oedipus_tex

I think that the end goal should be to get battles back into the range of +0 to +4. Functionally, a 50+1 player vs 54 enemies is the same as a 50 player versus 53 enemies. The only real difference is the drop rates. So I'd remove the Left Shift and then (maybe) slightly increase rewards for level 53 enemies in appeasement. That would reintroduce level +4 enemies as the top tier and hopefully satisfy most players.

The answer to the question in the title is "Partly, yes." Dominators were one of the least played archetypes because they originally had very low base damage. This is back when Domination provided a Damage boost and the design idea was you were supposed to beat stuff down while Dominating and hang back the rest of the time. Needless to say Dominators outside of Domination at the time were... very bad. But when IOs came out, players figured out you could maintain that Damage boost at all times, and the class was playable. When the developers rebalanced Domination, Dominator base damage was increased and the +Damage was removed from Domination. The idea was for permadoms to remain at their strength, and the class to still be playable outside of permadom. So, the balancing was done with knowledge of how permas would play. Personally I still don't think that went far enough. I've posted elsewhere about why mezz protection (or perhaps just a part of it) should be available outside of Domination mode to help further close the gap. Mainly for me its just a factor of Dom builds being too tight because they are pushed so hard to hit a magic number for Recharge. Another option that would improve non-permas generally but not significantly impact perma is to lower the recharge on Domination by around 33%. Then you'd still be able to permadom with IOs but you'd have more build flexibility.

Thanks for your thoughts. I always enjoy more options and I agree that they're a nice feature in CoX. Unfortunately in this case, I don't think just expanding the game with higher +level enemies will have the effect we're looking for. To me the problem is more fundamental. If there was an option for even higher level enemies the issues with the Level Shift would get even stronger. For example, we've mentioned that nukes have radically changed gameplay, which is true. But more specifically nukes have radically changed gameplay in part because the Level Shift has them doing 17% more damage if an enemy +4 to you is shifted to +3. If you make the gap even larger, the benefit for the Level Shift gets bigger and bigger. Removing the Level Shift in non-incarnate would be the smartest move IMO. The tech exists to do it already, and there were many years where the game operated without the Level Shift and players did fine.

For various reasons I personally consider Plant, Earth, and Dark to be the "top 3" Dom primaries and Energy, Fire, Psi and Savage as the top 4 Assault sets. Which is not to say others are bad, just that if you pick any one of those sets, even if not together, you'll likely get something that performs well. Here's the text of a private message I sent to a player recently who had asked for advice on what to pick that explains my rationale (he had asked specifically for a Ranged dom, hence the focus on that). Plant Control is probably the most straight forward. You get Seeds of Confusion around level 6 or 8. Its a fast recharging cone Confuse that pretty much carries the set. At 26 you get Carrion Creepers which is an invincible pet that can do huge damage. The only real downside to Plant is its pretty one dimensional. The way it plays at level 8 is about how it will play forever. Earth comes together a bit slower. It's basically built on a combo of Stalagmites, Earthquake and Volcanic Gasses. All of these can be used at range, but again with Stalagmites you can't be flying. Of course you can hop down, Stalagmites, hop up. But once you get good global Recharge going, you'll be casting Stalagmites every 30 seconds or so so it can be a lot to deal with. Dark Control is a very solid set that mixes some range and some PBAoE. It has a Stun that is very similar to Earth's, except it's PBAoE. All the powers in Dark have -ToHit so you have some extra survivability. Fiery Assault is a good ranged set with absurdly good damage. Mainly notable because its the only Assault set IMO playable almost entirely without taking any of the melee powers. Meanwhile Consume helps with endurance management. Fiery has no self healing altho its also probably the only set that can be played as a full time hover Dom. Savage is a late blooming set that really only comes together around level 40 when the final 2 attacks are slotted. That said its very fun. One attack is the killer bird, the other is a badass teleport-slash that ports you instantly into melee range. Powers in this set lower your endurance costs. Has a mediocre self heal but its better than nothing. Encourages an interesting playstyle because you totally can Hover for most of the fight and then teleport in for the kill because the teleport works even when Hovering/Flying. Psi is completely different than any of these. It doesn't have very good damage. Instead it has Drain Psyche, an insanely strong +Regen +Recovery power. You really need a high recharge build to get it going full time, but once you do you can take hits better than any other Dom. It requires a few enemies nearby and only lasts 30 seconds per cast, so it encourages a kind of manic vampire playstyle where you run from mob to mob replenishing your Regen. The blasts though are mediocre and a lot of enemies resist Psi damage. Energy is the only one of the ones I mentioned with no recovery or endurance discount or healing. It's a bit hard to describe. Basically it's a melee set that actually hits hard enough to justify being in melee.

You can monitor your Stealth radius attribute to see if stuff is knocking you out of stealth. Most buff or healing powers won't. Enemies will totally ignore you even if you heal teammates as long as you don't hit them with any attacks or debuffs, as long as they can't see you. Note that attacks from pets count as attacks though.

