DrunkFlux

Honestly I think people are biting more into the comedy of it rather than the bait itself, it was amusing.

Yeah live was....maybe months away from the "Softban on influence in trading" that would have been inevitable due to how badly inflated influence was. Instant respect that you were able to quickly admit you were incorrect about the buffs, that still gave me a good laugh though :D.

You missed one. Brute max damage was 850% before fury changes in issue 18. Every min/maxer was flatout saying brutes were the ultimate class up till then, we weren't kidding then.

Kind of why i'm fine with the changes myself, as a nice compromise that lets tankers continue to excell at agro holding as they should while ensuring they don't outshine brutes and scrapper AoE power, ensuring there is no clear "winner" for min/maxers like myself. Min/maxers who enjoy min/maxing don't actually 'like' a clear winner for classes, one reason I love CoH is that most of the time there isn't. Just there has been when it came to tankers vs brutes.

i guess also.... The OP being what it is here says a lot about game balance being as simple as it is complicated :).

All classes and builds, even solo, have a place on a team or should have a place on a team. The strong solo build is just as valuable on a team as it is without a team. I read the tanker changes as 'slight nerfs', seeing more that while the baseline damage is being unchanged the damage buff is being lowered slightly and the extra AoE damage is being severely crimped which, honestly, it should be. It still doesn't solve a problem I'd pondered being that fury isn't quite the mechanic that it needs to be to separate brute from a "generic warrior glug glug" class I feel it kind of is, but the nerfs to tanker DO make me consider brutes again, for a long time i'd considered brute a class one SHOULDN'T pick, if CoH's community was anything like older days of mmorpgs the brute in its current state would have been a "banned class", like stalkers, peacebringers and warshades were during the earlier/early-mid era of live. I'm amazed people are insistent somehow that tanker should do more AoE than the brute like it does or that the nerfs are unwarranted ect, they all missing that the tanker in its current state out-classes the brute on so many areas that it kills the brute as a viable choice for 99.9% of the game and even for farming i'd say the brute is an inferior choice as your basically making an over-specialized character that is only viable in AE fire farm content, 100% against my design philosophy of min/maxing(which is make something good for every team and still works well in solo, crippling over-specialization is a no-no for me).

Forgive me on the second part though clearly the devs are thinking they made a mistake now, alas, farming is not the majority of this game but only done in a very small section. Again though, brutes do not out-shine the tanker in single target enough to be worth playing. Farming is only about 1% of the content, granted content people play constantly 'again' your talking about a game designed around team gameplay with classes making very clear trade-offs for there strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps I'll take it to the brute subforum if its discussed there, as I said though i was only stating WHY a nerf has to happen :/. No one may like it but brutes were always balanced against the other melee classes its a rare case where a class is a major outlier :/. Tankers are just out-classing the brute severely :/. But I wouldn't shut down conversation here on 'that'; because then people may shut down the conversation in the brute subforum and the discussion is dropped entirely.

