ABlueThingy

Do you think there's anything they could do with the set, assuming we're keeping the combo mechanic, to make the set more palatable for you(and everyone else who dislikes the new mechanic)? If the mechanic is staying maybe there's a way to tweak it more to people's liking. Maybe letting the player store up to three focus charges and having BU give you 3. To cut down on the number of times you need to hit TF. As long as you hit BU once every 3 times you use ET you wouldn't run out of Focus and wouldn't have to hit TF at all. Personally I like the new mechanics I would be ok with that. But I don't like the idea that so many of the old guard EM folk don't like it.

I'm not in game but how strong is Ice Arrow's -special vs Benumb/Weaken?

Didn't Bruce Lee once kick a man so hard he broke the arm of the guy behind the guy he actually kicked?

Alright so I played with the new TW on a TW/Nin scrapper. I played at +0/x0, +1/x3, +1/x6 and +4/x8 at levels 20, 30, and 50 though 5 paper missions in each level range. If I died twice I would give up and move on. I used SO's until 50 when I ran one mission with a full generic IO build and then one using the random IO set button. I also used the new TP pool to great effect. I used no Incarnate powers. My impressions of it are that it feels WAY more responsive and smooth to play while still having the up/down feel of heaving around a large weapon. If I forgot myself for a moment and dropped momentum at the wrong time it would throw me off balance. That's a neat feeling. I can see why some people wouldn't like it though. It's still better than it was. Missing an attack and having to go through multiple heavy swings before Momentum kicked on sucked. That's why I never got a TW above 20 before. I did die more then I wanted to but I think that was Nin's fault. It's not the toughest set out there. Once I got into a good rhythm of using Defensive Sweep often and continually knocking people down I was fine. I was able to take on a 4/8 Council and Carnie mission with little trouble. I thought the Carnies would give me trouble with the -end effect but the new mechanics on Momentum saved me there. That and Nin's End heal. I really didn't have endurance issues like I was expecting. I also made a macro to swap out the TP bind between regular and combat TP. Hit it right as I go into a mission and switch back when I walk out. I also combined the Nin stealth with a +stealth in Combat Teleport. I could run around with impunity which was funny, sneaking up with the giant axe and dropping an AOE on groups. I think if I was to make this live, I think I would make a TW/Stone tank with the new TP pool and the stealth pool. Play a Jason/Pyramid head style monster. Very slow but always catches you, suddenly surprises you from behind. Overall I didn't see many bugs or glitches and it seems to have worked wonderfully. **The only bug I saw seemed to be some kind of animation issue with TP. When turning on Danger Sense while using TP to get across Talos it played the Dragon's Tail animation from MA. While in a mission and using Combat Teleport it played the Rend Armor animation. I was unable to reproduce the issue and it seemed otherwise minor.

Well, one thing has bothered me for years. I would resize all the roads and cars and civilians to be to scale to average human sizes. Most of the buildings are more or less ok I think in terms of scale. It's just always bothered me that none of the people could realistically fit in any of these cars. Especially the compacts. Barring that, I'm with Bill Z. Roll back the nipple nerf.

I was discussing /Regen brutes and I was trying to dig into my knowledge on the mechanics but now I'm not so sure. The baseline is that you regen 5% of your max health every 12 seconds. But I though mechanically there was actually two kinds of regeneration effect and that the /Regen set was split between them. Some +regen gives you larger ticks and some +regen gives you faster ticks. Fast Healing makes it tick faster and Health makes it tick larger if I remember correctly. But both can be written out as +x% regen. I couldn't find anything backing me up on that on the wiki. Does anyone else remember? I swear discussions were had with Castle during the IH nerfs and that's where this came out.

