ABlueThingy

That's a good point, last time player power level got that high we did a whole bunch of nerfs

I think they're just animated textures? Like blinking lights on screens and stuff.

As long as the feel of EM holds true. Being raining down endless blows and pounding one guy so hard he can't even react. Putting your actual lifeblood into the attacks to fuel the omega-level ass beating you're unleashing? I'll be happy. I don't need it to be a technical or finicky set. Just raw power. If any changes enhance that feeling I think they'd be for the better. (just make sure we change the animation first.)

If I recall the Devs were doing it in cycles. First they'd introduce super hard incarnate foes, then release the new slot. Release new iTF, then new slot that makes us a little OP for that iTF. New iTF that's hard even with the last slot. New slot to let us more easily beat THAT iTF. And so on. And the game closed on the "New slot" phase so no new, higher difficulty, content was added to contend with the level of power. Or at least that was my recollection

The top three are choices. You can choose to be a superstrong pixie or a sneaky burning man or a havenomouthbutimustscream-er. You have no choice in your anger based luminosity

Pour one out for all my blasters that had all the debt badges before 50

Of course it does. I never suggested otherwise. I am trying to understand when this mythical golden age utopia was where 8 players did not steam roll content or mobs lasted longer than 1 blaster nuke that some are purporting existed. I think they're talking about the bolded point below.

I agree it's a hell of an undertaking. But for the long term health of the game I think something of similar magnitude is going to be required eventually. Raising the base acc is the same as just lowering everyone's defenses in Incarnate content. It's just as boring an answer as going through and lowering the base value for the def sets. Er, not that I'm saying you should have the answer or anything. I'm mostly in this thread for the sake of discussion and hashing out ideas.

Has anyone ever tried an all SO iTrial? That might be an interesting test to see if it's doable and how hard it ends up being.

I thought I did a pretty good job of it but I can try again. "Hard mode" is a vauge term, there's lots of ways you could make the game "Harder" but not many that would actually solve the issue we've been trying to articulate. The game is too easy > Because there's too much AoE dmg and players can achieve max def/rech on their own > this makes some roles, specifically buff/debuff classes and non-ranged/AoE dmg classes and control based classes much less useful. =/= the game needs to be harder Like, broadly I think most people would like the option to make the game harder to challenge themselves in new and interesting ways, not against that. I'd love that. But that's besides the point. I don't want to make the game harder for the sake of it. I want parity between all the powersets and ATs. Or something closer then what we have now. That might entail making the game harder all around. But if you can find a way to carve a niche for everyone in the end game, max level content(and the resultant trickle down to the rest of the game) without nerfing AoE damge, the ability to Soft Cap, mega stacking +rech. I mean. I'm listening? Ok, so, there's a lot here. But again. Making the game harder is not the goal with nerfs. It's a possible side effect. We're all well aware of how to make the game harder for us on an individual level. That's not the complaint. That might be why you're confused about our motives. With all the IOs and Incarnate stuff going on we are rapidly coming to a brick wall. People want the ceiling raised instead of everyone else brought low but... some parts of this ceiling are immobile on their own. How can a character get MORE evasive beyond where we are at now? Like an SR Tank is already beyond the soft cap with even a little effort. And highly resistant to def debuff. Stacking more +def on them is pointless. Enemies will always have the lowest possible chance to hit them. You could make enemies more accurate to make it harder but isn't that the same as lowering their def? What does the SR do to counter that? Def is already capped. If you both lowered enemy chance to hit AND player def you could, hypothetically, hit a spot where the SR tank feels exactly the same as now (1 in 20 shots lands) but still have a way to push beyond that and make it 1 in 30, 1 in 100. Become even stronger then you are now. But it means some numbers go lower and some numbers go higher. It would be something like changing the def formula and base acc values across the board. Now keep in mind I am very dumb. This is something I would rather invoke Arcanaville for as she is the lord and master of all mathmalogical matters. But in my baby brain way... The basic formula goes like this: HitChance = Clamp( AccMods × Clamp( BaseHitChance + ToHitMods – DefMods ) ) in PVE. You'll notice that the "AccMods" is seperate from the base/ToHit/Def section. That little trick, and the clamp, are why now matter how much def you have a Boss will always have a higher chance to hit then a minnion. You can't floor them because their final chance to hit gets multiplied by 1.30. Now a 6.5% chance to hit doesn't seem SUPER high. But it works out to them hitting a capped SR tank 30% more often then a minion. The clamps ensure that an SR tank with 60% def to all gets hit just as often as a blaster with 45% def. But in PVP there's an added mechanic HitChance = Clamp( AccMods × (1 - TargetElusivity) × Clamp( BaseHitChance + ToHitMods – DefMods ) ) Elusivity. Which works against the Acc much like how Def is subtracted from ToHit. Right now, you can't bring a boss's chance to hit down to the floor of 5% chance to hit due to Acc. But if an SR tank had access to Elusivity they could push it even lower, down to the 5%. Hypothetically we could remove the clamp on the Acc portion and make it a bell curve that stretches off into infinity in both directions. An endless arms race between Elusive and Acc where you can never quite get it down to 0% chance to hit. Now I'm not saying we SHOULD have Elusivity in PVE. It's a change that would necessitate rebalancing most of the game and in many cases I imagine players will end up weaker at first. You'd likely have to shave off some Def from all the powers and shove some of it into Elusivity. That would mean, at first, you'd get hit more often until you adjusted your build. But it would also shove the ceiling into the stratosphere. Imagine going from a 1:20 chance to get hit to a 1:100 or 1:1000. And a Defender who could buff Elusivity could always make your defenses better. Heck you could even break buffs up into Elusivity or Def (or both) so an FF adds to Def and makes everyone just flatly better. But maybe an Emp's Fort is Elusivity and it doesn't do much for someone with zero defenses but makes every def point added to you even better. Or the other way around. But as it stands, at the top, Players are generally well over-capped on Def. It's basically at it's structural limits. Adding more doesn't do anything. That's boring. (Hopefully I didn't screw that math up too much)

