arcane

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.

Giving all blasters a powerful recovery/etc toggle was already highly questionable extreme power creep. Please don’t spread that kind of thing beyond them.

You can make it a better mini-nuke with a handful of procs due to its pretty much guaranteed max proc rate, BUT having perhaps the longest activation time in the game (which also means it soaks up an entire BU/aim) keeps it from being an “optimal” choice. But yes, so fun 🙂

LRM Rocket with damage procs is a solid mix of suboptimal but satisfying.

Dark armor already easily caps negative energy res...

Was looking through the thread for you. Thank you for validating my opinion with your greater SR experience.

Slight correction maybe: I think the magic number is 0.67 for even con, not 1. Maybe I’m wrong tho.

Plainguy, I’m afraid I have to reiterate total opposition to any further opt out mechanisms that allow you to continue to put off learning to play the game. It’s not a super hard game, I promise. Sudden Acceleration may be a massive buff that really transformed powers like Bonfire and Tornado, but man did it establish a bad precedent for anti-thinking players to latch on.

I dunno.., I’d think if the brute/tank leads with a solid AoE attack there shouldn’t be any issue. EDIT: unless ofc there’s an aggro cap issue.

Since you robbed the bank already, you’d think the other mission would say mission failed.

It seems to me that the OP’s problem could only be the product of aura suppression if the tank was literally running in, not attacking at all, and hoping for a taunt aura to do his or her whole job.

The feature you are inquiring about is called common sense 🙂

I think of defense as just being a more valuable bonus like recharge, which is also harder to get than resistance or regen, for instance. Such patterns are so common through all the IO bonuses in the game that it is clear they were intentional choices by the developers.

I would never take the S/T immobilize on a dominator, and only occasionally on a controller if the build has room for it due to controllers having next to no other options for single target damage. Especially if my epic choice’s S/T option feels clunky/slow and worse (power blast or mental blast as opposed to fire or ice blast).

Off-topic but I’m still trying to figure out how to play my SR tank right. Sure he doesn’t die, but having to hang out with low health to get to your high damage resistance feels and looks wrong 😕

If we’re going to allow players to opt out of any feature that is challenging to use correctly, I’m not sure why we can’t just give every AT an inherent toggle power with 45% +DEF(ALL) too. Seriously do you guys want this game to have a hint of nuance or not.

All characters have access to DDR at level 50 through ageless. So it’s no more of a hole to “squishies” than mez protection.

I see absolutely nothing in Blaster Dark Blast that needs the slightest buff.