oedipus_tex

What burns me more than anything is spending the game fighting +4s only to reach the end game and find out it caps out at +3 or even +1. That said, I hope what's still coming in clear is how much I respect differing opinions on the issue. Threads don't go on for 40 pages unless people care, and clearly in this case they do. I respect the passion people have, I hope they respect the passion I and others have about Level Shifts and how I wish end game still meant fighting enemies that were scaled for me. I don't feel that with the current state of the end game.

Yes, one of those examples is to restrict Level Shifts to iTrials. 😄 There are a lot of forum disagreements I "get," but I'm surprised by the Level Shift one. Being able to run around Dark Astoria and get +4 rewards versus +1 enemies while the rest of the team fights +5s strikes me as misperforming both in theory and when actually playing it. I understand we all have our points of view so I won't call anyone who disagrees absolutely wrong, it just surprises me it's a topic of conversation. More than anything what I do not want to see is +6 +7 and whatnot enemies added just to try to offset the Level Shift ability. At that stage, you're creating teams where some people are fighting +3 or +4s and others are fighting +10s and +11s. Definitely not the direction I want to see the game go in. Much easier to just make the Level Shift apply specifically to iTrials. Should have been that way from the beginning to prevent teaming from turning into Door Sitting All Stars.

I'm not necessarily opposed to all-AV missions because variety is important. However, that is definitely not a replacement for standard content and I can't imagine many people being happy with it long term. The amount of rebalancing you'd have to do to make classes like Dominators have a role on an all AV team is intimidating. Much easier to reign in mechanics like Level Shifts over the course of an afternoon rather than engage in months or years trying to reclock everything in the game around a couple of gamebreaking systems that were originally offered as Pay to Win incentives.

That's a good point about the AoE making it less likely to miss after the first attack. So it's kind of like a single target attack that happens to have an AoE afterwards, similar to a wider version of the knockdown in Propel. On my Elec/Psi build I used to take Jolting Chain and proc it out, but was never satisfied with the results. It felt like it took ages to finish off spawns. However its possible thats because that specific combo already has 100% chance to knock in TK Thrust (which I convert to KD). That is pretty useful so I can see why a different build might like Chains. I did end up adding Gremlins back into the build because of their chains. They cast it every 6 seconds. That knockdown I do find somewhat useful, but mainly because I get it with no cast time because the Gremlins handle firing it. They're reasonably good at firing it first thing upon approaching a new pack, eliminating part of the reason I would cast it. That said I do see the synergy between Static Field/Jolting Chain/endurance drain. I do wish Jolting Chain drained endurance on secondhand and thirdhand targets. The fact that it doesn't feels like a bug or oversight.

I don't think this is a realistic option. I'm not saying no extremely dedicated developer team could do it, because already the dev teams have pulled off some amazing stuff. But it is a ton of work, and involves some technical hurdles I'm not sure any team has yet mastered to author new content. City of Heroes' combat system functions reasonably well when stats fall within certain constraints: Most of the team is close to each in other level Most of the team doesn't have Defense near or at the soft cap Most of the team doesn't have Resistance near or at the soft cap The melee team members haven't been able to completely patch the holes in their sets The team can't just obliterate the enemies in the first seconds of combat Once those limits are exceeded, it is indeed still possible to challenge the team. It's just that the way to challenge the team at that stage is to disregard their stats and powers. This is why I lean toward recalibrating what "+4" means. In particular, reeling in Level Shifts and the Winter's Gift set, and ATOs. The numbers don't lend themselves to a comfortable combat system. Adjusting how the -1 to +4 range scales is the most sanitary option. Players will be running the same content under that adjustment. Adding new content that destroys non-IOed players will result in what a lot of folks in this thread fear, gatekeeping content based on the willingness to IO.

RE: Jolting Chain, I've found slotting it worthwhile on Controllers but not Dominators. I'd be happy to be convinced that Jolting Chain is worth it on Dominators, but I'm just not sure right now. The main thing about Jolting Chain is that it has a 5% chance to whiff the first target and do nothing. On balance, I guess that isn't too different from single target powers, which have an identical chance to do nothing 5% of the time. Jolting Chain has an animation time over 2 seconds, so a swing and miss really impacts it negatively. The "critical fail" aspect of Jolting Chain (and Synaptic Overload) is fixable, if developers see it as an issue. I'm on the fence about whether it should be corrected or is fine as is. But, I also don't like Jolting Chain because of it. You have a 5% chance for each chain jump to fail no matter how good your Accuracy is, and a 5% chance for the power to do nothing. I don't know. I could be convinced by some really good proc numbers, but I don't feel like JC procs that well. The recharge time of the jump power the psuedo pet uses is 4 seconds, so the proc rate doesn't look impressive on paper. Wouldn't mind be convinced otherwise. On Controllers I'd still take it just because Controller damage is so low.