TL:DR ; Min/maxers will always pick tanker over brute because tanker only loses a very small amount of single target in order to do literally everything else that a brute does better. On raw performance tanker clearly wins its not even a fair matchup. Even with those technicalities remember that tanker resistance and defense powers out-class brute and scrapper equivilants which, in actuality have always performed on the exact same scales. The only difference in survivability characteristics that brutes had over scrappers was litterally more HP(and only a mediocre increase at that) and a higher resistance cap(the real difference in survivability). Because we also have to consider overall roles in teams: Tankers job primarily has always been a frontliner holding agro. Granted we don't want the tanker being nothing but a taunt bot but its still more on the survivability focus as its main speciality. Brutes job was either to focus on being a tank, or an off-tank with DPS focus, OR DPS focus. It wasn't meant to render the scrapper or tanker useless. Scrapper is a striker, a DPS class with no regard for agro management, if it takes confront it can off-tank but generally its truely meant to just hit as hard as possible. Stalkers are also a striker with less AoE than scrappers for even higher single target. Thing is, with your logic of tanker being better at AoE than other melee archtypes, you run into the problem of potentially making other archtypes obsolete or redundant. The LAST thing you want in game balance is one or two classes being rendered inferior to another, there should be no clear winner as to what people pick. Brute was a clear "Avoid me" class, a smerf as me and snarky said. The real reason BEHIND the increase to target caps for the tanker was to allow it to hold agro better than the brute, it was not really meant to render the brute useless(which it kind of has from a min/maxer perspective). This also hurts the scrapper which only survives on its ATOs, which brutes do not have the benefit of. You cannot have a class that has higher baseline survivability AND area damage than another without rendering the other class redundant. It simply doesn't work, you have a 'very' clear "PICK ME I AM SUPERIOR!" choice. Even tanker players I talked to knew about this problem. A major factor in player choice in classes is divided in power vs utility. All melee classes are power archtypes, blasters are power archtypes to as are sentinels. Support AT's, CC ect are chosen for UTILITY likewise, be it support or control. I role that later category into one for simplicity sake. But how do I measure power? Simple, survivability * damage output. how do I measure utility? Crowd control and buff/debuff effects. Tankers out-strip brutes on both categories completely. On utility they are kind of meant to; they are meant to hold agro and hold it well, to be the best main frontliner in the party. Brutes were also meant to be a powerhouse, and they are, but with the huge AoE power tankers have, brutes are just outshined in raw power. This renders the brute questionable as a choice at best on a min/maxers perspective. Also understand more players will over time see which class performs better than the other there is always the 'feel', and it depends course on what powersets they pick. Some of us played the same sets on both classes and the difference quickly became clear as night and day. Some of us clearly never picked the same sets so its taken longer to notice it. But many players notice it. Someone even did a tier list with AoE clearance time as a measurement and found tanker FAR out-performing the brute in the tests, especially with AoE centric sets. It was far, far more comprehensive than my math here could show at the time. And tanker wasn't changed or 'nerfed' for a long time between that post and today. So why pick brute when brute loses both categories? It loses to scrapper on DPS in both AoE and single target, loses out to tanker in AoE horribly and holds agro less effectively than a tanker. This left brute in a very, very weak position as an option. It simply lacks a niche because the tanker far exceeds it on the AoE front, and loses to tanker on survivability and utility. Again, the choice shouldn't be so clear like it is on what you pick for damage/survivability/utility for melee classes like this. Its less clear with scrappers vs stalkers and thats actually a GOOD thing, it ensures no one class is dominant over the other as a choice. If your choice is between scrapper vs brute its ALSO not that clear, one does more damage and cannot hold agro, the other does slightly less but CAN hold agro. But its very clear for brute vs tanker. One class only barely beats the other on single target and is far out-stripped on AoE, a min/maxer sees a gain in power with the AoE increase at a cost to ST. That same class with better AoE has more baseline resistance/defenses and much higher HP. Again, a min/maxer will put more points in favor of the tanker. And that same class has better agro holding mechanics. Again, a min/maxer will see that and draw the conclusion: "For about 10% single target damage i'm doing almost 60% more AoE damage, have way more HP, have much higher starting resistances and defenses and need way less buffs from allies to hit the maximums than the other choice, this is clearly the better option". That is the exact line of a thought a min/maxer will take as its the exact thought ALL min/maxers take, we look at things from "what am I sacrificing to gain?", thats what min/max means, minimizing loss to maximize gains. And tanker just leaves brute in the dust on this. And in gameplay practice it applies to, especially with how EASY it is to grab the max target cap on a tanker.

I'm primarily looking at things from an AoE focused perspective, as it depends also on power set use. Tankers AoE potential out-classed brutes when you used AoE focused sets, or rather if you looked at things from using powersets identical across ATs such as say, fire melee on tanker vs fire melee on brute, fire melee on tanker far out-classed brutes version. But this also continued with sets such as titan weapons, spines, radiation melee ect.

