DrunkFlux

Thats why i'll have to start doing more mission archs, to many times I get in a team I don't see them doing nothing but council, which is easy to see since they are by far one of the weakest groups in the game. Many players probably never fought even most the groups I mentioned. I also realize my oversight of Crey, Rikti, Longbow and Skulls, as well as the mobs in First Ward, which I expect to be difficult, though I wonder if the Awakened might be exagerated, many sets do deal with psionics, though it is like to give them a higher tier. Vanguard look from what people describe a lot like Ralaruu or Banished Pantheon, wide ability variety. I'm not sure about the special debuff, largely due to it having a hard counter. A hard counter 'will' drop somethings threat significantly, the lack there-of is a major qualifier for how dangerous it really is, as well as the frequency it's encountered, which makes a big difference. This is why I only put Malta Operatives in Tier A, they have some especially potent controls, but they are not as frequent as you'd think. Combined with Sappers being very fragile it's not very common to be struck by them if you know what your doing. I'll try to find time since I will have it after work today to take a look at Goldbrickers. I think also Vanguard and Longbow, though i'll make sure I have the counters to the one ability and look it over, but I will consider the counters, which is a factor for how I am tiering the enemies. Remember though it's my opinion in there.

I plan to check them out, though I'm not gonna make an S++. S+ is what I'm reserving for if a villain group is especially imbalanced or unfair :P, or simply very, very powerful but still doable, just more punishing of mistakes than the other mobs. I also passed skulls by mistake. I'll get to them when I get time, I rather not try reviewing them without looking over there newer enemy(think they have one I do not remember, it's been a while since i played those missions in fact think I only messed with that arch once).

