Koopak

Dynama hit several of my points already but ill try to keep everything into loose categories of descending difficulty to overcome. To echo Dynama first, this would be a much better dps AT than tank AT conceptually. I will also be ignoring exact values as those can all be changed easily, and focus on implementation. Fundamental Design Limits: These are issues that are at odds with the core design of the game and how it is played by the modern playerbase. As Dynama said, this playstyle will encourage the tank to move, causing mobs to chase them. Without making the mez provided by the Inherit able to reliably CC the entire pack of mobs, it will cause enemies to move out of AoE patches and complicate targeting. Worse it will split the pack up, making it necessary to now split targets. This has further complications with aggro management listed further down. Mission Maps are also largely not design to accommodate this type of engagement. This playstyle inherently is a 'fighting retreat' or 'kite' playstyle, which is incompatible with modern CoH. Granted in the old days pulling to a corner and fighting there sometimes falling back was normal. Today the normal that people expect is 'push forward' play, in when the team is constantly making progress forward and never backing up. Complications of Implementation: These are issues that added dev time or detract from the experience, they may be addressable, but not easily. As Dynama said, this playstyle almost necessitates movement abilities added to the kit, this combined with the likely correct presumption that the benefits of the inherit may need to be encoded into the powers themselves greatly reduces the advantages of reusing Assault as a category, ultimately creating more work rather than less. While that will be true of every new AT proposal, this particular example is expressed as intending to avoid or minimize that issue. Current the game is incapable of cleanly supporting dynamic movement during combat, necessitating the point above. If the point above is ignored and no inherent mobility is provided the player must accept 'down time' in their rotation to manually move and deal with the strict and often jarring rooting powers currently demand. Most likely outcome will be ignoring the mechanic entirely unless tuned heavily to enforce its need. Resolving this is likely a systems wide change and to do so cleanly, a big one. It may or may not be possible to retrieve the range of multiple targets in an AoE, adding another challenge to sorting the inherent's mechanic. Balancing Concerns: These are issues that make balancing the AT difficult. This will be the largest section and all of them can probably be addressed but not necessarily easily. Punchvoke and Taunt auras as it exists now on Tankers is mostly able to handle general aggro management on a Tanker in most content, on most teams. Note i say most, this is because especially well built DPS ATs can and do on occasion pull aggro from even well built Tankers, let alone Brutes (using Pokevoke) that do not make use of Taunt. Taunt is a mandatory portion of every melee set in the game for this reason, even if the original aggro system was vastly different. This issue would continue to exist on this AT and be unable to be addressed without taking a pool power as submitted. In fact the aggro management issue would be worse in this case, using the example of an enemy aggroing onto a defender, or more likely a blaster, the ranged attacks would need the taunt they apply from the equivalent of punchvoke to be significantly higher than the melee attacks to account for the fact that aggro generation is reduced by the target's range significantly. This already combined with the fact that aggro's starting value is damage to make it near useless to taunt an enemy that does the same thing today. Thus this 'opportunity' to gather stacks for the inherit becomes a liability to the team, one likely to happen often if the pack splits like mentioned above. This being a likely outcome and possibly an expectation of play also means the AT requires more conscious effort on the part of the Tank than other Tank ATs to accomplish the bare minimum of their role. On the topic of aggro management, the example given of using a ranged attack to start the engagement has further complications due to the above mentioned range reduction is aggro generation. For a ranged ST opener to work, it would necessitate both an AoE taunt effect all Tanker Punchvoke rather than Brute Pokevoke, and an increase in value to account for that range, or for the devs to code an exclusion to the range portion of the logic somehow. Otherwise ranged pulling would require, like taunt pulling today, for the team to wait for the tank to get stable aggro through AoE before joining in. Lastly on the topic of aggro management. Tankers and Brutes as it is have an antagonistic relationship with aggro. Even a well built Brute often struggles to pull aggro from a poorly build Tanker on more than a mob or two. This same dynamic will, due to the nature of the threat system, exist for this AT as well, either ensuring it cannot meaningfully protect a new player on a Tanker, or will be unable to be protected by a veteran Tanker. Getting into the Mez side of things, the way control works makes balancing it near impossible as it is. Either enough magnitude of an effect is applied to overcome the target's protection, or it is not, and purple patch reduces duration. This means that the mez effects of this AT would need to either be extremely powerful on anything below +4 enemies or nearly useless on anything at +4 or higher, or they would need to be exempt from the purple patch. This will not prevent the mezes from being effected by mez resistance on some enemies groups and in some harder content like 4 stars. Having this mez be core to the AT means any situation it is ineffective means you aren't getting to play the AT, this is essentially the Controller life in 4 star ITF as it is and its not great. Slotting for powers if the mez is allowed to be enhancable will make for complex and antagonistic slotting. While I would personally enjoy the build challenge, a large portion of this playerbase sticks to relatively simple slotting, using 4-6 of a single set per power. While Id encourage them to improve, it is a sign that the enhancement system is not conducive to complex slotting like this, where one needs to balance multiple set types in a single power to get meaningful value out of it, which is what will be necessary if the mez effects are not exempt from purple patch since there is no way for them to be balanced to be useful at both +0 and +4 without being over powered without relying on the player to fill the power gap with enhancements or other mez duration buffs. Having the type of mez be based on the Assault Set while neat conceptually is problematic mechanically as a proposed advantage is in being able to stack mezes with your Controller and Dominator teammates. However as not all control sets have access to all control types, this doesn't work out in a consistent way, enforcing a team composition requirement beyond simple roles. The various mez types suggested are treated as if they are interchangeable in power, this is not the case. Fear, stun, hold, and confuse each have different value in an engagement. Generally speaking it can be argued to go Fear < Stun < Hold < Confuse in terms of power. This will directly impact the validity of any given set. Even if the above two points are resolved, for instance if they all provide immobilize, a more reasonable ask, the inherent, in order to not be to powerful will need short duration mezes, even assuming these durations are protected from purple patch and even mez resistance, they will make the stacking logic a low value effect as even 10 seconds is a very short time in a game where optimistically you would get 3-4 attacks off in that time especially after factoring in the desired movement. Anything less would quickly become pointless, as even with stacking this AT's effect will ware off and the effect will no longer be strong enough mag to apply. Finally damage. AoEs scaling more damage with more stacks than ST attacks will create many challenges in balancing the damage output of the AT, in many cases it is likely to push AoE attacks ahead of ST attacks for damage, and encourage only using AoE, which could step on the toes of Blasters and Tankers as main AoE sources. Assault Sets generally do not have the attacks to comprise entire rotations of ranged or melee only or ST or AoE only, without excessive recharge. While theoretically thats not an issue your in and out fighting will mean you are rarely in melee or range for more than 5 seconds, creating a very erratic playstyle. This encourages using assault entirely in melee until a full optimal build can be done. That is unless the Assault set is significantly adjusted leading back to the points above. Factual Errors: This is my 'umm awckshuly' section, and is mostly only relevant for further discussion of examples given. Sentinel Armor sets are only 'weaker' due to the lower AT scalars Sentinels have, presumably a Tanking AT would have higher scalars. No mention was given to resist cap in the proposal so ill assume 90%. If this AT was given sentinel defense and resistance scalars, hitting caps would be a chore to say the least.

