FupDup

Unfucking the economy is objectively the best thing HC ever did (besides bringing the game back in general).

I'm talking pure melee primary and pure support secondary, no "half and half" compromise sets like Rebirth did with their Guardians (they did Assault/Composition, the latter of which was a split of armor and support). You've got epic pools for ranged attacks, and the buff reflection thing takes care of armor.

The main new AT we'd need is Melee/Support, with an inherent to help them bulk up a little. My idea would be for it to reflect a portion of teammate buff powers (and heals) back at the user, and solo players could target enemies for the same effect. And maybe a bit of baseline mezz resistance. Epic pools would be a mix of ranged and control powers.

Someone on the Discord once suggested that most currently KB-enabled powers should be KD by default instead, with the onus being on the player to slot for KB enhancement if they really want to fling targets around (as opposed to the current situation where players who don't want to annoy others will need to slot for KB->KD). ST attacks can get away with it a bit easier but AOEs really can't in most cases. Flipping the onus around like that would prevent accidents and remove the slot tax aspect, plus it would be way easier to identify people who are doing it on purpose because they'd have to slot for it specifically as opposed to it being the default state.

I'm going to counter-argue that most set bonuses are ultimately rendered obsolete by team buffs and/or insps. Like, sure, a Blaster can try to build for 45% ranged defense, but a Blaster with nothing but procs slotted still has the same max defense potential as the softcap Blaster, but with more damage too. Hoarding set bonuses will only raise your minimum values, not your maximum values. Thus, building for pure damage (via procs) is objectively the best choice at all times because it gives you something that cannot be replicated/replaced by any other source. My opinion is that our max caps for things like res, hp, etc. should be influenced by the bonuses we pick so that there's some kind of value from them that can't be rendered useless by teammate/insp buffs. I think it should also vary by powerset, i.e. Fire Armor should have a higher max fire resistance than any other armor type (right now it just caps easier but the cap is identical to everyone else). And even the damage buff set bonuses should raise our damage cap too, because right now they're hella useless (there's no world where 4% damage is equal to 10% recharge).

I'm not one of the "make the game harder" people, but the part of the Council buffs that got complained about was how tanky/spongey they became, especially considering some of them could rez after you finally whittled down their health bars. Bullet sponges aren't challenging, just tedious and annoying.

Broadly speaking, the game has a few mechanics that stand in the way of picking every power in a set. >Animation time budget (once you have a full chain, adding more powers is literally useless) >Limited power choices >Limited slots ...So being able to get by without the full 9 powers is practically a necessity. However, it also sucks for some powers to be pure noob traps with no legit use case. My take is that powers with weaker DPA should generally have higher utility or something so there's a little more give and take as to picking which ones you want. Like for example, in Dark Blast, right now you always want to take Gloom as your first attack because it has higher DPA and that's the end of the story. What I would do is make the T1 blast have a noticeably stronger to-hit debuff (perhaps last longer too?) than Gloom so that it would be a choice of DPA vs safety. You aren't expected to take both because, again, animation budget and limited slots, but maybe the choice would be a little less of a no-brainer? Some sets with limited utility might be harder to translate this idea to than others, admittedly. Like maybe Flares might have a chance to spread fire to nearby enemies or something because Fire Blast lacks secondary effects, I dunno. I think you get the idea.

It just occurred to me that Rad Blast might actually be a better candidate for this than Beam Rifle. Rad already has an eye beam power, so adding eye beam alternate animations to some of the attacks would keep with the theme and not run in to the potential issues of Beam being coded as a weapon-holding set. We could try to find some "head blast" animations from Psi Blast and/or Sonic Blast and replace their FX with eye beams. Neutrino Bolt -> Shriek (exact animation time match) Electron Haze -> ??? (Several animations are shorter but I'm having a hard time finding something equally long...perhaps it's time to shorten it in general. Perhaps we could take Psionic Strike from Sentinel Psi Blast and trim it down with sequencers, or Psychic Scream from Psi Assault). Proton Volley -> Psionic Lance (exact match, maybe animate as a "pulse laser" kind of thing) Cosmic Burst -> Shout (only off by 0.07 seconds too long, can use sequencers to trim that off easily) Neutron Bomb -> Mental Blast (exact match, this would maybe be visualized similar to Refractor Beam from Sentinel BR)

We might be able to creatively work around it. The new Reactive Regeneration power tracks each time a player gets hit and does something afterward, so maybe a reflection power could use that as the basis to deal damage to a nearby enemy (might have to be random instead of targeted at the shooter) instead of buffing the user's regen rate.

Regarding the Labyrinth, it's really not that hard at all in a league. The final ballroom is almost like a stationary KM-ITF. And of course it's run daily on multiple different servers. That aside, there is most definitely truth to the accusation that the playerbase mostly focuses on easier content. I see this as a feature more than a flaw most of the time.

PBAOEs seem to be treated differently/favorably compared to cones. Here's a Page 2 patch note for Sweeping Cross: At one point there was going to be something similar for Jacob's Ladder but that got cancelled. Based on previous history/precedent, I would not trust the powers team to give us free arc buffs, which is why I suggested the compromise of "penalizing" recharge instead of damage.

The Tanker nerfs prove the point, actually. Previously (when Tanks got gigabuffed), Tanks got free cone arc buffs with no strings attached. In the earlier rounds of beta nerfs, they got to keep the larger arcs but got their damage nerfed to adhere to the formula. People were very understandably not happy about losing damage, so this caused the devs to then simply remove the arc buffs completely in order to avoid nerfing the damage (because they really really like the formula).

