oedipus_tex

Biggest thing with Dominator attacks is they should be thought of by the powers designer as Dominator attacks, and not just clones of Scrapper or Blaster powers. On a Scrapper, a 60% chance to mezz isn't bad, since you have armor to absorb hits. On a Blaster, a 60% chance to mezz isn't bad, because you're a Blaster and are supposed to have limited access. On a Dominator, a 60% chance to mezz is poor. You're a Dominator. This is supposed to be your armor. This can be bent a little bit with AoEs. With single target powers though, if it's not a 100% chance to happen you need to hit the enemy with a power that has 100% chance to happen first, which negates the suppose benefits of having the "chance for mezz" in the attack. There are a lot of small "chance for" effects in Dominator powers that you end up just ignoring because you aren't in a position to chance it. It would be like if Armor powers randomly shut themselves off 60% of the time. BTW this should probably also apply to Defender blast powers. Always bothered me that what scales for Defenders is knockback Magnitude and not Knockback chance which is what actually provides mitigation.

Things partly don't scale past 54 for a somewhat hilarious reason. A lot of summon costumes don't scale that high. Yes, in the code you have to define a costume for every possible level of summon. Or at least a lot of old summons are created that way. There are 54 lines of code describing which costume an Ice Slick uses.

The best thing I have ever read on the internet was posted by someone on these forums a few years ago, telling the story of joining a Doctor Quarterfield TF without realizing it was being run by a group of ERPers. Hahahaha. Just thinking about it makes me cackle. I hope that person makes an appearance in this thread.

You could have Detention Field provide players with a proc that removes Detention Field if they use any offensive power.

An unsung soloist combo IMO is Fire/Traps. Although Caltrops doesn't do Containment damage, it adds a respectable amount of AoE damage. Of the available Control sets, Fire Control is in one of the best possible positions to take advantage of this. It won't out damage a later game Fire/Kin, but it should dish healthy damage from early in the career until the end of the game.

Instead of framing this discussion around what content is balanced around, I wonder if it would be helpful to reframe it as a discussion about the circumstances where IOs justify player abilities, (and also justify enemy abilities). For example I will use iTrials. Most of the game's content is not iTrials. They are a small sliver of the possible challenges. Yet iTrials represent high stakes end game challenges. Because of their existence, a power or powerset that in "normal" content may not be considered useful can be justified by its usefulness in a trial. Earlier I mentioned Jolting Chain. Perhaps it is not balanced around IOs at all. Instead it is justified by IOs. Players who want to IO their builds can take the power and those who do not can skip it. On the flip side of this, the fact that so many players have access to IOs may not mean we need to balance around them. However, it may mean that in order to justify IO builds, harder challenges need to be added. The nature of these challenges don't need to be linear changes in difficulty. They could be exotic challenges that justify IOs or non IOs in new ways. To use an archetype example, Dominators are not balanced around permadom builds. But for many players, permadom justifies choosing a Dominator. Knowing that you can make a Dominator a permadom is part of the decision process and reason to go down that avenue.

There are some good thoughts in the comments above. IMO it's not possible to remain entirely neutral about IOs as long as development continues on the game. I think sometimes the conversation ends up focused on "balance" in terms of the sets that already exist. But the effects of IOs is a question that comes up frequently when a new powerset, power, IO, or inspiration is added to the game. Even players who prefer a mostly "expansion pack" approach to server development, where new powersets are added but fundamental rules aren't adjusted have to contend with how powers interact with the gear system. Here are some examples of questions that come up: Can a new Control set get a clone of Jolting Chain? Jolting Chain is a mostly bad power except for the fact that you can proc it. Can I proliferate this power to other sets knowing the main reason a person would take it is for the procs and not because of what it does on its own? If I can't proliferate it, is it fair to Electric Control to be stuck with it? Can we create clones of Bonfire? Bonfire is not popular on its own. It only becomes popular when used in combo with a kb to kd proc. Are there any archetypes where this effect is overpowered? Is it fair to call it overpowered if it only tilts that way when the special IO is slotted? TLDR, its not easy to escape the question of IO balance. It's something you need to think about even if the dev teams takes a mostly "expansion pack" approach.

