William Valence

Actually I think this one is pretty well described as force of personality. Enraging enemies as the tanker attacks, whether that take the form of a silver-tonged trash-talker, an imposing or defiant demeanor, or even just a really punchable face. Scrappers are said to be the fiercest combatants, and Brutes are literally just a fury "Madder hulk gets" type. Saying one at is the more skilled and the other is the heavy hitter is really hard in a situation where both ATs have access to most of the same powersets. It seems like they were very deliberate, and with good reason, in choosing language that didn't inherently attribute skill or power leaving that to the player. Why would we say that a SR/MA tanker is more thunderous and booming than a TW/Invuln Scrapper? My idea was to give tanks the ability to mitigate damage that was intended to bypass league levels of survivabilty without changing their normal resistance values. Another idea is to solidify their threat generation mechanic either through additional taunt effects, or tossing this one off the top of my head simply reducing the threat generation of non-tanker or MM teamates. Why would it be better, to twist the tanker AT around AoE attacks, instead of improving one of the areas it was designed to be strongest? Considering all the work that would be needed to layer the multiple AoE effects with proper tags to fire at the appropriate team size with modified target caps. It seems like a lot of work just to make shadow maul better.

Just throwing my bona-fides in here because I may have shirked on that end. Necro/dark was my most played combo from I6 to shutdown. The last thing I remember doing in live was going on test and soloing Ms. Liberty and Penny In Recluse's Victory, at the same time. That same character soloed all the other hero RV AVs as well. The zombies version of healing was not sufficient for self sustain, and 26% resists was not bueno enough for pets that were -2 to the things you were fighting. The pairing with /Dark carried it, and even with the insanity that was /Dark, Zombies died a lot. Because of the purple patch, a Minion rank henchman takes 22% more damage from an enemy that cons even to you, so with their resists they still take 90% of the damage that hits them instead of 74%. Not including the damage they take from BG mode. And they don't resist everything. Notably missing resists to Lethal, Energy, and fire. And if I remember the parses correct, Zombies were shown to be the lowest damage T1 henchmen. Basically all the damage from the set is funneled through the Grave Knights. Something that becomes more apparent when you don't notice a drop in DPS when doing a TPN because as a Necro you didn't upgrade Zombies or Lich and it didn't matter because you didn't get any real damage through them anyway. The problem is he seems to have too many powers for his AI to handle. There was a thread on the old forum that had him attacking a dummy in RWZ for like a half hour or something nuts and they counted the times he used his powers, and it was silly. He would ignore certain powers just to use others over and over again. It matched my observations at the time that he had issues juggling the different powers, especially ones with the sword animations. Giving him another power would just make that worse. It's part of the reason I recommended just giving one strong power in place of the two that were removed. Summon your Lich and use /releasepets, use soul extraction, then re-summon everything and buff and you've got all your pets. If you've paired with /Dark, that's 8 dudes you have all the time.

So when the game was Live, the two things I bugged Synapse about were Energy Melee and Mastermind inter-set balance. Since MM's overall were not seen to be under-performers I never made any progress on them outside of Incarnate content. Well here are the ideas I've had in my head for a long time to bring Necro, Mercs, and Ninjas up to the level of Thugs, Bots, and DS. Never used BM, so no idea where that one is. *NECRO* This is and easy one and a lightweight one. Lich is fine as a control boss, and Grave Nights are ******* baller, however it's base survivability as a set is low, and zombies are probably the worst T1 minion. Take the Cloak of Fear icon, recolor it Necro colors, and give the following to Zombies on their T2 upgrade: DEATH RATTLE: Passive - 15' radius -5% tohit, -10% damage, 3% chance to mag2 fear 10s. Against an even con enemy that would be -12% tohit and -24% damage if all three affect the target. *NINJAS* For a Melee pet that has no resists and only defense, them having less defense that Probot buffed bots or Enforcered Thugs is pretty bad. All three ninja types should have their defense upped to 16% (All) at least to match thugs. With no resistances to layer with their defense they should get defense debuff resistance (25% base + 25% per upgrade max 75%) Jounin should lose the Poisoned dart power, and gain a passive Poisoned Blades power that adds -regen to its existing attacks. Oni is a hot mess, and needs to lose and replace some powers. Drop the fire sword attacks. Whenever I played my Ninja/Time I noticed the Oni had issues bouncing between the sword attacks and other attacks. Move Fire breath to being a starting power, and char to the T1 upgrade. This would put both control powers on the same upgrade and open a spot on the T2. Give the Oni Incinerate on the T2 upgrade to make the difference on the loss of the two Sword attacks without adding another weapon draw animation to juggle. Smoke bomb should be infinitely better without poison dart to **** things up, but maybe allow it to accept recharge intensive pet damage sets just to ease some of the burden of slotting. *MERCS* Honestly the pets themselves I don't even know. They seem over stuffed with kit they won't use right and may just need to get trimmed up a bit and focused. However I've thought a lot about Serum, and here's what I'd do with Serum if possible. Make it and enhancement mule. You can stick any enhancement you want on it and that slotting will apply to your target, like a form of super soldier serum. When you use the power, for the duration, it gets the full benefit of the slotting with the kicker that it is unaffected by Enhancement Diversification, similar to Alpha slots. There would be no crash, it would have a constant recharge unaffected by recharge modification, and it could even mule aura IOs.

