Captain Citadel

I'm kind of in the middle. I don't obsess over the numbers, I'm bad at math. But I do care about balance, and I notice how bad Super Strength feels to play without Rage compared to playing other Tanker sets without Build Up. I don't think every set in the game should be mechanically identical but I do think Rage creates a severe lack of parity between SS and other melee sets.

I think maybe one of the reasons people were so ready to just jump to Unleashed Might and forget about it (myself included!) is because it seems unlikely Rage will ever get deleted, so the best we can hope for is a slightly weaker version of it that has no crash. I firmly believe the only way to truly fix Super Strength is to reduce the overwhelming impact Rage has on its entire damage profile, and even if that means Super Strength still has a power in it called Rage, people who don’t want it to change will consider that to be equivalent to killing it.

For someone who is “trying to stay out of the Rage debate” you really seem to be putting a lot of effort into convincing people that Super Strength has no design flaws whatsoever, simply because you don’t notice them. You don’t care about the numbers, so we shouldn’t either? We do care about the numbers, that’s why people were upset that these changes didn’t go live, even with the actual Rage adjustments omitted and simply adding Unleashed Might for everyone to use or not use in the meantime. If your experience with Super Strength is completely unaffected one way or the other because you don’t care to notice the difference, why even post here? You don’t seem to have any opinion beyond “nobody should have an opinion because it doesn’t matter.”

Damage on a Tanker with Super Strength, without Rage, is going to be substantially lower than damage on a Tanker with any other melee set and no Build Up. This is the problem. Most of the damage profile of Super Strength is tied up in Rage. Build Up does not have the same uptime even if you cap your recharge rate, so the damage floor for a set not using Build Up is already above Super Strength without Rage. I don't know how I can make it any clearer. This is bad design.

It’s not my “personal opinion” that you have to use Rage and double-stack it to bring Super Strength’s damage up to the same levels as other melee damage powersets. Other people have already done the math on this, the disparity is substantial. Given that Super Strength is only available on Tankers and Brutes, of course you can “do just fine” without Rage. My Tanker can only be killed by damage that doesn’t conform to standard gameplay rules, like Hamidon, or Battle Maiden’s blue patches of doom. He can stay in the fight until the sun goes out. But he can’t clear any missions if I’m asleep at the keyboard because it’s taken me ages to clear a roomful of bad guys, while an almost-identical build (by which I mean without proc-bombs) using a different attack powerset has already finished it and moved on.

Okay, if we're going to get pedantic about it, nobody is forced to take any power except their T1, I guess. But you know what I meant. Super Strength suffers for having a unique type of damage buff power that is so heavily weighted as to have the majority of the powerset's damage potential tied up in it. If you don't take Build Up/Aim in the sets that have them, you're still able to get consistently good damage from those sets, because the floor is much higher. To the best of my knowledge, you can't get perma-uptime on those powers, and you certainly can't stack them. But because Rage is designed differently and can be perma'd and stacked, you need to take it and use it as much as possible if you want to have any hope of dishing out comparably high damage.

Thank you for this. I knew I had seen Superman use Hand Clap before but couldn't remember where. Rage is really the only "Hulk-like" part of Super Strength's design. And even then, only because of Rage having a crash. Bruce Banner hardly has a monopoly on Super Strength characters who get stronger or hold back less when they get angry, it's just that those characters don't tend to become powerless after they cut loose, like he does. And that's the problem with Rage. It's basically required to get any damage out of Super Strength, and then punishes you for using it. This is why Unleashed Might was the best solution, at least before a larger rework can be undertaken. I get that Rage has to have a crash to balance out how powerful it is, but the powerset as a whole suffers immensely for being forced to take and use Rage.

Don't Council and 5th Column werewolves have Super Strength? I know it doesn't appear as often because we don't have missions with Trolls at endgame, but it's not completely absent beyond those few AVs.

What if they limited the number of damage procs a power could slot, or turned procs into an actual set bonus instead of letting them be equipped by themselves with no set investment at all?