Aye, i'd tried to play brutes a lot myself and every time I roll one, I end up stopping myself because as a major fan of melee(I'm about as bad as the emperor on text to speach device as a melee fan), I always found myself switching to stalker scrapper or tanker, because brutes are just lacking and the only question was "did I want to draw agro?", if yes, tanker, if not, scrapper or stalker and 'that' was based on how capable a set was in AoE on a stalker. Like a train of thought like 'that' was always a baseline for me to consider "is it reasonably close to balance?". I'd been saying a while brutes could use an adjustment, and wasn't sure how they'd adjust tankers, well now we know.

Baseline tanker damage is actually 0.95, brute 0.75. Brute damage is low as it is to accomodate for fury, when you run the numbers though as I do in my post above, brute falls WAY behind tanker currently, so does scrapper for that matter. AoE damage is king in general gameplay, and scrappers only remain relevent due to having especially good ATOs that brutes 'dont' have.

Firstly, since some here are upset, I'm just gonna say it as a min/maxer who always sees imbalances rather easily. Everything is in the math as to WHY this has to happen; If considering pure DPS chasing in normal content, area effect damage has always been king. Not a complete be-all-end-all but it has always in balance resulted in favorite archtypes leaning towards area damage. The stalker was for a long time considered useless trash that should be out-right banned from teams in live purely for having a cmplete lack of AoE and only mediocre single target potential, hence why many newer sets have aoe and stalkers have the crazy consistent critical strike tricks they have today to remain relevent. For scrappers, brutes and other classes however AoE was the bulk of there DPS, with single-target being primarily reserved only for straggling bosses and archvillain fights. Tankers do not win on single target, BUT they should not win, they aren't meant to, they trade damage for survivability, right? Wrong. Its all in the numbers and you literally only need to compare baseline numbers to get exactly how far they left the other melee classes in the dust in recent years. Smarter tankers who actually min/max knew about this, and some like me who sometimes jokingly put out "STOP-HAVING-FUN!" statements in chat also stated it: Tanker DPS was far out-classing brutes, I'd said it a long time since they were buffed to a baseline damage of 0.95 and a max damage of 500% compared to the brute being at a baseline of 0.75 and a maximum of only about 700%. Lets look at AoEs, brute attacks with a target cap of 10 meant that even maxed in damage, they score 5.25 when you multiply 0.75 against 700% if you take that number and multiply by 10 you get exactly 52.5. For 5 target cap attacks your only scoring a pathetic 26.25. If you take tankers however on live currently, 0.95 multiplied by five they only score 4.75 BUT we have to multiply the number by 16 for maximum AoE for pbaoe you end up with a score of 76. 47.5 for 10 target cap attacks. This disparity if you took it to an analogy of a racing game, is liking having such a huge speed advantage over the opponent that you end up LAPPING your opponents and running rings around them even if you were hitting walls left and right becaue they are just so slow and your so much faster than them. On dividing the resulting AoE numbers, I end up with 44% advantage in favor of tanker (76 divided by 52.5) and 80%(HOLY !#@$) advantage in favor of tanker for lower-target cap attacks. Tanker disappears around the first corner of a racing track never to be seen again and lapping the brute and scrapper both. So tankers were doing a terrifying 44% more effective area effect damage than a class supposedly designed for superior damage per second on area front, on top of having significantly higher baseline values for damage resistance, health and defense values. Brute was consequently what us min/maxers would call a "smerf" class as a result; objectively flat-out inferior due to another class completely out-classing it in the same jobs and functions. Some of us myself included even counted brute as a D(complete garbage) on the archtype tier list, with Tanker being double-S(above blaster and defender) purely for destroying another archtypes relevance. Oh, what about scrapper? 1.125 * 500% = 5.625, * 10 scrapper only gets 56.25 on area damage front. Tanker still outclasses A PURE DPS CLASS. Even if you consider critical strike timing the tanker needs zero actual effort or timing ect to out-perform that. 5 target cap attacks only score 28.125, also very low for AoE performance compared to a tanker. Without AT proc scrapper is completely left in the dust. This is all ignoring procs, to, btw, which tankers benefit from to. The goal the devs have is very clear, they want to reign tankers in on area damage and make players consider brutes and scrappers again. You wanna DPS better? Scrapper or brute. Tank better? Tanker. Want to do both? Brute. A purely defensive class should NOT be out-dpsing a balanced/off tank dps focused class let alone a purist like the scrapper. This also means I can raise brute back up to A tier(back from D) as a class again, alongside scrapper(Which I left at B in my scores due to AT procs being the only thing saving the class from irrelevence), and i'd be lowering tanker to A or even normal S tier purely for the reason the class IS losing that extra AoE, but brute will no longer be a joke class like it was purely for being completely out-stripped by tankers so brutally(no pun intended).