Well I'm glad I have your expertise to tell me what I'm doing when I make my suggestions. And here I thought I was attempting to address a situation where the inherent differences between AT's are being eliminated observably due to buff saturation. Thankfully you're here to tell us that the games too easy to care if there's disparity between AT's.

Just to make sure I can understand the rules you've got. I'm allowed to observe that brute can take the role of tanks, I'm allowed to observe that brutes and tankers have the same functional mitigation in league situations due to buff saturation, but I'm not allowed to propose a change that actually makes tankers more survivable in league situations but doesn't change their 1-50 power?

My two most played characters in incarnate content were my Necro/Dark MM, and my Dark/NRG Tanker. When it came to incarnate content, I never had the feeling of being the Tankier class, mostly because the content was designed to kill people buffed to the gills by a league. If my tanker is next to an NRG/Dark Brute with and endgame build, it will have at most 10% more health and less damage in the trial. And that's despite having 45% S/L/E/N on top of Dark Armor resists to start. So at that point, aside from the fact that "Why not", what benefit would my tanker bring over that brute? Just mechanically speaking. The brute has aggro control and with league buffs, the same mitigation numbers as the tanker, with a higher damage buff. What I'd really like to see is the tanker actually be the more survivable class. Give them resistance/defense to unresistable/autohit damage that's in the game to just wreck the super survivable characters. They are the most survivable 1-50 class, easy, and they trade the damage for the higher mitigation, but once you get to the mega buff numbers of trials, the buff saturation really just muddled everything up, and the little cheats the devs used to keep things threatening are, in my opinion, the best lever for fixing the issue. 1-50, however, I feel is an appropriate trade. More margin for error and less damage.

The AT Idea I had and posted on the old forums, before the shutdown, was the Vanguard. Vanguard would be a combat focused Assault/Armor class that would be intended to bring a similar playstyle as VEATs allowing for mixed ranged/melee offense combined with survivability. It would be a very straightforward class with a passive called "Versatility" that was just it's strong stat scalars, again similar to the VEATs. It would have scrapper max health, and defense stat scalars. It would have 1.0 melee/ranged Scalar, and an 85% cap for resists. The Vanguard would have no inherent taunt effects in it's powers. It's only goal to bring the style of play with the VEATs and to some extent the HEATs to a more varied and customizable platform.

Well I definitely wasn't crying. It was a great idea, but had no place as an EM mechanic. It would have turned every EM user into Ip Man I'm sad I didn't get to see a version that maintained the ST heavy hitting feeling, because I think synapse had really cool ideas. But I did realize how silly I was when everything closed down, because I didn't save any of my PMs.

The sad part is they were looking at EM before the shutdown. There was a really cool version that they had tossed around that I think got cannibalized for savage melee if I'm remembering the timeframe right. It would have been terrible for EM though because it went from huge hits to death by a thousand cuts and a ridiculous AoE increase. I'm sad I never got to see Synapse's final version. I should see if I've got the version I sent him saved somewhere.

#3 Gets the MM pets out of the way for other players

Well I have to say this was quite a surprise. I guess that means Virtue player William Valence is in attendance.