Perfect balance might be, you're right. But no one has ever claimed to be trying for perfect balance. Abandoning the pursuit of balance because it might be hard is a terrible idea. Because... Everything the devs do is going to be time and resource intensive. The point of balance is to create a starting point to continue from so you don't waste your time/resources. If you want to make a new melee dmg power set how to you decide how much damage it does? Because that's a balance issue. Is it a high damage set? Low? Fast? Slow? AoE heavy? ST heavy? Those terms are almost meaningless except as relative comparisons other sets. Where it falls in relation to the others is the balance. You could easily just add in a new melee set and pick some numbers, some animations, some effects. But which ones? If it's a high damage set, how high? Does it do control effects, how strong? If you try to make a low dmg, fast animating set with a bunch of AoE debuffs and controls. Should it do less damage than a set that is just pure damage? If not, why not? If so, why so? Any choice you make is a balance choice. Lets say the only melee sets are Energy Melee, Fire Melee and Spines. For simplicity's sake. A hypothetical balance could be struck between these sets. All of these sets could be considered "high" damage. EM tops out ST damage, Spines tops out AoE dmg. And Fire is equally good at both, better AoE then EM and better ST then Spines. Their damage is thus balanced between them. Now AoE damage is good, so to make up for it's lack EM also has good control against STs. And to make up for it's lack of ST damage to break hard targets Spines has some debuffs and control. Fire doesn't have to make up for any lack of damage because it has ALL the damage. If you added another set in, lets say... Acid Melee. Acid Melee does Toxic like Spines, but it's ST like EM. It's does lower damage but has -res/-def and can stack it's debuffs until it has good damage. Just not in a burst like EM can do. Except now you have a set that's 4th for AoE and hypothetically 2nd in overall ST damage... but because it's all backloaded after the debuffs land Fire actually does better ST damage in play. Maybe if it's debuffs are enough it might boost team damage enough to not be totally pointless. But that seems unlikely with the overall meta. It doesn't really serve any niche well and you'd be better off painting Fire Melee green and calling it "Chemical Burns" melee. Now throw in a dozen more melee sets. And the possible mixes with the armor sets. Now what is it's niche? What is it's point? Do they leave it alone because "Balance is pipe dream" and let the energy they put into it go to waste? Now you have the devs wasting their time and people complaining that the new set they worked so hard on is worthless. Now I think most people would argue that Acid Melee would need to be buffed to find it's own niche between the other three without overshadowing them. Maybe you could make the Build Up power cause it's attacks to splash so it has temporarily good AoE until it's Debuffs are spread. So can shine under some conditions without stealing the spotlight all the time.... But what about the other sets? Fire doesn't even come close to "Good" AoE or ST damage relative to the other sets, we know that. And it lacks any tricks to make up for it. If you try to aim for Fire Melee is a balance point you'll end up making the set garbage relative to things like Katana and Claws and, god forbid, Titan Weapon. If you aim for TW/Claws/Katana you'll end up vastly overshadowing the other sets. Bump them even further down the ladder. There's a reason that every time someone mentions buffing Regen or using it in a build half a dozen people show up and suggest you just take Willpower instead. Because it fulfills the thematic niche closely enough and the mechanical niche better then Regen does. I'd like to think most people are not OK with every new set being added either being terrible or OP and would like new sets to be balanced. The ideal way to do that is to create a series of internal balance metrics to measure the sets by and figure out where they all sit right now. Something like Galaxy Brain did. But to also create a list of where the sets SHOULD be on those lists. Then adjust them until the two lists match. There are ways to avoid that. That's part of what people have been discussing here. Like blocking Incarnate stuff off to Incarnate only areas or some such. Having specific high level areas to go bananas in sounds fine to me.

That'll be the healing arrow

I'm just spitballing but... What if we add a layer at character creation that lets you makes big chunky changes to how characters play. Like picking a "Power source" that changes how your endurance regenerates. Or a "Weakness" that gives you bonuses for overcoming when it pops up. Big chunky things you can chip away at with IOs. And of course some kind of trainer to respec it. And clamp it at low levels so new players can't hose themselves completely, open it up as they level. Like you pick the "Earth" power source so you get an end discount that builds up as long as you're touching the ground all the way to 90%. But you need to pick up a "Fire" weakness like -15% fire def and 30% fire resist. You picked this because your character "Lodestone" is magnetic and as long as they're aligned with the earth's magnetic field they can draw on it. But fire de-polorizes them and weakens them. That's something you could use IOs to build around. Or just run a fire/stone tank and mostly negate that penalty. Or lean into it and play a wildly end hog Grav/Rad Cont build with a dozen toggles, the whole leadership pool! And use IOs to add enough End recover to ignore the costs. And just pray when you hit a fire based AV that you have enough purp inspers. And of course Incarnate powers will mostly steamroll over this.