I like this, this is more constructive. It's not that people want to nerf Powerboost or make some sets worthless. It's that some aspects have an outsized effect such that it's impacting more than one area. In this case Powerboost kinda sucks for anything that's not boosting a long durration buff. If you just made it not work on +def powers it would suck universally. No one wants it to suck. I personally want it to be more nuanced. What if it was a toggle that drained a very small amount of end and did nothing. But when you shut it off it gave you a powerboost effect based on how long you charged the toggle for and give it a super short recharge. Deactivating a toggle costs you almost no time, I think? That would be neat. Just have +def accumulate slower then the other effects and tweak the numbers so it takes a full 60 seconds of running the toggle to get the +def to full. But people who want to use it for heals or controls could cut it at 20 or 30 seconds for a big boost. That way huge +rech won't overbalance it and there's a risk to trying to get the full +def boost. Someone could crash the toggle out and make you start over. But your reward is easily hitting the soft cap. That's a nerf but it opens up new styles of play. People who metagame for maximum power can still get there. Just keep the amount of time the toggle has to run to get the max +def around the cooldown of the power now. Now you've halved the cooldown for people who just want the +special and it's otherwise normal for the +def. Roughly. Now I don't necessarily think we SHOULD do this but it's an idea. The anecdotal evidence of "I've never seen this issue" is not going to sway people when anyone can check the math and show it's trivially easy to make a team below 8 members that is so overpowered that there are whole suites of powesets that cannot meaningfully contribute to the team's success. No matter how hard they try. Where if you replaced them with literally no one the team's clear times wouldn't change*. They wouldn't die more often without them*, monsters wouldn't die more easily*. There's lots of casual teams where this isn't as much of an issue, where people are not stuffed to the gills with power. But anyone can intentionally(or unintentionally) run a sub-optimal build and wind up with room for others to contribute. Not so at the maximum levels in the game. When you can max out your def solo, the guy who only gives +def isn't helping anymore. *to within the margin of error. Obviously if you land a blow then the damage must have done something to speed up it's death but it can be so little a difference that it falls inside the expected variance caused by random chance. ie, not meaningful.