I recently took a deep dive into some powers and was surprised by what I saw. Turns out there were a few I never really understood after all these years. Hoping this info dump will help some folks strategize. I reserve the right to be wrong about how I am reading these powers to work. 🙂 Electric Control > Static Field For years this description of this power perplexed me. It lists endurance recovery as well as endurance drain, but I rarely seemed to see it working. Here's what Static Field is actually doing: Static Field drops a Static Field pseudo pet. This is the pet does the pulsing sleep effect and slow run speed. Easy enough so far. The power also does minor endurance drain. It has a 50% chance to drain 0.03 endurance per pulse. Here's where things get really strange. Each pulse where an enemy inside the field gets hit, there's a 25% chance to drop another, invisible pet. This pet is called Pets_Static_Field_End_Recovery. This pet has a life lasting just one second. It restores 2.5% endurance to up to 16 allies within 15 feet and then dies. 15 feet is a smaller radius than Static Field. So, endurance recovery from Static Field is not dependent on actually being inside the field. You just need to be within 15ft of an enemy who is inside the field when a recovery pet drops. Static Field's Sleep effect stacks with itself. So a boss standing in a Static Field can be slept as long as the pulses overlap with each other. You can also summon more than one Static Field on the battlefield at the same time. Doing this can create a situation with psuedo pets firing all over the place, since every pulse from every Static Field on the map results in a 25% chance to summon the endurance recovery pet for every enemy in the fields. Electric Control > Synaptic Overload Some of this is already well known or documented elsewhere, but there are a few details of this I didn't understand until recently. Synaptic Overload does a straightforward Confuse, End Drain, and Recovery debuff on the first target hit. Simple enough. The power then summons a pair of pseudo pets. These pets are only summoned if the first target was hit; if you miss, no pseudo pets. After a short delay the summoned pseudo pets cast an AoE with a 15ft radius, max targets hit 1. To be hit by this AoE, the target must: not have been hit recently by Synaptic Overload, and must not currently be Confused. This means you can't stack Synaptic Overload's Confusion duration easily on the enemies. The Confusion duration will extend on the first target hit, but any other enemies will not get hit by the power's chains. If you've ever noticed enemy groups seem to break out of Electric Controls controls all at once and turn on you, this is why. For some reason, the endurance drain applies to the first target only, not each enemy in the chain. No idea why, because this is easily fixed. But Jolting Chain (both the one you get and the one Gremlins get) behaves the same way. Earth Control > Volcanic Gasses (Thank you to @carroto for some assistance calculating tic times, see conversation in thread). Oh boy. Let's see if I can get this right. Volcanic Gasses is actually not just one pet, it's 7. At 0 seconds, Volcanic Gasses drops a pet called Volcanic_Gas. This pet applies a Mag 50 Afraid effect (causing enemies to run out of the gas), and a tiny Fire damage effect. This pet is also responsible for the gassy particle effects you see while the power is active. At exactly 0, 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 seconds, Volcanic Gasses summons a new pet called Pets_Volcanic_Geyser. Each of these has a lifetime of 15 seconds, except for the final Geyser, which has a lifetime of 10 seconds. The pet is technically invisible but has a power called Thermal Vents. Thermal Vents is a ranged AoE Hold (enhanceable) with 30ft range, 10ft radius, hitting max targets 5, recharging in 6 seconds. The takeaway from this is Volcanic Gasses pulses are not random, they happen in a perfectly predictable pattern: 0 sec 6 sec 10 sec 12 sec 16 sec 20 sec 22 sec 26 sec 30 sec 32 sec 36 sec 40 sec 42 sec 46 sec 50 sec 52 sec 56 sec Because Thermal Vents has a 10ft radius, its to your advantage to keep enemies close together. From what I can see, enemies near the center of the gas are the most likely to get hit. Because there is only a 2 to 6 second gap between pulses, and the Vents will target the first enemy they can find, this power is excellent at holding the remaining stragglers, including bosses towards the end of a fight. We've seen evidence of that anecdotally over the years, so its good to see it confirmed. In this sense it is much more reliable than Arctic Air or Choking Cloud type powers. The gasses are not randomly rolling versus each enemy, they are hard coded to pulse at certain times that are 100% predictable. When there's only a couple of enemies left in the gas those enemies will reliably be held by the gas.

