Captain Citadel

No. Sorry, but this is missing the point of the tank changes and the changes being made to Rage. The defensive debuff portion of the Rage crash is manageable for any Incarnate-level Tankers or Brutes that are built for defense, it's the -999% damage debuff that cannot be mitigated in any meaningful way.

I really think we need to rework Bruising rather than get rid of it. Make it the defining characteristic between Tankers and Brutes. By all means, reduce the vast gulf between Tankers and Brutes as far as DPS, but in exchange for doing slightly less damage on a Tanker, use Bruising to emphasize their team support capabilities. Trade slightly less individual damage for greater team damage, use Bruising as a flanking debuff.

Putting in an option to remove the effect of recharge buffs from other players isn't going to fix my build. But changing the functionality of Rage to offer less potent buffs on a permanent duration would be a nice compromise. If double-stacking is so bad, then don't let Rage stack. The thing I hate about Rage currently is the damage debuff.

This would probably be horribly imbalanced because only Shield Defense has one right now AFAIK, but a jumping teleport gap-closer would kick ass, if they removed Rage and baked it into the set (which I think would be thematically appropriate because it is SUPER Strength, i.e. you are mightier than other melee heroes).

Yeah, thematically I hate Rage because of this. But I just stop thinking about it because it's not like the animation looks like your character is getting angry, they're just concentrating momentarily while it activates. I think at this point though, it should just be rebalanced into a toggle. It's required to make SS a competitive damage set and yet it's still saddled with horrible penalties that make it feel bad to use. A Minimal FX option wouldn't go amiss either. I don't like constantly glowing from it, especially when I have all the glowing effects from Invulnerability turned off.

I don't know about the mez protection, but I'm pretty sure the CC boost stacks. It's not broken, though. At best you can hold an AV with it near the end of a fight, assuming you have perma-Hasten and enough global recharge to make one of your holds stack magnitude high enough. It wouldn't still be a thing 15 years later if it was really that bad.

Domination actually does stack with itself, I've got like 40 seconds of it on my ice/fire build. Hasten doesn't stack, but it still has fairly forgiving penalties. I don't even mind the end crash on Rage so much, especially as we're getting more endurance in the patch. What I can't stand is the -999% damage debuff. That part needs to go. At this point though, I'd rather the devs just admitted what they really want is for Rage to not stack anymore, and rebalance the damage output of SS to be competitive with other sets while under perma-single-stack Rage with no crash.

Another power like what, Hasten? That I don't have? I don't have any other powers worth being able to auto-cast. It''s not user error, it's an annoyance tax.

It doesn't solve the issue of people like me who slotted LotG into their build to benefit Foot Stomp and Knockout Blow, and took Ageless as their Destiny-slot Incarnate power to benefit their team because it refills their endurance bars. I can take the recharge directly out of Rage and still be way over the double-stack threshold. Making high recharge bad on an auto-cast power because it becomes too easy to double-stack (which we will be penalized for not avoiding now, instead of just being penalized for using the power at all which is already bad) is extremely counter-intuitive and unfun.

I wouldn't mind seeing Tanker damage output get a lot closer to Brutes, but I agree with the suggestions posted about making Bruising more potent and propagating it to the Tanker's entire kit, rather than one power. Tanker damage is (IMO) too low, but I would rather see it increased a bit less (leaving Brutes at the top because that's what they do) while giving Tankers more support utility. Hulk is a Brute, he doesn't really do team support, but I rolled a Tanker for team support. The suggestions involving a Tanker spreading their defense/resistance buffs to their teammates seems rather redundant because other support ATs are already doing that sort of thing directly, (and really, if the Tanker is doing their job, does the rest of the team need better defenses?) but a -Res debuff seems very thematically appropriate for Tankers. They're heavy melee hitters but they don't directly bring the damage, they make the team more effective because the bad guys are too busy focusing on the Tanker's hits to defend themselves. The -Res debuff is like a flanking maneuver.

