ABlueThingy

Like I said, that wouldn't solve the issue. If you add harder content but the power disparity that exists still remains... it won't make the other powerset combos more desirable. It just means instead of bringing in 4 Blasters and winning you'd have to bring 7 Blasters and a Def. Once you hit that "Can obliterate everyone in one or two seconds" level you're done. You don't need anyone else. The only way to fix that is to prevent players from being able to obliterate foes in one or two seconds. You can either build a huge elaborate story arc and maybe some new Tasks forces. You can design model, program, animate and balance an entire new and unique villain group or two, maybe some upgraded versions of existing groups. And give them un-debuffable resistance bonuses or maybe health gating so you can only do 1/3rd of their health in one shot. That would make them harder for sure. Or just give them something like 6x the health. Even if that somehow fixes the issue I'm talking about(and I don't think it will for the reasons I outlined above) it doesn't fix it for the other 99% of content. Just the new stuff. To fix the issue there you're still going to have to nerf 'em. Which would make all that new content too hard(Because you based it around the most insanely powerful players who you have now nerfed) so you'll have to rebalance that again too. Or before you go spending the huge effort of building a new endgame... you make sure that everyone is on the same footing. I'm not talking about rookies. I stated that pretty clearly I think? Some powersets, no matter how skilled the player is or how well built their build are just never going to be useful to a team build using the "right" sets. Do you believe that some powersets and archetypes are "Rookies" or otherwise inferior to other "Professional" sets? Unless I'm mistaken everyone has been working under the assumption that this is a skill-neutral discussion. We're talking about the sets themselves, the raw math and balance behind it. Obviously individual skill will change the outcome. So you have to assume two equally matched players. If you assume all the players are equally skilled does your argument still hold? What would happen if Lebron's scores counted for ten times as much as Jordan even though they're equally skilled? Perhaps 10x is an overstatement but there are powerset combos in this game that contribute far, far, less to a fully optimized and skilled team. No matter who is driving them. 👇 WIth no malice I want to point out, this is a strawman argument. No one has said they want to nerf everyone into being exactly alike. No one is arguing that everyone has to play the same. When you say that someone is you are "Creating a strawman argument" a kind of fallacious version of a person's argument that is simpler or weaker. In this case saying someone is arguing for nerfing everyone to be exactly alike. No one has said that and no one would agree with that argument. This makes the argument very weak, rhetorically, and easy to "knock down." Hence, "Strawman." A man made of straw doesn't fight back. It's like if you whipped up a straw copy of... lets say Steve and put Steve's face on it. Then you beat the straw man up and said "See, this proves Steve's kung-fu is weak" when in reality the strawman does not represent Steve's actual kung-fu prowess and to determine that you'd have to actually fight the real Steve. Steve is a ween-ass tho and his Wilting Lotus style is like that of a teething child, grasping futility to calm a sore toothless mouth. If Steve wishes to prove otherwise he will meet me atop the white mountain three moons hence.

