Cheli

The attitude some people have towards this game is eerily reminiscent of WoW players who analyze the game exclusively in the context of the meta; that is, because some people spend most of their time steamrolling, theoretically everyone could do it, which means we must assume everyone is always doing it and that's the only way anyone is playing and therefore it's not just a problem but the problem all conversation has to revolve around. In WoW, if a raid tier was finished by world-first professional video gamers 'too fast', or some meta comp developed that let people blast through high-level keystone dungeons, everyone from the top-to-bottom of the playerbase would say the game was 'too easy' even though literally 90% of players had never seen any mythic bosses or done a key above a +15. People see that some teams are full of procced out IO'd invincible heroes nuking half the map in 30 seconds, and even though most gameplay doesn't take place in that atmosphere, we must always assume everyone is playing like that all the time, and all balance discussion has to take place in that context. I think even in the context of teams it can be overgeneralizing to assume every team is mowing maps down. I'm sure many are, but even in that context, how many of even those teams mowing maps down are complaining about things being too easy? I feel like it's a percentage, but one small enough that they're probably satisfied by things like hardmode TFs and other optionally applicable changes. That's sorta why I feel like any sweeping changes to difficulty, even in a team setting, should be either very subtle, or strictly opt-in. I definitely agree, though; if we're going to have these kinds of changes, they should be tightly tailored to the actual problem. I don't think the Council changes really were.

Because it effects other people, Like I said, in the post you didn't read, it impacts the exact opposite of the people you and others are insisting this change is meant to impact. For folks with tweaked builds it turns Council into slightly-more-annoying Freakshow clones and evinces - as others have pointed out - a design tendency to equate "slog full of HP punching-bag" with "difficulty". For the old-fashioned types who run around with SOs and don't engage in forum feedback threads and already weren't soloing Council at +4/x8 and complaining about the game being "too easy" - many of which do still exist - these changes probably are very noticeable. I'm not terribly committed on these changes either way - but when I feel like they're evidence in a broader picture of the direction the HC team is taking on balance, I certainly think it's worth talking about it. And I have no problem pointing out that extremely compelling counterarguments like "well you complained the game was too easy, get good noob!!!!" aren't all they're cracked up to be. Your signature suggests to me you probably have a history of saying silly things to people, being called on it, and then claiming victory by publicly announcing you've ignored them. There's a common denominator there... and it isn't me. Such is life.

The change has 0 impact on how I play the game; I don't do PI radios except occasionally to stress-test a freshly IO'd 50, and I mentioned multiple times in my post I've had no problems with them, even on characters using fairly meh powersets. The projection here about "insults" is strong; from your first post and this followup it seems you're really jonesing to throw out snide and condescending replies to people fairly innocently discussing the state of the game, even if it requires you to build strawmen. Like you did in this very post, by shifting from "well some people somewhere complained but I'm not going to dig their threads up" to accusing me of being one of them, even after I explicitly said it didn't effect me (going so far as to cut out the part of the post where I said I wasn't even opposed to the change if it's done for logically sound reasons), so you can get your digs in. Reading is your friend.

I don't know about OP but I never complained about the game not being challenging enough. I don't think all that many people did, and most who did are probably satisfied with hardmode TFs and stuff like that. Is there anyone on here with a history of complaining about the game not being challenging enough, now complaining about it being too challenging? Okay but this game has been one where you can fight 6 zillion guys one-on-one for the better part of two decades. Why exactly does that need to change now? Because you want it to? I'm not even against buffing some of the weaker enemy groups (I've soloed +4/x8 nu-Council on a /nin stalker, I don't honestly think they're that much tougher with the right build), but it's always the same weak, lame arguments trotted out to be nasty to people making fairly innocent comments about changes. Edit: now that I think about it, honestly the change feels a bit counterintuitive if the objective was to give people who complain about the game not being "challenging enough" a challenge, since those people are probably not feeling that big a difference (I'm a fairly average builder at best and can deal with nu-Council on several melee characters fairly decently), but casual players and people with no build experience or who just want to run no-incarnate SOs at 50 and probably already weren't eating Council maps for breakfast are definitely going to feel it. I don't feel strongly either way about it, but that's certainly something worth noting.

You're taking game mechanic discussions very weirdly personal, which is.. the exact thing I was pointing out in my post. ROP was among the least-picked powers in the game pre-nerf back when it was essentially free, permanent mez protection for any character that took it. Popularity is not an indication of power strength, especially for a set that flavor-wise is the only one that represents an extremely common and extremely popular character archetype. There's a reason AR/dev has always been one of the most common types of blasters in the game, and it's not because those sets are mechanically strong.