My mistake. I don't think I could afford IOs back in the day because I had no idea how to leverage various systems to make lots of influence, or how to make an AE farming character, so I misremembered because I was using SOs up until the point I left the game and had my account hacked and deleted in my absence. I tried starting again when Going Rogue came out but couldn't run the game on the computer I had and quit for good not long after, until HC launched. I guess it would be fairer to say that proc-bomb builds weren't a thing for most of the game's life. I think they should be eliminated, personally. However I understand this would have a tremendously negative impact on Defenders and other ATs with abysmally low damage scalars, so I would only support taking procs back to their old "Bob Ross version" after we solved that problem. I just feel like because procs are part of set bonuses and 6-slotting powers was fairly common back in the day, the old devs seemed to not have intended that we should be stacking procs, that they would be extra bits of damage rather than our actual powers being the extra bit of damage. I know i24 was "in-house" from the end of the game's original run, but is it possible they hadn't realized proc-bombing would be a thing, and that they might've reconsidered their approach once it had gone live? IIRC it was only on the test server at the time. I don't think this would fix the underlying problem of "all our damage comes from procs and not powers" and for me it's not just an immersion or RP thing. Decluttering the overhead numbers is always a good idea for readability, but that's way down the list of issues for me personally. It's a build problem for me. I like leveraging set bonuses and Incarnate powers to make my Tanker the best at tanking he can possibly be. I build all my characters like that, but it feels like the current "culture" of proc-bomb builds means I'm expected to build every AT for maximum damage, not maximum role performance, if that makes sense. I like making my powers stronger, whatever those powers are designed to do. I don't like having to proc-load all my damage powers and then turn all my other powers into set mules for the global stats I'm neglecting by not building my damage powers to be better powers. That doesn't make me feel super, that makes me feel like I'm a fake superhero who's using performance-enhancing drugs, lmao.

IMO the reason they're "broken" is that stacking them on a single power is the best way to increase damage now, and for most of the game's life they did not exist, because we didn't have IO sets. Before IO sets, we slotted enhancements for their passive effects to make the power better. You put some combination of damage, accuracy, recharge, and endurance reduction on all your attack powers. Now, we use Incarnates and set bonuses on other powers to get global accuracy/recharge/endurance reduction, and just stack procs on all our attacks for raw damage. The attack power itself becomes largely irrelevant, we're stacking external damage onto it and getting all our DPS that way. It just doesn't feel good. This isn't how the game was broadly designed for most of its existence. I would rather get my character's power from their powers, not throw a punch with Super Strength and watch the target go down from a combination of every element in the game except Smashing damage. At that point it's like my character has no powers, they're getting everything from items, if that makes sense.

So...you want to completely redesign the Force of Will power pool now, and rip out Hand Clap and Hurl? I don't see what this has to do with the topic of removing Rage from Super Strength or otherwise fixing the Rage problem. I'm very much against the idea that Super Strength was only ever designed to embody a Hulk fantasy. We have to remember that many of the powersets we have now did not exist when Super Strength was created, as it was a launch-era set. We didn't have things like Street Justice back then. Or Titan Weapons, for that matter. If you didn't want to use a melee weapon or some kind of elemental melee attack, your only options were Martial Arts or Super Strength. And we didn't have power customization back then either, so I'm pretty sure the only thing you could do with Martial Arts was kick people. Super Strength had to cover a lot of bases in terms of concepts and fantasy.

Pretty sure I was in one of your other threads where someone else explained why “knock damage” isn’t a thing and would have to be created from scratch, which is either impossible or prohibitively difficult. Unleashed Might is not currently available for testing, but it was in the last Open Beta patch before being reverted. It’s a very simple but elegant solution to the Rage problem. It was a mutually exclusive power choice with Rage, and functioned in much the same way, using the same enhancement categories so as not to disrupt existing builds. It was a toggle power that had no crash, and boosted damage scalars on Super Strength powers specifically. It also conditionally permitted Hand Clap to accept damage enhancements while toggled on, modifying Hand Clap from a PBAoE radial stun/knockdown to a very large forward cone attack instead. In short, Unleashed Might was the solution, not changing Rage, or fundamentally redesigning the entire knockback mechanic for the benefit of a single powerset. I get why you want Super Strength to move things, but other people more knowledgeable than either of us have already explained to you why it’s not possible.