Being able to make harder content doesn't address my point. Some powersets are just not able to compete at that level no matter how skilled the player or how many IO bonuses they stack. If your only answers are "Don't change anything, they just have to deal with being sub-par" or "Just buff the under preforming sets" you're missing the problem I'm trying to articulate which is: "There is no higher heights you can buff these sets to that will improve them relative to one another" When you say it would be boring to have ATs at the same level of effectiveness do you mean some ATs should be more effective OVERALL? Or that it would be boring if all ATs were at the same level of effectiveness for EVERYTHING? Those are very different and I'm aiming for one but not the other. I want the sets/ATs to be good at different things. Protecting, aggro management, durability, control, damage, etc. There's lots of types of roles. But right now, if you bring enough pure burst AoE damage and get your personal def above the soft cap? You're set. Effectively you can be SO effective at damage that you render the other stats meaningless. That's the problem I have. Incarnate buffs and IO set bonuses effectively negate a lot of powerset's usefulness. To use your example of comic book super heroes. Superman is physically stronger than those heroes, yes. But Superman still teams with Batman because he brings SOMETHING to the team. Right now, in this game, there are teams with several Supermans just eye-nuking whole groups faster than batman can run to catch up. Spiderman sometimes manages to get off some webbing but like... why? A Superman is just going to nuke them in a moment anyway. And all the Supermens have soft capped def and huge resistances so they're not even worried about getting hit. If all the batmans and spidermans left the team, would the Supermans even notice? It wouldn't change their DPS or put them at more risk of taking damage. Of course there will always be a "Best" in any given category, no one here has at any point denied that. No one has even said that it's a bad thing. I want every AT and every set to EXCEL at something and I want what they excel at to be useful to a team at all levels. Maybe some sets are better in some situations then others, that's fine. That's great even. But we have too many situations where some sets excel at nothing or at something useless. The point of rebalancing is not to achieve perfection. It is to bring things closer to perfection. Even the Devs admitted in the first post that perfect parity is impossible. I agree. I still see the attempt as a worthy endevour

So some powerset combos should resign themselves to being redundant or pointless in PUGs? Who is suggesting we make everyone the same?

I think these two are related. What should the mix of trash and... what's the opposite of a trash mob? Treasure mob? We'll go with that. How fast should Trash mobs die? How many mobs should their be? What should the mix of trash to treasure mobs be? Because right now lvl54 bosses last only a few seconds longer then the minions outside of Incarnate content. Frankly not much longer IN incarnate content. The opening novas wipe out the minions and most of the LTs and the follow up AoEs and one or two ST strikes take out the boss. And all of that can hit almost simultaneously. If a boss lasts long enough to get a few Debuffs on him they evaporate like a snowflake falling into the sun. But what is the answer? Make a +5/9 difficulty? Make a "No minions" option that fills the gap with LTs? A "Double mob size" option that halves the XP gained but doubles the number of mobs? All of those options are really presupposing that the developers are(or should) consider this is an issue of player personal choice. I don't think that's a healthy way for a developer to look at things. It shouldn't be controversial to say that that a Kin/Regen Scrapper and a Mind/Emp Controller should be just as important to team success as the Bio/TW Tank and Fire/TA Blaster. Mind you, this is when played at absolute capacity. Player skill is equal between them. Obviously even the most well build character will be sub-par in an unskilled player's hands. This also means all power sets need good IO sets they can slot comparable to the options afforded to others. This does not mean everyone is completely equal all the time. If you have a team with 4 Regen Brutes and 3 Fire/Fire Controllers doing nothing but fighting Carnies then that mind/emp is gonna feel like dead weight I imagine. You'd be better off bringing something else to the team. What is true right now is that a team of 8 with any combo of ATs and sets can take on something like 99% of the content in the game with no trouble. And that's good mind you. What is NOT true is that any team of 8 with any combo of ATs and sets has each member being equally valuable. If you have 4 maxed out blasters taking turns obliterating the mobs. You... can't really improve that much. Maybe one good buffer to knock them the rest of the way to the cap and then... that's it. The team is at maximum damage(All of the enemy health instantly) and maximum safety(never take damage) and maximum sustain(Blaster sustain toggles) You cannot replace any of those blasters with even the most skilled player using the most perfect an expensive IO build if they have the wrong power sets. You couldn't replace them with that Kin/Regen and have them helping the team just as much. The remaining Blasters still do overwhelming amounts of instant damage. The scrapper would never have time to build their +dmg stacks or even execute their high damage attacks. Even if they did their target cap is super low. And the thing scrappers are good at, killing bosses, does nothing when the boss dies just as fast as the minions. Even a TW/Bio would have issues bringing as much to the table as any of those blasters because it's a solved equation. A hand full of players can deal more HP then virtually any group of mobs up to and including AVs with enough speed and safety that their health is never in danger. They can recover and continue indefinitely without running out of steam. If a team half-full of just one specific set of characters can do that then everyone else is just window dressing. I don't think you can buff anyone enough to match that. There are no buffs that could make people more valuable because there's a finite capacity for value. Four blasters can hit the soft cap for value. You only need controls and aggro management and support if there is risk of failure. You only need more damage and debuffs if there's more health to remove. Once you've solved those two issues more teammates bring minimal value. Now mind you, most teams are not that refined or skilled. But even PUGs at the end stages of the game are nearly that refined. You can easily find teams that are "Complete" at 5 or 6 members and new players add nothing even though the difficulty is maxed. Not that I think adding higher difficulty settings would even fix that. Just means you bring even more high damage players. As long as that's all it takes to solve the problem.