Rage could be doublestacked with even a mediocre IO build on live and before the doublestacking bug was "fixed" (which, reminder, was not until the secret server) it had no crash when doublestacked - which was the entirety of the game's retail lifespan. Somehow without a crash SS still wasn't this god-tier machine everyone insists necessitates the crash existing. This is the real problem with these kinds of discussions; people making silly assumptions that completely fair and sensible assessments of a powerset's performance capability is somehow an assessment on the skill, knowledge or worthiness of people who pick the powerset. Outside of a group of minmax trolls or deeply-committed 4* tryhards, no one is casting judgment on someone who enjoys a powerset. I love StJ and Dual Pistols for the sounds and animation alone, but I'm aware enough of how the game works to recognize both sets perform some ways behind the top sets. I love Dual Blades for the combos, which are generally suboptimal to use but I like them so damnit I use them. But if someone explicitly asks for an opinion or explanation on those sets, I'm going to give one that acknowledges their wonkiness and/or numerical drawbacks, but that will inevitably bring out three-dozen people who play DP religiously and are emotionally attached to it and refuse to admit that it has these numerical drawbacks by bringing up feelcrafty stuff about "playstyle" or "just play what you like!" which are useless answers to someone explicitly asking for feedback on a set's performance. Nobody thinks you're an "idiot". There are just plenty of people, many who even like the look or feel of the set, willing to acknowledge it has mechanical weaknesses that other sets do not.

"Sucks" is an oversimplification, the kind that tend to crop up in an atmosphere where people aren't exactly equipped to write page-long explanations for their feelings on a powerset (like general chat). There are any number of ways one person might consider a set underpowered, overpowered, et cetera. People in general chat also commit the opposite sin just as often, making feelcrafty judgments on the performance of a set based on their enjoyment of its aesthetics, theme or love of a character they play that has the set. Reality is that every set has pros and cons, but some are more pro-y and con-y than others. SS is stuck with a lot of cons. Rage crash is one that can be built or insp'd around, but other sets have buildups that have no crash, and better dpa baseline than most SS powers, so leaning on the rage crutch and dealing with the crash can be seen as unnecessary hoops jumped through to reach the performance of other sets. Stomp and procout blow are crazy good but that's two powers in a set with 9. When pool powers are a better substitute than some of your actual primary/secondary attacks, that's not a sign that the set as a whole is in a good spot - but it's hard to really justify sweeping changes on a set that can do what SS does, all because of Rage. That leaves it in a difficult position. As the last paragraph of @Fritter Chicken's quote says - what really differentiates sets is how much return you get for your overall investment. Ask yourself, if I put this much time and resources into a build using another powerset, would it perform better? For SS, the answer is sometimes 'yes'. Considering the HC devs 'fixed' the placate-breaks-on-damage bug, but then were receptive enough to feedback to carve out an exception for vital stuff like Stalker ATOs, I wonder sometimes, if the stacking 'bug' had been 'fixed' on this server instead of the secret one, a similar exception would've been made for Rage, if indeed that's possible coding-wise. Because as much as people downplay the crash - understandable, given you can ignore the end problem if you're constantly popping blues or running ageless t4 on CD, or can ignore the def loss by popping purples (assuming you weren't blasted to dust in the second between Rage crashing and the insp buff registering, assuming you weren't animation locked when it happened), or are fine with standing there not using any attacks for 10s (again, assuming you weren't animation locked when the crash happened and oops you just blew a CD and watched your screen fill up with -1's because the crash registered in the time it took the animation to finish), it is a real thing you have to deal with that you don't on other sets. Long story short you have to define what a powerset "sucks" means to really address this. Any powerset can be IO'd to functionality, but a powerset only having 3, maaaybe 4 desireable powers in it is a bad thing, even if those 3 powers are really good. And when one of them is the giant can of worms Rage is, it's difficult to say the set is in a great place balance-wise. But if you like it, and you can accept those things, you should play it (which is a common-sense thing that I assume everybody knows intuitively and doesn't need to be told, but it's the usual rejoinder to this kind of thread so I have to fit it in here to preempt anyone insisting I'm dumping on their playstyle or something.)

Around 2.5b in raw inf, though most of my actual wealth is tied up in 2 SG bases full of enhancements, a bank character inventory full of converters/merits/catalysts/boosters etc I have 50 characters, though only a handful are 50 with full builds. I tend to shift IOs around to try out new builds and characters, and will unslot and ship IOs over in bulk if I wind up not really liking a character. Recently did this with an old farm character, and a crab spider cos I don't really like crabs all that much and wanted the ATOs for my fortunata (though I've been thinking about trying a crabbermind build, those look sorta neat).