Also, not every build can squeeze the same amount of benefit out of IOs. It's not a universal power boost like Incarnates.

The fact that they have controls and multiple attacks sub-20 makes them significantly harder than the standard Blue side mobs. Or even Redside. Standard hellion minion has one revolver attack and one other melee attack. An axe or sledge or something. If they're in melee range they will just wait for the melee attack to recharge. This means you have a couple of seconds between attacks. Their LTs are even worse, they only have a Shotgun or Submachine gun attack. No melee at all. This is all almost identical for all the other low level groups blueside. Redside gets a bit tougher, your average Wolf Spider minion has 2-3 attacks and doesn't have to waste time pulling a different weapon out. That raises their DPS just by virtue of them having less downtime between attacks. In addition a group like Arachnos has a ton of enemy types that all have weird quirks to them even at level 1. Smoke grenades, psi attacks, electrical attacks, end drain, sleeps, toxic damage. They're much more dangerous then the 1-20 blueside groups. Longbow is fairly similar in that respect, though with fewer tricks. GOLDSIDE though. The Clockwork, the PPD, the Resistance. They all have multiple attacks they can cycle and they rarely need to exchange weapons. They're almost always attacking and it's almost always mixed with some exoitc damage like Energy or Fire which at level one many people are going to have no protection against. You get up to even just level 10 guys and you're looking at hard controls and status resistance too. It's one thing if you're running a melee class with defenses of some kind. But squishes get chewed up.

I disagree! On the first part that is. While there are two groups of people arguing that I think there's more then just those two. Personally, I don't think the game is "Too easy." Not every game needs to be hard. Frankly I gave up on Bloodborne while trying to fight that big buy at the bottom of the hill in a temple thing. I did that fight a million times and I did eventually beat it but JESUS that was tedious. But I think that changes for the overall health of this game are needed and in some cases that's going to end up making portions of the game objectively harder for some players. The goal is to only hit the top few % of course. Anyone else that gets tanked should be rebuffed until they can solo at whatever we're considering a fun solo benchmark. Be that +0/1 or hell if we want to raise it a bit, +0/3 could be the new baseline(maybe we have to adjust the settings in the notoriety picker to reflect that). I'm not against lowering the floor or raising the ceiling. I'm against continuing to pile more spinning plates on this already dangerously overburdened system. It's a testament to how durable the game is and how much fun the basic premise is that we're all still here. But this game, if we continue to pile more features, powersets and content on top of the shaky foundation we have will eventually collapse. We're butting up against the actual limits of the game engine to allow our characters to even be different. The end game will just homogenize more and more if we're not careful. And anyone that doesn't fit into the more and more narrow definition of what is useful will be cast off. And I don't mean that someone is going to go "Oh, you're a BRUTE, pffft-- pass." because our community is actually super cool. And also the game is still so easy that you don't really *need* any kind of specific powersets or ATs and the community mostly accepts that. This is a fate that many an MMO has suffered that CoH is almost immune to, beautiful game that it is. But no one wants to be the lodestone of the team. That's part of the reason sidekicking even exists.* Players can tell when they're just not being very useful, even if they can't see the numbers. It comes off as "if I did nothing, the team wouldn't even slow down." If you're playing a Broadsword Brute and can't even get enough aggro to build your bar and your animations don't go off fast enough to to get more then one or two kills before the group is nuked. You don't feel useful. The team can nuclear strike the group so fast that your contributions are the lesser for it. But you can see that if the Blaster and the Mastermind swap out for a Scrapper and a Def... now you're actually having a chance to build rage. You're taking out a third or a quarter of the guys on your own. You see these posts every so often and I've had the discussions in game. While there is always(and should be) some level of redundancy in teammates. Everyone should be contributing equally. Or as equal as we can get. Obviously perfect equality while maintaining a large diversity of ATs and Powersets is a pipedream. But it's one worth perusing. Right now some mechanics are overly valued because and some are undervalued. A lot of this is simply due to being able to hit the cap on so many systems and so many other systems being binary. The exception of course is damage. The be-all, end-all system. Bringing more +def once everyone is capped is pointless but bringing someone with more damage? That's almost always an improvement. Most especially for the 50+ game. Now you can say "Oh, just make your own teams to avoid the offbalanced things." But that's not how this or any other game works in today's MMO market. Players expect to be able to group up casually and easily. Someone says "Starting ITF, room for 4 more" and people jump in. If you have to add another level of self-curating experience it will turn people off. And as a dinky pirate server with no official backing(far as I know) we really can't afford to turn people off. Teaming needs to be easy and fun for all powerset combos, all ATs, at all levels. Obviously huge nerfs will also turn people off, suddenly making the game so hard that fun and casual teams are a challenge instead of a "One-handed playing while eating chinchilla" type playing. I like that about this game, I think a lot of people do. We could still add in some high end content that needs both hands of course. *wait, I typed that out and had a thought. Something more like the old Sidekick system. Could we upgrade it to alleviate some of the high level issues of power disparity? So if someone is too close to the Mentor in level, or even level, they become a "Partner" instead of a sidekick and receive some buffs. Like if the Mentor has an incarnate slot unlocked it gives them a slight boost across the board. Or if they have more than 20 set bonuses from IOs. Or even just a level adjustment. Or something like a leadership style buff for equal leveled partners that buffs them when they're near one another but for every other teammate within that range it goes down? Call it "Work together" or something. Then it wouldn't change the balance of power that much in a huge mash of a team. But it means you could split off from the main team more confidently in open maps. Maybe it's just for Incarnates to let non-incarnates play with them. Maybe if it's just two of you on the team it might let you share the basic teir for every Incarnate slot you have maxed. That would be neat if we ever add in some kind of "Incarnate Newspaper" missions. Keeps the player base from splitting up too much. I dunno, I just hadn't considered using the old Sidekick system for something like this until just now. It's something to think about at least

