FupDup

My belief is that all rez powers should be usable on living targets to some effect, like what happened with Phoenix Rising. The support AT rezzes thus would/should get the same treatment.

I think if we were going to add a whole separate Power Armor set, it should come with some utility/offense powers because folks like Iron Man have a lot of gadgets up their sleeves. We're also a bit short of offensive/utility armors in general. Let Invuln be the "pure tanky wall of steel" armor set. One possibility could be a ranged AOE missile barrage, as a ranged counterpart to Shield Charge. Maybe a tractor beam to pull an enemy into melee range (Sentinels might get an inverted version that knocks them away instead). Perhaps deploy some Seeker Drones as a tool to eat alpha strikes and debuff enemy To-Hit. It'd be cool if the T9 could be a transformation like Granite that turns you into an enlarged Assault Bot with added firepower or something. Definitely needs some kind of "Enhanced Targeting" toggle with To-Hit and Perception buffs. Kinda just spitballing here.

Field Medic is just a weird capstone power to have in a pool. Like imagine if the final power in Speed was just a clicky that made you run faster for a while. IMO the final Medicine power should've been a PBAOE heal but this might run into the "Cottage Rule" issue. Aid Self and Aid Other shouldn't have any interruption window whatsoever, regardless of what happens to Field Medic. Resuscitate could maybe be changed so that it can be used as a large burst heal on living allies, similar to what was done with Phoenix Rising. Aid Self's endurance restoration should take endmod enhancement and I think the power could even use a weak amount of recovery by default (there are way too few recovery tools in pools and all of them except Aid Self are T3's with extremely long recharge times, one of which is unenhanceable). Lastly, I'd like to see a "synergy" effect similar to what the Fighting Pool has. Depending on which Med powers you pick, other powers get different bonuses, like for example picking Aid Other as your T1 would make Aid Self's heal stronger, but picking Injection would make the recovery portion a bit stronger.

Hitting more targets and having wider AOEs does make sense in regards to helping Tanks grab/hold aggro from more enemies at once.

I'm not arguing against Brute changes here, but it's kind of worth pointing out that Hardmode tends to result in a meta of 7 ranged supports with one melee AT, and that melee actually ends up being a Scrapper more often than a Tanker these days. Scraps are able to fulfill the melee tank role "good enough" when megabuffed by allies/Barrier while providing more damage. Are we going to conclude that Tankers are underpowered from this? Hardmode's meta is kinda sorta fucked, to the extreme, so if even the mighty Tanker of all things can't compete against a Scrapper there, it's gonna be real hard to make a Brute compete without just making them outright better than Scrappers. Again, I'm not saying don't change Brutes, I posted some ideas of mine earlier, I'm just saying that maybe there might be some underlying/overarching metagame issues to resolve so we can get a more clear picture here. And hopefully have a meta that isn't a harem of 7 ranged supports following an armored melee AT of some sort.

Yeah, maybe it could be a -res and -def debuff to enemies instead? Like a reverse-Buildup that achieves a similar effect but by weakening enemies instead of empowering the user.

This would be a problem because as it stands now, Storm Blast only has 4 ST attacks, two of which are your basic ones. This change would make the set a lot weaker in the ST department on non-Blasters who don't have a secondary full of ST attacks to fill in.

The recharge provided by Agility and Spiritual is not global, it counts as slotted recharge (which reduces proc rates). Global recharge is stuff like Hasten and Luck of the Gambler.

There's a difference between relative balance and absolute balance. (Relative means that you stayed the same but other things changed around you, absolute means that you actually changed directly). From a relative standpoint, Brutes now feel worse because Tankers are almost a direct upgrade (15% higher ST damage on Brutes isn't that big of an edge). From an absolute standpoint, Brutes only received a very small nerf to their base kit (max damage buff reduced from 775% to 700%) in the same patch that buffed Tankers (the Fire Armor thing is separate from the AT as a whole). But then again, Brutes also got a slight buff to Fury in that same patch to make it generate a wee bit faster on teams and with attacks slower than Brawl. If the Brute changes were the only things that went through and Tankers never got touched, we wouldn't be having this conversation. If we compare Brutes and Scrappers in a vacuum, there are actually quite a few advantages in their favor. A bit higher base HP, much higher max HP, much higher resist caps, universal taunt auras, and being able to function without ATOs (Scrappers without ATOs don't really have an inherent, like at all, the base chance is so freaking tiny). The one edge (admittedly a very important one) that Scrappers have over Brutes is that they put up much bigger orange numbers when fully built out. Fortunately for Scraps, the game's meta revolves entirely around orange numbers. But when we compare Brutes to Tanks, their only edge is around 15% higher ST damage while losing a whole bunch of other stuff in the process. Virtually no one thought that Brutes were some irredeemable pile of trash before that fateful patch. They were what everybody used in place of Tanks because Tanks didn't put up as many orange numbers. I'm not saying that Tanks shouldn't have been buffed (they should've been) or that Brutes shouldn't get any more changes (they should), I'm just trying to remind everybody of the past so we don't keep repeating it. What I think should happen: Tankers: *Base damage modifier reduced down to around 0.875-0.9 (currently 0.95, used to be 0.8) to find a middle ground between pre-buff and post-buff, in order to increase ST damage gap between them and Brutes *Possibly nudge the AOE down a little bit if the above change is insufficient (but they still should remain the AOE kings of melee to distinguish them) Brutes: *Base HP increased a bit so it sits between Scrapper and Tanker a bit more evenly instead of being way closer to Scraps (max HP cap remains untouched) *Base armor modifiers increased to around 0.8-0.85 (currently 0.75 for Brutes and Scrappers, 1.0 for Tanks) *Replace +Fury ATO with something else, possibly Shin's recharge buff idea (but I would make it stackable similar to Unrelenting Fury) *Some kind of change to Fury to make it a bit more unique (like Ston's speed idea or something, IDK)