Can we have a compromise? Remove the crash but reduce the overall effectiveness of the power so 2 stacks of Rage is equivalent to maybe 1.5 or 1.25? And don't let it stack past 2? Super Strength's damage output is garbage compared to other sets, particularly Titan Weapons, but those other sets don't have Rage. That's why I don't like the crash, because I get 50 seconds or so of good damage on a Tanker and then I get 10 seconds of zero appreciable damage, followed by average damage at best with one stack. I can mitigate the other parts of the crash, but the -999% damage feels awful. It might match the whole "Hulk turning back into Banner" theme, but I'm sure far more characters are themed after Superman, or some other Super Strength character who isn't cyclically losing all their powers. Honestly, if I could turn Rage into a toggle or avoid taking it altogether (without reducing my "superhuman strength" to "gently shoving things with a feather pillow") I would. And I really don't like this idea that the only option for avoiding the crash is to micro-manage the power because I made my global recharge too high. I didn't do it to stack Rage, I did it to make better use of my two best powers, Knockout Blow and Foot Stomp.

So now my feedback doesn't count because I didn't post it early enough? It's not like it was advertised in-game that the dev team was seeking feedback on Rage. Announcements were not clearly made until these changes were pushed to the beta server.

It's not a buff, it's just a very clunky and inconvenient way to avoid a crash that goes against conventional wisdom regarding recharge. No other perma powers have a crash like Rage does. It does not feel good to have a crash on Rage. Avoiding the crash only by not stacking it just begs the question why it isn't being made into a toggle.

That's my point. StJ and other sets are significantly better than SS when you compare them with their buffs up, and yet Build Up is not perma like Rage often is. SS needs Rage up to be even remotely competitive, and yet it's still saddled with heavy penalties when it wears off.

Other sets don't need Build Up to be as strong as Rage is, because sets like TW and StJ are inherently stronger. I feel it's disingenuous to debate the strength of Build Up vs. Rage when Super Strength is already subpar next to the other melee damage sets.

Yes, a way to avoid it that is very clunky and does not feel good to play. On top of that, the crash penalties themselves don't make much sense, and are not balanced with the lack of penalty other sets have for using similar buffs. The crash should be reworked or removed.

Thank you. It's completely against the concept of Super Strength for it to be "used up" when the Rage crash hits, and it's also completely against 15 years' worth of build planning wisdom to punish players for being able to perma things. We going to start imposing harsh penalties on perma-Hasten and perma/stacking Domination next? SS builds need Rage to be even remotely competitive with other Smashing melee sets like Street Justice or Titan Weapons. Removing even just the damage debuff portion of the crash is not going to destroy game balance, it's going to make SS a better-performing set.

I think Bruising should be applied to all tanker powers. It fits the support-oriented nature of tankers that brutes aren't really about. Giving tankers a flat damage buff that makes it equivalent to Bruising (but only for them) seems like it's missing the point. I am in favor of the increased damage cap and AoE range and target caps, however.

Either remove the crash and leave the power alone, or remove the crash and remove the ability to stack. The way my build is currently set up, I can take both the 50+5 standard recharge IOs out of Rage and have a 2-second window between duration and recharge. Meaning I can set it to auto-fire and be punished if a support player shows up with a recharge buff. Oh, or if I use my Ageless Core Epiphany, which I slotted specifically because as a Tanker I want to support my team. Replenishing their endurance and boosting their recharge rates. You know, things that are supposed to be helpful. What am I supposed to do with those two slots? Put a To-Hit set in there? Knockout Blow and Foot Stomp already have 345.6% and 283.9% accuracy bonuses, respectively. The only useful thing I can slot would be two pieces of Adjusted Targeting for a whopping 2% damage increase. That damage buff isn't going to help much while I'm eating a -999% damage debuff that I cannot build to avoid without ripping all the global recharge out of my build that I slotted to make Knockout Blow and Foot Stomp better, not solely for the benefit of having 2 stacks of Rage for 50 seconds. I can generally rely on group buffs to make up for the resistance and defense debuffs from the crash, and I could always use Ageless Core Epiphany to eat the endurance penalty, but the -999% damage debuff makes me feel like Super Strength is anything but super.

I would really like to see the crash removed. It's not fun, it feels antithetical to the concept of Super Strength, and frankly it's not like the set is in danger of topping damage charts even relative to other melee sets. Also, while we're at it, can we get a Minimal FX option for Rage? On my Invuln/SS tanker it's rather nice to have the visuals for all my armor turned off, but I'm constantly glowing because I have Rage perma'd (and with a window of two stacks, which is why I really don't want to have to micromanage it to avoid crashing).