These powers are more powerful without requiring a target because you can fire them from behind an obstacle and enemies can't return fire. Also, IMO the Lockdown proc needs to be lowered in effectiveness anyway, so I'm not upset if it's firing less consistently in EMP Arrow. I don't feel like non-Dominators should be getting reliable procs that mezz bosses. Same goes for the Contagious Confusion proc. These procs should be reverted to their original state before the PPM system was introduced and gave every Scrapper Brute and Blaster holds that mezz bosses in one shot.

I'm personally not sure if it's more balanced or less balanced that the absolute best gear in the game is easily available. On the one hand, it means more people can get their hands on it. On the other, there really isn't any gear in Homecoming that represents epic, top end, coveted equipment like you would find in many other RPGs. The result is that the IO system is balanced around the best of the best gear, versus before were it was balanced around what was more easily obtained.

Still reading responses. Lots of good, if not necessarily totally in agreement responses from skilled players. One thing I hope we can all agree on is that there's a difference between "gear is important" and "the full library of gear is widely available to every player." The latter seems to be more what we are dealing with currently. I don't farm very often or chase cash, but still my "main" toon would have few troubles purchasing any given piece of gear he wants. I have IOs I never touched on live because they were too far out of reach. For example, I never dreamed of owning a Gladiator +3% Def until Homecoming or built a Mids build that included it. Now every build has one. Ditto with ATOs. I don't know if I miss or don't miss how it used to be. The economy is different. Some pieces that used to be incredibly rare are now staples, and that's forced a reconciliation on combat. Definitely I didn't assume in 2009 that the baseline end game Ranged Defense of a Controller with a Confuse was +16 just from purples, ATOs, and the 2 +defense IOs. It was more like 8.

Before I rolled Mind Control anything I'd first determine whether I'd be happier with Dark Control. If I was still determined to roll it it would be a Dominator for sure.

Most primaries more or less break even when compared Dominator vs Controller. It depends on what you value: support vs a more direct approach. The Dominator is often the better soloist and usually has more independence. On a league, the Controller is usually a better choice than a Dominator. But it depends. Mind Control for example is clearly better on Dominators. I don't consider Mind Control the strongest Dominator primary, but it is way better than Mind Control on Controllers. Low damage elemental Control sets like Electric, Earth, and Ice also benefit a lot from having an Assault set to supply their missing damage. That's because even with the bonuses from the Support set they still usually can't kick up enough damage to compete. These aren't strictly better or worse than Dominators, altho in some cases the damage is so low some people may not even consider these control sets on a Controller Dark Control is about as middle of the road as you can get. Not great damage on a Controller, still good on a Dominator. Plant is Plant and deserves its own essay. It's a leader on both archetypes. Fire Control is debatable. You can make a pretty mean Fire Dominator. The question I always have about Fire Dominators though is why bother when you can roll a Blaster and get a better version of the key power, Hot Feet and still get Bonfire? Controllers are mostly immune to this comparison. Fire Control on Dominators really did not make out well with the recent Blaster buffs IMO. That said, Mag 6 Flashfire and mezz protection in dom mode isn't nothing so the Dominator might work out for some people. Gravity meanwhile is opposite of Mind Control, much better on the Controller than Dominator. This isn't to say some Dominators don't deal more damage than Controllers, just that for the modest amount of extra damage you trade away a huge amount of flexibility. Gravity Controllers do not struggle to solo like Mind, Electric, Earth, or Ice Controllers do so transitioning to a Dominator provides less lift.

If you're playing a Gravity Dominator, in most cases you should probably take Lift and skip Propel. You come out slightly ahead of the comparable Controller... who then fills the gap in his attack chain with Propel, grabs an entire secondary powerset devoted to Buff/Debuff, and still ends up with single target damage very close to if not better than the Dominator when the chips are down. The mediocre AoE the Dominator brings doesn't cover the gap in performance. There are some edge cases where the Dominator does a'ight. Gravity on Dominators falls into that "at least it's playable" category where Force Field and the old Energy Melee reside, ok if you never compare it to anything. The best I can say for it is at least it is better than it was before it was revisited toward the end of life of the old game.

