Captain Citadel

If your characters have 90% damage resistance and a 5% chance to be hit, you shouldn't be worried about their HP. If they don't have both of those things, then you're cherry-picking my post. 45% defense (or 65% for Incarnate content) isn't enough to make you invincible, but combined with capped resistance it is. Extra HP is just padding out your stats at that point. It's silly to harp on HP as the defining advantage Tankers have over Brutes when other stats diminish the actual effectiveness of that sole advantage. If you're hitting harder than a Tanker and not taking any appreciable level of increased damage in return, you're objectively better than a Tanker in any way that really matters. Buffing AoE is a good start, but eliminating Bruising in favor of a purely selfish damage increase doesn't make a Tanker more attractive in a group setting. And the buffs to support abilities like the Leadership pool are negligible, especially considering you'll find Leadership buffs more commonly used by ATs that aren't Tankers. Using my own builds as an example, I have a Dominator that runs all 3 toggles plus Vengeance. My Tanker can't fit anything past Maneuvers in his build.

I fail to see the relevance of increased hit points when a Tanker and Brute have both achieved def/res caps and the Brute deals more damage. HP is basically irrelevant if you're only getting hit 5% of the time and resisting 90% of the hits you do take. Barring extreme edge cases like Hamidon where your defensive stats are purposefully invalidated, the Brute will consistently outperform the Tanker at their stated group role. The fact remains that Brutes and Tankers were never balanced to coexist. Homecoming has inadvertently shone a bright light on these imbalances because of how much easier it is to put together top-tier builds here than it ever was on Live. Just buffing Tanker AoE and calling it a day isn't going to fix the problem.

Hopefully the individual Tanker sets will be reviewed quickly after this patch goes live. I'm still not happy about Bruising being gone, but the AoE buffs will be nice. I just liked the thematic feel of Bruising and feel like it could have been buffed to increase the team support capability of Tankers. It doesn't seem like these changes are enough to fully close the gap between Tankers and Brutes. Brutes will still do more damage against single targets while retaining equivalent defenses to Tankers. Playing Super Strength just feels very...not super. I don't like dealing with the debuffs attached to Rage, so I removed it from my build, but without it the set may as well be called Impotent Nerd Rage. And Hurl's interaction with flight powers is still broken. It should be able to be used while flying at surface height, like Foot Stomp and Mighty Judgment.

Any idea when the next round of changes will hit beta? It's been a month but it seems like all that's happened in all that time is the reversion of the change that allowed for Rage crashes to be avoided. Plus the removal of Bruising and the extra endurance for Tankers.

Scrappers do not need Taunt powers at all. They are not intended to soak damage, otherwise they'd have higher resistance caps. They're just not intended to be squishy, either.

I don't think we need a Superman/Cyclops-themed EAT, but otherwise I agree with you. I personally don't want eye beams, I just want to play a flying tank with super strength that doesn't need Rage to obliterate his enemies, and can be built to laugh in the face of all damage types. My current build is indestructible and can even hit the flight speed cap, but he hits like a wet noodle because I took out Rage for the sake of convenience. It really feels bad to have all my DPS wrapped up in one super inconvenient power.

By this logic it seems there's very little we can be permitted to do in order to fix the problem of Super Strength being designed around Rage, I think "violating the cottage rule" would realistically involve actually breaking the theme of Super Strength and what the powers do, whereas changing the way Rage interacts with the set doesn't actually constitute such a violation. The old devs also acknowledged the cottage rule could be broken if it was necessary, and it's not like they were infallible.

Making Hurl better is still not going to fix the fact that Rage is a required power, whereas Build Up is not required in every other set. Build Up is more of a "limit break" power that you only take if you want it. Single-stack perma-Rage is required to make Super Strength deal respectable damage. I don't want to take Rage. I don't like the crashes associated with it, particularly the damage crash. I don't want to micro-manage it at one stack just to perform adequately once these changes go live, to ignore the crash effects. Building Super Strength around its own special version of Build Up was a mistake, but the people who love stacking it twice and even three times are shouting "but muh cottage rule" and insisting we cannot change Rage in any way, beyond what's already been done. The proposed changes don't feel good to use. As far as I'm concerned it's just an incomplete fix. Rage and the set as a whole need to be looked at.