Electric Control is well known for its shortcomings on Dominators because its use of pseudopets precluded most powers from being able to Dominate. This was fixed in a later control set, Dark Control, but the fix was never rolled back to Electric Control. The fix is simple if a bit tedious because it requires additional powersets and psuedopets get added to the game. However, I created a test case for it and it seems to work. I'm planning to post the code to a git soon for any servers that want to fix the set. The fix I tested added these features: Static Field follows rules for Domination > Shadow Field and Dominates on the first pulse only (Mag 3 Sleep with 50% longer duration than the pulsing sleep) Synaptic Overload Dominates on every leap of the chain (Mag 3 Confuse with 50% longer duration than the standard confuse) I made a quick video to demo how it would look in game. Really cool if I say so myself. I know we're not permitted to post videos of Homecoming; this video is from I24 private server I modded to test case the changes. (Note that chain powers should also probably sap endurance on every jump of the chain, not just the first target. I didn't fix this myself but that fix is incredibly straightforward with copy and pasting the drain to the correct pet powers).

Before I found out level shifts applied to Dark Astoria, I ran that content on a 50+1 character leading an 8 player team and found it fairly satisfying. The missions were neither too hard nor too easy. After I found out I can run at as a 50+3 I lost interest. If you recruit members for that team who is level 49 or less, you end up fighting them as +1 to you (with rewards of a +4) while everyone else is fighting +5 enemies. One player can shred the map while everyone else follows behind or door sits. Hard pass. Really disappointing too because most of that content is excellent. The thing about this discussion is I played the game before the incarnate content existed. It was not a crushingly hard game. It was also supposedly "balanced against SOs." But the game was better IMO. I was never a soloist on live. In CoX 2021 (not just on Homecoming) after 50 I am almost a pure soloist unless running radios for lowbies. The team game isn't that much fun. This isn't a problem Homecoming created, they inherited it from the OG devs and how the Resurrection team interpreted the pay to win items from the cash market. But its the situation none-the-less.

First the good news: Elec/Energy does indeed have a lot of synergy and can be built fairly strong. With that combo you're probably building a melee sapper who relies on Power Up to boost defenses and endurance drain multipliers long enough to drain enemies and withstand the rest of the fight. Energy deals excellent damage and, for a Dominator set, actually has pretty good AoE thanks to the Whirling Hands special mechanic. I'd be most likely looking to the Mu APP for Power Sink. If you choose to solo, your opening gambit is probably either Synaptic Overload or Static Field. Both have their merits as an opener. Other than your controls and saps you have little else to protect you. This isn't too atypical of a Dominator actually; Dominators are perhaps the most limited archetype when it comes to access to survivability buffs or debuffs. The real downside for Electric Control is the number of powers that summon psuedo pets. On Homecoming and most other servers, these don't Dominate. The only AoE Electric Control powers that Dominate are the AoE immobilize and hold. Synaptic Overload dominates the first target only, and Static Field does not Dominate at all.

If you're willing to go Dominator, there's something really great about Plant paired with Savage Assault. You said you liked Plant/Storm, and you could make something pretty similar with Plant/Savage/Ice, which would give you Sleet and Ice Rain.