I should add lastly, as a maniac who greatly values soloing on the highest settings possible(which I do as a means to maximize my capacity to work in a team, kind of as a benchmark), where controlling the enemy mobs is critically important, placate has saved me more than a few times in my test runs on my latest stalker builds.

I used to skip it but i've found more and more that after using it, i found it very, very valuable: For moments where you need AoE power, Placate can STILL be useful for guaranteeing a critical strike on most targets your attacking, as long as you have an AoE attack be it from your primary or ancillery, I placate and then energy torrent all the time on my main Ninja blade/EA/Energy. For single target DPS theres always the obvious placate into assassin strike, though I find depends on the primary since sometimes, street justice's crushing uppercut hits harder than assassin strike for DPA(Damage per activation). When running Tier 9 powers such as Overload and Elude, placating just before the buff ends is a good way to protect yourself from being attacked while your re-activating your toggles, especially combined with unleash potential cycling. I find it more valuable on extreme recharge builds simply cause it turns into a swiss army control power.

Alpha only gives +1 at tiers 3 and 4, tier 1 and 2 powers only give a +1, Musculature core boost is only a tier 2, so your only getting the enhancement effect but not the +1. The Lore/Destiny also only give an "incarnate level shift" at tier 3 and 4, "Incarnate" level shifts only apply to incarnate specific content. So you still have more to progress for your alpha slot before you have the consistent +1 in the rest of the game 45-50. Once youg et up to any of the four tier 3 alpha powers you'll have the +1 and you'll keep it once you get to tier 4.

Its not from people having lives so much as people just not learning the mechanics much when they do play. Be it from being an AE baby, though thats very rare actually, or simply never learning how buffs/debuffs work. The weakest PI team I ever had was lead by an empathy defender. And you can 100% guess why it was weak; they clearly over-valued healing and had not understood the value of buffs/debuffs and there was no other +1 toon. I eventually left. I did save teams before by myself whenever I switched to my widow, however, but she's designed around salvaging weak teams.

Honestly AE farming shouldn't be the only way to rapidly level toons from 1 to 50. in fact, AE farming is almost akine to cheating practically, always has been, only reason it never seems to get hit hard as AE fire farmers always claim is because its the fire farmer doing all the work, no one else ever joins in except hitters like blasters with max fire-resist and high defense on top of that. When we just close off power leveling routes players find other ones, its true, and then close those off all it'd do is just make the HC team come off as nothing but nerf-heads. And honestly I don't think most players have the kind of time required to level toons from 1-50 normally. Even con enemies give such low exp that I barely notice the bar moving, when I join friends in non-50 content exemplared down to say, mid 20s I often don't notice the exp bar climbing at all, even on non-50s with double exp. I run say, 6-7 missions with them and only gain like, 3-4 bars of exp at most in that time span. Edit: I am fine with PI teams going for others but I had seen one PI team only go after council still, like the team leader hadn't caught onto how the council play being much harder for lowbies to survive and the teams killing power wasn't quite high enough to stop warwolves from popping up.

