ABlueThingy

I dunno man... It really feels like stone needs a big rework to get it out of the binary boring state it is in now. Both thematic and mechanical. It may not be popular but I liked the old days of the armors being unusable with one another. I'd like to see that brought back-- HOLD ON DONT KILL ME --while also patching holes in the set. Give some decent def/res to all the armors with a large boost to their specialty. Change rooted/mud/ee/ss/ to have thematic buffs. So while brimstone armor is on mud pots does a fire for on people and EE gives a small buildup, things like that. Make all of them stack with granite armor and lower granite's value (rock + granite = present day values) and give us the option to shut off rockmanmode graphically so we can just have one simple state Hm... Ideally you could make it so turning an armor on and then granite gives you boosted values but turning granite on first doesn't give you and def/res but it unlocks armor stacking for the people that want to mix types and min max it, the penalty just being the end cost. And some people like looking like a random pile of stuff. It that's my pie in the sky stone

It might be interesting to give some status protect to the passive. Even if just low level. Would be a neat, fairly unique, trick

I said this in a different thread but it really belongs here.

Currently don't sleeps, generally, have a higher mag then their hold counterparts? So it's easier to sleep a boss or what not. Maybe you could make it so every sleep cast on them was like... another ablative layer of sleep that had to get knocked off? Cast one sleep, takes one hit to wake. Cast 3 sleeps, take 3 hits? Or tie that to Mag? Mag 7 sleep actually drops 7 sleeps on them that you have to break through one at a time? Sleeps are really just an obvious and clear example of the problem with controls in this game in general.

If the aggro cap is higher or unlimited... it kind of defeats the point of two tanks doesn't it? Like, if you're not doing enough damage you... get more damage ATs If you don't have enough protection you get more support ATs And if you need more aggro control... pick up a second tank or a brute. If you pull 45 mobs you have one Tanker take 17 and the other Tank/Brute take 17 and the remaining 21 will have to be spread between the Scrappers/Sents/MMs of the team. OR locked down by the Contollers/Dominators. If you have all the mobs taken care of... well now the Blasters can shine by ripping them to shreads without restraint. If one tank has unlimited aggro capacity or even just a higher aggro cap? This has huge knock on effects. You end up with one tanker, one def and 6 blasters. Now just have the blasters unload AoEs and clean up. Do enough damage fast enough and you can burn down a group and move on. You only need 1 Tank, 1 Def, 6 Blasters. With a little wiggle room. With Incarnates now you might be able to swap that Def for another Blaster. Scrappers are only useful if there's a danger of the DPS getting aggro... with no cap, no worries. No need for Scrap, Blasters WAY out damage them. No need for single target dps(Stalk), no time for debuffs to do anything so Corrs are a waste of time generally. It's better to just pound them down into paste in one volley. No point in a Brute, all you need the tank for is to soak damage, not deal damage. That's what the blasters are for. And at this size of mob... it's Tanker or nothing. Cont and Dom are just taking a slot that a Blaster could use to be more effective. You don't need controls when the Tank has perfect lock-down and a half-way decent support. And I'm not talking about farming either, this was a STRONG trend in the game before aggro caps. It will only be worse with IOs and Incarnates. And I'm not trying to doomsay or slippery slope here... it's just... when you ask why this weird guardrail exists... it's because people kept slipping down that slope. Also, purely subjectively, because it makes DPS boring as hell. It's way more fun to play on the edge, just dodging the aggro and think tactically about when to use which attack. I like it when the Tank takes the bulk of the foes and the scrapper has to grab two or three and survive the beating. When the Blaster has to think before nuking because they risk the retaliation crushing them. With one unlimited-aggro tank it's just... push biggest button until move to next spawn. I hate that kind of gameplay.

I remember a rumor of "Vectored Knockback" No idea what that means. But I hope it means the Devs have more control over the arc/direction. Knock "in" powers and what not.

