels truly anemic.

It is undeniable that range is a defense, but one must understand that for most of the game's lifespan, the developers hugely overrated range's defensive benefits, to the detriment of several ATs, most obviously Blasters. Ranged attacks also obviously have added offensive utility; it's easier to shoot a runner with an 80' blast than it is to chase him down - but again that advantage was consistently overshadowed by the developers' determination to (over-)compensate for it. As DarknessEternal notes, most builds have some amount of melee baked into their design - not all, but the exceptions are rare enough that we can safely generalize: most any build which chooses a range-exclusive play style (either permanently or in a given situation) sacrifices something, often something substantial, whether it's an extra PBAoE attack, a control effect, a debuff, or just a heavy single-target hitter. That last example is instructive, because as several people have already noted in this thread, melee attack sets are, and always have been, generally stronger (in terms DPA/DPS potential) than ranged attack sets. For years and years, the comparison really wasn't even competitive. The balance is a lot better these days, but still far from perfect. (lol, remember when tier 3 blasts had a 20' range?) But the most obvious point here relates to the historical defensive comparison between ranged and melee builds. It's all well and good to point to range's defensive advantage, but it looks pretty damn silly when you're comparing, say, a stock Blaster with a stock Scrapper - the latter routinely achieving 4 times as much numerical durability, and that's before we even get to the all-or-nothing character of mez protection in this game, which traditionally wasn't offered to ranged ATs at all, at least until Dominators/VEATs, IIRC. Yet all we ever heard from the devs was that range is this awesome advantage that cannot be overstated; "range is a defense;" "we have to be super duper careful not to overtune Blasters or else they'll pwn the world." It got real old. Again, a large chunk of the above grievances no longer apply. The introduction of IOs, for example, allowed e.g. Blasters to pick up decent defense, and if they stay at range they need to soft-cap fewer positions. Toggles no longer drop when you're mezzed, and Clarion offers everyone a chance at comprehensive protection. Sentinels sort of embody this shift away from a melee-centric design philosophy - they're the first ranged AT that has a comprehensive suite of melee-AT-style defensive powers. (Again, possibly leaving aside VEATs, which have always been an outlier, and which in any case carry little thematic appeal to most people, judging by the population numbers.) But as a more-or-less range-exclusive AT, Sentinels do inherit some of the problems that have dogged ranged attack sets since the beginning. They also have (small) problems all their own. One point that I think may be a little underrated is that their builds are unusually tight, because like melee ATs, Sentinels have to take all/most of their secondary powers - but their primaries don't have the power/slot efficiency of the average melee set. "Ah ha," you might say, "But ranged sets generally have more AoEs, which is an advantage!" That may be true, but if the single-target damage is lackluster, then you need copious AoE to offset that. In other words, ranged attackers generally need more powers/slots devoted to offensive powers in order to play their intended role effectively. (And TAoE IO sets tend to suck, for the purpose of soft capping, an efficiency tax with which Blasters are quite familiar.) Anyway, that's a massive wall of text to bolster a pretty trivial case - that Sentinel defenses should be on par with Scrappers'. The difference is tiny even now, so it's hard to argue against the suggestion. If only for the sake of simplicity, why not?