As an Ice/Ice/Ice Dom you want to press your main advantages, which in this case are: You have synergy between Arctic Air and Power Up, where Power Up will increase the duration of the Confusion, allowing fewer gaps in coverage Power Up also increases any +Defense armors you have while it is active Not Frozen Armor though, because it contains enhanceable Resistance Arctic Air synergizes with Chilling Embrace, the damage aura Using Arctic Air with any kind of effectiveness will require acquiring mezz protection. You can get this from going permadom. Life without mezz protection on an Ice Control character is very rough due to AA's long recharge (15s). Without it, it's typical to see AA detoggle constantly starting in the mid 30s. Even a half second Sleep you'd barely notice on another character can wreck an Ice player. Icey Assault is a surprisingly straightforward set, at least compared to Ice counterparts on other archetypes. Ice on most other archetypes tends to mix in some controls with the attacks. Icey Assault though is mostly just the attacks. They do some minor -Recharge/Slow but you're unlikely to even notice. Ice Control on Dominators has some issues we should be upfront about. It's much more difficult in my experience to tackle difficult enemy groups as an Ice Control player because the control just isn't there. Arctic Air is technically nerfed on Dominators; it has a Confuse duration 33% shorter than a Controller when out of Domination mode (typical of control powers) but no ability to enter Domination mode, where it should provide Mag 6 Confuse and 50% longer duration. There is still some value in playing the set, because there's no denying its unique playstyle. I do hope the developers revisit it to make Domination mode more valuable.

I didn't know until the TA updates that Special Resistance (e.g. Resistance to -ToHit, -Recharge, -RunSpeed, -Recovery etc) is recalculated every game pulse. What I mean is that if you have a bunch of -ToHit on you and, after the fact, acquire -ToHit Resistance, any existing -ToHit on you gets recaculated and lowered. Looking at how the stats show in game makes this obvious, but since few enemies had Resistance to debuff that changes turn to turn never put it together. Casting the new Acid Arrow does, indeed, recalculate all existing debuff and increase it, even debuff that hits prior to the arrow.

Domination does not affect Arctic Air except to help you keep it from detoggling when mezzed. That's not nothing, but leaves a lot to be desired IMO. I run a private server where I modded Arctic Air to suppress rather than detoggle on mezz, and where it correctly becomes Mag 6 with a longer mezz duration when in Domination mode. Both changes IMO would be nice to be bring to Homecoming. Ice Control isn't terrible but it does feel/is less powerful than other Dominator primaries. Domination mode adds 50% to the duration of controls, so Ice Control Dominators are using a version Arctic Air that is significantly weaker than it "should" be.

Interesting idea. I had to go back and look: Oedipus Tex: Earth/Savage Dominator Social Medium: Electric/Psi Dominator Pinball Blizzard: Gravity/Storm Controller Cold Reader: Ice/Psi Dominator Sarcopha-Guy: Dark/Energy Dominator Chilly Pepper: Fire/Ice Dominator Late Fee: Dark/Martial Dominator Radio Iceotope: Ice/Rad Stalker (LOL) Hope you brought some breakfrees.

I think our dilemma can be partly summarized by how different types of players interpret the goal of gameplay. When I've been a developer on mod projects in the past, I've tried to classify player preferences using a cross axis like this: I prefer to use the term Certain and Uncertain rather than Easy or Difficult because it's a better reflection of what most players mean. There's a high degree of Certainty, for example, in CoX's player death system. The stakes are deliberately not super high. You are fairly certain to advance even with many defeats. The Solvable-Unsolvable axis refers to how the player approaches the gameplay puzzle. Players who prefer a Solvable game often prefer few changes and fairly predictable challenges. They want to "beat" the game and may feel cheated if they build with one understanding and developers pull the rug out from under them. Players who prefer an Unsolvable game view solvability as actually a flaw--in their view, the puzzle should be nebulous and changing, with players only ever temporarily seeming to defeat the system. There is no "right" opinion. But it's helpful to understand why players have particular view points. Players who prefer a highly Unsolvable and Uncertain game are sometimes accused of wanting the game to be unapproachably difficult or elitist; players who prefer a highly Solvable and Certain game are often accused of being afraid of change or of being too attached to their perfect builds. Usually, neither case is true. It's just that each preference values different things in the game. (For reference, I would place myself as preferring a somewhat Certain and highly Unsolvable ruleset for most of CoX's mechanics.)