I keep seeing people say that the players could just curate their own experience by only teaming with people that fit their playstyle. In the "3 blasters clearing the map" example where you're... say a Scrapper or Defender who doesn't have enough AoE to remotely compete with a blaster or has all kinds of buffs that mean nothing when the NPCs don't even get a shot off/live long enough for a debuff to take effect. You could just team with blasters who don't do as much damage or just other ATs that are worse preforming at clear times in general. There's an argument to be had there but that's not really the argument this thread is around. This isn't about what players can do to enjoy and experience this game. This is about what kind of game experience the Devs wish to create. I'd argue it's not totally UNREASONABLE to say "If you feel useless playing alongside top-teir powersets, quit and play with someone else" from a player perspective. But from a Dev perspective should a subset of ATs and powersets have a significantly larger chance of being "Awesome" or "Super" or "Fun" or whatever in any given PUG? By extension should some ATs and powersets be relegated to needing to curate their experience to be likely to be able to contribute meaningfully to a group? If you have a high level, fully Incarnated Fire/TA Blaster with a billion inf IO set up. The odds of you going into any random team and feeling like you're contributing is very high. Very few teams will have a composition that can invalidate your core gameplay loop. It is POSSIBLE of course. You might join a team of 7 Storm/Energy Def intent on breaking the world shotput records with every single minion. You might have issues with enemies having a lot of Fire resist but that's really only going to be a big issue with AVs due to the shear damage you output and the odds of teaming with at least one person who can put out -res or +dmg support powers. While it's possible it is statistically rare. Systemically rare. There simply arn't a lot of things that break this kind of gameplay loop. If you have a high level, fully Incarnated Emp/Psi Def with a billion inf IO set up. The odds of you going into any random team and feeling like you're contributing are... not as high. Your secondary is partially negated by the content and partially by players. It has two gimmicks. Psi dmg which is heavily resisted by end game monsters. There's also the controls which are partially negated by enemy status resistance and partially negated by enemies being dead before it matters. The second one is important because it also negates a lot of what Empathy is there for. Empathy is mostly here to reduce recovery periods and heal in combat. At the high levels you don't add anything there. Fort and AB are still good but that's-- if you asked all Empathy players if they we're ok with just watching for when buffs fall off allies and refreshing them I don't think you'd get a lot of takers. The core gameplay loop of the support *IS* broken consistently. You can't buff someone's damage if they're already at the cap. You can't help someone recover if they never spend more endurance then they recover on their own. And most importantly you can't heal people that never take damage. Even if there is a chance you ended up on a team without blasters the odds that you team with an Ice/ or Time/ or Nature/ def who protects their allies so much you still end up with nothing to do are pretty good. This is all something that is within the realm of discussion for developers. And I really do understand the anti-nerf sentiment. But we're not talking about trying to make your character less super. The game is literally running up against mechanic limitations, a ceiling. We can either buff everything to the ceiling, which would homogenizing the hell out of the game. Or we can mess with the numbers until the ceiling is further away. I'm not saying Blasters should do the same damage as Def. I'm saying there's only so much HP a given. There's only so many targets before the AoE cap. There's only so much damage before the dmg cap. Blasters can't really get any stronger once they're at the cap. If you nerf'd all AT damage by 50%. Cut in half. Just leave the caps where they are and halved all NPC healthbars. What would happen? Time to kill should be exactly the same or near enough. But now you could keep buffing Blasters. Finding more ways to push your damage even higher with the damage. Maybe change Defiance to last 30 seconds. You COULD run in and spam one nova and maybe one other AoE. Or you could open with a volley of ST powers to build up your Defiance buff to catastrophic heights before using your novas. If you tried that stunt now you'd hit the cap and that would be that. Now mind you this is just an example, I'm not saying it would be a good idea to do this specific change just... there's more to this equation then just "NERF BAD" or "NERF GOOD" or even "Nerfs make you weaker" Sometimes nerfs make you more super.