It's mostly the ones under 90* that really need to be wider, excluding the psuedo-ST powers like Cleave and Golden Dragonfly of course. 90 and above are fine. Part of the problem is that the damage formula considers arc as a part of the math, so raising the arc has to come with a penalty somewhere else (usually damage). I would suggest slowing down the recharge a bit instead of lowering damage, which can even turn out to be a net buff sometimes because recharge influences proc rates.

Usually, the more veteran players tend to load up their eligible attack powers with as many damage procs as they can, at least for the powers that have a decent proc rate. Powers with lower proc rates might be used as a source of global recharge/accuracy bonuses to help the proc'd powers work. Loading up pure sets in everything is still viable in the sense that the game's difficulty is low enough that you'll still be able to complete almost anything that way, but proc bombed builds are mathematically better because damage is the name of the game and non-damage stats like defense can be outsourced to teammates and/or insps. At the risk of going off topic, the issue is that most set bonuses don't actually raise your maximum ceiling for those stats, they just bring you closer to the same ceiling that everyone else has (in other words, raise the floor). Meanwhile, damage procs give you a way to surpass your standard damage ceiling. A Blaster built for softcapped defenses has the exact same upper limits for def, res, HP, etc. as a Blaster with 0% defenses, but the 0% Blaster has a higher damage ceiling that can't be replicated from inspirations or teammates. If I were to make the game again from scratch, I would add some kind of way for set bonuses to interact with your max caps, i.e. resistance bonuses might slightly increase your max res cap to a particular damage type, so that non-offensive investment couldn't be completely replaced by outside sources (which of course would entail rebalancing the default res caps, etc). ...But this is definitely way too much for a game as old and established as this one, I'm just ranting for academic purposes.

Set bonuses are typically inferior to procs, at least in powers where procs are applicable, so there's definitely room for improving what you get from sets without even touching the meta. One thing I'll note is that low recharge enhancement can actually be a good thing if the set has a proc in it, because of extremely bad game design that punishes your PPM for slotting recharge. I think that there should be more sets like Positron's Blast where you can 5-slot it while keeping the full PPM. Accuracy and endurance reduction, however, are definitely fair game for more cowbell (and other attributes like range and stuff, also like Positron's Blast). I'd definitely like to see the Cupid-style proc boosting mechanic proliferated to other sets, prioritizing underused sets of course (i.e. purples probably don't need it).

More like Shit of Heroes amirite?

I’m mostly just trying to pre-empt the power devs who think Sents having an armor secondary is so strong that they can’t allow Vulnerability to be stackable (yes this is their actual reason that I was told). I personally would have zero opposition to the proc applying the full effect but I’m not as squeamish about buffs as they are. And to be fair, Vulnerability does ignore purple patch and does more than just -res (but of course -res is the most important part of it). At this point my expectations are low enough that I’d surprised if Sents got any kind of buff.

The Chance for Vulnerability thing seems to be nearly universally agreed upon. The only detail I'd add is that maybe it wouldn't be full strength, like instead of the normal 15% debuff it might be 5% at orange tier and 7.5% at purple tier, or something like that. Sentinel's Ward is basically a clone of Gauntleted Fist, but inferior in every way. The PPM is much lower (2 PPM vs 3 PPM), AND the absorb is smaller too (GF is 15% of max HP, SW is about 15% of base HP). I see 3 potential choices for this one: A. Increase the PPM to be higher than GF, but keep the low value, which gives it better sustain than GF but lower alpha strike cushioning. B. The opposite of Option A, we keep the inferior PPM but raise the absorb % (and make it scale with HP!) so it's better against alphas but has low sustain. C. Just make it a straight clone of GF, which is kind of boring but gets the job done.

I count lack of end management as a part of “sustain” (both regen/heals and recovery). The psi hole isn’t as big as it used to be, nor is psi a super common damage type. The lack of heal/endurance tools meanwhile applies to all fights.

Invuln is a set more about preventing damage than bouncing back from it. Lack of sustain is meant to be its main weakness (unless you're using the Sentinel version that has sustain, in which case your weakness is being a Sentinel). Maybe the T9 could be remodeled to resemble the new Elec Armor T9 to serve the healing power role, because right now Unstoppable is pretty much a delayed suicide button.

There’s a wide gulf between having no skippables and having almost the entire set be skippable. A happy medium exists somewhere inside that gulf. And of course this is one of those cases where “skippable” is a euphemism for “total dogwater noob traps.”

It’s true that most sets don’t normally want or need all 9 powers, but SS is on the opposite rare extreme end where it’s not truly a power set so much as 3 powers wearing a trench coat.

Entirely new incarnate slots would pose balance problems, but new options within the existing slots would have fairly little chance of disruption. Stuff like a cold damage interface, Malta or Dev Earth lores, a damage boosting destiny, a toxic judgement, etc.

This is actually canon for Captain Marvel's eye beams, funnily enough.

I'm not a fan of the anti-synergy that the def crash has with def armor sets, nor do I like how the damage crash forces proc bombing to do anything at all during that time, but the whole set is balanced around it and a lot of people are attached to it as it is now. I think it would be safer to just work on other punch-based melee sets, like for example giving Street Justice some actual functional AOE, so that people could pick an alternate punchy-themed set while leaving the classic Super Strength as a legacy feature. Any attempt to change Rage on Brutes or Tanks would likely get Beanbagged (Scrapper/Stalker version would 100% never have Rage as it is now).