While this is by no means definitive, a bit of good news is it seems at least some powers do line up with the an origin point on the weapon rather than a fixed origin on the player. Of course there are other factors that might make this difficult or inconsistent across powers, but its good to know.

With sets like Assault Rifle, does the origin point of the particles align to the weapon or is it fixed on the player? That would be worth noting. A cheat-y way to do this might be to just keep the current animations, put the wand in hand, and obscure the origin point with a particle effect burst at cast time that hides the spawn location.

Removing Level Shifts would be the most positive move the developers could make IMO. One big thing here. On end game builds, the shift shouldn't understood in terms of the difference between level 50 and level 51. Instead it should be understood in terms of its inverse. The Level Shift lowers level 54 mobs to level 53 (but gives you level 54 rewards). Sorry for italics. Just hoping to drive home a point. :) A Level 54 enemy takes only 48% of all Damage, Debuffs, Mezzes, and so on. In other words it has 52% Resistance to all. A Level 53 enemy takes 65% (Resists all by 35%). That's a 17% difference. Hold on to that number. The average Corruptor, Mastermind or Controller AoE -Resist power starts at -22.5%. But that's against a +0. Against a +3, that reduces to 65% of strength, so 14%. The Level Shift is better. A Level Shift that lowers an enemy from +4 to +3 is better than getting free Sonic Dispersion cast on you at all times. And since you can email Empyrean merits there is no reason you should ever spend more than a brief amount of time as a Level 50 unless you don't play enough to have Empyreans stored up. The big takeaway from this is (other than just Level Shifts being really powerful) that unlike most mechanics in this game, Level Shifts actually get better when your enemy is higher level.

All the incarnate stuff was behind the paywall. In the End Game thread you and I were participating in a few days ago, this came up about the Destiny power. Destiny used to be available to paid players only so you'd run into it on teams less often. Level Shifts too.

Gravity/Time will basically play like a Time Defender that has a mass Stun + Teleport power and a pet instead of AoE blasts and a nuke. There's a bit more to it than that, but that's the big picture.

Excellent analysis. The most outrageous part of your data is that Explosive Shuriken was outdamaged by the procs in Malaise's Illusions and Sting of the Manticore. I assume you have Malaise in Mass Confusion, which means its only up every 60 seconds at max. That's pretty damning for Explosive Shuriken, tho I also can't see from your data how many times you cast it versus other powers.

I like Vigor Core for Kinetics since you don't need more damage. The End Redux and Healing are also a nice extra. Gets you out of having to slot for those things, which is nice for Kinetics since the powers don't take good sets.

I think there's also a kind of "Inverse Power Gamer" dynamic for some players too. I need to play a character who is "good enough" to contribute. But it's also weirdly important to me that the character not be "flavor of the month." I like to be one or two steps from perfect. Good but not cookie cutter. That's how I ended up maining an Elec/Psi Dom. It's definitely not the best Dom. Electric frankly gets a bad deal from the Domination rules. But it does have its synergy and is functional enough. I also have enough characters that it doesnt bother me much to skip "critical" powers anymore either. I have a Dom or 2 now without the AoE immobilize for example.

BTW is there a way to revert certain IOs to their pre-PPM rate of fire? There are a few that stand out as "way too good" and encroaching deep into Dominator space: Lockdown: Chance for Mag 2 Hold Coercive Persuasion: Contagious Confusion IMO these two procs should be reverted to a flat 20% chance to trigger and not be based on PPM. Maybe all mezz procs should as well. My Scrapper shouldn't have a 90% chance to Hold a Boss in one cast while my Controller or non-perma Dom has a 40% chance because his Hold recharges faster. If this fixes these two procs in toggle powers like Arctic Air and Choking Cloud where they used to be pretty decent, even better.

I took a snapshot of the state of various characters I have run recently. Far from a full picture but it provides an idea. Top left is my main-main. Only character who has a full build with Range defense, S/L defense, and everything. (I have one other character, a Stalker, who has a similar end game build). The Oedipus Tex character himself is less complete. He uses the "Trust Fund Perma Dom build" I posted about here: Top-right is a semi complete build. I like this character but he's being retired in favor of the Earth/Savage Tex build. Bottom row is what would be joining your radio teams or other content. These usually get a mercy IO or 2 where the character is lagging.

Well we can get some idea just from the number of times some of us have rerolled the same character. 😄

I can take a stab at this. I am a power gamer in the sense that I want a character that adds value. There are certain sets that in my eyes aren't effective enough in the game's meta to consider. In my case it has less to do with wanting to dominate content than it does with a belief that each role should have merit. For me, I liked the balance we had just prior to the incarnate system better than after. I'm not a "burn it all down" player who wants to get rid of IOs and so on, but I definitely had more fun before, when I felt like rolling a Support or Control character had more purpose.