As a "What if...?" thought... What if you buff the AI to be less dumb so it does things like run for cover or run to trigger alarms/aggro more groups... at the same time you overhaul controllers and add better group control? Like finally upgrade the physics so you can do knock-in powers to just shove groups where you want. Tanks could just suck people to them or a Storm/ could slot a "reverse KB" into Gale and blow everyone who tried to run toward themselves. Buff up all the AoE controls into being useful again. Add a bit more of a tactical element to the game? Doesn't mean you NEED controllers but you just need AN answer to it. Slot Explosive Blast with a "Reverse KB" and open with that first to crunch them all up for your AoE rotation or snipe out the obvious runners before you open up with the AoEs.

The simple way would be to have a mirror system set up with mutually exclusive powers to the Incarnate system with a different story as to why you have level adjustments and such. An... Uncarnate system if you will. But I think there's a better way and I've been working on a grand theory for an Uncarnate system in my manifesto. Everyone called me mad but soon, you'll all see...

I like playing Superman but I also like playing Batman. Right now CoH endgame is just for Superman. It's not fair to the people that invested in the Incarnate content to be stuck doing boring regular content. It's also not really fair to ask them to hold back and play limited just for non-incarnates. But it's also not fair for people that don't want to engage with the Incarnate system being completely sidelined because there's one or two Incarnates on the team. I'd like to see an alternate non-incarnate/non-cosmic power endgame systems/content. Not INSTEAD of but ALONG SIDE the Incarnate stuff.

Oh, I suppose that should be obvious... So the point is that with this bug fixed they can actually address the set and buff it proper for all ATs? Because if they buffed DP while this bug was ongoing Blaster DP would be off the charts? Er, I know you're not a dev. I guess I'm just thinking outloud.

I see this sentiment a lot and I just don't see people calling for homogenization. Balancing power sets is not the same as making them all the same. If Fire does more damage than Ice but Ice has bonus debuffs, that can be a balance. If Fire does so much more damage then Ice that Ice's debuffs are pointless and there's a noticible drop in player usage of Ice then that's a problem. That's unbalanced. The balance that should be maintained is in the differences and uniqueness of the sets and their places relative to one another. TW can be the high ST+AoE+Control with a cost of high end and chunky animations. EM can(should) be the high ST damage king. FM can be the high AoE+ST damage with no frills. All of those can be true and it still be balanced. Maybe FM doesn't have as good AoE as TW or as good ST as EM. But it's competitive(based on build and skill with the set) for second place on account of it's having better AoE than EM and no penalties like TW. (That's all just an example mind you not saying that's how it should be) I have not yet seen anything the Homecoming team say or do that implies they're going to make all the sets the same. I've never seen anyone even argue in favor of that. /em soapbox Of course separate from all of the inter-set balance is the overall balance of the game. Right now [i feel] there's a big problem with everyone's stats just sitting at the cap. That's the real homogenization[in my opinion]; Incarnates level content and IOs. If every team has so much -res that it doesn't matter what damage type you bring, if everyone's got so much +def it doesn't matter what armor set you bring, if everyone does so much damage it doesn't matter if you lock down foes. When all the stats are at the cap it removes the nuance from all the sets. Frankly I think we need some kind of stat crunch and an adjustment of how HP and damage scale relative to one another. I'm not even saying a global nerf or anything. As long as it's crunched on both ends there shouldn't be much of a difference for the player besides the fact that you can now surpass the previous caps. You just run out of ways to make the game harder at the high end if everyone is sitting around the damage/resistance/def/acc/rech/HP caps. But that's like... CoH 2 stuff I guess. And people would throw a fit bigger than ED.