I agree 100% It seems the Devs do as well. They appear to be looking to nail down an "Average" and then balance everything off that average. If you nail down an average damage and average speed then you can decide to make one set extra strong but also extra slow. Without making it too strong or too weak. All the sets can be balanced against one another. One control set does more damage while another has stronger holds. Get everything to that fuzzy balance where nothing is 100% equal but there are trade-offs and exchanges and on the whole everyone can equally contribute to a team. By the same token, IOs need to be combed over and every build needs to be given options to increase their power. Yeah, it's not that there are NO situations where Powerset Z or R can help. It's not that, say, a TA/Elec Def is useless in all situations. It's just that they fall off in usefulness as you get into the end game through no fault of their own. And that's a mechanical failing that can only be fixed by the Devs adjusting things.

You say this like I haven't tried. Like I haven't crunched the numbers. Like I haven't run dozens of both AH runs and ITFs to iterate multiple times on my builds to make them work. I cannot get my build to meaningfully change the clear times of a team that is equally geared and skilled. I bring nothing. I make no one safer, I make no one faster. X is so far over Y that nothing I do makes any change to it. I've actually checked, 7 manning a TF with a full team of well built and well played characters finishes with an average clear time of roughly the same, paper missions are even worse. Varied by tens of seconds. Literally within the margin of error. I make no more difference then random chance on that build. The mechanics of the game don't allow it. Mind you, I have a Fire/Ice blaster that can shave off a good 30-60 seconds from that same team. I could make my teammates worse? I could find people who are bad at the game and baby sit them? But that's not what I'm asking for. You keep glossing over the specifics of what I'm saying and just tell me to find people who will help with the challenge. But you won't say how. How would a any team playing at maximum capacity, in the end game, experience mechanical value from a fully built maxed out (in this example) Mind/Emp that couldn't be improved by the same player switching to a meta build? Yes there was a time when not every scrapper could solo AVs, which is what I said. Post ED? No, most of them couldn't. Most Tanks and many scrappers couldn't generate the damage needed to overwhelm a GM's regen. Sets like Claws, Mace, Katana. And many defensive sets couldn't keep you alive. Before their later changes they couldn't compete. Remember, -regen was a very rare debuff in the early game. Until Warburg and the Envenomed Dagger temp. Yes, Empathy always was crap though. Relative to kin specifically. Even if people didn't understand it in the early stages of the game. (lots of people thought you needed a healer... you didn't) If you think players in the old days could achieve the same levels of power they can now, prove it. Show me a Stone/Mace tank using only SOs and HOs that can preform the same stunts a fully Incarnate and IO'd Stone/Mace can do. I bet you only one of them can come close to fighting GMs. If that's too much a challenge how about an MA/SR. At some point you have to bow down to the math. This is a video game, a program based on code and hard numbers and mechanics. Some people may have "Felt" they could be just as powerful in the old days. But anyone who thought that is wrong. The math doesn't care about your feelings. I'm from Victory, I've done more Hami raids then I can count. Please stop assuming what I have and have not done or know. Just because I came to a different conclusion doesn't mean I'm lacking information. If you will recall they had to nerf hami raids back down to 50 people because people could just completely overwhelm the mechanics of the raid with the level of power people can put out now. I believe they are actually going to try a pure Tanker Hami raid here soon, love to see how that's going to turn out. I expect they'll win. That was not possible pre-IO. It's always been a pure numbers game. If the power creep continues we'll eventually have to restrict the Hami Raid even more because even just 50 will be able to overwhelm and zerg it. My point being that all the creative and imaginative methods you can come up with can be undone by pure raw, overwhelming, numbers as long as players are allowed to reach them. It always comes down to X>Y

To be fair, I'm pretty sure you could go in and swap all the +rech for -rech res and +def for +res Easily. You'd end up resolving a lot of the complaints on the pro-nerf side. Suddenly you'd need more help if you intended to go around nuking all of creation with impunity in max level content. Tanks and Def and Cont/Dom would be much more usable, they'd have to get aggro/buff you/lock down the spawns before you could blast away without being instantly counter-nuked. ...Of course if you did that I think 99% of the playerbase would riot. Frankly I wouldn't be very happy with that either. Very true.