So I was thinking for some time and decided i'd write this while in an AE farm, a enemy villain tier list. Now, this is based on the following criteria: How dangerious are they to player groups through the time they can be encountered? How many ways can they disable a player? What level ranges are they encountered? How available are quality buffs/debuffs/cc and IO's/incarnate powers? Much of this is opinion based, and it largely looks at how the enemy groups gimicks and tricks(or lack thereof) effect player gameplay. So to start, Tier F. Tier F The problem these villain groups have is a lack of tools to counter players and ultimately are the equivilent of the dumb guy with a club who never hits anything. These are the least threatening in the game and only destroy players who are low in defense and when they are scaled up significantly. To make matters worst, Tier F enemies are often encountered at HIGHER levels, and still fight like they are in the level 1-10 range. This compounds the problems they have. In short, they fight like low level mobs and are at higher levels. Because they are fought at higher levels and have no special abilities, they are total pushovers. Council/5th Column Council suffer one major problem as the player levels up; they get no form of support abilities or meaningful CC. This means they can only disable a player with attacks, and while they have 'some' CC it's so rare that it's hardly ever noticed. Nothing ever changes for the group, and this quickly results in them getting curb stomped over and over by player groups. The most annoying are werewolves mostly because they spend 90% of there time running away like Sir Robin. These guys just SUCK, and are number#1 villain group players love to bash for it :). Knives of Vengeance They are a major downgrade from the Knives of artemis(who are a MUCH higher tier). They are encountered when you have incarnate powers(by design), and have the same problem council have, no CC of any meaningful form. They don't even have the caltrops that the knives of artemis are known for, nore the stacking stun grenades. Maybe i am wrong but i've never seen them use any CC in any form when I fight them. They make me think of diablo 2 corrupt rogues; forgetting 'everything' that made them dangerous and downgrading to mindless brute force. Tier D These groups tend to be encountered mostly at lower levels when players have limited tools to deal with mobs, but sometimes have few tricks of there own. These will not cause much difficulty for a team that has a reasonable understanding of the game, and won't be much threat. Hellions What? They aren't in Tier F? What gives? As mentioned level is a major factor, and hellions, while very easy still, are exclusively encountered at lower levels when players have limited powers available to them. They also do limited damage, the only reason players may die to them is when players get especially reckless. Trolls Similarly to Hellions, trolls rank slightly low. While they are more dangerous than hellions, they are still easily dealt with by using reasonable buffs. They are pretty much just bigger hellions. Freakshow Freakshow are mostly a damage focused group that, prior to some changes, were in the Tier F category; nothing but damage and a gimmick to self res that posed little danger to players. But they can CC better now and sap endurance, it however mostly serves to slow teams down if they have endurnace problems which in the missions they are often encountered, many teams have. Clockwork They do scale to higher levels slightly dangerous manner with -recharge, but the most prominent levels they are encountered are at very low levels, the main problem they pose is largely draining endurance. The biggest threat perhaps is a player getting bored or running out of time in the Synapse TF rather than any frustration from difficulty. Warriors Mostly a brute force faction, though they can stun and have swords to debuff defenses, but not to threatening. They are almost never encountered at higher levels likewise. The Lost They have some CC and can prove to be somewhat hazardous, but are otherwise a lower level group. They do gain an upgrade at level 20-29 and then 'another' upgrade at 30+, but I have to make a different enemy group for that for anyone who understands the games lore. Redcaps A brute force faction with an unusual ability to get bigger, and bigger, and bigger. But so long as they are destroyed by reasonable DPS, they rarely use that ability. They are also pretty much exclusively encountered in Croatoa. Praetorian Clockwork They are effectively cleaning robots that can resurrect or heal one another, but otherwise a raw damage attack group. Tier C Groups here tend to have a balance of tricks across the time they are encountered, or they get easier as players get to higher levels and somehow lose the tricks they are known for. These groups can pose a threat because of this for a mid level team. Circle of thorns Circle of thorns are hard to place. On one hand, if they kept the nasty defense debuffing CC of the earlier levels and massive -tohit, including earthquake which can absolutely ruin your day, they'd be in Tier S. But they lose all of that as the game progresses, largely turning into a fire and brimstone and seeming to lose most of there tricks, which would throw them into tier F. This averages out, and kicks them all the way down to tier C. Cimerorans Cimeroans are dangerous mostly to players who rely on defense but have minimal defense resistance. They can also punish a player who has only moderate accuracy with defense buffs. Beyond that however, they are largely a brute force faction that can pierce defenses every so often. The ITF also has very frequently placed elite bosses that take some time to deal with, this lets them barely qualify as Tier C. Outcasts Outcasts can CC somewhat for there low level range and sport some potentially dangerous boss rank enemies, including even one who can use fire imps! Or freeze players with ice blocks. They also mix some powers from trolls. Skyraiders They have an annoying +defense drone that they spawn and teleporting enemies, but are otherwise somewhat average with attacks and abilities similar to Council. They are not down to Tier D largely because the level range they are for the most part at is somewhat fair for them, the player isn't likely to be overpowered. They are especially easy for Market Crash TF, but other then that I cannot place them very high otherwise. Tier B: These groups can potentially cause a lot of deaths in a team, and have a multitude of tricks up there sleeves. These groups can cause a lot of deaths if a player ignores those abilities. Many of these are also only encountered at higher levels. OR they are enemies with tricks or unusually high damage at lower level ranges. In fact, these groups are very close to some of the more balanced enemy groups, OR they are almost unfairly difficult for the level range they are encountered or for some archtypes, almost. Praetorian Police These guys pack a serious WHOLLOP for the level they are encountered, and are surprisingly accurate also. Praetorians have a very rough start, and at the same time teams may not be readily available. Ghouls High damage, often place bombs and also hide and ambush the player in carefully positioned locations in the maps they are placed. At the same time, they almost always spawn an ambush every, single, time you detonate one of there placed explosives from a distance. Lastly, on death they heal nearby ghouls, forcing the player to kill them one at a time or make absolutely sure they all die at the same time. Imperial Defense Force Sometimes, these guys can be painful with some degree of buffs and also support from the seers and Victorias who are able to slice a player very quickly. The Cabal These girls can be very nasty, and very very difficult to fight for melee. The lieutenants and bosses love to spam hurricane and that alone puts them in Tier B. They are still easily defeated with range, but there tendency to shut melee players down can be frustrating. If only there was another group who abused even more storm powers..... The Destroyers A brutal high damage group for the tier they are encountered with a tendency to spawn in very, very high numbers even solo. This group can give a player a lot of trouble. Tier A Well now we have some real threats to worry about here. These groups are fairly deadly, and can cause a lot of deaths. Note some of these groups have a rep as being more dangerous than they really are, or less so, but once you consider there gimmicks and secondary debuff effects, these can be troublesome in some missions and task forces. A team that understands the game reasonably well will be able to defeat