I don't play DP could someone explain? DP was double dipping with defiance? I thought DP was under preforming?

Not to be impatient but I'd also like to hear what kind of changes you're considering for TA. We've been trying to balance that one for eons and I've seen millions of suggestions and I'd love to know what direction you're going in

Balance doesn't just mean nerfing or homogenization. Isn't it impossible to have any kind a game without balancing the systems within it? Like you have to balance enemy HP vs player DPS even in a single player game. Things like that. "Too much damage" is not just arbitrary. It's measured against something. How many NPCs you can kill, how tough, how long does it take? The Devs have to make a call somewhere down the line or else you can't... develop anything. How could you add a new enemy group that has high health and low damage that can still kill a player? If you don't know how much damage players do or how much HP the player should have? How could you add a new high damage single target attack set if you don't know what "High" means? Once you make a decision on any one thing, you've set a standard. A measuring stick. Once you decide that X DPS is average for melee sets then you can decide where all the sets fall relative to that. You can have a strong and slow melee set, a low dmg with a climbing self +dmg set, a Med dmg set with some ranged attacks thrown in. But you can't have that until you define what "low" and "med" and "slow" mean. -- I can't speak to Energy Melee but I can speak to Regen. I mained a Kat/Regen since Beta. When people say "Roll back the regen nerfs" I flash back to when MoG dealt 90% of your health in damage to you and with slotting gave you max resistance(and I think def?) to everything. It also made you immune to heals but not HP regen. IH was a toggle and relatively I think 4x stronger than it is now? Keeping in mind this was also before ED, nothing could match that. I could take multiple giant monsters easily. (I also recall a time when MoG was a toggle in Beta... that was pure insanity) Regen has always been the hardest to balance armor set. Every single character in the game has some amount of damage they can survive per second indefinitely. Beyond that they will slowly have their HP pushed toward 0. For a def based set that tends to be spiky. Some times you got a few moments taking no damage, then suddenly three big hits. For a resistance set it's slower and more predictable. Every bit of HP regen raises the DPS threshold before you start dying. Every bit of res raises your effective HP pool. Every bit of def lowers the incoming DPS. Something like Inv has a lower DPS threshold before it's natural health regen is overwhelmed but with all the stacked def/res it means it will take you hours to whittle away it's HP to 0. It means that you usually can defeat the foe before they kill you. With Regen(the set) being pure HP regen it has an extremely high DPS threshold to overcome. But once you do? They're dead almost instantly. That's part of the thrill, imo. It may not look like that right away because your health bounces up and down with the Recons and DPs but as long as you hit those buttons you're immortal. Right up until the point that you're not. It does mean that they're VERY hard to balance. The Devs will never know how much damage is coming at you of course. That depends on what NPC group, what level, add in lvl adjustments, team comp. And all it takes is one or two more mobs or a lucky crit and you're paste. Once they overwhelm your regen you die. But UNTIL they do that you can't be killed. This is an issue other sets don't really have. They have a wider range of "I'm ok" and "I'm in danger" before they get to "I'm dead." The Devs nerfed Regen to shrink the "I'm ok and will never die" to something more manageable. But that did nothing to boost the "I'm in danger" area. The Devs saw Regen being unkillable in most content as a bigger issue. WP came about from experiments to "fix" regen but all they ended up doing was stealing all of it's flavor so it worked better as it's own set. Personally I think the Absorb mechanic provides a very thematic way to revive Regen. What they did with the Sent Regen is a good start. I was going to link these two sections together somehow when I started writing but now it's 1am and I'm tired.