The PPM formula is very gameable because it accounts for local Recharge in the power but not any global Recharge. So, what strategic players do is avoid getting the local Recharge of the power too low from enhancements, but then load up on global Recharge, which forces the proc to fire more than it "should." Part of me sees that as an exploit and part of it as just a quirk of an interesting power system. However like I pointed out before, what this results in is powers in APPs, which have higher base Recharge supposedly as a penalty, become super effective because the Recharge penalty translates to reliable procs. This is why I think powers in the APP should be penalized when rolling procs. These powers are meant to be weaker than the base power they are mimicking.

I actually think /Fire is among the strongest secondaries for Ice Control. This is mainly because you can immobilize enemies and keep just outside the reach of their melee attacks while you blast them. This gives you more control over the area that Arctic Air covers versus having it dictated by whatever you're swinging at at the time. Consume is also much appreciated for its endurance bar refill. Beyond that, Energy or Psi are decent options for various reasons.

Agreed. This is partly why a Grav/Psi Dom might be competitive. You can yank things to you and vampire health and endurance from them. Psi Assault has attrocious ranged blast damage and stands to gain from Lift/Propel. I had briefly toyed with a theoretical Grav/Martial Dom on the theory that Grav could benefit from Envenomed Blades buffing Lift/Propel. Then realized that's no different from Fulcrum Shift or Freezing Rain buffing debuffing its damage and abandoned the idea. The Grav/Martial Dom actually will have better AoE damage because of Caltrops and Trick Shot, and having a snipe is always a plus, but when I consider that means losing all the benefits a Buff set brings the tradeoff is just too high to justify to me. Controllers also automatically get Containment damage against incarnate bosses (some of them? all of them? haven't explored this). Not sure how many enemies this actually applies to, but since Lift/Propel with Containment do more damage for the Controller than a Dominator gets needless to say the Controller is by many millions of light years the better suited for that type of encounter.

Hear me out. Lift does close to or more damage than many Dominator melee attacks, has 100% chance to knock up, and can be used at range. It's also available from level 1. Because of Containment it also does more damage on a Controller than a Dominator. There is a theoretical Dominator with excellent AoE damage that might best the Controller in that department, but most Dominators don't have excellent AoE damage. The one Dominator I can think of that might pull even with a Controller would be Grav/Psi with perma Drain Psyche if you don't care about team buffs. It's still playable, because you can still kill stuff with it. In fact you might even find some situations where you do slightly more damage than the equivalent Controller. But you've left on the table the huge advantages of a Buff set like Cold, Storm, Kinetics, Radiation, Dark, or Trick Arrow for mediocre (at best) gains. I'll never tell anyone not to play something if they are set on it, but in this case the Dominator so clearly underperforms the equivalent Controller that I just can't see myself rolling a Gravity Dominator again.

I was gonna wait for more people to post, but here are a few of mine: Earth Control > Stalagmites There are a couple of powers in game that perform an AoE stun, and of all of them, this one is my favorite. The delay between when you click the button to when the power effects fire is very short and jut has this fantastic feel I don't get from Flashfire or Heart of Darkness. Storm Summoning > Thunderclap Here's a situation with a great, unique particle effect, wonderful booming sound effect and... relatively weak result in most cases. It's unfortunate. This is a good power on Controllers with an AoE stun tho. Energy Blast > Energy Torrent This power just feels like it hits like a ton of bricks. It's funny because it's not all that different than other cone blasts, but somehow just feels great. Shield Defense > Shield Charge I figure we'll see this one listed a lot, might as well mention it up front.

Basically in most cases, most of the time, this is true. Gravity is a set that trades away some of its control capability for extra damage in powers like Lift and Propel. On a Controller, which is normally a low damage archetype, this is a bonus. Not only does it mean your damage is better than it would be with another set, but because Controllers get x2 damage from Containment, you deal much more damage than most other types of Controllers, not just a small amount. In fact, you deal more than most Defenders in single target. And with Propel and Lift specifically, with Containment, you actually deal more damage than a Dominator, even before taking into account additional damage from -Resist or +Damage a Controller can get their hands on. This isn't such a hot tradeoff for the Dominator though. They get an Assault set that does damage, trading away the benefits of a Buff/Debuff set. This isn't to say Gravity Dominators are unplayable. They're just losing out on huge benefits of multiplication effects of the Buff/Debuff set for relatively minute gains. Sets that mimic aspects of an Assault set often work best, particularly /Storm, because with /Storm you can even match Dominators at their ability to mezz bosses with an AoE stun.