Giving it more AoE would mean lowering its single-target damage, and then that will end up not feeling strong when fighting bosses. Also, with the way Knockback works, you want the magnitude to be low enough to knock down, not back. Knocked down enemies are attacking less often. Knocked back enemies are just a headache because they're now out of your reach, and if you're in a group then you're spreading enemies out, annoying your allies too. This was already (mostly) fixed by Unleashed Might, because it directly increased the damage of other powers in the set instead of applying a massive buff to overall damage and thus further increasing the gap between things like Punch and Air Superiority. Grabbing and throwing an enemy may be too sophisticated for this engine to handle. But even if it could be done, it's already been established that knockback is generally not helpful, it just looks cool. You'll feel "more powerful" for a second, and then notice you're now dealing less damage because you have to catch up to your target to keep hitting them. This is something that's generally more fun to play around with in single-player action games, where knocking an enemy back will often send them flying off a cliff and instantly dying because they've been removed from the field. This is not something that happens in CoH. The whole point of this exercise is to delete Rage because of the design problems it brings to the set. Reduced endurance costs are not going to make it that appealing to play without Rage, because any endurance you save is only going to be spent on more attacks, since your damage is now pitifully low.

While I understand where you're coming from, I'm not sure Super Strength would be right for this particular gimmick. I agree with you that if it were to have anything, more defense/resistance would make a lot more sense than less defense/resistance, which it effectively has because of Rage and the crash. However this really only makes sense for characters like Superman, and anybody taking Super Strength to play that particular concept is almost certainly going to pair it with Invulnerability. And with IO sets and Incarnates, Invulnerability can be built with some frighteningly powerful resistance and defense, particularly for a mostly resistance-oriented powerset. If we added any +Res buff effects to Super Strength, Invuln/SS would just become even more powerful, and we'd probably see people running around with fully overcapped resistances and way over soft-capped typed/positional defenses. Effectively perma-Unstoppable but without any crash, lol. But let's look at some of the other classic Super Strength characters for whom enhanced durability wouldn't make sense. Spider-Man would use Super Reflexes as his armor powerset. Captain America is obviously Shield Defense. And sure, technically they've both got some Willpower and Regeneration in there too, but one thing they're not going to do is bounce bullets off their chests, right? I think the key thing about the damage powersets you mentioned is that they all use weapons to attack with, so it makes sense that those weapons could be used to parry or block incoming attacks. It gives the melee sets with weapons a unique gimmick, and Martial Arts only shares in that gimmick because it evokes the concept of a disciplined warrior who uses their entire body as a weapon, and as such has honed their skills to increase both their offensive and defensive capabilities. If we were going to give Super Strength a gimmick, I would add -Res debuffs. I was surprised to learn Sonic Melee doesn't already have that gimmick, despite the fact that the Sonic ranged sets do have it. This would still work really well for a set like Super Strength, because a common theme with this type of ability in media is how overwhelmingly powerful and destructive it is. Guns get twisted into pretzels, blades get bent and broken. Heavy steel doors designed to withstand anything start getting dented and fall over. Supposedly impenetrable armor plating starts to buckle and crack like an egg. It's almost the defining trait of Super Strength: breaking the unbreakable. Obviously damage numbers would have to be tuned accordingly, I'm not trying to make Super Strength the most powerful melee set or anything. I just think it's a cool concept for the powerset that should definitely be considered as part of a larger rework. Even if it's conditional to something like Unleashed Might, rather than being baked into the entire set automatically.