Thanks for your well thought out reply. Things can get pretty heated on the forums because there's a lot of passion so I appreciate you taking the time to be respectful and thorough. That there is so much energy about this topic I think it speaks to how great this game is and the amazing job the latest dev team has done reviving it. I understand the perspective you're coming from. For me personally, I'm much less concerned about top level builds than I am about making the Support and Control classes have a purpose. They did, for a long time in the game's history. Things were never perfect and damage was always king, but there was at least somewhat more of an attempt to make them relevant. The thing about "casuals" is they existed before the incarnate system existed, and everything more or less worked okay. The game was never extremely difficult. But I think sometimes we slide into an attitude that "Since things are basically easy, numbers no longer matter." Destiny, Level Shifts--they stand out for their negative impact to people like Bubba and I along with some other observers. If these sharp edges are sanded off, casuals would go back to playing the game the way they did on Live. The incarnate system only existed for 1 Issue before it moved behind a paywall and 2 issues before the game shutdown. The game we're playing right now doesn't represent how it worked at any point during its live run, and casuals were fine with that.

I mean this with all due respect, but I feel like any player immersed in the game enough to have an opinion on +4/x8 content and how easy it should be is by definition "a power gamer."

Rather than totally remove Level Shifts I think they should apply only to iTrials. The iTrials feature enemies who have their own level shifts, so they are balanced for it. The tech already exists to flag a level shift as conditional based on the zone, it is currently used by Lore and Destiny. I think that needs to be applied to Alpha level shift and Dark Astoria de-tagged as an "incarnate zone." That would fix a lot. The DA content is actually pretty good, but fighting +1 enemies and getting +4 rewards from it shouldn't be a thing.

You nailed it.

In fairness to the folks who are fine with where the currently difficulty level lies, running at +4/x8 produces superior rewards to running at lower difficulties. They may feel that the rate of XP and influence generated at +4/x8 is the reasonable rate toons should get in normal play. So, I can understand some anxiety when the discussion turns to making things harder. Solo performance is less an issue for me right now than 'splash' or 'incidental' buffs like the AoE buffs in Destiny. No one really plans their builds around this and I think it's one of the safest places to explore taming buffs. A lot has been said about Destiny sidelining the buff/debuff sets. It's worth adding that this is at least partly intentional. It's made this way so that iTrials aren't dominated by teams of Defenders and Corruptors, who on a team of 24 or 32 would have an outsized impact. That's a fine design for iTrials and partly why I think Destiny's AoE buffs are appropriate there. Unfortunately, it bleeds out into the pre-i game with the same effect. The AoE anti-mezz in Force Field and Sonic Resonance used to give those sets something. Now you can get that from a Blaster or Scrapper so why bother?

I agree. The original post was a piece of theorycraft for a future Task Force or iTrial, not a recommendation for the core game.

Yes I did post something about that a while back. :) I still think that combat system could be useful for a specific enemy group or Task Force. The nice thing about Multi Opponent Combat modifiers in games that use them is a squishy character can obtain excellent defense against one or two enemies without turning into a Tank. It also makes Defense less one dimensional, so that Defense obtained from Force Fields or Super Reflexes (for example) is "more real" than Defense from less "authentic" sources. In some ways this is what the current DDR system does.

Thanks for the reply. My response is kind of long so I hope it's not too overbearing. --- Trick or Treat has existed since the time I and many others started playing the game, so I've had a chance to experience it under a few different metas. It used to be more challenging but doable. Bringing a support character was very helpful. Trick or Treat, Invasions, and the MSR are all older pieces of content that allow "mass bunching." That is, the optimal strategy is to bunch all the players together and hit every buff you have. This strategy was effective even before Destiny because players have so many AoE buff powers that benefit. Destiny sent it into overdrive though. The iTrials were reactions to this meta. It's not an accident that iTrials have so many moments where players are forced to move to avoid a death ray. That was put there as a rebuttal to the bunching strategy after watching how players reacted to invasions and the MSR. --- So, why not just add a new +6 mode? The problem with even higher difficulty is the way Defense and Resistance work versus how debuffs and damage work. As you raise level differences the Purple Patch degrades debuffs and damage. At +4, enemies take 48% of debuffs and damage. At +6 they take just 15%. Player Resistance armors (and Defense, tho slightly more complex) are mostly unaffected by level differences. The soft cap is the soft cap. Once you've given the players 75% or 90% resists, depending on their archetype, it can't go higher. This is why developers should keep an eye on these attributes. It's the same issue with Power Boosted Farsight. Once these numbers hit the limits, designing content to challenge players without vaporizing non-top end teams becomes harder and harder. How do you challenge players with very high Defense for example? You raise the base ToHit of enemies like was done in iTrials. I'd like to do everything to avoid that. (That higher ToHit base is also why I think Destiny is okay in iTrials).