these with careful inspiration use and active defense tactics. Vahzilok Some might think i'm being generous with the Vahzilok, but they have very nasty -recharge debuffs that players rarely have a good answer for at very low levels. They can completely shut your powers off just by attacking! as if that is not enough, there bosses have very nasty -defense or -tohit debuffs in there attacks. And any veteran knows to attack the cadavers for a reason, there is nothing worst than the entire team being nuked into oblivion in a single explosion. And at such low levels to. Malta Operatives Malta would be in Tier S if not for the fact that every ability they have does have it's counters, and they are only encountered at 40-50 level range. Sappers are also very fragile and quickly identified and killed. The other major threat are gunslingers, who can teleport and CC squishier players. Teams fighting council that then decide to fight Malta might be in for a rude awakening for that. This group again would be Tier S if not for the fact that they are encountered late, and can be countered. There mechanical lieutenants can merge into bosses, but that makes minimal difference. The Resistance Oh god these guys are nasty. Forget the IDF, these guys can be brutal. They just stack the to-hit buffs like no tomorrow, and do a lot of damage. They are one of the few brute force groups that qualify higher than the lower tiers, simply because they can get around player defenses. They are also fought at low levels, and sometimes(or even often) solo where they can be no better once your level 10 and up. The Syndicate These are the praetorian Tsoo with...less variety of nasty tricks that can cripple a player. It's primarily relegated to bosses. They do however also have lots of -defense debuffs and are primarily encountered at lower levels. Warworks In the B.A.F itrial, they can infinitely stack +tohit buffs and achieve a critical mass. But even not accounting for that, they have deadly attacks and the Victoria, which can get a ranged critical strike. Higher accuracy overall puts them a tier higher than they truely deserve. Arachnos Arachnos possess blinds, some CC, and nastier -defense that can consistently hit through defense unless you specifically have psionic defense. This group starts slightly easy, but even earlier on the blind abilities can leave you especially vulnerable. They're diversity of abilities places them in a very strong A position and they certainly earn it, but there are stronger groups with hard to stop abilities. Paragon Police What? How in the world is THIS group in tier A? When considering this group, I had to think about the sheer insanity of variety these jerks have, and how they certainly scale up very well. The big danger is simply they love bringing out very hard to counter debuffs at the mid level range, with powers similar to glue arrow and acid arrow. They don't get much easier either in later levels when peacebringers show up, and the mass of defense debuffs at range show up. Many veterans are not unfamiliar with the amount of time they spent in jail during a mayhem mission. Tier S Oh god where do I begin with these groups? They often have abilities that are difficult or even impossible to truely counter without killing them before they use them. Some stack CC like no tomorow like Malta operatives in Tier A, or unleash massive varieties of abilities. These groups are rarely fought, but when they are, they can be brutal in the right circumstances, and can be consistently dangerous. I also tried to order them from least to most threatening Tier S. Knives of Artemis Oh god how these gals got downgraded when they got "upgraded" to the knives of vengeance, what happened? The biggest reason the KoV qualify to tier S is the almost uncounterable caltrops ability, which they all possess and can stack endlessly. This will whittle away your health, and if thats not enough, there swords have nasty -defense debuffs. Top it off with stun stacking that the bosses and lieutenents use that can last over 40 seconds, and we have a low tier S. The only saving grace is they cannot use the caltrops at long range, and the debuff ends if you escape. Likewise, they are also somewhat fragile. Carnival of Shadows Carnival of shadows have the annoying ability to sap your endurance consistently on dying, while also having some nasty CC. The most frustrating thing however is the combined ability for some bosses to fade out of existence while still attacking you. Those same bosses can summon allies and it does not help that there lieutenant equivilants can also fade in and out constantly. They also have AoE stuns and are more than happy to use them. They are not the most dangerous tier S group, but still earn a spot. Tsoo Tsoo are encountered at a wide, wide variety of level ranges and possess probably one of the widest variety of nasty tricks, as well as a consistent tendency to have at least some CC as well as a teleporting enemy who uses hurricane. You simply cannot predict what they will have, and that can make them especially dangerous. Special note that there minions ALSO have special abilities including siphon speed and can ruin your cooldown rates, and simultaniously stack. And unlike werewolves, they don't like to run away and are more than happy to attempt to pound your now powerless face in. Tier S+ These groups are either equipped with extremely nasty, almost unfair combinations of abilities, or are downright cheaters. As in seriously, they practically cheat. Immunities to CC with no counter, to hit ratings that are so artificially high all defense and tohit debuffs just as well not exist, most of these groups are victims of very bad play testing. Only one group here is remotely balanced, and probably deserves to be in Tier S+ inspite not relying on effectively major oversights. Ralaruu Oh my god these guys are cheaters. The eyeballs have a flat 200 to hit, meaning defense builds are going to need a team whether they like it or not, and to-hit debuffs have no effect on them. Boss watchers possess 300 base to hit! They also inflict terrifying damage. There brute minions can buff allies when weakened, or heal if they are lieutenants(bosses have defense debuffing attacks). Wisps have CC, and natterlings can merge together, and the lieutenant natterlings can also cc you. Lastly, some bosses can summon allies. This combination(especially the 200 BASE to hit for the watchers) places them in Tier S+. At least only 'some' enemies have the absurd tohit. Banished Pantheon Make no mistake, this group definently qualifies as a brutal group even at high levels. While at lower levels they may not be to dangerous they are also not encountered often at such levels. But the high level banished pantheon have some of the nastiest -defense abilities and -tohit in the game. There storm users can summon freezing rain, which is one of THE single deadliest AoE CC in the game to face, the damage may be low, but once your hit, the -defense and -resistance will last long after the power has ended or you escaped. Those same storm summoners also have hurricane, so good luck hitting them reliably with melee. Combine powerful psionic attacks of other bosses and high damage, and you have a group that can easily be seen as a top contender. I also find these far more entertaining to engage, since they are hard for good reasons imo. They are also pretty much designed to pose a challenge for incarnates. Nemesis Nemesis are in an odd place. They are otherwise of a very low threat when first engaged, with only possibly a strong defense stat from force fields, and also resist some degree of crowd control, outright ignoring a few forms unfairly. What places them in Tier S however is when you start defeating there lieutenants to early in a fight. These jerks will absolutely wreck you with a mass of stacked to-hit/damage/defense buffs in the form of a unique form of vengeance that can extend a very, very far distance. This group forces you to slow down or get wiped from insanely overbuffed enemies. If not for this one ability they would be in Tier C or B, but this places them far into Tier S territory. And I tie them with Banished Pantheon for the level of, to be frank, fake difficulty they bring. The other fact that some CC has zero effect on them also doesn't help. My feelings about them are, they are tedious to fight, force you to slow way down and artificially inflaes the duration missions take. Those are the groups I can think of for the moment, if I have time I'll try to think of where to place the other villain groups. Understand this is mostly an opinion piece. I am not sure where to place Talons of Vengeance to be honest, even though they are very prominent in dark astoria, just as an example.

