Snakebit

Aggro cap cannot be chamged for 1 AT. What did your testing show that makes you think the damage cap is too high?

Omg yes! So much scourge...

You dont need inf for merits. Convert hero to merits at a vendor. The conversion is free ans you dont need to have a hero merit.

I personally went with global recharge and filled in whatever defense and regen I could fit. I uae parasitic aura as my defense and siphon/ablative during the downtime. I farm smash/lethal at +4/8 using incarnate now, but I was farming +2 amd higher before incarnate with ease. There is a defense build in the farming thread that doesnt use PA but I havent tried it. It may be faster.

Made a short post about my hour or so on test with sd/elec. All in all it's really strong and pretty. I didn't use ladder but did use Chain. Chain is awesome. It lights up everything. Thunderstrike is actually good as well. Hits a lot more targets and has some actual meat to it. Compared to my scrapper, it was much easier to get to the melee cap and I had higher ranged as well. I do think the scrapper would have an easier time on higher difficulties with the same defense because of the lack of a self heal and the scrapper kills all the minions now while the tank takes two more cycles to clear the minions and then 3-4 more for bosses and LTs. Even though there's only 5% damage coming from the minions, it climbs quickly with 2 bosses and the tank WILL survive longer but not long enough to clear the bosses, where the scrapper crits pull way way ahead and get it done before being overwhelmed.

I put together an elec/sd tank and played it for about an hour in a high density battlemaiden fire farm. I chose elec/sd because I have a scrapper in that set at 50. I also have a spine/bio and I'll try that one day this week. I haven't played a tank seriously past 40 since Issue 10-ish. While I like the idea behind tanking, the vanilla implementation was always underwhelming for me, particularly on small teams and solo. I was expecting to bu+charge+Rod and then tstrike/CB for a lot of recycles and to be OOE constantly. I was expecting to be challenged at +2/8 without liberal use of inspirations. I did softcap melee and had 38 on range, but other than the individual slots in powers I did not slot any endredux outside of the sets. I did not slot anything at all to stamina, health, healing, absorb, global hitpoints, and did not slot hasten at all. I had about 40% global recharge. In other words, I was in no way min/maxed, though I did have good defenses. My expecatations were exceeded pleasently. The set on tanks takes BU+SC+LR, then maybe 3 cycles or Tstrike and whatever CB fits. The damage is significantly better than I hoped. Endurance was very manageable, and I never fot below about 35% health even though I stayed at the aggro cap for the majority of the map. Popped small greens 2 times. Never needed a CaB. CB is freaking epic. Thunderstrike has an impact on the spawn. Even though the recharge times were really slow compared to my scrapper, the clear times were only maybe double, but I didn't have the same health and endurance issues as my scrapper. Note that my scrapper only had about 39 melee defense at 40 instead of the 50 on this slap together build. I very much like the flow of the set on a tank. It's smooth and has a margin of error. There's time to telenuke around and taunt. I was able to quickly recover from unexpected aggro and apply AOE's liberally. Very nice flow of battle. The scrapper BLAMS everything and what survives is probably dangerous so she has time/endurance/health pressure. The tank slams in and doesn't feel that pressure. I can see a lot of fun to be had as a tank with these changes. I can see me making a lot of tank alts.

Thats the most optimal play...

This is a good thing. Tanks have existed in a meatshield vacuum long enough.

Personally I don't care about parity. I'm just hoping for some decent damage output for tanks as they progress. Its disheartening to play through a build and have each new attack not really do all that much to reduce clear speed.

THIS thread as it is needs to exist. ANOTHER thread needs to exist and it needs to have ONLY posts describing the play of the changes on the test server.

I asked the exact thing a few posts up.

This is a horrible idea.

Yo, Could a moderator go through this thread and remove all the non-feedback posts to a different discussion thread? I'd really like to see the results of the play, not a bunch of dissertations on the tank/brute/scrapper relationship or why bruising is better/worse?

I've been having a blast leveling with /Storm. I was already familiar with it from Earth. The extra 2 pets, the additional tohit debuff and positioning from hurricane, the ability to build some nice proc attacks and the -res really make it a strong team player. The damage from tornado+enflame+LS is brutal, and then throw Haunt and fluffy on top and you have a wrecking ball of a controller.