Its clock based RNG and yes, very badly designed, and always has been more working against the player than the enemy mobs, rather than evenly between the two. My most frustrating deaths on defense based builds have always the dreaded "double hit" where I get hit by two attacks at the same time rolling sub-5, not even a proper defense cascade, no time to react, just full health to zero in an instant. Because the two mobs attacked at the same time when the RNG clock happened to be sub-5. This also leads to an annoying factor with the player when the same attack in the attack chain, and one of your better attacks, missing every time. Wait about 1 second before attacking and it stops suddenly, every single time.

Thats largely why my stalker ended up clearing the mobs faster than my blaster, it was 'entirey' the warwolf boss spawns making them effectively more annoying freakshow. My blasters I feel were only getting closer risk of being defeated purely due to the bosses simply living longer, while my stalker was fine simply due to being able to survive a protracted fight against boss ranks and also had far superior single-target DPS, that her inferior AoE was entirely negated compared to the blasters. It'll always take a long time to clear through council now.

I admit I find carnies and malta more fun overall and always found them fun to fight. If anything, I think they are still more fun than the new CoT, since they are managable groups that aren't really overpowered in any particular manner. Carnies weakness to lethal and malta are just kind of dependent on CC, the sappers are just glass cannons that stick out like a sore thumb, I felt them also a lot of fun. I had noticed most people ignore though the more threatening enemies in both groups; sappers get focused but gunslingers not so much, in the case of carnies, dark ring mistresses are not dealt with by ranged toons as fast as they should be imo(they are effectively death mages). Whats funny is I think Malta are way easier than the new CoT and honestly thinking on it, the council are capable of doing way more aoE damage, some even guaranteed, so lowbie teams are likely to get hit especially hard guaranteed, but I noticed that its not the worst, and the warwolves are just an extra health bar to drill through more than anything. The new CoT are a bit higher than banished pantheon now(maybe we should buff banished then? Just cause...), though my blaster never had problems with the nukes. Like, I've usually one of two goals on toons: Either: A: They are strongest possible solo with maybe some leadership. So if the team drops they can still keep going, the last alive. B: Make the entire team virtually unstoppable. Which is well, my support toons, they aren't made to be super solo focused. The toons I was testing were in the former, since non-support toons. I admit I rarely play them as I had bad experiences playing support during live, but thats a tale for another time. Last team I was in: council only, team mostly died to AoE res powers and the PBAoE life drains, except a few +1's, the non-50s 90% losses were from the eclipse, with only a few from the equinox's. But no CoT, it was just all council.

Yeah usually my intent, though I also sometimes switch toons if i'm on a lowbie and the teams leader likes taking on more than they can chew. I rarely actually form teams, if i'm being honest. And yeah I noticed most teams can still destroy them without much difficulty, this was more for when I needed to switch to someone cause a team was bad. Honestly maybe i'm just being to insecure about it, after-all usually the best solution to a bad team is to leave, usually. But sometimes I like to switch to a toon to save one. Its more for when i'm switching in an effort to save a team more than anything. I found them easy on the ice blaster on +2, and also was in a team that crushed them very very quickly, so much so the archons never got to transform into warwolves. so I'm kind of retracting on the Council a bit further, though I don't think I even stated the council as OP to begin with. Mostly just the CoT and the overkill to-hit debuff making focused accuracy a requirement which I kind of hate if i'm being honest, as it feels like all the new pools added just as well have not been added at all to the game. Bad design there as a few others mentioned so far in this thread.