For those who don't play with me enough, I do actually enjoy the sentinel class and have what I feel is a solid water/SR build :P. Even using water blast though, a top tier set, still could use some work. My beam rifle/bio armor is also fun to play. It does feel sentinels are imo funnest when you pick a very, very strong powerset combination though, it's mostly imo how powersets transition to sentinel that results in them feeling weak. That and some base number discrepancy.

(Split this into a separate post) As for other things happening regarding IO's and balance, I thought of something that already happened, and given I entered this thread somewhat late, but I thought about the things I said earlier, and then came to a conclusion after having rolled a tanker(and after having done some more research for another thread, with the original post I am actually fine tuning). We are already seeing archtypes being balanced as a result of IO's, a little bit. Specifically, the tanker. See before IO's ever came around the tanker was mostly useful because he was THE agro holding archtype in city of heroes hero side. He wasn't vital, or required 100% but he was useful for keeping enemies away from other more fragile archtypes. Back in pre-IO's force fields were still very useful even into late game, and even at the beginning of IO's most players didn't know how to increase locational or typed defense very well with IO's. But that slowly began to change, and so did the value of the tanker. He was already somewhat skippable if you had very good buffs, but still helpful for agro control. He became more skippable because scrappers could soft-cap defenses, and higher cooldowns and better defense improvements from IO's were discovered over time, but not overly so. But then Going Rogue came out, and the brute could come to hero side. And the brute, we all know by then could greatly increase defenses. Brutes were effectively more useful and more effective tankers simply because they could get comparable defenses to a tanker and have all the utility, AND the superior damage. But lets rewind a bit to pre-IO villain side a bit, brutes could NEVER, without IO's, achieve tanker survivability. Brutes needed to be buffed to be effective tanks(and often brutes were in effective teams). Fast forward again, brutes could upgrade the IO's to get very high survivability and out-class the tanker at his job effectively. They had to NERF the brute on going rogue because the brute out-damaged the scrapper. But it still wasn't quite enough. So moving forwards to homecoming, the tanker was from going rogue up till the time he was buffed, only on a .75 damage modifier and 400% damage cap. Thats pretty low compared to a .75 and 775% damage cap a brute had after he was nerfed on going rogue(Brute pre-GR was 850%!!!). IO's still let the brute get pretty much the same survivability. The brute may start with LESS survivability, but at the max brutes were effectively better tankers once IO's came into play. People felt the tanker was lacking and not viable. Low damage and a redundancy was a major problem for giving people incentive to play the archtype, even though they USED to be very valuable in the earlier days, they just didn't keep up with the power creep IO's introduced. So what happened? Well, tanker was boosted to .95 damage modifier and a 500% damage cap. Other adjustments also made tankers superior in the area of effect damage field. Effectively, tankers were changed to an AoE focused melee DAMAGE class with agro holding ability. In fact, the new tanker feels more like the polar opposite of the stalker, a melee damage dealer focused on AoE and crowd control(through taunt). And I enjoy the class when I play it. This had to happen though because of how IO's effected the game. Brutes also had a slight nerf(I think lower target cap for PBAoEs, and damage max lowered to 700%). That was done primarily to assure tankers had an appeal; for people who love AoE damage. Now do brutes suck because of the changes? No, not at all. Tankers excel at AoE, brutes are better at single target damage. It simply means that theres now an arguement for rolling a tanker over a brute. Even for damage focused players the tanker can now be a good choice, and thats a good thing. The same will probably happen for the same reason to the sentinel. Everyone always says sentinels are useless because of how IO's can buff a blasters defense to soft-cap, be it smash/lethal/energy or worst the three locationals. There is very little appeal to playing a sentinel because of that. No matter how much you argue that the game is never going to be balanced around IO's, when people make THAT arguement about sentinels being weak BECAUSE they can achieve the same survivability on a blaster, it's not really any different than the tanker vs brute arguements many min/maxers had during live and the beginning of homecoming. Because blasters can both out-damage sentinels AND have the same survivability it creates the same situation tankers had with brutes achieving the same overall survivability and superior damage. They ended up having to buff tankers to make tankers relevant. So if we are looking at balancing around IO's, I think we'll see more of that, balancing the AT's around how they can max out besides just what they have as a base line. Changes may occur in which you'll see it being a far harder call between the two AT's even considering what you get at the max.