Presumably it's a very outdated viewpoint from the early development of the game that giving a single-target hold or a buildup to an AT that doesn't get it natively endangers making the AT that uses it natively useless. We can all see from the ensuing decade+ of the game's development that giving char to blasters or soul drain to corruptors has not made controllers or scrappers useless. Not necessarily a bad sentiment to work from, blasters or brutes shouldn't be as good at mezzing stuff as a controller. But giving them char or electrifying fences even with controller numbers ain't gonna do that.

This might work on a current meta, practical level but considering this is a thread where people are discussing balance and design, suggesting that the devs' design approach going forward should be 'the power is fine, it can be proc-bomb slotted' is a bit problematic.

This is how I feel about the stated reasoning for soul drain being nerfed: the explicit justification is to bring it in line with outmoded ideas about power balance from 15 years and 3 dev teams ago. This line of thinking gave us 9-minute hoarfrost, but it also gave us the current meta where the best picks are ones that are a) not onerously burdened by the damage nerf/extra recharge imposed by the epic power pool formula, and b) offer performance beyond what the power offers on paper, usually via proc-bombing. This is why char is as popular a pick as it is; the extra recharge and nerfed damage don't matter much when you can 6-slot proc it to hit as hard as your primary powers and also hold. Unfortunately I fear the response to that will be to nerf proc IOs instead of rebalancing epic powers to contribute more.

The problem with the 'cottage rule', aside from those pointed out prior, is that it straitjackets making changes that are for the better of the game when interpreted conservatively. How far do you go in determining what the 'core functionality' of the power is to adhere to the rule? Were the changes to energy melee breaking the 'cottage rule' because being slow to the point of uselessness was part of the 'core functionality' of energy transfer? Obviously this is a bit of an edge case for the purpose of making a point, but it underlines the fact that the people who came up with the rule aren't working on the game anymore and trying to divine how they would have handled changing currently-existing powers is silly. Are we trying to make the game better or are we trying to fulfill what we imagine might have been the wishes of people who worked on it over a decade ago? I can understand and sympathize in some respect, as I myself really don't like powers changing so drastically, constantly, to the point I have to worry about respeccing or 're-learning' the game, the way WoW changes fundamentally every 3 months. I hate that. I despise it. And I'd really like it if that was avoided. But I don't think retuning powers to function well should be avoided because 'this is what the devs said 17 years ago'. That said I don't think soul drain being changed is bad because of 'cottage rule', I think it's bad because it's unnecessarily changing the power to conform to other outmoded design considerations from 15+ years ago, and appears (going by the track record, anyway) to be doing so mostly arbitrarily to make a power choice that the HC devs know is popular significantly less so. I feel more that epic pool powers should be closer to how soul drain works than to how the aforementioned 9-minute hoarfrost works.

Regen isn't a very beginner- or low-level-friendly defense set. It relies 100% on +recharge, particularly global recharge bonuses, something you get basically nothing of until you're near max level, running hasten and slotting IO sets. At very high-end and with a lot of game knowledge regen is absolutely indestructible, but you're going to struggle. Try a different armor set with less click powers and more resistance/defense toggles. At low-level and with less game knowledge it's much better to be able to just tank damage on a melee character than try to play super-reactively. A blaster - or any other squishy-type ATs really - are going to be a rude awakening if you're coming from a different type of game, especially at mid-high level and especially against certain enemy groups that smash you constantly with mez effects. As a blaster you have no defenses at all unless you take pool powers. No mez protection, no damage reduction from armor or w/e that even the 'squishiest' of squishy characters in other games get. You will be taking full-on 100% damage right to the face. Pool powers might help, and you can get around some of this with clever use of the meagre CC your secondary set usually provides (though dark doesn't have a whole lot outside of the standardized t1 immo). Once you get a grasp on that fact and fill your tray with insps you can get around, but you're still going to be having trouble tackling stuff, especially against mez-happy enemy groups, until you're higher level. Blaster definitely takes more general knowledge, or just playing with a team, to get the hang of.

I'm a little surprised at the consternation of some in this thread honestly; it's so incredibly easy to get into the economy in this game and there's so many checks in place on the market to keep prices down that it's 500 times cheaper and easier to put together a strong build than it ever was on live. I've done just fine and have had a relatively frustration-free experience, and I absolutely hate the "AH metagame" so many other online games force you to play. "Play content and convert rewards to items that sell instantly for plenty of cash" is WAY easier than what it takes to get into the economy on a game like WoW, where you need AH-scraping addons, price scanners, secret tips gleaned from the dark corners of the web that are probably out-of-date by the time you find them, and probably multiple paid accounts if you want to get into things.

I'd also be wary of reliance on proc-bomb gameplay, and specifically build without relying on it on most characters, because I strongly suspect it will be next on the dev chopping block.