So what exactly are we allowed to change about SS then, Vanden? With Bruising gone, Jab is now a complete waste of a slot that we're forced to take on Tankers, and Rage is a pain in the neck to run perma-single-stacked, but SS as a set only gets competitive damage when you run it with double-stacked Rage. So in order to maximize uptime on double-stacked Rage, we have to take Hasten. As @Demon Shellreported, that requires taking a huge endurance drain, averaging -35 endurance per minute.without even counting the drain from toggles or an attack chain. And even with the awesome power of double-stacked Rage, we then have to put up with 10 seconds of being de-powered and only being able to fire off Judgment if we want to deal any appreciable damage. Some part of the most holy and sacrosanct "cottage rule" will have to be bent or broken to fix the problems Super Strength has. There's no other way around it. SS is completely shackled to Rage, so Rage has to change in some way so that the rest of the set can be reworked to be more competitive with newer damage powersets.

Another thing you're forgetting is that without Rage, the numbers for SS don't really equal the numbers for sets that only have Build Up. The powerset was balanced around having Rage up nearly all the time at one stack. Build Up is a very bursty power, so the sets that include it are designed to account for the fact that Build Up is not up all the time, and therefore not an essential part of their damage output. This is the problem that I think needs to be addressed. I don't think IO sets were ever accounted for when the devs looked at Super Strength balancing back in the day. The power was not likely meant to be perma-double-stacked or even triple-stacked. It becomes imbalanced at those levels but not so much before that double-stacking threshold. That's why I personally think Super Strength needs a rework, not just to improve the functionality of its attacks, but to change the way Rage is balanced. Of course, suggesting that anything be changed from the way it was on Live will invariably bring the "cottage rule" people out of the woodwork. But I really like Shadowsleuth's ideas for improving the attacks in SS. Giving Haymaker a cone and putting a debuff on Hand Clap are great suggestions. Though IIRC Hand Clap already has a stun, so maybe the magnitude could just be increased to make it a more useful form of CC? I still think removing Bruising was a mistake and that Tankers should just inherently apply a -Res debuff to all their attacks, but that's just me. Also, while this seems like it might be more of an oversight than an actual rework component, it would be nice if Hurl followed the same rules as other "ground attacks" like Foot Stomp or Mighty Judgment. Both of those powers work while a flying power is toggled on, as long as you're at ground level. Hurl doesn't though, and it's a pain to turn off Hover (a thematic defense toggle for many builds) just to use my only ranged attack.

Fair enough. My point about Cross Punch still stands. I was saying Super Strength is not getting as much benefit out of the Tanker changes to AoE powers, because it only has one damaging AoE and no cones or other area attacks like several other Tanker secondaries do. Telling people "just take Cross Punch" is not a great solution when most people aren't going further than 3 powers into the Fighting power pool.

It's balancing the entire set around double and triple stacking that's causing so much of the grief over these proposed changes, though. It was already a mistake to build the set around Rage when so many other sets get by without a constant buff power to account for. Build Up is optional for so many builds because you can't have 100% uptime on it, but because you can have perma-Rage and stack it, the entire set has to be balanced around the assumption that it will be built for perma at the very least. It'd be like if Hasten was part of a powerset instead of a pool power, you'd be expected to take it and build around it. No other damage sets are built with something like Rage that needs to be up all the time to have parity with other sets.

Cross Punch is a pool power, and a fairly deep one at that. Not many people are going to build with it. Also, you're going to compare Rage to Fury when Brutes with Fury can take Rage in SS? And 2x Rage at that? Double Rage is not worth the damage crash, and it's rather disingenuous to call Tankers and Brutes "even" by comparing 2x Rage on a Tanker to a Brute that doesn't have it, seeing as how SS Brutes are fairly common, and the only reason it's not the most popular set is because Spines/Fire farmers exist.

Do you play Super Strength? Because the AoE changes are far less impressive for that set, and honestly I'm tired of Super Strength feeling very not super. After these tanker/brute changes are finalized, I think SS needs a rework of some kind. We've got a whole thread for Rage but it's just the tip of the iceberg, as far as I'm concerned.

Submitted mine. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of the Bloody Rainbow Fire Farm. Would get a kick out of seeing my character in one of your farms. Though if you've run out of room in the Fire farm, my character would work well for the Smashing/Lethal farm since he uses Super Strength. Thanks for all your hard work in making the mindless task of farming more entertaining and convenient!