I'm not sure if it's a good idea to force specific archtypes in every team though, even in higher difficulties. I saw how that worked in Diablo 2, with immunities added to hell mode to try and force teamplay, it wasn't very fun for a sorceress player like me to have to always do dual or tri element, even later as changes messed that up further. I didn't wholly enjoy that. Then players found ways to circumvent that in ways that are kind of silly, like the sorceress who only focused on 'ONE' area for loot farming. I also didn't enjoy having to wait for X or Y class all the time like in guild wars. I don't want any one class to become the be-all-end-all in general, but forcing people to team with x or y class isn't particularly interesting to me, especially in radio missions. We have that in incarnate trials, but only to a small degree. What makes people team up and enjoy having a variety of archtypes in a team is that every archtype usually has something to offer outside of just damage/survivability. I have another post about something after this since it's not 100% the exact same sub-topic.

Thread should be stickied. Since this was done for blasters.....maybe some comparisons regarding sentinels? (I know, this post starts feeling like it should be in a thread under sentinels) I felt I should mentions some thoughts so far, on water, beam and dual pistols from what I saw on a sentinel. Water blast(played with super reflex) seemed to far out-perform the other two, in part from it's tidal power providing an extra "category" damage boost, I was inflicting higher damage with it than I'd expect. I use Gaussian's proc almost as a crutch on the character, but she performs surprisingly well, enough for me to solo mobs in some incarnate trials with a few purple IO's. Outside that, I'm able to cut through mobs reasonable fast for a sentinel with water due to tidal power boosting geyser so effectively. Water blast most part is almost completely unchanged compared to other blast sets when crossing over to the sentinel. Dual pistols was significantly weaker due to a lack of buildup, sentinels using dual pistols have to take mental mastery(think it's called that? I do not remember) just for link minds in order to get the gaussian proc, which without they tend to under-perform on many sets. Beam rifles oddly feels more potent to me on a sentinel than dual pistols does on the same archtype. Even same secondary(bio armor). Simply having aim makes it easier to hit hard when I need to. I think overall due to sentinels changing many blast set powers maybe a different thread needs to be made specific for sentinels? I think the same could be said with defense sets, as many are also fundamentally changed(super reflexes is buffed tremendously in the hands of a sentinel over other archtypes, with an absorb power and endurance recovery, Bio armor likewise loses it's damage resist debuff aura and gains a lot of movement speed). I mean not all sets change, but there are oddball differences, like dual pistols suppressive fire actually turns into a very high damage attack, or energy blasts snipe being replaced with a consistently slower heavy attack. All tier 9's on sentinels share the 1 minute thirty second cooldowns, which means consistently bombing enemies with them in every mob. I know the archtype will need an overhaul but I just wonder. Feel this post belongs in the sentinels thread.

Well are there alternatives? Because as it stands IO's are basically letting blasters become the clear go-to archtype, superior to all the others once you've geared them out and by a landslide. Let me clarify a bit, I don't really like that idea either, but blasters soft capping the LOCATIONALS(key word, locationals) to me is a VERY bad thing. Only other thing I could think of, exclusive to blasters is letting them only soft cap damage typed defense but never locational. I somehow am getting the feeling people are not understanding how dangerous it is to let a blaster get locational defense, or the difference between locational and typed defense or rather the bang-for-the-buck locational defense is. I mean soft-capping the locationals means your soft-cap vs all damage types except pure psionic attacks. Thats 90% damage mitigation effectively, a ten fold survivability increase, for a BLASTER. On a class meant to be extremely high damage and lower survivability. It's not even remotely the same as smash/lethal/energy defense capping, it's on an entirely different level of survivability. You can never hope to buff or balance sentinels when blasters get effectively the same survivability. Scrappers also lose a lot of there use, blasters can always choose to go into melee on top of ranged to. Thats with the scrapper being a balanced AT. I mean blasters have extremely high damage, insanely high damage, by design. To let them soft cap vs everything effectively means they far outclass the other archtypes, comparably high survivability to most archtypes and about 3-4 times the firepower to 90% those same archtypes, one shotting minions/lt's and annihilating boss rank enemies in seconds, yeah that seems 'very' fair. An overpowered god with zero effective weaknesses. Blasters effectively 3-4 times as powerful as other archtypes (Overall power = Defense * Damage, how do people not remember that simple rule?) Only stalkers have any advantage and thats only in single target DPS, and only a few sets give them any AoE and even then they are horribly dwarfed by blasters. Other melee AT's and the other ranged AT's can't hope to match the AoE firepower of a blaster, it's not even a contest. This, just knowing blasters can hit 40+ defense on locational(build I saw was about 42-43), it seriously worries me. Only other thing I could think of was go ahead and balance the AT's around IO's, that means nerfing blaster damage output, or greatly buffing sentinel and also further adjusting tanker/brute/scrapper, support AT's ect. If anything, if a def cap had to be added, could just add a 'max def cap increase' effect for those using actual defense powers so they still hit better defense caps than those without. I have nothing against other archtypes getting locationals soft-cap since they have far less damage than blasters. Blasters though? Really, even as someone who loves the blaster archtype they really shouldn't. It's gamebreaking.