Frankly I'd like to see them made much stronger. Make Unstoppable remove the resistance cap letting you push it to 100% for the duration or something nuts like that. Also 100% slow resistance. Something you'd be willing to eat the crash for. (I know I'm in the minority but I always wanted the sets to have stronger buffs and crashes with maybe some way to mitigate the crash built into the set. Like Elude only having a crash if all the toggles are on or something. Higher highs and lower lows. Without removing the options now. So you could build the armor sets in multiple ways. Just as long as people have the option to build for consistency if you want.)

So I have no stake in this as I don't main NRG melee or anything. Lots of people have more riding on getting proper changes in terms of wanting the feel of their set back. I'll likely make an EM something either way once the animations get changed. But I wanted to add that as a relative outsider to Energy Melee I always liked the idea of the self damage portion of energy melee. It was unique and interesting as not a lot of powersets have so direct a trade off. As part of some greater update to Energy Melee update I'd love to see EM's Build up converted into a Follow Up clone that called... let say Feedback Loop? Have it deal self damage and in exchange give a proportionately larger damage boost or longer duration relative to Follow Up. Combined with the animation roll back Energy Melee would never ask you to stop punching. Just not stop barrage of pompoms. Start weaving in the "Feedback Loop" and ETs in there and it starts chunking your health but giving you ever escalating ST damage.

From the perspective of someone who's been on the other side a few times, I have to say my experiences lead me to safely conclude that this is the case. You need a space you can work without judgement, without dozens if not hundreds of people second and third guessing your every move before you're even sure if what you're doing is what you're going to be doing. This is even more true when the only thing fueling you is your own passion for the work. There's no paycheck in this for the homecoming team encouraging them to come back. They're working because they want to. Game development is not something that can be done by committee. By having all the players get a say during the build process. I've seen that tried. I've been part of teams that tried to do that. (I wouldn't call us professionals mind you) Game development never moves fast enough for The Beast. You have to come up with an idea, spend time figuring out how to even do the idea, work on the idea and then find out the idea is actually crap and you need to scrap it. If you do this behind closed doors you can, without judgement, cycle through dozens of ideas without creating and weird expectations. Players remember every screw up, every broken promise, every half-cocked idea you ever mention. They will build cargo cults to these ideas. You can absolutely poison a playerbase by letting them see how the sausage is made. Programing is taking pure ideas and folding and cutting them until they fit in a set of 0s and 1s. But players live in the ideas, they don't understand the compromises and considerations that must go into getting those ideas to live. Dr. Frankenstein was horrified by his monster, because his original idea in his head was a perfect man. But he could never create that, that was never an option. It was only a spark that started him down the path. If he had accepted what he COULD make, this patchwork being of pure tabula rasa, he could have done something amazing. If he didn't have this idea of the perfect Adam. He could have appreciated that he literally created life from death, he defied god and nature. They don't need to hear about how the perfect man you're going to build is going to have flawless skin and be 7ft tall with rockin' abs and he's gonna be the smartest bestest boy. They don't need see you skulking around graveyards hacking off parts from dead people either. Both of those dull the appreciation for the creation in the end. And that'll kill anyone's motivation quick. I've watch it happen. ...So at the end of this metaphor Powerhouse ends up chasing the Dark Melee changes into the depths of the arctic and dies tragically? Also don't build the rage changes a wife. I think that's my point... ya...

math is not my strong suit, nor reading comprehension I guess *cough* I would say I'm unsure if making it more frequent is a good idea or not. The reason they added the PTOD in the first place was controllers trivialized AVs. A % chance to lock down an AV kinda means "A chance to end the fight entirely." The POTD was their answer to the binary nature. You can only lock them down SOMETIMES. fwiw I'm not trying to be contrarian or anything. Just poking at the idea so it can be the best idea it can be