I was gauging how well my toons could do so I could know how well I could carry a team or not with them and whether things were fair or not, an largely sharing my thoughts on it so far. I already adjusted the build of the ice blaster to account for the dark damage attacks, and plan to gauge and perfect over time :). Experimentation phases and all that. But its also a mentality; if I was to join a 54 and I needed to switch to a 50+1(I have had bad teams with weak incarnates even before this update, collosally weak in fact) I wanted to make sure I was bringing a toon up to the challenge. Something worthy of difficult combat. Fixing flawed builds is always something I'm doing anyways. To be unable to solo them is also to be unable to carry a struggling team. A standard I go by on all my builds, be it support, tank, dps ect. I already have my widow but she makes the rest of the team unstoppable, this experiment was for my non widow toons. I suspect the same, I mean I saw teams when leveling toons myself who were captained by people who were far from capable of handling even the council back then, let alone say, CoT today. I admit I usually just split them a bit and then cut them down after, rather than simply trying to "tank spank" them, in fact I prefer mobile builds specifically to deal with patches and ensure i'm always in the best position for cone attacks ect. Maybe i'll actually take a second look at focused accuracy, since I realize they lowered the end cost of it considerably(at least I thought in a patch note? Mids says otherwise, unless it was even more and i'm remembering incorrectly). Hard to though when snipes can do so much damage that its a huge loss to take focused accuracy for a few mobs. But it does make me think of how I could improve on the stalker who excelled at the council already to punish the CoT even further on her.

So I'm trying to solo them on 8x+3, reason being that if forming a 54 PI team, often there are lowbies, if your the only incarnate and not able to 100% solo things, then the team is going to struggle very very hard. So with this in mind, I decided to so far try the mobs on 8x+3 for one main reason: Some mobs are 53, some are 54 due to some getting 1 level higher than the setting(barring 54 streight). So far; Melee toons struggled against CoT due to way, way to much -tohit aura spam, I ran into a situation on one of my scrappers where I had to just flat out abandon the mission, it was 100% undoable. They'd stack to much -tohit and I had no effective counter to it. My stalker could partially counter it, but even then I frequently had to pull back, and this was only one run. Also I had noticed confuse/terrorize are used in spades and many sets provide no protection from that, which horribly damages one of the main draws to playing melee classes/sentinels, protection from CC. My ice/martial/ice blaster was able to deal with them largely due to simply destroying them at a distance thus negating the huge to-hit aura. My staff/bio/mu scrapper in fact had the worst luck; a mob composing almost exclusively of death mages and ghosts, due to just sheer luck. She couldn't do any damage, at, all, due to the sheer amount of to-hit debuffs. Even judgement couldn't hit 'any' of them. Meanwhile, my ice/martial/ice blaster couldn't deal with the council to terribly well. This was due to a combination of factors, the big one being that dark eclipse archons have WAY to much health, and also almost ALWAYS turn into dark warwolves which are also very, very tanky. Even though she leans heavily towards survivability she struggled and died TWICE, which to me is an F. My water/time/fire blaster meanwhile died once on the first run, but managed to avoid dying the second run after switching to diamagnetic and spamming the hell out of AoEs to stack it asap on the mobs. Even then I had a few close calls such as two big hits in a row both rolling identical 4%'s. She even handled 3 mobs consecutively but the slower ST kill speed that blasters generally have compared to a certain other class, it was only due to having to escort a very slow npc and lower ST issues). After a third mission I concluded my water/time/fire blaster was in a better direction and it leads me to consider a respec fore the ice/martial/ice to an ice/martial/soul blaster(since neg energy damage is so rare in IOs *shrugs*). My DB/Bio/Energy Stalker actually stomped the council super easy and even cleared the map faster, purely due to the ST being higher ST against bosses allowing her to dispatch the dark eclipse archons/dark warwolfs so much faster that the lower AoE(Still had some) actually didn't matter, I was able to clear the mobs just fast enough and clear the bosses faster that my clear time was far, far higher. This wasn't perfect as she also had some difficulty with circle of thorns and to-hit debuff spam, but I could always teleport out of the auras and patches quickly. I'll continue periodicly testing characters against 8x+3 council/CoT to see how things are effected. So far; There seems to be no limit on -tohit aura spam for the circle of thorns. This isn't cool for melee at all and was a main problem players had with the original positron TF. God help a pure melee team. This in fact actually lines into fake difficulty; best you can hope for is keeping moving away and use the ST you have from your ancillery pool, god help you if your main set has no ranged attack which is 90% of them for a clear reason. Council aren't to bad but the dark eclipse archons(which always turn into dark warwolves) are so tanky(due to 90% of the time turning into dark warwolves) that high ST builds out-pace high AoE builds, unless they have a lot of both. The non-vampire eclipse galaxies seem far, far more interesting now, though, and are actually a lot of fun with teleports and the reses. So for team gameplay they are nice, solo the dark warwolves are more annoying attack sponges that might sometimes hit you absurdedly hard. This was a problem for the blasters, not so much for the stalker. Both groups are much harder than arachnos and carnies. Honest opinion; With my tier of F being far to easy to A and S being very fun, and SS+ being cheating and very frustrating with no fun: CoT: Overtuned, easily, melee simply cannot counter 10+ to-hit auras when a mob is unlucky enough to have a lot of ghosts spammed in it. Combined with confuse and terrorize having no cc protection for many sets, this puts them in SS+, cheater level. Tone the ghosts to-hit spam back, or relegate that kind of spam to TF's only. This is NOT fun for radio missions, not, even remotely. I also noticed the other mages, ruin/madness/agony seemed surprisingly rare so far. Since it seems to just spam dark to-hit debuffs and nothing but, this makes them feel like a poorly designed AE mob with to-hit anchors spammed. So thus, SS+ cheater level. Council: Far more balanced, but dark eclipse archons seem to be the most common bosses at times, and always turn into dark warwolves. When every single mob seems to have one 90% of the time and then 95% of the time turn into dark warwolves, it gets repetitive fast. I very rarely encountered the more interesting eclipse galaxies and there lt/boss counterparts, I ultimately felt council to be annoying in spots with some missed potential, but it might be my rotten luck. A tier. Nice roadblocks but my luck turned fighting them into a slog on my blasters, and my stalker managed to out-pace the blasters inspite far less AoE firepower simply due to superior ST being the big winner in this. Things this has done in this update: I won't be building blasters as much but I also won't be fighting circle of thorns solo, if I do ever form teams i won't be ever picking circle of thorns until they tone back the to-hit spam. Edit: I Am going to make some clarification, these conclusions were made regarding solo play, for two reasons; Some of us enjoy being able to solo things, and also 53 and 54 teams often only the leader is 50+1 and I've not always seen top builds, and I wanted to see how my top-end builds performed and also tested one scrapper even with a medium-build. I am very glad i'm not the only one who feels this way about the new mobs. 54 with only 50+1 is effectively one player carrying the team, and they may be fine with it as they want the company, also many people join 54 on non 50s because yes, they are trying to level lowbies, and may not have a few months to level that toon in the long run, or simply not the time to grind forever. And 54 PI is actually faster than AE due to even the non 50s participating. When a mob is powerful enough, 54 teams simply move onto other mobs and ignore the more dangerous ones. Ironicly, I find even malta to be easier than the new CoT, and the new council are just meat-bags in teamplay, simply taking longer to clear. 54 normal mode ITF is still faster yet than 54 PI, and honestly i wouldn't ever want the normal mode ITF to get the changes to it that hard mode introduces.

CO deserved it, 100%, considering the hard neglect the game has had. OR the bipolar sense of balance the game has had with regards to its powers or the impossible to solo qlithopic warzone designed to make healers required, and the mostly rotten community. Of course now cryptic is being disolved into DECA, with cryptic employees seeking work elsewhere now, only with cryptic for a short time until they find another position. This is effecting STO, to(In fact it was an STO player who first caught the pieces and put things together, such as no cryptic positions open directly, only DECA games positions for cryptic games with no mention of cryptic itself many cryptic devs including the absolute top now putting up as available for work ect).

.2 * 2 isn't actually 40%, thats a gamblers falacy. Its more like 36%. (you calculate the chance of it NOT happening first, so .8 * .8 = .64, you take that and subtract it from 1 and thats your actual percentage, even then it'll be significantly more unreliable). Even so, odds are it'll probably still be useful for zoning them a little on my water blaster when I get around to her.