bruh, no need to be that hostile, goddamn

Overfocusing on healing is just putting the board entirely in Emp's favor though. The set struggles to have impact and always has, the only thing that makes Empathy seem like it was better back in the day is the lack of game knowledge at that time. Since then IOs, Incarnates, and player knowledge has left it in the dust. I say this as someone who LIKEs Empathy, but its not good compared to its compatriots because what it offers isn't as valuable. Purple Patch swings things such that the harder the content you are doing, the less useful Empathy is outside of tailored engagements like specific boss fights, and i do mean specific. This is because healing, at its core, is about undoing damage. This means it has to be reactive, you can try to preempt the cast time some sure, but now you are expecting an awful lot of a game that has poor communication to the player and a playerbase that gets overwhelmed any time more than 4 characters hit their buttons at the same time. (One is partly the product of the other) A casual trawl through health and damage values with purple patch in mind will show you that in MANY cases, anything besides a Tanker or Brute is going to have their health evicerated in mere moments if they don't have high defense and resistance, and it can still happen with just high defense, leaving the Emp player no time to react. At lower difficulties this isn't an issue, but that same perusal will show those same values aren't even close to threatening. This is exacerbated by every AT having different max, and maxmax hp values, often by ridiculous amounts. A Tanker quite literally can have 3x the health of another member of your team, and remember regeneration scales with maxhp. Meaning this threat profile is inconsistent. Inconsistent in a way that means if things are moving smoothly at high difficulty your Tanker is keeping aggro and probably needs little if any healing, but if he loses aggro, your other teammates are likely to die before you can react unless you are a very above average player for this game. This can be resolved by lowering the difficulty sure, but now you are artificially handicapping your rewards because the Tanker is BAD, which is fine, but feels shit to a lot of people. This prevents you from finding a middle ground, say +2, +3, whatever it is for you, because what that middle ground is is different for every AT. The exceptions are those specific encounters I mentioned, things like Romulous, especially on hardmode runs, create a scenario where you are likely to have spill over threat and even if you don't expecting the Tank to hold all of that threat and survive is unreasonable. Rommy has slow recharge, heavy hitting attacks to slap a Tank down to low health in a few attacks but not finish them, and the aggro packs are scaled similarly. Or atleast they are after you add a full set of team buffs. And theres the rub. The one time Empathy is unequivocally good at something, that something presumes that the team is already rocking 3 other support sets which are more important to team survival than the Empathy is. This is less an issue with Empath persay, and more an issue with the game at a core level. A dedicated healing set, no matter how good at healing, will always be underwhelming, because this game rewards preventing damage FAR more than reversing damage. Empathy has other things, but they don't come close to competing with the competition in value, and when multiple other support sets can heal almost as well? Its a nail in the coffin. Empathy is nice to have, it FEELs nice to have the auras and adrenaline and fortitude. But it wont be the difference between you clearing content or not, living through a fight or not even a fraction as often as the others. Again, this is as much a core game design issue dating back to beta, as it is a modern issue. Modern situations just make it worse.