It looks like, to me, the Homecoming team is trying to gut and rearrange the bowels of CoH's backend into something coherent so that it can be stable and easy to update. This is part of what they said they were doing during The Dark Times™. It's a long and arduous process and it looks awful when being preformed on a live game with people in it. The Pseudo-Pet change is a good one I think, that was a nasty bit of kludge to make the game work. With time and care I'm sure a better method can be devised. I mean, even the OG Devs came up with better ways. They just didn't have the ability/time to back port them to the older sets. Now that we do... we should. CoH's code is a NIGHTMARE of random hardcoded info, tables that bleed everywhere. I remember one time they changed something about Cape physics and it broke the tram system back in the live game. How? Why? God knows. But cleaning up all this code, making it make SENSE so you can track problems and actually fix them instead of building elaborate work-arounds should be the goal. Buuuuut. You end up with weird consequences. Cleaning up the AT mods and Psudopets means some powers are losing or gaining relative strength. Not necessarily because they think the powers are OP or UP or anything. They are just now reset to a baseline, universal, rule. Now if Controller /Dark or Corr /Dark are doing poorly... you can change them. THAT is worth the nerf, I feel. GOING BACK TO THE BEFORE TIMES... TAR PATCH. Also Twilight's Grasp, but Tar is easier to talk about because it has a single nice round number. Assuming you ignore the -speed. Which I am. Tar Patch was just always -20% res for everyone, no AT mods. Because it actually summoned a static pet that cast the real "tar patch." When you cast Controller/Dark/Tarpatch it summoned "Tarpatch.pet" which was a specific NPC that cast "Tarpatch debuff aura." If you cast Defender/Dark/Tarpatch it summoned "Tarpatch.pet" which-- etc. For every PC and NPC that cast it. Didn't matter what version of the power you cast, you always summoned the same tarpatch.pet. Now later on they did find ways to make it so each AT summoned their own version of the pet but that was by STARTING with that assumption and building it that way from the base. It's much harder to go and un-code the original stuff. It's not as easy as just making a new TarpatchDEF.pet and rewiring Def to summon that new one. I mean, you could. But then any NPC that was using the Def version would ALSO summon this new pet. So you'd have to go through and alter them to use a new pet. And the new pets all have to call on new powers with modified stats. And this is true for every psudopet they didn't make exceptions for. Which was... all of the original ones. So when the time DID come for that and they had Corruptor and MM who were going to get this new power. They had to decide if they wanted to go through and prune and clean all the Psudopets to force them into having AT mods(They couldn't actually make them respect AT mods they would just manually adjust the numbers) or just... screw it. It wasn't THAT big of a deal at the time. And making new versions of the pet meant more crap code tangled across a dozen tables, diagnosing any issues would be hard. You'd have to dig through all these redundant copies of the power. And it just... wasn't worth it. I remember this argument though. I had played a Dark Def and a Robo/Dark MM. The fourms complained quite a bit that it kind of made Defender versions of Dark feel kinda crappy, all the powers should obey the AT mods or else what is the point. My Dark MM's buffs/debuffs were just mostly the same as my Defender's. But the MM had three times the damage, easily. But at that point Posi had said... they can't buff the Def version of Tar Patch. It's literally the same power as MM and Corr versions. You buff one you buff all. (also all the NPC versions). (this is why the suggestion to just buff the Def version is misunderstanding the issue... until now they couldn't do that) So we all just kinda... bleh, fiiiine. At the time "Psudopet" was the dev's "A wizard did it." It kind of trumped all balance discussions. "Why is TA garbo?" "A wizard did it." Homecoming has made it so now all versions of Dark Miasma can be more easily balanced individually. AND without making a bunch of stupid clone powers, it looks like. But that means that all the Tar Patches and Twilight Grasps snapped back to AT mod shape, a nerf for most. If they need to be buffed individually now they can be. Like, I don't think Any */Dark MMs are going to really suffer. But maybe */Dark Corrs will need help. Now you can fix one without breaking the other. At least, I think. I've not seen what changes they made to the code.

Well, the general answer is that this is the set's schtick. All it's attacks are AoEs that are balanced as ST attacks. So they do stupid damage. That breaks the formula However it's suppose to be balanced by the Momentum mechanic and VERY high end costs. I think if they just undo Posi's last second change to the set it would be fine. Where he was like "Guys the set is fine, it doesn't need a buff. If we buff it, it will be stupid OP" and people wouldn't shut up and he couldn't justify a pay-for set with press that bad. So he buffed it and... well At least that's how I remember it...I wonder if the patch history still exists. It was something like... he extended the Momentum duration for an extra 2 seconds and that pushed us to where we are today

So, if when they do finally nerf TW are all the people that say "You can't fix this, it's not as bad as TW!" or "Why are you doing X when TW is still OP!?" going to just be like "OK, nerf away"?

If you want anything new you're going to have to learn to put up with nerfs. I mean, there's more to it than that but... it's like asking for a surgeon to fix your appendicitis without cutting into you. The Homecoming team has been pretty clear that they want to make sure they do things right, they comb the spaghetti code out as they go. So adding new things is easier and lets them do even more creative tricks. Unless you don't want new powersets or other updates to the game. In which case... I... Don't know what to tell you. People who are unhappy that the game is getting updates, changes, nerfs or buffs are not going to be happy with Homecoming. The point of this server is not to maintain the game as it was. It is to improve it and push it forward while trying to maintain the core of the game.

