Haijinx

While I tend to agree, the flame wars over Rage in this forum have been legendary. Almost as wild as live. Even when Capt PH proposed to split the Debuff between Defense and Resist, and make single rage not crash at ALL. Which was pretty much everything you could ask for. Short of eliminating all Rage based crashes.

Or poster child. Whatevs.

Rage is basically the postage child for the cottage rule.

I can do that with my martial blasters debuff aura though

Does EA have a taunt aura on scrapper, or just debuff? Though I expect debuff works good enough. EA is a great set. Claws might be the best AOE scrapper already. For real mission type play. Next step up would be a blaster.

The stalker version still has less downsides than the other versions. That and claws stalkers don't get spin.

Maybe (and I know this will never fly) , you could have diminishing returns on certain content within a certain time frame If you do 5 missions of Council, the 6th one only provides 75% of the rewards, The 10th one only 50% and so on.

I use the money from the last one lol I find the previous character makes money a lot faster than the new one But I am sure not everyone does it that way. I concede your point. XP and Influence awards scaling with more challenging content seems a worthwhile motivator. You would need some way to measure this though I would think. I am sure everyone has seen the Bads farm or S/L and Fire farms where the opposition is no real threat to the farmer. If you started upping awards for challenging content. It would have to be actually challenging. And one that would make it worthwhile to bring support and/or crowd control along. The complaints of Control and Support sets based ATs are valid.

I guess. I mean you can slot all the IOs by 50 latest. But I suppose you are right about the incarnates. The game seems such a faceroll at that point I can't make myself see that as part of a level climb. My playtime on a character drops off steeply after 50 with rare exceptions.

I wonder if part of it is simply a mechanical limitation of the linear % based system they used. At end-game hugging the rails of the system, there's not a lot of room to make adjustments, even if people wanted to. And increasing XP for high level content seems laughable as a motivator to play this harder stuff assuming you could design it. Since we are talking about people that are either 50 or within hours of being 50. The level climb is really short in COH these days.

The guassians chance for build up probably will be a lot better in follow up than tactics in a build that's meant to solo the TF. It does work great in tactics on teams though.

Not sire what level it is exactly. But its definitely not the lower level game that's the problem. Cox has a great feel at lower levels. If anything its a shame the 2x xp boosters are free. Since it makes that part go so fast. And on topic, its where support classes really shine on PUGs, TFs, etc.

This is true, with LOTS of support, you can do max difficulty at fairly low levels. And you don't need pesky things like tankers or DPS classes or IO bonuses or anything. All opposition will be crushed before anyone is killed. Either because you have so much survival powers stacked that no one can die, or you have so much Enemy reducing powers stacked they all melt like American Cheese in the microwave to even defenders' modest blast effectiveness. Or Both.

I think this is true. If you wanted to do max difficulty reliably at say level 25, you'd need both a full team and a fair amount of support, along with a scattering of IO bonuses throughout the team. And you'd still need to keep on your toes. And this sort of balance feels more like the dynamic in other MMOs, as a general threat per encounter level. But for some reason people at least judging by some very vocal status quo defenders around here, do not want this dynamic to continue up into the endgame. I'd argue that not even a hint of this dynamic exists by the time you have a "fully done" build and incarnates at T3+ playing such content as ITF, etc. No wonder Support feels left out.

I don't see why its such a hard sell that the highest difficulty setting for the standard game in an MMO should be intended for Teams

So this is now an issue 24 rant?

Hurl boulder

Stalkers were probably overbuffed in the end. Their ATOs are so much better than everyone else's. Its like they were designed to turn stalkers into scrapping damage fiends with more buildups than you can even fire off, and oh yeah here's a lot more hides and hide crits too! Scrappers have decent ATOs too, not as good, but definitely second place. Sure Tankers got nice buffs but their survival is mostly wasted. Stalkers and Scrappers hardly ever die anyway.

I was thinking more maximum potential ST output, so pylon times would be one way to measure it. I am aware real play is not like that. I think Blasters do far more ST damage in real play throughout a mission for example due to their range.

I don't think they would happen. But this position is definitely more consistent than buffs for X, but no buffs for support classes.

However you would not support nerfs to those ATs that have gotten the Lion's share of the creep?

I do have to agree its a bit disingenuous to point at support characters and say "POWER CREEP!" While waving Scrappers, Stalkers, Tankers and Blasters through undeterred.

I thought EM was #1 St right now? If not which is TW still?

If you say so. I'll stick to leaving my suggestion as is though.

That's okay. This was my suggestion though.