It's something weird and mathy. Like how they're actually two kinds of accuracy. "Accuracy" and "To-hit" and one modifies the other. I think the point was Defense worked on Accuracy but Elude worked on To-hit. So if they had 50% acc and you 45% def you'd have a 5% chance to get hit. But if they had 20% to-hit that gave a 20% boost AFTER the def was applied getting them to at 6% chance to hit. ie, you're taking 20% more hits. But Elude-- Elusivity! that was it. If you had 20% Elusivity you could tank their to-hit to 0. Which would get you back to 5% chance to get hit. Something like that?

I agree, Coming at this from a table top view... If it's a low random chance then there's a chance that the controller simply doesn't contribute to the fight or contribute very much. Which is better than not being able to do ANYTHING but still not ideal. IMO So, against an AV there's a 4% chance per cast of OO! tripping. That's a 1% chance in 25 casts. How many casts does a Controller normally get per fight? I'm just spitballing so this will be simplified. If we have a hypothetical 3 second recharge on our main ST Hold and we just spam that we're looking at about a minute (75 seconds) to reach 25 casts. So roughly 1% chance per minute of fight against an AV? A five minute fight means about 5% chance using our above scenario If the cool down is at base(8 seconds) it's 200 seconds(3.3 minutes) to get to 25 casts or a 1% chance of tripping OO! So somewhere between roughly 1-3 minutes to have a 1% chance of tripping and making the controls worthwhile against an AV. That doesn't include the opportunity cost of doing nothing but spamming control powers hoping it trips. Realistically it would take even longer because you're also casting debuffs and attacks in between. The more non-hold powers you mix in the lower the chance you land an OO! with a hold. A mag 50 immobilize or fear is kinda meh. I mostly just bring this up because control crits are not like dmg crits. Scrappers deal damage no mater what and the crits are a nice bonus. But a controller who doesn't get that OO! crit just... wasted a cast basically due to the binary effectiveness. It would be like if brutes fighting AVs were always at 0% fury but at a 1% chance per minute to land as if they had max fury for a few seconds. I think that would feel bad. Or that's my feelings on it anyhow Maybe instead of a % chance have a growing bonus mag? Something more predictable that the Controller can... control. Perhaps the Fibonacci sequence? 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 and so on. Every time you cast a ST control power you get buff that lasts a short time called Overwhelm that gives a +1mag to the next control power(ST or AoE). If you cast another ST control you get another +1mag. If you keep casting it follows the sequence going to a bonus 2, 3, 5, 8, etc. At the low levels it wouldn't mean much. If you can cast two controls on a boss they're held either way. Maybe this allows for some strategy? Cast the ST imob and use the Overwhelm buff on your hold for a guarantee Mag 4 hold on a boss without relying on chance. More importantly it allows for rapidly escalating controls against the same target ensuring you can lock down EBs/AVs as long as you have fast and strong holds. If you want to get really fancy you might make this an effect that sits on the NPC instead of a buff to you. So the next controller to hit them with a control gets the mag boosted and knocks it up the sequence. Two controllers could pound an AV down more easily. Obviously you have to make it so only controllers trip it.

If you could re-wire it so the AI would refuse to use their "Biggest" powers if they had more then a combined mag 10 hold/sleep, or a mag 15 stun/confuse or a mag 20 immob/fear? Maybe lose more powers the higher it goes? Have a little "Disabled!" pop up If you felt like rewriting all the AI it's hypothetically doable

Maybe use the ghosts from First Ward

I dunno, I think every attempt to balance control based characters on the control axis is going to fall short because COH still has binary controls. You're held or you're not and being held is a massive benefit. We've been discussing this kind of issue since back on the old black/orange forums. I still stand by the idea that *from the start* this game needed a third bar beyond HP/End. Some kind of morale bar where enemies were incapacitated/arrested/surrendered on depletion. If Iceman freezes an entire group of thugs solid... that's it, they're out. Just as much Batman spin kicking the whole room. But all the proposals for this kind of system tend to be rather dramatic and big and outside the traditional scope of updates to an existing game. I just don't see much else really fixing the issue. Controls are binary. The only way to fix that is to make them a gradient somehow, IMO

Isn't there an "Elude" mechanic in PVP? Maybe that's what the OP is talking about?