There are some aspects of a power that are easy to define. Damage, recharge, etc, even animation time. A more nebulous concept is how a power feels. Sometimes, an excellent power just has a wishy washy or inconsequential feel to it. Other times, a power has an amazing feel but sub-par effects. Sometimes it's just right. And sometimes both the feel and the effects are weaksauce. What are your favorite examples of powers with good crunch and bad crunch? What are examples where the effects and the crunch don't line up?

I'm not sure what you mean. The APP powers are not shared assets from the archetype, they are their own unique power that originates as a copy-paste. They sometimes share a PFX file that defines them in the menu system for power customization, and usually share FX files and PART files that define the visual effects and emitters/particles the power uses. However the .powers file is usually unique and hand-coded per archetype. This is true both when a powerset is proliferated to a similar archetype (e.g. when a Defender set proliferated to Corruptors) and when a power is added to the APPs of a disimilar archetype. There may be cases where an APP power is shared among archetypes as an APP power, but they'd be sharing a version of the APP power, not a version of the base power.* Pool powers are sometimes the exception, and are shared across archetypes. But that's fine, because a Pool power is always a Pool power, it's never a power borrowed from another archetype. The procs themselves are actually powers. They are located in the Power definition folder and use the same AttribMods as powers, including the Requires field. There's a field for PPM that determines the proc rate. It's true that they aren't currently aware what power called them, but it's also true the Procs Per Minute field was added late in the game's development. There's no reason a power couldn't know that it is a APP power and adjust proc chances downward. The proc system is already "aware" of what the local Recharge slotting is. *EDIT: Just for the sake of completeness, there are cases where parts of a power are shared. Mainly this is the case with powers that summon pseudo pets. Powers like Fire Rain and Ice Storm etc aren't usually recoded just for the APPs (though they sometimes are like when something like Containment or Scourge needs to be added). Powers like this could pose a bit of a headache, although there aren't a whole lot of them and it could be addressed by introducing an APP-specific version of the pet, as annoying as that is to code.

I think it's a given that the formula is editable. That's what the discussion is about, editing the formula. EDIT: Hope that tautology doesn't sound rude. Not trying to be antagonistic, it's just that the discussion is about editing the formula. Rereading it, I can see how it might be read otherwise. My apologies if so. It is true that the formula isn't written proc for proc in most cases and is located in the core files. However, my understanding is the mechanism for editing that is available.

Lots to absorb here and a lot of thoughts from players whose opinions I respect. To throw my two cents in, one thing I think urgently needs to happen is powers in Tertiary pools need a nerfed chance to proc PPM. The same power in an APP pool shouldn't get better on another archetype just because its Recharge is increased. Increased Recharge is supposed to be a penalty. Instead the PPM should be sliced down by however much the increase in Recharge was. Any archetype with a Hold in their APPs can make it a 90% Chance for Mag 5 Hold by slotting a Lockdown proc. An actual Dominator cannot do this. The fact that Lockdown isn't even the ideal slotting for these Holds speaks to how overpowered Holds in APP powers currently are.

Force Bubble is the haxx for this.

I wouldn't recommend trying this Task Force without an Alpha slotted. You could maybe convince a team to run it without using their other incarnate abilities. Back when Apex was first introduced, Destiny wasn't around yet and it was way, way harder. Also back then a lot of IOs we take for granted now, like Gladiator +3% Def were outside the budget of anyone but ultra-elite players (so expensive people didn't even put them on the auction house--if you did find one, it was usually smarter to sell it than slot it because it was so valuable you could build out 10 other characters for its price). The archetype ATOs were pay to win and mostly unavailable. I never slotted one on live or made a build that incorporated them until Homecoming. I do miss that version of the game a lot.