Since they have a mechanic that allows a passive to scale based on your health, why not do that for an absorb mechanic. Like, have Fast Healing give an absorb shield if your health is already full. So Regen can functionally surpass the HP cap. Or while IH is going if your HP is at 100% it starts building up an absorb shield. That way you can use it preemptively.

I forget if I said out right, but I definitely implied it! But more accurately I think there's big parts of the game that could be tweaked or reworked that would (ideally) improve the game for the majority of players. Not literally the whole thing though.

So, just restoring the code for the sound effect and adding a blank sound file that the player could replace with the original sound file? So people who don't want to hear it have to change nothing but people who want it can edit it back in? That sounds like a good request that wouldn't take too long at all! Poke one of the devs, shouldn't be too hard to slip that into the next patch on Beta so it can be hammered a few times to make sure it doesn't suddenly make everyone's faces spawn upside-down or whatever

As a more out there idea, what if all of Regen's clicks were Rez powers while you're down? They just revive you and trip the power's effect. DP gets you up with 15 seconds of untouchable and bonus max HP. IH gets you up with 15sec of untouch and a huge regen boost. Etc You'd have Recon, DP, IH, and MoG. 4 build in revives. You could toss Revive entirely and replace it with something else. Like something from the OP. I dunno how effective it would sure give Regen a flavor no one could match. You'd always have SOME kind of revive ready. I can't see that being too overpowered, like Bill Z and Shard said no one builds for rez. It would also satisfy the part of me that gets frustrated when I die in a game and wants to stuff another quarter in so I can try that level again without restarting the whole game. And then run back to the change counter and get more quarters because I just blew 20$ and because I WILL BEAT THIS BOSS. (this is perhaps not a healthy urge)

That's more or less how Blasters were at the start of the game. The issue is that Defiance giving good bonuses it meant you had to have low health. And blasters without protection die to virtually everything. You might be able to do what you're suggesting if instead we left the protection alone and changed Defiance* back. Blasters are much tougher now and have a better chance of leveraging things. You might have to also give all the blaster def powers a stacking bonus for having high Vig. Bonus absorb at low health or something so it's not impossible to stay floating down at the bottom of the HP pool. Blasters would "Get more squishy" not by virtue of being nerf'd but through sheer scrapperlock. It's a thought anyway.

That would be neat. There's already a few powers with unique recharge mechanics like that. Not specifically that one of course but other weird things.