The only way I'd be happy with a bruising mechanic would be if it scaled proportiante to the tanks current versus max hit points, and of it were auto pbaoe. Otherwise its too strong, and the idea of having multiple stacks of it from other sources is farcical. I think what's on Beta is a better direction and I'm excited to see the results. It might get me to play Dark/SS.

I don't bother with them for exactly that reason. The Ouro challenges do not make the time in game more productive. If they did, I would play the hell out of them.

I do the same thing my friend. I was pointing out that the time from 1 to 32 is frivolous. Therefore the complaints about DFB...which is almost exclusively full team content and easy as pie to boot...being hard on TW are inane. It's an hour or two of content that grants pretty good rewards in addition to the xp. It's no harder or easier on any toon at all. It requires the minimal effort of all the content in the game except door sitting. How does doorsitting go with TW by the way? Is it harder than say, AR/DEV? It amuses me greatly how offended you are that I dismissed that incredibly entitled and hollow lament.

I propose a temp power category from the p2w vendor as a testbed. Let players choose from a variety of risk reward options and see what gets the most traction. Add or add to content focused on the most popular difficulty buff powers. Scale up rewards for Ouro challenge settings and track how that gets played.

Wanted to read but you started talking about how hard life is in DFB.

Required Reading for warshade: https://dechskaison.blogspot.com/2011/01/mfing-warshade.html

Get over It.

I havent read where anyone is saying that pylon dps is the only metric. It is only *A* metric and I'm pretty sure that anyone actually posting in this thread already knows that it is only any indicator of relative performances. Trying to stifle pylon time as that indicator is just silly. It's been said and said. Everyone knows. Someone should solo Market Crash on every possible combo so people can dismiss that too.

Whatever the issue may be with the pylon numbers, they will be the same issues across all sets. If TW is inflated, so is claws. I think you're right about having to look at TW as a whole and not on a power per power basis because of the way the performance changes during momentum. You don't get those extreme shifts with most other sets. But you put a spine/bio next to a TW/Bio and we know who's doing the most damage. And it isn't even subtle. Stalkers outperform scrappers for damage across the board, no matter what set it is. Except maybe Elec/SD. And I think a good elec/sd player on a stalker would outperform a more casual player (like me) on a Scrapper. I like scrappers better is the only reason I play them and not stalkers. But I might be in a pardigm shift as I've tried 3 stalkers and 3 scrappers lately and I'm leaning toward the Stalkers. At some point I'm going to build an AV killer and I think it's probably going to be a Stalker for the DPS. My spine bio has about 270-280 recharge. He's a monster. But he can't even sit in the boat with a TW/Bio. Ran Market Crash with a TW/Bio and it was pretty impressive the damage he did. I can see where the people who played (not farmed) a TW to 50 would be heated about a nerf. If a change is warranted for the sake of "balance", I can't imagine buffing all the other sets instead of TW getting the hammer though. I feel the same about Bio. In my opinion, Bio is far and away the best overall secondary for scrappers in terms of durability, flexibility, and ease of use. Yes, it's active and clicky, but you get not 1, not 2, but 3 self heals. Recovery from 2 different powers. Super S/L resists, reasonable defense, AND a damage aura. Looking only through the lens of "set balance", Bio should be nerfed before TW. Once /bio gets enough oompf to eat an alpha and not go down instantly, it's pretty much game over. And it takes not a set bonus one to be really good.

I don't have a dog in the fight, I don't really care one way or the other about TW. I think the pylon times demonstrate clearly that is seriously outperforms the rest of the melee sets, but meh. It sucks to play. But this post doesn't really cover the reasons not to nerf it. A LOT of powersets drain intensely. Especially if you compare damage/effect to end cost from those high cost sets to the damage output of TW. High recharge timers aren't relevant, again compared to other long recharge powers in other sets that make you wait minutes. I think the learning curve bit is not a reason not to make a balance pass on the numbers. Dual blades has a pretty steep learning curve that lasts through the 40's and it sucks wind compared to TW. It has double the DPS of some of the other melee sets. Double. And all you have to do is figure out the best order to click the buttons to get it. Again, I don't care one way or the other, I don't like the set and will likely never play it past what I already have (which isn't even 30). I'm just saying that the arguments here are kind of poorly considered.

I'm pretty sure chain crits. I'm pretty sure it only checks on the first job and if it cuts in the first it crits in them all. Edit: Does not crit.