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. One thing that is somewhat unique about CoX's situation is that there aren't a whole lot of gated content areas. You have iTrials for that, mainly. The rest of the content is usually scalable. So when we talk about build performance, a lot of the time what we're talking about is whether players are running identical content on +0 or +4. When players are forced to take a step down, they're still usually able to do the same material on a lower setting. Although this conversation is mainly about IOs, IMO there hasn't been any system as destabilizing to this combat engine as Level Shifts. This is a topic that deserves its own thread. Level Shifts work in reverse of the purple patch; they get better when level differences get higher. This happens because shifting a +4 enemy down to +3 is better than shifting a +1 enemy to +0. If I were to open my own server and change literally nothing else, the one change I'd insist on that Level Shifts be either removed or confined specifically to iTrials. I like to be surprised, and maybe there's an enterprising dev team out there that's ready to tackle making new high end missions and task forces. Already some of the dev teams out there have made some ambitious things that are impressive in their scope. On the other hand part of me sees all this pretty decent content that currently exists and how unengaging it feels. Tagging along behind a team that can obliterate enemies before I can get to them makes me lose interest in teaming fast. The fact that this content could scale properly but doesn't because some players feel they should be allowed to run at the highest difficulty setting at all times makes me want to seek alternative solutions.

I seem to remember someone on live who ran dual boxed Cold/Sonic Defenders with sick results. The video I remember is him "accidentally" soloing some AV he'd just meant to annoy. This was eons ago, before the incarnate system, so not sure how it would do now. Might even have been before Illusion/Cold troller was possible. I also wonder how Beam Rifle stands up to Sonic Attack on Defenders these days. Just at a glance it sure looks competitive, not sure if it turns into real actionable damage though.

Well again I can't really agree. City of Heroes is easier in 2021 because it is actually easier. I used to run an expensive Dominator build on live just before incarnates launched that could solo Rikti at +0x8, and that felt powerful. Around the time of the servers closing I had gotten that to +1. Now my benchmark is an easy +4x8. That's possible because the numbers have shifted, not because I got better. The baseline Defense-to-all of that character shifted from +3 to +11, the strength of a Dispersion Bubble. That was possible mainly because, the saying was, it doesn't matter. End gamers are going to do what end gamers are going to do, the game is based on SOs so why even think about what IOs are doing. At the end of the day I think it's fair for developers to think about the average equipment their players have access to when they make stuff. I'm writing a powerset for Controller/Dominators right now, and for sure I'm thinking about what happens when it goes permadom, for example. I think the last time "balanced around SOs" was true was three presidents ago. Most of the newer powersets seem aware of the system they'll be part of.

Not really going to agree with you here. The game has gone through a number of metas. There wasn't a point where non IOed builds were getting crushed and the game was punishingly difficult.

Just as an anecdote. Last night I joined a level 50 Task Force on a whim with my Vet level 100 Dominator, who is the most IOed character I have. He's built well but not what I'd call a top performing build. In the opening minutes of the first mission each of the spawns went from full health to zero faster than I could fire a control power. I ran behind the team for about 5 minutes of that, then faked a disconnect so I could speed up the bin engine I had compiling game code in another window. Sorry team (but you didn't need me anyway and that adventure was as much fun as walking the full perimeter of Independence Port). Whether that situation was caused by incarnate powers, level shifts, IOs, crashless nukes, damage procs or some combo of those things isn't something I investigated too deeply. The point was that even on my best build I was obsolete. I also played the game when it was not tilted quite so heavily toward instantly obliterating spawns and miss that. A lot.

Wouldn't be against this for buffs like Destiny actually. Although I think there are cleaner ways of handling it.

I think this is a good point. The gear progression in City of Heroes is unconnected to the gameplay loop in a lot of ways. Part of my disconnect to the game in the old days was a feeling that the only way to progress past a certain point was to farm. Just playing normally didn't seem to get you far. I'll give the Homecoming server credit, because I have less of a feeling of that here. City of Heroes has always reminded me of the Diablo series more than most other MMOs (interesting because World of Warcraft is literally built by the company behind Diablo). There's this sense of "you against a dungeon of nonsense" in CoX that I've always found enjoyable. But the "drops" in Diablo were always more exciting. In City of Heroes I definitely don't get a Rikti Alloy and go "Awesome! One step closer to my end game build!" CoX is interesting because it actually has two models of drop systems in its standard gear and its incarnate system. I feel like more people figure out the incarnate system. Maybe because its rewards are more straightforward?

I apologize if this sounds out of line, because I think this is an important discussion and I value people's input. But, sometimes I wonder if in there's a cavalry of low level players running in circles in Atlas Park because they can't figure out keyboard movement, and Its Important That We Balance Around That Not Experienced Players.

Like many things this is a subject with shades of gray, not just black and white answers. Decking out a character in full end game IOs is one thing. Understanding that Blessing of the Zephyr provides knockdown protection is something else. But these two things are frequently conflated.