PeregrineFalcon

I agree. And it is optional. For players, not necessarily for characters. Play one of those stalkers, dominators, Kheldians, Soldiers of Arachnos, controllers with Indomitable Will and/or pets which hold aggro exceptionally well, blasters with their triple-stacking mag 1 status protection ATO, and masterminds who let their henches do the heavy lifting. But if you play a Defender, whose literal job it is to defend the team, then I don't believe that it's unreasonable to expect that you'll want to be on a team.

There's another possibility that may be factoring into the developers' thoughts on mez. A great way to avoid being mezzed is to invite a tank to your team. Squishies pretty much never get mezzed when a tank is holding aggro. I know, I know. How dare I suggest teaming up with other people in an MMO as a way to solve issues. Brutes, Scrappers, Tanks and Sentinels can solo well due to being able to ignore mez for the most part. Other ATs can't. I just don't see why this is an issue.

I'm sorry to hear that your life has been miserable, and that it's caused you to view life as mostly misery. I've worked hard, and been through a lot of hardships, but my life has never really been miserable. It's been a learning experience. And, even when times were tough, I always had friends and family. Perhaps that's why I'm loyal my species and wish to see it survive.

The only problem I see is that if all ATs have a way to deal with, or ignore, mez then why bother having mezzes in the game? A complete rebalance of the game involving giving everyone access to temporary mez protection, along with reducing how common mezzes are, would work. As I mentioned before it works in SWTOR. But, that would mean that the devs would have to go in and change the powers on every single AT and every single enemy group. That would be a massive undertaking. As it is currently, every AT has access to Rune of Protection. And while I personally don't take it on many characters, because of thematic reasons, there's no reason that you couldn't if you really want the mez protection.

And they say that I'm a pessimist. 😃 Having read a lot of history I see that, over the years, we've come to accept and allow the bad parts of human nature less and less and engage in the positive things more and more. This leads me to believe that by the time we have FTL travel we, or at least a large part of us, will believe in those positive aspects of humanity that you agree are good. Plus, I have children. Anyone who thinks that humanity isn't worth saving also thinks that my children aren't worth saving. For obvious reasons I can't agree with that point of view.

🙄 I swear, it seems like I'm the only sci-fi fan on the internet that actually wants humanity to survive. I often wonder why that is.

Let's not forget that when Star Trek Online launched there was a mez effect, Viral Matrix, that could be stacked in duration. People would come out of a PvP match with enough stacks of Viral Matrix on them that their character would be mezzed for AN ENTIRE HOUR after the match ended. These were the same people who designed and built City of Heroes.

People complain that FF defenders suck in comparison to other Defender types. FF being able to give out defense and mez protection is literally the only reason people are willing to put up with an FF character taking up a valuable team slot. So let's give all of the other Defender powersets mez protection too and put FF squarely in the trash bin right alongside Assault Rifle and Mercs. Now that being said, having a mez protection click, with the same stats as Rune of Protection but with different FX, being added to other pools, is not something that I'd be opposed to. Let someone other than wizards have a mez protection click in their pool. I actually did not know all of that. Thank you for the info! 😃 Since I'm on the subject, the way I'd like to see the mez system done is the way it was done in SWTOR. Every class has a click breakfree power that also makes them immune to all mez for 10 or 20 seconds afterward. Certain classes also have conditional mez protection. Several of the tank classes have a gap closer - a "jump to the enemy" power - that also gives them mez immunity for 4 seconds after they land. This actually works very well because mezzes in SWTOR are pretty uncommon. This means that tanks occasionally get knocked back by certain named task force bosses, and squishies get mezzed more often, but still not often, and the NPCs cannot perma-mez any character. Yeah. This is the kind of thing in game design that makes me wonder how these people can possibly still have jobs in this field. I had something similar happen to me on my Invuln tank happen the first time I took her into a PvP zone. A lot of games have a thing where if you've been mezzed then once the mez is over you have immunity to that kind of mez for a little while, usually 5 or 10 seconds or something. This allows you to escape and prevents the situation that you've just described from happening.

But we currently have easy access to mez protection in the form of Inspirations, IOs, Combat Jumping, Acrobatics, and Rune of Protection. And, if this pool idea gets added to the game, people will start posting that this pool should be made inherent, just like Fitness was. We know this is true because of the threads proposing that Hasten be made an inherent. Besides, I thought you were against Power Creep.

And what happens to Sentinels if Blasters can perma mez protection? I completely agree with you on this. Mez was done horribly wrong in CoH. However, and I'm sure I've said this before, this is something the devs should have addressed back in 2004. I don't think that the Homecoming devs can "fix" it and still have a game that resembles City of Heroes come out the other end of the process.