The Unrelenting Fury proc already adds a stacking endurance discount, along with regen too. https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Superior_Unrelenting_Fury:_Recharge/Chance_for_%2BRegen/%2BEnd_Discount

In regards to "which direction to break Brutes in," I think slightly breaking them towards Tankers makes more sense since Scrappers and Stalkers are already kind of neck and neck against each other. We don't need a third AT competing for the same spot. Furthermore, a common character archetype in gaming and fiction is the "bruiser" (or off-tank) who has a combination of good damage and durability, so I think that having something sit between Scrappers and Tanks to fit that bill makes sense instead of making people choose all-or-nothing between pure tank or pure DPS. Tanks should retain their AOE advantage over Brutes to help them stay different but I think the ST gap should be widened a bit (15% is too small). In addition to that, something unique like the ATO suggestion in this thread and/or something else (like maybe Ston's idea for Fury to grant a speed boost). I really don't like the suggestion for Brutes to be basically better Scrappers but with a higher skill requirement because you're resigning the Scrapper to be nothing more than training wheels that experienced players will inevitably discard.

Maybe instead of a large upfront bonus, make it like the other Brute ATO (the regen/end discount one) where the recharge bonus can stack multiple times but is a bit smaller per stack? I think that fits the "building power over time" motif a bit more accurately than a single big number.

An issue to contend with is that the existing eye beam and head-psi powers have specific animation time durations but there's a pretty wide variety of different animation times out there for the various blast powers. We need to match them up exactly or things would look/feel wonky. If I weren't lazy I would put to together a list of the ani times to see if there was at least one whole powerset that would match the eye/head blast ani times...but I am.

Maybe the Warriors could be given a "Quantum Mace" or some other melee weapon to fill a similar anti-Kheldian role but being more thematically appropriate?

In terms of armor, I think plant-based alternate FX for Bio Armor would fit the bill here without needing to try to balance a whole new armor set. And Bio can be kinda ugly sometimes so it could really use some more options.

Savage Blast and/or Savage Control could be cool, but the OP already ruled out animals. 😔

In this particular example, most debuffs against a +5 enemy will have their strength reduced to just 0.30 of their standard strength. So that 5% (unenhanced) Cloak of Fear gets bumped down to just 1.5%. https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Purple_Patch

I has an idea. Let's nerf Cloak of Fear by like 50% to increase the "power budget" of the set so we can do good things with the other powers (assuming we don't trust the devs to only give a slight heal reduction to Dark Regen instead of gutting it like a fish). Totes balanced.

The reason it has such extreme endurance cost is because it has extreme healing, like several health bars worth per click. It's complete overkill, so even reducing the heal a bit in exchange for reducing the end cost would probably be a net buff most of the time.

There's also the SG base empowerment station buffs if slotting endurance isn't working (or you don't want to). This just feels kind of redundant because a P2W/START power for helping your blue bar already exists. I wouldn't hate it or get mad if something like this got added, but I don't see any value in adding it either.

I think Ice Armor is relatively close to Water Armor as a concept, with the main issue being that Icicles needs a proper minfx version that doesn't make you look like a porcupine. Maybe something like the spines aura but shooting out tiny shards of ice instead.

A part of the issue is that there's already a massive number of melee sets, so making one that stands out from the crowd will be harder compared to set categories that are less crowded. There's also a number of presently crappy melee sets that really ought to be improved, which would almost be like adding "new" sets since they would see more than limited niche/concept use.

Someone did a comparison and found that overall, redside story arcs result in fewer merits than blueside ones. This is largely due to many redside arcs being a bit shorter, which could in theory mean more merits per hour at the end, but in practice I feel like my villains have to work a bit harder to earn money than my heroes.

Sents have a high enough base damage modifier that, in an environment with few damage buffs/insps active, Assault Core can give greater damage returns than Radial. However, Radial still has the advantages of bypassing the damage cap (if you're heavily damage buffed by allies/insps then Core doesn't do much or anything), energy damage type (helps against lethal-resistant enemies), and requires no stack building/maintaining (pretty easy to do on a Sent but it's still a little bit of added convenience). It's hard to go wrong in this case because even the "worse" choice is still going to be good (unless you're using Core and get a lot of external damage buffs), but Radial is a "safer" choice because of the damage cap thing.

For Ignite, the important thing to note is that it will always deal full damage to the primary target even if they run. Only secondary targets can escape the DoT by running. Ignite is advertised/slotted as AOE, but in practice it's actually a single-target power with some occasional AOE as a cherry on top. Due to Sents lacking Sniper Rifle, Ignite is a mandatory part of your ST attack chain.