So EM is to be fast, effective, and powerful. The ST, focus down, boss killer king. And right now it's... not. I'd argue to go ahead and give ET back it's original animation. That would push it up to at least having SOME kind of viability. I'm still pretty sure that it wouldn't be stand-out though. Not compared to the monsters we have right now*COUGH*Titanweapon*COUGH* Now to push it further into it's niche of ST king, you could just... pile on more damage. Just flatly boost the damage. You'd have to add a frankly absurd amount of damage to whirling hands to make it beat out any other good AoE set. I don't see it stepping on toes there. And ST damage is only gonna be so useful, considering how large groups end up being. ...But that's... I dunno... boring? I'd rather boost it's damage in a way that helps boost the meta-narritive of the set. The flavor. In comics and movies and anime and what not "Energy Melee" is pretty common. One of the more common traits is being able to convert your health into fuel for the attack. That's what ET is all about. So, I'd lean into it a bit more. I'd argue that the BU power is the bit that needs to be changed. Switch it to work like the "Burst of Speed" power from Blasters secondary. You hit it once and it will pop back up several times before going on a longer cool down. Every time you do it bites out a chunk of health and slaps a proc on all your EM powers to deal an additional hit of energy damage. Mash it several times and it gives you a large boost but eats a lot of health. Maybe it does -maxHP or -regen too. But then all your attacks are super charged for the duration. Doesn't give you much more AoE damage, it's still whirling hands. And because it's not a flat +dmg it bypasses the damage cap limits. If this new EM were to be at the cap from... whatever, a Kin/ lets say. Normally that is it. But an EM could burn their health and push over the top. I'd make the recharge longer then BU but also have it last longer on account of how risky it is to use in combat. Helps mechanically and thematically, I think. Expands upon it's existing roles and unique traits and has enough numbers that I've left undefined that you could tweak it until it was in a nice little sweet spot.

From what I recall the original complaints about PVP nerfing X or Y are because in introducing PVP the Devs ended up seeing a lot of these powers in different lights. Castle said something to the effect of "Because of the PVP we noticed that some of these powers are out of wack." Not that they were going to nerf just so it would be balanced in PVP and that PVE was caught in the blast. He did clarify that EM was on the chopping block since he joined and the PVP stuff just helped prove his point that it needed nerf'ding. But that's not how players saw it. They just saw "PVP caused EM to be nerfed" and Castle gave up trying to argue otherwise pretty quick. From what Castle said though... even if PVP was never introduced. He would have nerfed EM. He didn't like how far it broke the damage calculations It was... arguably OP under specific conditions. I do remember playing as a scrapper and wiffing because the Tank one/two shotted the boss. But those are long since passed. AoE wasn't (as) all consuming back then. IO Procs weren't the kings. It was also as I recall nerfed before Arcanaville invented Arcanatime™ and showed how important DPA was and all that. I'd say give ET back it's animation and it should be fine.

I too am curious

Yup, crashed my whole game

Uh, is Kinetic Melee broken? Trying to make a new Shield/Kin tank and the T1 is auto-chosen like normal but the T2 is opened like I could pick it.

Can't you ignore part of the crash if you overcap Def or Res?

I *like* the feeling of ever escalating heights of power. Maybe Dragon Ball Z broke my mind but I like the Rage, Rage X2, Burnout Rage X3. Knowing I just put myself on a timer feels like a fair penalty and the high of ultimate power and batting foes around like Styrofoam is amazing. Reading through this I see people's point about the "Double-stacked rage holding the set hostage" That's just so much damage that unless you throw a crash in there it's objectively better. But people that don't like crashes and avoid them are getting screwed because the set needs to stay at a low baseline to avoid being broken powerful. Personally though I don't need the set to do huge amounts of damage. It just has to FEEL strong for me. FEEL like I'm hitting with the force of a truck. Even if I don't have 400% damage and I'm not actually one-shoting AVs What if they raised the damage of SS baseline to be better and add in an itty bitty AoE to all the single target SS powers. Something like 1 foot. Now make rage work more like Burst of Speed. You click it once and get regular Rage, no crash. Right after you use it you have a small window for say 5 seconds where it recharges in 2 seconds. If you hit it again you get maybe a small bonus to damage and an AoE size boost you can stack but now you get the crash. If you max out your recharge you could 4-5 stack it. Turning the whole set into big AoE explosions that bounce rooms of enemies around. Unlike TW you would have to deal with a crash if you wanted to abuse that. Tweak the numbers so you can't get the basic attacks over... say 7ft AoE? And most people would just have it around 5-6ft. Just enough so you're hitting around 3 guys regularly and 5 guys max. You could also lower the crash strength because it's not as big as an 80% damage boost. Now the AoE boosting is just a hypothetical buff Double/Triple-Rage could give. I just want to keep the option to throw it into turbo mode, even with a risk to myself. Using the Burst of Speed idea you have more control over when the crash happens and how bad it is. "Do I want to go to level 2 or slam the gas to level 5?" You pick right after you activate the power how many times you want to mash it. OF COURSE I also don't know how the code works, you might not be able to use the weird mechanics that power has as a buff power like that. I just want to keep my stacking anime power ups