Bruising could be improved. Proliferate it to the entire Tanker secondary pool instead of just the T1 attack. Increase the amount of the damage resistance debuff it applies. Increase the emphasis on Tankers being a support-oriented tank rather than a selfish one that only focuses on raw damage. Instead you'd rather have Tankers be "less worse Brutes" than they already are, and call it a day? The proposed changes are not enough to make Tankers a worthwhile choice over Brutes when picking a character for yourself or when picking team members. Pumping the numbers on the proposed changes wouldn't fix the problem either, it would just flip the positions.

I think we've only exhausted the topic because a vocal minority is shouting down some really good ideas (like proliferating Bruising to Tanker secondaries entirely instead of trading it in for a selfish flat damage increase) and it's become clear that the AT is just getting band-aids instead of quality fixes. The AoE damage buffs are the only thing I'm really happy about, as an Invuln/SS Tanker main. The Rage changes over in the other thread are depressing because (IMO) they are the wrong kind of fixes. Tankers as an AT were designed in a vacuum where Brutes didn't exist. I think it's a mistake to just increase Tanker damage to create more parity between Tankers and Brutes, because at the end of the day Brutes are still equally good tanks and still have greater overall damage output. I think more emphasis on Tankers' support capability and team synergy should have been made. Removing Bruising was a mistake. I think an opportunity has been missed to make Tankers the "support tank" and Brutes the "selfish tank." This would give a solid answer to the question of which AT to pick and why, instead of the default answer still being "pick a Brute, they do more damage." Increasing the effect of Leadership buffs is the wrong kind of fix also. You have to actually take them all to make your Tanker better at support. This does not increase Tankers' support capabilities out of the box, like Bruising proliferation would. It's not a bad idea, but I think if I had to pick between Leadership buffs and Bruising buffs, I'd take Bruising. All in all I think the proposed changes are not strictly bad, but they are not as good as they could be. Hence my disappointment, and I'm guessing I am not alone in feeling this way.

I've already removed Rage from my build, the damage buffs are enough to make the set perform okay-ish in AoE-heavy fights. I just hate that we're not getting any changes on how it functions apart from removing the crash under specific micro-managed use of the power to achieve perma-single-stack. It's liberating to not be shackled to such a poorly designed power anymore. Now if they could just correct the oversight of Hurl not working while a flight power is toggled, even if the character is at ground height...that'd be great.

Those are disingenuous arguments and you know it. Pets and Masterminds are far more integral to each other than Rage is to Super Strength. Momentum in Titan Weapons is not a separate power that has to be micro-managed, it's a built-in mechanic. Build Momentum itself has far more in common with Build Up, but outside of that, Momentum is more like a proc.

Because a lot of people have good ideas for how it could work a lot better than it currently does. You seem to hold the mentality that change is bad on principle. To quote Shuri, "just because something works, does not mean it cannot be improved."

So because it has Rage, we can never make changes to the functionality of that power beyond the single-stack crash removal? Perma-double-stacking it or even triple-stacking it is not intended behavior. Stack junkies are currently holding the entire set hostage because they cannot accept the possibility of improving the power by changing it. The "cottage rule" does not apply to everything. If it did, we'd still be on Issue 1.

The sets with Build Up don't need to (and can't anyway) perma it to be competitive with SS, though. SS needs perma single-stack Rage just to be on an even footing. That's why it begs the question of why it shouldn't be reworked. Removing the crash for a single stack is a good start, but when the power needs to be at one stack with 100% uptime just to maintain parity, it suggests the existing design for Rage needs improvement because it feels very awkward to use. But no, keep simplifying my gripes down to laziness instead of offering compromises to the current stacking system.

When SS needs one stack of Rage up all the time to compete with every other set that has Build Up, it begs the question why the set is designed in such a way that Rage needs to be up all the time, and then spawns questions like "why not make Rage a toggle?" and other such things that have become staples of this thread.

I doubt many people were giving up 10 enhancement slots just to do that at the expense of basically everything else in their build. Possible? Yes. Practical and widely used? No. I certainly never remember it happening, and I played Invuln/SS back then, from launch to around the time F2P happened.

Scrappers aren't meant to hold aggro, though. Like Stalkers, the stated purpose of the AT is melee DPS.