Had this set burning in the back of my mind, all three are on the same build. Run Type: Pylon Division: 4 Archetype: Blaster Primary Powerset: Fire Blast Secondary Powerset: Plant Manipulation Time in seconds: 43 Burst: Burst Hybrid: Active Build is usable for General Purpose: Yes Number of Runs Averaged Together: 1 Version: I28P1 Notes: I know of a Fire/Nin that out performs this but Toxins should scale much better in a team and at damage cap. Video Link: Run Type: Pylon Division: 2 Archetype: Blaster Primary Powerset: Fire Blast Secondary Powerset: Plant Manipulation Time in seconds: 40 Burst: Burst Hybrid: Active Build is usable for General Purpose: Yes Number of Runs Averaged Together: 1 Version: I28P1 Notes: I know of a Fire/Nin that out performs this but Toxins should scale much better in a team and at damage cap. Video Link: Run Type: Pylon Division: 1 Archetype: Blaster Primary Powerset: Fire Blast Secondary Powerset: Plant Manipulation Time in seconds: 28 Burst: Burst Hybrid: Active Build is usable for General Purpose: Yes Number of Runs Averaged Together: 1 Version: I28P1 Notes: I know of a Fire/Nin that out performs this but Toxins should scale much better in a team and at damage cap. Video Link: FirePlant - Blaster (Fire Blast - Plant Manipulation).mbd

Congrats again to @Auroxis for taking the November bounty! I'll be moving on to more specific challenges in the near future. Going to fill in some blanks myself and set out bounties to beat various times in various conditions as i am able to ear mark the inf.

1. 150% (70% comes from Hasten) global recharge is all that's needed to make it permanent. You also don't need it to be permanent, your endurance doesn't evaporated instantly the second your income doesn't match your use. 4 minutes is a long time, you'll be fine. Even with 0 recharge, it averages out to +0.66 end/s which is about +40% recovery. 2. Ageless Radial is the best suited option for a lot of builds when soloing because debuffs are usually the issue for a build that can normally solo without relying on it's destiny. For group play you just don't use ageless because the group has your end covered. For the niche case of a solo build reliant of barrier or rebirth to survive solo, then sure, but recovery Serum is still available unless you are doing something like hard mode TFs solo. The level argument is fair to a point, but you don't need to get build fancy before 50. Sure it can help but ive leveled every AT and a lot of power sets using just SOs and basic IOs and yeah then I slot end redux because I just have the spare slots since I only need 3 of the likely 4-6 each attack will get, to cover accuracy and damage and only 2 for each buff or defensive

So here's my contribution to your goblin hoard, if you'll have it. Abandon +recovery, embrace drugs. https://cod.uberguy.net./html/power.html?power=temporary_powers.temporary_powers.alt_lp_recovery_serum Really this is something that took me several years to realize. Most builders tend to worry a lot about endurance, and I did too for a long time. Initially it was just vibes, then i got into the nitty gritty and tried to make sure i had more end/s coming in then my ST rotation and my toggles would eat, then i just shot for lasting two minutes with the understanding that Ageless Radial (not the one gives recovery, just a full bar) would solve that, as well as embracing accolades. Eventually however I realized that hitting that two minute mark is pretty easy most of the time, and when its not there's this stupid cheap gem at the START vender. Now its a temporary power sure, but the only content that locks you out of temporary powers is specifically tuned for teams, specifically large and/or coordinated teams. This means that you almost certainly have an endurance battery somewhere on the team, take a look through the support sets they are absolutely lousy with +recovery and +end. Not to mention the kings of support (in said content) currently, Kin and Cold, both bring big end to the team. Thus I've landed strongly on the ideology that endurance is a non factor even before factoring in any other tools. This opened up my options and planning a lot.