While IO's can solve a lot of character weaknesses, I say no, if anything, IO's need to be brought in line with the game a little. When blasters,(Yes, BLASTERS) can get soft-cap defense vs the three locationals with just IO's that practically renders almost every archtype in the game useless outside the incarnate trials. As in theres just no point to really playing the other archtypes. Unless you wanted to have high damage resistance to, then sure, you could role a tanker/scrapper/stalker/brute, but to an overmaxed toon theres not much point is there? It's kind of created a conundrum, imo. Blasters can get defense to high to easily with IO's as they currently stand. I mean theres supposed to be other archtypes for higher survivability, or support archtypes for +defense/resistance/extra damage ect. In fact finding that people are getting soft-cap with blasters like that REALLY hurts the game for me(at least tonight anyways), I played this feeling it was at least somewhat fair. I mean, the ramifications, lets see. Scrappers are useless, lower damage than blaster, no more survivability than blaster(only has mez protection and the builds some people get don't need destiny for this, also blasters have the same HP pool as a scrapper). Sentinels are underpowered also, lower damage than blaster, only get easier soft cap locational and faster cooldown t9's but thats it.(Though sentinels kind of do need a buff even compared to the other ATs). Defenders: Severely impacted, though we all know defensive focused defenders were always weaker late game, soft-cap locational defense blasters really hurt defenders usefulness long term. Corruptors: See Defender above. Except against arch villains/giant monsters, corruptor damage is fairly low. Tankers and brutes: OUtside of incarnate trials and a couple task forces, soft-cap blasters don't need anyone drawing fire from them, ever. Controllers/dominators: Lol control? While CC can be useful in a lot of situations, a max locational defense blaster laughs as everything dies super fast and cannot hit back anyways. That is just IMO, not good for the game. And anyone who knows me will know, I usually do NOT advocate nerfing anything. It's bad, like worst than titan weapons OP days bad. It's one thing to see a blaster having high defense against just smash/lethal and maybe energy. But another to see a blaster having nearly or at soft-cap vs locationals, that to me is just a game breaker. To Balance around IO's, they'd have to do something like, hard-caps on defense or something. (Like, 55% for tankers/brutes, 45% for sentinels/scrappers/stalkers, 35% for the rest(yes, 35%, 40% is still extremely high). OR reducing defense from IO's or something but I'm sure many players would dislike that, including me even. OR they would have to make it so you HAVE to have super good IO setups to even survive say, 50+2 even level or something silly. IO's should be balanced around the game, not the other way around. Blasters having to much defense is kind of a sign why they need to be.

Maybe I misread somewhere then. Because I knew on LIVE it could be perma, but heard somewhere it couldn't be anymore.

I'd have to check that part with hasten, thing is I remember reading combat attributes, hasten adds additively with the IO bonuses. I know that if you were 'somehow' to renew hasten before it ended it'd just renew itself. I'll have to check later though(actually working atm, understand wanna get this accurate though, I see far to many people spreading misinformation about damage buffing). I know that you can shorten it's cooldown with recharge enhancements. Main point of my post is clarifying how power buffs and IO's interact with one another because of all the misinformation I see being spread. I saw it twice which imo is twice to many times :P.

On that last part, I'm talking about the numbers shown in the combat attributes. I'll correct my original post above. On the point of hasten though I recall that was nerfed so it was no longer perma?