If the standard is (or should be, per the devs), "Scrapper-level damage," then an increase to the damage scalar won't cut it, because melee sets just have better (DPA) attacks, in general, than ranged sets do. This is why even ranged Blasters historically struggled to match Scrappers in Pylon runs - though of course Pylon tests tend to gloss over Blasters' offensive advantages in normal content (burst, particularly AoE burst). Nowadays, ranged builds can kinda/sorta compensate with heavy proc slotting. For example, the Sentinel version of Dominate, when fully procced, has higher DPA than almost any other available ranged attack, and it's available to every Sentinel. But the fundamental problem remains that the balance among ranged attack sets is uneven and, generally, leaves them behind their melee counterparts. This problem is perhaps especially pronounced on Sentinels, whose power selections are oddly divergent from all other ranged attackers'. Freeze Ray, for example, is the best single target attack for Ice Blasters/Corruptors/Defenders, boasting a high base DPA and the ability slot numerous Hold-IO damage procs - but Sentinels don't get Freeze Ray; instead they get a mediocre attack with a sleep attached. On the flipside, Sentinel Sonic Blast actually makes out like a bandit, because of what the devs did to the Sentinel version of Screech, but as far as I know that is the only case in which the Sentinel version of an offensive power set gains DPS. There are, of course, cases where Sentinel primaries shine more - their faster cooldown on nukes synergizes especially well with high-utility powers like Blizzard, with its huge -ToHit debuff. But the point is that trying to compare the offensive capabilities of whole ATs is almost impossible with these powerset discrepancies. Perhaps more importantly, there's no amount of (reasonable) AT-scalar adjustment that will prevent, say, an Energy Blast Sentinel from feeling anemic next to a Fire Blaster. The live devs more or less acknowledged this problem way back when they standardized the DPA on first/second tier Blaster attacks, but they never followed through on tier three and up. All of that said, I agree with Nihilii. At the top end, and if you compare like to like, Sentinel DPS isn't all that much less impressive than Blaster DPS, and Sentinel survivability is plenty of compensation. Blasters have always been a bit underpowered on the whole, due to the old devs' irrational fear that Blasters would take over the world, or something. Blasters have received a lot of buffs recently, and I like the way they play - but even now their offensive advantages don't quite balance out their utility/defensive disadvantages. Their offense has always been overrated, and that remains true in the era of uber procs. Sentinels suffer less from a numerical deficit than what I would call an uninspiring design, or if you prefer, they lack a compelling reason for being (apart from insane high-end solo feats like Nihilii's). I think the most obvious first step here is to balance ranged sets against each other, possibly give Sentinels a better inherent, and then worry about inter-AT comparisons.

There are already difficult factions in the game. The balance of difficulty among NPC factions is, in fact, all over the place. Many are pushovers; some seem to have been designed by a gleeful sadist. Of course a team full of IO'd Incarnates can handle just about anything, but I suspect many players don't even know that the game gets harder than level 54 Council maps or the ITF. There are challenges to be found if you look for them. Otherwise, I agree with whoever it was who said that he wants to play City of Heroes as he remembers it. CoH was never about hardcore challenge, and I believe the HC devs want to preserve the game's original flavor. And even if you could convince the developers that CoH should be about hardcore challenge, they work for free, so asking for wholesale changes to the game's design is impractical.

Haven't read the whole thread, but I did test out an SS Tanker last night. Like a lot of other people, I thought the micromanagement would be annoying, but it's really not bad. Rage has a circle around it when you're at risk of double-stacking, so you just wait for the circle to go away and click it again to keep your 1-stack perma. I might prefer the circle to appear in the opposite circumstance; I'd prefer it even more if the power were simply unstackable - but all in all it works pretty well.

lol, this is exactly the image that popped in my mind as I was typing some of these. It's silly, but it passes the time. And as I say, there is a broader context to this feud that relates to the thread's topic. o7

Of course this whole @modest debate is a bit of a derail, but there's good reason for questioning his numbers. The entire thread revolves around the balance between Blaster vs Sentinel; it's in the title. If @modest's numbers were even close to accurate, then Blasters would have 2-3 times as much offense as Sentinels, not just in target-saturated environments, but by default, more or less at all times, single-target or AoE. And if that's true, then we can easily argue that soft-capped Blasters are rolling around effortlessly pwning things that Sentinels would struggle to defeat. But the truth is that Blasters don't have that huge a damage advantage. It turns out that the best Blaster scores in the Pylon thread are extraordinary, and it seems almost always from builds that made defensive compromises. This is important if you care about the thread's topic. I also think it's funny that you posted at me three times on this page to whine about my tone, but when I respond to you I'm just showing how "unhinged" I am by posting so much. Thanks for your totally on-topic help, Miss Manners!