There is no amount of social engineering that will counter the structural inequalities built into the mechanics of the game. Specifically the ones I presented. I've told you the challenge I'm looking for. And explained how I can't get it. Because it's not an option. None of the content presented fixes the issue I'm talking about. To be blunt, stop assuming I lack the ability or willingness. The system is broken. the TL;DR would be "There is a quantitative difference in both average and upper level player strength between pre and post IO builds. The specific ways in which strength was raised have pushed many builds by the way side." The relevant section of my post is below: This is, mostly, true. There was specific builds and tricks you could do so any player could solo the vast, vast, vast majority of content. Even most of the TFs could be solo'd post-ED and pre-IO. But-- this is an important one now. Pre-IO, until the Envenomed Dagger and the Chemical Warhead, only a handfull of builds could solo the hardest content and it required a great deal of effort. That's WHY people posted screenshots. It was a challenge, it was hard. There were some builds you could never do it on. The math just wouldn't allow it. Like that Mind/Emp I proposed. No -regen, no -res, purple triangles, almost no damage. They couldn't solo an AV. Now, in a Post-IO and Post-Incarnate world? Most power set combos can solo most TFs. Even that Mind/Emp can get surprisingly far. The power difference is staggering. The potential power an individual can get has increased many fold from the old days. I am not. I was making a point. A bit further beyond the part you quoted actually, the next line. If you want to do something that invalidates AoE damage so much that pure AoE + softcap is no longer the meta build, which opening up the meta to more build types would do... you have nerfed AoE damage and building for the soft cap. If we're going to nerf AoE damage then why don't we... just... nerf AoE damage. Frankly I'm not even saying we should specifically nerf AoE damage, there's a lot of things to take into account here. But if, *IF* AoE damage is the issue... why build some kind of Rube Golbergian mechanics to nerf it... just... nerf it.