Also congratulations to @Auroxis for taking the gold on this one.

Terribly sorry for missing your question all month, been a messy year all around for me. These are challenges I am posting to get engagement with the thread linked in the OP. For now its mostly pylon times but there are other categories and I am open to adding more, all in an effort to collect real world performance metrics for ATs and sets under various conditions.

Congratulations to @mezzosoprano for taking the win

Alright been a busy as hell week for me IRL so apologies for the delays. Congratulations to @Auroxis and @mezzosoprano for winning the D4 Sentinel and D1 Controller competitions respectfully. I will be in touch to transfer your winnings via the forum dms here. Due to said IRL roller coaster and others I'll only be posting one time gated bounty for November, one requested by a previous winner. Depending on activity levels I may be swapping to 'first to beat x' bounties in the near future as well. Without further to do. Bounty Posted! Prize: 2 billion influence Task: Post the best Division 5 time of any AT for the month of November. Start Date/Time: 00:00 UTC, November 1st 2024 See in your time here! End Date/Time: 00:00 UTC, December 1st 2024 See in your time here! (In the links, look in the non bold text with your location in it, if anyone has a better translation method, let me know.) Runs on the test server are valid provided they do not make use of any changes currently being tested, or the changes used are promoted to live. Division 5 Rules: No temps or incarnates that provide anything but defense, resistance and hp, this includes no endurance tools.

But this time with a twist, lets see what you all can do without the toys! Bounty Posted! Prize: 2 billion influence Task: Post the best Division 4 time of any Sentinel for the month of October. Read the rules and regulations for Division 4 and post your results here: Clear Speed Leaderboards (posts made in this thread will be processed if they meet the requirements listed.) Start Date/Time: 00:00 UTC, October 1st 2024 See in your time here! End Date/Time: 00:00 UTC, November 1st 2024 See in your time here! (In the links, look in the non bold text with your location in it, if anyone has a better translation method, let me know.) Runs on the test server are valid provided they do not make use of any changes currently being tested, or the changes used are promoted to live. Division 4 Rules Synopsis: Any power not available in the most restrictive endgame content (currently 4 star hardmode) is banned. (See OP for specific powers)

Its finally time for Controllers to flex their stuff, and in this competition the AT has a history of unexpected results, lets see what yall can manage. Bounty Posted! Prize: 2 billion influence Task: Post the best Division 1 time of any Controller for the month of October. Read the rules and regulations for Division 1 and post your results here: Clear Speed Leaderboards (posts made in this thread will be processed if they meet the requirements listed.) Start Date/Time: 00:00 UTC, October 1st 2024 See in your time here! End Date/Time: 00:00 UTC, November 1st 2024 See in your time here! (In the links, look in the non bold text with your location in it, if anyone has a better translation method, let me know.) Runs on the test server are valid provided they do not make use of any changes currently being tested, or the changes used are promoted to live. Division 1 Rules Synopsis: Any temp that can be easily stockpiled and ran as part of normal play is legal, lores and inspirations are banned. (See OP for specific powers)

Huge congrats to @Ratch_ and @BRADICAL for taking the month's challenges. As we roll onto October, the next round begins. Bounty Posted! Prize: 2 billion influence Task: Post the best Division 1 time of any Controller for the month of October. Start Date/Time: 00:00 UTC, October 1st 2024 See in your time here! End Date/Time: 00:00 UTC, November 1st 2024 See in your time here! (In the links, look in the non bold text with your location in it, if anyone has a better translation method, let me know.) Runs on the test server are valid provided they do not make use of any changes currently being tested, or the changes used are promoted to live. Division 1 Rules: Any temp that can be easily stockpiled and ran as part of normal play is legal, lores and inspirations are banned. (See OP for specific powers) Bounty Posted! Prize: 2 billion influence Task: Post the best Division 4 time of any Sentinel for the month of September. Start Date/Time: 00:00 UTC, October 1st 2024 See in your time here! End Date/Time: 00:00 UTC, November 1st 2024 See in your time here! (In the links, look in the non bold text with your location in it, if anyone has a better translation method, let me know.) Runs on the test server are valid provided they do not make use of any changes currently being tested, or the changes used are promoted to live. Division 4 Rules: Any power not available in the most restrictive endgame content (currently 4 star hardmode) is banned. (See OP for specific powers)

Big congratulations to @Ratch_ for taking the win, and doing it with two hands behind his back. Submitting a time of 52 seconds with inactive hybrid and no 'burst' category powers used.