arcane

Considering people that call brutes useless would be unwise to play brutes and that’s apparently the mindset I’m arguing against... yes maybe I do. or what infinitum said lol

Well the shared experiences of every brute that actually plays the game instead of City of Pylon Testers, for starters. “A data point” (1) with no larger established testing methodology and with all the player’s build philosophy biases in play means absolutely zero.

Or, bear with me here.. drumroll.. imagine this: just start using whatever difficulty is comfortable for the team on a case by case basis 🙂

Not what you’re asking for as a dominator, but I would like to once again rep the grav/traps concept build and reiterate just how satisfying it is to enter a +3x8 mission, lay out ~4 trip mines, whatever caltropses/mortars/traps come up while the mines recharge, and then wormhole to have the *entire* mob obliterated in a second. Even bosses yes. Time efficient for a team? No. As satisfying as concept builds get? Yes.

Well, considering many of the claims being made only make sense in the context of a fully kitted out build, I am assuming that all of the “brutes are useless lol” supporting data was more or less gathered at 50+3.

Yes I am down for some similar additions to sonic and to FF. Just commenting that powerset overhauls in this game are going to happen in the form of several minor tweaks, not redefining powers. Look at trick arrow. Tons of changes, and the only functionality that was totally replaced in the entire overhaul was the removal of -res from Acid Arrow; and they even dumped that same -res into Disruption Arrow to justify the move.

Unfortunately, I can tell from the extent of your recommendation that you haven’t read up on the cottage rule.

What’s this 50 you speak of? I don’t play the alt at all prior to 50+1.

Now that’s more like it. The reality is calling any AT useless is absurd because all of them are roughly on equal footing in terms of being able to plow through this game at max difficulty with no trouble. Brutes, or any other AT, would actually have to be hurting in some way for your prior rhetoric to be justified, and they are very clearly not. The whole thing is just a petty gripe around the lack of a perfectly linear relationship between tanker’s mitigation advantage and brute’s damage advantage.

Only because their definition of useless is not consistent with the meaning of the word useless.

It’s even more silly than that to understand that difference completely and think it actually amounts to “brutes are useless now” - which is complete hyperbole.

This whole argument is highly silly to me. Even the folks cherry-picking data trying to prove the ridiculous claim that brutes are literally useless now have posted their very own tests showing that their brutes are still doing more damage.

There is no way you can achieve all of those things at once on just any defender build. Time defenders definitely. But most builds with that many procs can’t possibly get that much defense and recharge too. So let’s not treat outliers as norms.

Resistance debuff is already one of the most powerful tools in the game with zero enhancement. Not seeing this as a viable change unless the debuff base values are nerfed, which I don’t think you want.

I’m not opposed to an alternate animation option here and there, but I don’t think unique animations should be decoupled from their powersets completely like this. If you want the martial arts animations, you should play martial arts. It’s that simple to me.

I can understand why people would think procs aren’t ok right now, but it’s not like they don’t come with a sizeable cost. Good luck slotting ~25 damage procs and all the other goodies AND playing the high +recharge + soft capped defense forum meta all on the same build. (Proc monster tanks are an outlier to this statement here since they can’t exactly be squishy)

I don’t have mids so good luck with those data chunks, but I have 5 vet level 100+ /fire brutes including dark/ (as well as rad/, spines/, ice/, and fire/). I can confirm for you that the loss of a second damage aura is not that big a deal - it’s maybe slightly noticeable but burn is still your main damage, and epic/patron aoes are more than enough to cover for the lack of a short recharge click PBAoE attack. EDIT: I also haven’t respec’d since the touch of fear change, so not sure if that power’s new AoE changes much. Looks like a tiny radius but maybe it could be proccy, idk.

Nature needs a buff? Lol not a chance.

It’s a fact that this is a highly disputed opinion. I’m coming around more and more to tankers myself, but I still find the “brutes are useless now” narrative to be a major stretch and know I’m not alone here.

If they actually did such a thing to a game whose variety and range of possibilities is one its biggest assets... well I’d probably go play Guild Wars 2 again lol.

Yeah, I guess my starting point is a vague conception of what I want the character to do as well as whether or not I want to commit to any specific pools. Once I’ve decided, for instance, that I want the character to be a total damage proc monster, that’s when other incompatible options get thrown out the window. I don’t always go one way or the other - I try as many playstyles as possible. Some characters soft capped and loaded up on set bonuses, some procced to the teeth, some built around something else entirely (like using aid self or fold space for a change as opposed to the most popular pools). This also extends to incarnates - I know already that I could make any combo work great with musculature/intuition, degenerative, ageless, assault, etc., but I prefer to explore the other options than to tie myself down to the meta.

I see many people doing exactly what I predicted and promoting soft capped defense across the board. Let me clarify: I have soft capped characters, and I have more offensively powerful characters with ~20% defense. I have zero problems surviving on the latter type in endgame content if I play my character mindfully and appropriately. So please please please take this soft capping trend with a grain of salt and build in a way that works for you.

No guidelines. People here will probably try to convince you of some soft guidelines like 45% ranged or s/l defense, 5 lotg’s, or something like that, but we can assure you from experience there is no such thing as a mandatory power or even a mandatory IO. That being said I would personally never ever skip the procs from gladiator’s armor, steadfast protection, panacea, miracle, preventive medicine, or performance shifter.

I don’t think dominators need a *buff* in net terms, but further tweaks to their dynamic could be a good thing. I don’t think permadoms in their final form need to be any stronger, but tweaking either (1) the gap between permadoms and other doms or (2) how hard it is to get perma dom would be fine.

Since you haven’t gotten a very specific response yet, I’ll try... 1) Blast set cones. I don’t see a precedent for cones needing to hit 16 targets, but agree that Full Auto specifically should get the buff. 2) Sirens song. Sure. Sonic blast is pretty bad right now except on debuffer characters. 3) Melee cones. These should not be standardized because they are not directly comparable to one another. Frost already has a big cone. Fiery Breath does not but is balanced by having more range. Some do more damage, some do less. Sure, a couple of individual cone powers could use a buff. But overall they should not be treated like directly comparable powers because they are specifically designed not to be. 4) No comment because I haven’t played dual blades or street justice. I haven’t seen any big issue with other mechanics though, like energy focus or savage’s thing, so riddle me skeptical. 5) AR. Hard yes on fixing the animation times making AR horrible. Slight ignite radius increase might not be too overpowered, but I don’t see how on earth it makes sense to remove fear from such a power. 6) Combustion. I’ve never gotten the sense this is a big offender animation wise. Not seeing an issue here relative to real animation problems like Assault Rifle or Kinetic Melee. 7) Kheldians. Fine with a taunt aura proposal. Not seeing why it should also give any other buffs though. 8 ) Sentinel cones. Yes please. 9) Psychic blast. The ability to time projectiles and stack burst damage is the single best part of the set. Hard no to changing that. Fine with tweaking Psinado tho I guess. 10) Masterminds. Just adding multiple levels to all henchmen without nerfing anything to balance it sounds like a shameless power creep request to me. Other changes fine but agree ninjas/beasts need to be faster than zombies for instance. 11) Pistols/fly bug thing. Never heard of it but sure. 12) Forge. No. Forge is fine. 13) Dark armor. Capping ones own conceptual res type without any outside help is not a god given armor set right. Invuln can’t quite do it either. And dark armor easily caps it once you introduce basic IO sets. And dark already gets incredible psy res as a unique thing. Not seeing the need for a buff. Overall, it doesn’t feel like you’ve laid out reasons for many of these buffs to be needed, so it feels like mostly power creep advocacy.