Writing this since when I run a search, I don't see anything on this topic. So lets considering the following scenario. Your a scrapper who reads your characters damage with that Claw strike doing 187 due to it having a base of 100 and enhanced up to 87% damage, a fulcrum shift is cast, you see your damage buff is blue at 400%, but then you only do 500 damage. What gives? Shouldn't you do 935 damage(187*5)!? Why is it lower? To understand this better, we need to understand how stat bonuses work. Or why a defender can hit 41% with power boost, clarion radial, and Farsight in Time manipulation, but a corruptor gets only 29%. Shouldn't it be a LOT more for either of them? This is a result of many power buff effects actually being cumulative, rather than multiplicative. Lets say a defender casts fulcrum shift, and achieves a perfect cast (10 targets, and next to enemies), the actual effects from the damage up to the cap is calculated as follows: Enhancements + Bonus damage This is because enhancements count as bonus damage. For simplicity I am using Enhancements + Bonus damage. The defender has a damage cap of 300%(Technically 400%, counting baseline). While you'd think with 85% enhanced damage to an attack with a baseline of 50 doing 92 damage suddenly only does 200 rather than 368. This is because the game is calculating the damage the power inflicts(before resistances and level difference) as follows: 50*(Enhanced damage + bonus damage). If ignoring that your playing a defender, this translates to the following: 50*(1.85+3) = 245.5 However, with us playing a defender we have to account for the damage cap: 300% (added to baseline). So, we are 85% over the cap, meaning it simply calculates the damage as follows: 50*4 = 200 In other words, the game is reducing our modified enhancement to 300%. The same applies with musculature. Assuming we are only getting 30% from musculature (45*(2/3)) 50*(2.15+3) = 275.5, the game reduces us to 200 because it again reduces our modified enhancement to 300% How the game is programmed to do this, I admit I do not fully know. But this effect is especially visible if you play a kin. This effect is also why brute fury may not seem as powerful as you would think, or why damage buffs on a brute seem significantly less effective than on other archtypes unless stacked significantly more. To compensate for the archtypes design of a lower base damage improved by fury, brutes have a higher damage cap than other damage focused archtypes. Higher damage enhancement from musculature only means as a result it is easier to achieve the damage cap. It will not raise your damage cap. This same phenomena can be seen in other effects as well. Clarion Radial, power build up and power boost, while powerful in there own right, do not boost quite as much as you expect and actually boost in the same way enhancements do. Accuracy bonuses from IO's on stacking only increase accuracy marginally due to them being added to enhanced accuracy. Accuracy is based on Power Base Accuracy *(Accuracy enhancement + global bonuses + power bonuses). Note that to-hit buffs are separate, and can greatly improve chances to hit. This has been discussed in another post in greater detail. Hasten cannot achieve permanent hasten due to cooldown cap being to low for it's cooldown to become shorter than it's duration. This is also resulted from enhancement IO bonuses and buffs only being added to it's enhanced recharge. (Edit: It actually can, global recharge max is a bit higher than I thought. Extra Edit: Now that I think about it, this was Elude I was thinking of.) Conserve Power only adds it's endurance reduction stat to the end reduct of each power it's effecting. This is still effecting effectively all of your powers however. In short, do not assume that bonus damage is multiplying to your enhanced damage like it often does in other games. With any bonus effect, it's enhancement + bonus, rather than (power+enhancement)*bonus. If it was, we'd be far far more overpowered, and damage numbers would be through the roof. Also of note: Separate abilities providing actual defense/resistance stats do stack. This is why many melee archtypes take fighting, leadership ect. Resist cap for brutes/tankers is 90%, other AT's 75%. Epics 85%. Damage Cap for archtypes(Note: This is BUFF max, actual caps are 100% higher for archtypes): 300%(400%) (Defender, Dominator,, HEATS and VEATS(correct me if I am wrong on VEATS). 400(500%)% Scrapper, Stalker, Blaster, Corruptor, Sentinel, Tanker 600%(700%) : Brute Edit: I should make one clarification. Incarnate powers are NOT effected by any kind of bonuses, be it from powers or otherwise. They are effected by most alpha slots except any recharge effects. Additional Note: IO damage bonuses count as part of the same effects. This is visible in combat attributes.

Means even more that sets on such a low tier need a buff then. Especially some of those that are meant to be good AoE sets like dual blades. Though people should be considerate of enemy mob resistance ratings. But AoE sets generally clear groups faster. But theres also I guess issues with practicality, my street justice character, understand I LOVE the animations, they are quick and feel practical but the whole "combo" mechanic has a comparable problem to dual blades, forcing attacks in situations where they make little sense imo and gameplay wise it becomes impractical sometimes. So that could also be cutting performance down drastically.

I agree with Helblaiz on this. People who have full time jobs often have half hour to an hour travel time to and from work, kids and family to take care of ect, don't have time to unlock everything. One of the core reasons mmorpgs are unpopular outside of WOW(and even WoW is slowly losing players) is the manditory grinds, sometimes even exploiting "Fear of missing out" on players to force them into playing and losing even more of there freetime. When a game becomes a job, it loses it's entertainment value fast. And to many mmorpgs and even other games try to do that. Grinds are exactly what the video i'm gonna share talks about as being "inhumane".