Which channel should I join that would let me make/join teams where I can play max level content with my Mind/Emp controller(fully IO'd and sitting at the soft cap) where my buffs and heals and controls and damage won't be so minuscule as to be functionally pointless? I team where I can not just feel useful but actually BE materially useful to a team? Remember, I want to play max level content. Hardest stuff. I need a team also running at that level. I'm not talking RP, I'm not talking teaming with friends and shooting the shit. I am a good player, I know how to play this game, I know how to build a working IO build. I should be able to bring any AT and any Powerset combo to the end game and make a noticeable difference to my team's chances of success. That is not true with the game as it is. And while there are some issues(obviously) with Mind and Emp on their own just buffing them will not be enough. Any +rech beyond what you need for a stable rotation and getting what you need Perma Perma'd is just icing. Damage/def/res over the cap is literally worthless. High level players all make sure they have no end issues. Everyone being at the various defensive caps and having access to various super-modes and self heals and various clicks means my heals and regen are just icing. My damage is on par with something like two or three procs missing or a scrapper sneezing and misclicking their combo. Controls are pointless because everything dies almost instantly, negating the whole point of my primary. The few that do survive and return fire run into the aforementioned wall of res/def and fail to land meaningful blows so it's a null point, they were safe either way. The only thing I can do is build for damage, because more damage is (usually) going to contribute. But almost anyone else could do a better job of that. Buffing the controls won't do anything for this Buffing the buffs won't do anything for this Buffing the heals won't do anything for this. All you can do is buff the damage. Make all the AoE holds deal damage so you can stuff them full of procs and then max out your recharge to spam them. Which just means a high level Mind/Emp plays just like everything else. All this power creep, procs, IOs, Incarnate powers have homogenized the whole of the upper tiers of CoH and it's bleed down through the rest of the game. I don't want to nerf things into homogenization, into being the same. I want to RESTORE the difference between power sets and ATs, to give them all their own distinct play style and life. I want to nerf the homogenization. The first sentence contradicts the last one. It does NOT contradict the rest of it though. PUGs are more powerful than before sunset, on average, because there's more IOs floating around. And also prior to sunset you could steamroll a lot of content. I played through pre-purple patch, I did the wolf farms, I did the monkey farms. I remember ED, I remember it getting leaked from the CoV beta fourms just before I got my beta pass. I remember why they needed ED. This game would not have lasted to Going Rogue without ED or something similar. It's disingenuous to say that because we could steam roll then and we steam roll now that nothing has changed. In the old days, post-ED and pre-IO, you could steam roll because everyone had powers that were roughly on par with one another. Blasters and scrappers could deal tons of damage but they couldn't take a hit, they needed a tank or controller or defender. You didn't need *A* tank or *A* defender or *A* controller. But you needed someone, if you wanted to do harder content. If you wanted to steamroll easier content. You need to be able to kill the monsters before they kill you. That means you need to make your team's DPS greater than the enemy regen. And you need to do the inverse for your team. Scrappers and Blasters add raw numbers to the team DPS. Controllers and Def multiply those numbers in any of a dozen ways. Tankers and Controllers functioned as an enemy DPS sink by forcing the damage onto a harder target and reducing the amount to just stoping their incoming damage entirely. Controllers/Defenders multiplied that effectiveness as well. In X seconds, your team will run out of HP. In Y seconds the enemy will run out. Part of a team is getting X to be larger then Y. It doesn't matter how. That was the glory of CoH. Either people raise X or lower Y through any of a billion ways. Everyone had something they could offer to push those number around. And there was cross over and bleed, some blasters did debuffs and some scrappers could tank. That's awesome, I love that part of the game. But the math has changed now. The ways in which Status effects and buffs and to an extent debuffs help has been marginalized. Not because they became less effective on their own mind you. But when you can pile on so much damage that Y is down to 0.1 seconds there's no need to change X. Incarnates and IOs let people raise X, mechanically repalaceing the role in boosting X that used to go to tanks/support. Soft capping, boosting self regen, tough/weave. Etc. And Purples and mega set bonuses and Incarnate abilities have lowered Y to the point where you don't need force multipliers anymore. Hell, you don't even need different ways of GETTING to (X>Y) anymore. I mean, I love that all the sets-- ok most of the sets-- feel different to use. They each have their own playstyles and let you raise X or lower Y in their own little unique ways. But now it's just, soft cap Def and let the AoEs rip, every one has a judgement. Well, they have a judgement or they are irrelevant to Y. This is the real threat of homogenization. What I'm trying to get across here is all that making new, harder, content does with the Meta remaining stagnant is make doing huge AoE damage even more important. It marginalizes the others even more. Unless you made AoE damage irreverent somehow, like giving the new enemies stupid high AoE def... ...But that's just nerfing AoEs in a roundabout way. Which people(Not singling you out) keep insisting they don't want. It means raising Y and/or lowering X. Harder content means the players have a higher risk of death. Either because the enemy does more damage(lowering X) or because they are harder to kill(raising Y) In the end it seems like we all agree that X needs to be lowered and Y raised. ie. we need harder content. But just expanding the highest tier stuff without addressing systemic inequalities between sets and ATs will result in even more homogenization. Rebalancing the game and taking AoEs down from being King Spit on Fudge Mountain to instead being "Another equally useful tool" is what I want to see happen.

Liquid skin? (transparent with a wavy effect and maybe bubbles) Rough crystal vs Faceted crystal

AWAKEN MY EM(asters) (i did this instead of going to sleep...)