If I understood it correctly, "The Well" is really two concepts that are interlinked. There is a sentient being that claims to be "The Well" which is implied to be a human from a very very very long time ago. The first person to connect themselves to the metaphysical concept of human potential. From there this being established(?) the original origins, ie "Paths of Power." However this being only acts as a gatekeeper. In the CoH universe the laws of thermodynamics are wrong. Matter and energy cannot be destroyed just like our world, you can only change it's state. In the CoH universe however they can be created. Pure faith can generate new energy from nothing. You can build a perpetual motion machine. A single genetic mutation lets you shoot infinite lasers out of your eyes. But there's more to it than that. "Power" can't be destroyed. That is more then just face lasers. It's the charisma to move nations to war. The minds that invent and innovate. The will to change. All of these things remain. In some cases literally, lost artifacts or ancient magic sitting around waiting for you to pick it up. But even obscure things like the above mentioned charisma remain. All of it gets stored in a kind of Akashic record of all of humanity's great feats. That is the real well. It's not some asshole wizard called "The Well" that trickles off power to you. It's the metaphysical concept of potential. Humanity's potential specifically, thought it is stated that any beings linked to humanity can tap it. ... There just happens to be an asshole wizard who trickles off the power to people that is stopping you from getting to it. That's a problem of delivery, the Devs didn't introduce that very well. The old stories of heroes of legend often have people doing impossible feats. Things like climbing an infinite mountain or defeating their own reflection. Convincing an army of animals to follow them into combat. Most of them are not wizards or mutants. Many of them are not even related to gods(or in their mythology "God" isn't a separate kind of being.) In the CoH universe these are people who tapped the well. Went beyond mere origins. A hypothetical Natural Original Kat/Will incarnate could swing their blade and severe the ties that bond two people so they are no longer in love. Because love is real and he can cut any real thing, therefore... In the CoH world, the limits of what a human can do are not what they appear. They're being artificially squeezed and limited by the asshole wizard only letting people tap specific lines of power. People who can tap the full potential of humanity are... not the same as what would be considered a normal human. They're Epic in the original meaning. The things of legends. Now mind you this is going into the Silver Surfer levels, the post-CoH Q/A covered that. The players were eventually suppose to surpass the well entirely and become their own well separate from humanity and tap into the source of all being. Kind of a secular god entity. There would be weird angel type beings and other god-level entities. Marvel and DC comics have similar things for the "Cosmic power level" characters like Thanos, Silver Surfer, Galactus, etc. THAT ALL SAID. While I would love to see the Devs expand the incarnate system and keep going up to explore the mysteries of the cosmos... I think we need a second advancement system for people who don't want to do incarnate nonsense. I have too many characters that would become unintelligible if they progressed into cosmic bullshittery. I dunno what that would be but... yeah. Not everyone's story needs ends up with them punching god.

Oh yeah agreed. In most implementations it ends up over or under balanced relative to a flat Build Up. Still... given my own little magic wand I would replace all the duplicate generic powers like Build Up and Taunt. More importantly I would have made sure this was done at the start of the game so there was no expectation of the generic Build Up being the default option. But I still haven't managed to catch any fairies yet so until then I'm just going to agree that I would like to see Taunt changed. Not for any mechanical balance reasons. The melee sets AS A WHOLE don't need a damage boost or ranged attack or hold or whatever. But it just feels like a good place to leverage in slightly more of a unique identity for the melee ATs. (If it can be done without breaking anything.)