Captain Citadel

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.

It was not designed from the start to be stackable though. We know that much. It was impossible to achieve that level of recharge before the advent of IO sets. And if memory serves, it was Castle who imposed the crash penalty on it. Castle was not exactly a genius. That's the dev that made sweeping PvP changes which gave all ATs relatively similar mitigation and damage output, which the PvP community hated.

And as I've said before, in light of this, I would be willing to give up Rage stacking. The window of dealing next to zero damage feels terrible and I really want that part gone. Just removing the crash for a single stack and effectively slapping a penalty only on the people who currently have high recharge in their builds and liked to auto-cast the power for the sake of convenience (because they cannot currently avoid the crash) doesn't feel good to play either. Given that SS as a set has a lot of really lackluster powers in it beyond Foot Stomp and Knockout Blow, I find it unlikely that I'm the only one using the set who stacked global recharge purely for the benefit of those select powers. I'd happily accept some pretty hefty reworks to how Rage works if it made the power more convenient to use without leaving it held hostage to those players who are unable to accept that allowing the power to stack (and therefore forcing some kind of penalty to be imposed on it when other perma-capable powers neither have nor need such a penalty) might be a bad idea.

Knockout Blow is amazing, and also some people just really like the animations. It's difficult to use Martial Arts or Street Justice to capture the feel of a character with archetypal superhuman strength.

If it was viable to take Rage out of my build and still deal respectable damage, I would. I think it's a huge problem that the set is balanced around having at least one stack of Rage up most of the time. I'd rather it be replaced with Build Up and then not have to take it. You can build a Tanker or Brute to have high enough defense/resists to eat the mitigation debuff, but you can't eat the 10 seconds of -999% damage. All you can do is pop Judgment and then stand around being weak as a kitten for the remaining 8 seconds.

I don't see why people want to stack it. I want to auto-cast it and not crash, but I only stack it right now because I can't avoid the crash anyway, as it stands on the live servers. If it was a choice between being able to stack, and not having the damage crash, I'd choose the latter in a heartbeat. I guess because I play a Tanker with SS and not a Brute? I like this, I think it's thematic with the idea of building up a character's level of rage in combat. It ebbs and flows as the heat of battle grows and fades. But for Brutes it might be too much like having a second Fury meter. I've stated previously in this thread that ideally I'd like to just have the damage crash removed and let people stack Rage as high as their defenses can handle, but I really hate the damage crash enough that I'd be willing to accept Rage not stacking and turning into a toggle. I have tolerated the mitigation debuff up till now because my SS character is a Tanker and can easily achieve Incarnate-level 65% defense, meaning I can generally eat the mitigation debuff almost entirely on my own and can usually count on backup from my SG's party buffs. Even the -10% resistance half of the revised form of the debuff is manageable. I just think doing next to zero damage for 10 seconds is antithetical to the entire premise of Super Strength as a powerset and would really like to see that debuff removed. The fact that SS does such poor damage to begin with that the set needs Rage just to keep up with other sets (when they all have Build Up instead) seems like a pretty solid point in favor of removing Rage and replacing it with Build Up anyway. Just fiddle with the numbers to bring SS back in line with other sets.

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.