I thought i'd share this using a power analyzer. To those who are wondering, this is the reason people are using pylons to test the viability of sets regarding single target damage. The resistance is the same across the board. This does mean a lot of those sets, especially C and below, do need a buff to single target and are in fact vastly underperforming compared to S, A and B tiers. Very disappointed to see street justice at the bottom, makes me think I should shelf the bio/street justice character (yes, performance does matter to me a lot, no, i'm not someone who only uses the best of the best like someone else admits to here). Maybe i'll reroll her as a bio/titan. Also makes me strongly reconsider dual blades(in a bad way). This also makes me think of another point; how are sets being played with attack chains? Are you in this test making sure to use on high priority highest damage/activation time whenever possible? I mean, not all sets have a consistent chain to them, especially in SO range. And what about AoE testing?

So I managed to "Fix" the problem by picking up another mission and re-selecting it to reset it, by chance it spawned the bombs in different locations. I suspect the map has a fault with one of the bombs placed there during development, before pillars and wall decoration was put in.

So I am trapped on the mission "Destroy Main T.E.S.T. facility and the game won't let me skip or abandon the mission. There is a bomb stuck in a pillar and I am completely unable to access it in any way. The game also is not letting me abandon or skip this mission, it is a single player only mission to from what I can understand here. There is no option to abandon the mission. This mission is being forced on me before I can continue the warden arch, I cannot progress it simply because this mission won't let me continue due to this bugged map.

Nerfing high power sets in general would simply drive many players away as they like that power, and when you nerf something, the feelings players get is twice as bad as those feelings when something they like is buffed. This is the general rule of losses vs gains; losses always feel twice as bad as gains. I mean CO tried nerfing all the high performing powers and lost over 90% of it's player base in about a year or two. It lost another half of that when it nerfed overpowered vehicles when people felt it was baiting and switching. So here are a few thoughts on what could happen if some things I often use were nerfed. First, ancillerys and power boost/power build up. I wouldn't necessarily change it much, in fact, I would not touch it without also looking at scorpion shield and many armor powers in the ancillery pools. Many people only take scorpion shield because of its high defense vs smash/lethal and energy. Energy being very common in the 50s. And smash/lethal defense also works against many powers that are elemental based because they have smash and lethal components. This pushes scorpion shield and many defense based ancillery armor powers way ahead of the other ancillery powers. Power boost/build up allow energy mastery/power mastery to be an alternative to taking mace mastery. To nerf it heavily would remove power and energy mastery from being choices to a majority of players. Players don't often take underperformers. So now I want to go over tier 9 nukes. They were crap. Litterally crap, and were the most skippable powers in there sets. Tier 9 nukes before the change were crap even before judgement powers. Sure you wipe out 'one' mob with one shot, but then your completely useless for 20 seconds or more and even adrenaline boost does little to help until the first 10 pass. All the while the team at higher end skill levels will completely wipe at LEAST 2-3 more mobs in that same time frame. In effect, your SLOWING your team down and lowering your DPS overall. I always skipped the tier 9s even before judgement showed up in incarnate powers, because I'd always find many teams wiping at least a few mobs in the time it took me to get my end back, even with rest active. Tier 9 nukes were what you call "Awesome but impractical". The penalties back then FAR outweighed the benefits. Archery, assault rifle, psionic blasting and water blast ALL had far, far stronger tier 9s which could contribute far higher DPS. I understand people liked them, but they were useless in the meta even before issue 24. Fire blast with a blaster could one-volley most mobs with rain of fire + fire breath + fireball in that order while under build up and aim most people would use for an inferno. They'd die fast enough that it was more than enough lethal to get the job done and you'd never have that massive 20 second downtime. Many other sets also could do more in that same time span overall. Corruptors and defenders, due to the reduced damage no longer doing enough, would do even less. The 20%-25% damage drop for no end penalty and faster cooldowns made them useful enough to compete and be a worthwhile power pick. Incarnate powers I always felt were the closest things to equalizers for underperforming AT's/power set combinations. While they were end game power creep, yes, they still had to be earned and on live they were much harder to gain. But they aren't the be-all-end-all behind many top performing builds. It is the combination of powerset combination + IO bonuses/procs stacking on top of having those incarnate powers. It's easier to max defense stats with barrier, yes, but you still get a lot of defense from stacking IO bonuses. But they were end-game and most content is still lower than level 45. I'm honestly not bothered by incarnate powers much. If any incarnate set was OP, I'd argue destiny is. It's easy to make it's benefits perma, and even then some destiny powers didn't even need to be to truely be effective(ageless comes to mind). Also, I don't find the game boring being overpowered on a character. Especially when I IO'd the heck out of that character and loaded them with the best incarnate powers for that character. I earned it. I earned the right to be overpowered. It's when your overpowered WITHOUT earning that is when it gets very, very boring. Like champions online and solo you become invincible at level 8 even on elite difficulty, that killed its replayability and it was boring fast. If your bored of the character thats max level with IO's/incarnates ect, you can always roll a new one and homecoming gives plenty of character slots. Can even delete a 50 and start over if you want. Just pick different powersets/archtypes and the experience changes a lot. THAT is what I do to keep this game fresh for me.