What if you just fused reconstruction and revive? So if you're alive, it's a basic heal. But if you're dead, it brings you back. Also opens up a new slot in the set to put something more interesting

reverse debt protection. Revived guys give no XP. Also make it the revive from Willpower, a self vengence

Was it Doom that had a Nightmare mode where all the enemies would revive after 10 seconds? Ultimate speed run, all mobs have Revive with a 10 seconds cooldown.

I'd also be cool with some options to make it even easier. I knew a guy back during live that had to stop playing because he had something like a stroke and couldn't react very fast. He would only play when using lots of slows or team with people who could. Me and a friend used to a run Kin/ice and Dark/Ice def to give him enough of a delay that he could keep up comfortably. Someone in my SG at the time pitched the idea of some kind of "Slow mode" in the difficulty options but I don't think it got much traction. Just drops a 50% -rech and 50% slow on all the mobs in mission. Or something like that.

I'll agree on ED, it was vaguely intended to allow room for expansion later. Only took them 3 more issues to figure out what... I don't believe that the Purple Patch was done for a later expansion though? Mostly because it never came. It was a flat nerf to player power and their ability to team (functionally) and was stated as such at the time. (The teaming thing just seemed like an accident imo) There have been many, many nerfs in this game where the stated goal was to reign in players to a specific level of power. Especially pre-Issue 9. For some reason the Devs thought players should/could be challenged at +0/1. Which is just silly to imagine these days. But I will concede the point, I can't know what they were intending and my memory could be fuzzy and a lot of the original dev choices were... interesting. And I don't really want to argue on this because I believe we should do this NOW. No mater what the original intent.

Quite. I agree with them there. I don't know how possible it even is to rebalance the game around IOs. Or at least to do it before the sun explodes. That said I'm not against arguments saying that future high end content should be balanced around it. They were working on a post-50 advancement system to let us continue to gain power and basically needed ED to kneecap us first. If you're already at the damage cap and Acc cap and Def cap and Rech cap... what is +3.5 Melee Def or 7% rech from an IO going to be worth to you? I remember it changed a lot, one of the iterations was a skills based system for sciencey research, detectiveing, etc. It eventually mutated into IOs/Crafting... ...I would love a detective system... You can reverse that argument. The game has always swung around with harder or easier content added. Nerfs and buffs to the base game. Isn't it selfish to tell that from now on the game can ONLY get easier, when in the past it changed all the time? That this here and now is the new base difficulty and it can't be made harder from here on out. I think some people could see that as very selfish as well. ...Now see, like, I typed all that but I don't want to end on it. Because I don't actually want to see the observable base difficulty to really raise that much. I agree that this game has, for most any kind of team and a lot of solo players, for the majority of the life of this game, been easy. Not always, not in every mission or against every villain group, not for every AT and powerset at all times. But it was fun and exciting most of the time, I think. But for the sake of discussion... if it was easy to steamroll in the past, and now we are objectively more powerful in all measurable ways... I don't think nerfs to the most powerful, over-preforming, sets would actually make people unable to steamroll. You'd have to butcher a set to make a character weaker then the pre-IO days. If the game was always easy and you could steam roll things durring the SO era and now in the IO/Incarnate era people are even stronger... as long as you don't remove more power then people gained since the SO era people will still be able to steamroll and be powerful. Right? X+10 -5 is still X+5. As long as X alone was enough then X+5 should still be enough. That makes sense, right?

Well, that's not really true. Because at the time there was no way to "earn" that power at all. Not for a long time. The purple patch CRUSHED people. Tanks used to regularly fight groups of mobs at +8. That was why the steep drop off was added for anything higher then +4. Because some players were so powerful it was functionally impossible to challenge them under the existing rules. They nerfed AoEs to stop all the blasters farming, not just the wolf farms. I remember the wails when it became untenable to Hydra farm because they added ranged attacks to everything. Wolves got Hurl, Monkeys got psi blasts, Hydra got spit, all hellion/skull/troll/etc thugs were given at least one pistol attack , etc. I forget if they were all ADDED or they just boosted the range. Wasn't there a -acc added to fly for the same reason? But all that was done because Blasters could easily fly up and out-range foes and just farm XP all the live long day. ED dropped in issue 6(along with CoV) and IOs didn't come out until Issue 9. Frankly the backlash against ED would have been minimal if IOs launched with ED