This is an interesting idea! There's a few ways you could do it too. Like having a "Goon" class that just does poor attacks with decent health and spawns multiple invisible invincible pets that follow him perfectly so they eat up AoE slots. Or a boss or LT class with high AoE def and no range/st def that, when aggroed uses a leadership type power that spawns the same kind of invisible pets on all the nearby enemies so unless he's taken out first you end up with only 4 or 5 actually viable targets

Da Comrade. I submit this picture as irrefutable proof: Bear not pictured due to travel suppression.

Right! Everyone knows it was Russian bots! 😎 It was me actually, I was using my Regen/EM tank to solo entire zones at once at level 32. I once pulled Monster Island, all of it, and critted with an ET so hard it caused a stack overflow and delt -2,147,483,647 damage, crashed out Victory and gave Castle's mom hemorrhoids. The very next day they installed the Purple Patch, Aggro caps and nerfed both Regen and EM. That's also why you can't have regen tanks anymore. I'm so sorry.

I did on live, but Spines is so much easier and as it turns out faster too. How do they compare on the other stuff like Survivability and ST dmg? I've not managed to get any TW up very high due to Momentum being a bucket of farts

Well they could make Momentum last 20 seconds. Or 60. Or maybe now all the attacks give a stack of "Gaining momentum" and after 3 stacks all the attacks activate and refresh Momentum. Have the buildup gives 3 stacks instantly. So after 3 swings it lasts for the rest of the fight as long as you don't stop, if you manage it carefully you can almost always avoid the slow animations. Or something between those. Or something else entirely. Those are all changes to the mechanics. As long as they keep the broad feel of "Slow to start, monster once it gets going" I don't think it would lose it's uniqueness.

Most people are against being stabbed or cut or having parts of you pulled out. And yet surgeons still exist. You can't beat cancer by making the rest of your cells reproduce faster. That's what I have been saying. I don't want to homogenize the game just to please the handfull of people that like playing as softcapped AoE nuke cannons.

Do you believe there exists any specific AT/Power combos that, when introduced to a specific team of 7 other players using specific builds cannot noticeably change the outcome of the mission? Doesn't raise the clear time by a noticeable amount, a few percentage points maybe. Doesn't reduce the damage incoming to the team by enough to change any of the tactics or outcomes. As an example, a team of 7 level 50 Fire/TA Blasters with maxed out Incarnate slots and high quality IO builds. They're all at the soft cap or beyond for all their def and floating around the cap for their resistances. Their recharge is so wild they can, as a group, drop 2-5 nova/judgements per enemy group. And lets say a Kin/Regen scrapper joins the team. He's also a maxed out incarnate. Maxed out IO build. The player is literally the greatest Kin/Regen player to have ever walked the earth. He's so good he can use Kinetic melee in real life. Is there any kind of build, any kind of set bonuses or tactics that he can do that would make a noticeable dent in the Blaster's strategy? The entire mob group is instantly obliterated weather he's there or not. He can try and get aggro before they attack and be a tank but their speed and recharge is at least on par to his and what point does that serve? The mobs never live long enough to even return fire. Maybe every 90s he can pull off a judgement too, assuming they didn't hit their attacks first. But that's just the Incarnate stuff, the bulk of his character is redundant. Compared to them, he is not super. You could remove the Incarnate stuff, lets say it's just plain level 50 content and no incarnate stuff allowed. That really just put him worse off. The main advantage of Kin is the power draining and he'll never get that off the ground. The main advantage of regen is how well it takes sustained damage, it's terrible for burst. But all he's going to see here is burst damage. Because they all die before a second shot goes off. Mostly he's just going to be a passive observer. I don't know a lot of people that would consider that fun or viable. Maybe you do and more power to you. Now this is an extreme example but there are less extreme versions, I think you'll find a large number of the people here have experienced something similar. And the math is on their side. Some of these sets are just objectively better and some of them, in combination, are so good as to render large swaths of this game irrelevant. You can't buff this stuff away. We're running up against the actual mechanic caps in the game. Something has to give.