When the argument is correct, and the factors haven't changed since the last statement, there's no point in changing arguments. And they are used for farming because they have the highest AoE damage output. That's their strength. Their weakness is that they are the least tough of the armor sets. That isn't broken, that's by design. The entire game is balanced like this. This does not mean that Fiery Aura is underperforming. Fiery Aura's entire schtick is that it's weak armor but high damage output. Arguing that Fiery Aura needs to be tougher is like arguing that Blasters need some defense and a mez toggle. Really? What did farmers do before damage procs? Oh yeah, they farmed with Fiery Aura Brutes. Just because it's the weakest set doesn't mean that it needs a buff. In a game where not every set is exactly the same, one is going to be the best and one is going to be the worst. Yes, that one enemy was brought up as an example. So bring up a different example to prove your point. If Fiery Aura really does underperform that badly coming up with a common example should be easy.

I'm dismissing the idea that Fiery Aura should be given KB protection because the given reason was that it can't tank ONE ENEMY in the entire game. But ok, let's talk about underperforming sets. Let's remember though that it's highly possible that the sets that underperform may be closer to what the devs think is supposed to be the baseline. So if the devs decide to go and balance all of the armor sets then they may decide to nerf the newer ones, as they did with Titan Weapons. So, be careful what you wish for. Every set should have 1 weakness. Also, not every set should have damage amplification. If the AT needs every set to have damage amplification then they might as well just up the AT's damage across the board. They recently did just that with tanks. So, as far as I'm concerned, tanker Invuln did get a damage buff. Energy Melee was deliberately broken by the live devs as a response to something. Don't say it was because of PvP though, because certain people on this forum will turn green and go berserk. It has almost no AoE output, which is the PvE meta, so the only place that EM was the meta was PvP. But that can't possibly be why it was nerfed, no sir! Ok, I'm better now. Anyway, I suppose the other possible reason was that they didn't want it to overperform in comparison to the powersets they were selling on the market. Of course that would have required the developers to be procognizant, as EM was nerfed in 2008 with issue 12 or 13 and CoH didn't go free-to-play until 2011 with Issue 21. Yeah, that must be why the live devs nerfed Energy Melee. They had precognition. Oh, I completely agree. The devs really should do something to motivate people to pick Fiery Aura more often. Oh, wait! Fiery Aura Brutes pretty much outnumber all of the other characters in existence. Well, there goes that argument.

Yeah. I've been following this for years. Everything I've read says that it's not possible to scale the Casimir Effect up. Which means that even if they can figure out a way to project and move a microscale Casimir warp-bubble, it will be useless unless they only want to move objects smaller than a grain of sand.

Well, it looks like they did that to Titan Weapons. I'm sure they'll eventually get around to nerfing fixing the rest of the Pay-to-Win powersets.

I'm not touching you. I'm not touching you! I'm not touching youuuuuu!! But you know what I am gonna do? I'm going to use my mental powers to conjure up monsters from the ID to torture you psychically until you collapse from the terror and exhaustion. Hope that doesn't cause you any lasting trauma or anything. But I won't touch you physically, cause I'm a pacifist. 🤪 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4yzkefot3c

I don't pay much attention to other peoples' powersets, but I suspect that you're right. And if they do nerf Burn such that three quarters of all characters on Homecoming (or whatever the number is) aren't Firey Aura Brutes, then maybe adding some Knockback protection to Firey Aura would make sense. Until then... ok so Lord Recluse is the 1 enemy in the entire game that you should pick another tank for. More importantly, what does Yomo Kimyata know?

Oh I don't think they'll nerf Burn. I think they're likely to nerf the way it interacts with damage procs. Right now they fire off way more often in Burn than they do in other AoEs. That's what I think will get nerfed. And, since that's obviously a bug, if that gets nerfed there won't be any compensatory buffs. Also, have we forgotten that Fiery Aura is supposed to be weaker than other armor sets? That's the tradeoff for doing more damage. I know that Bio might not agree with that, but that's a whole 'nother discussion.

Here's a guy flying a jetpack during the LA Olympics Opening Ceremonies in 1984.

Well then let me ask this: Do you guys really want the devs to do a balance pass on the armor sets? If they do a real balance pass Burn's interactions with damage procs will probably get nerfed into the ground. Also, Bio, and possibly Shield, will probably be nerfed as well.

I just don't believe that all characters, or even Brutes, with Fiery Aura are farmers. My point is that if a set is that popular it's difficult to argue that it's vastly underpowered, especially if the issue is just about just 1 enemy who's supposed to be one of the most difficult enemies in the entire game.

I really wanted to use an animated GIF of The Count laughing, but I couldn't find one in the time that I had, so I had to just go with that one. Also, no. I don't care about farming or the AE, and the AE isn't the only place that people play Fiery Aura. But the fact remains that Fiery Aura characters out number all of the characters by 8 to 1. That tells me that Fiery Aura does not need a buff. Also, you're asking for a buff based on 1 enemy in the entire game. The one enemy that Fiery Aura has an issue with. Pick another tank for that 1 enemy. There. Is that better, Ston?

Wait, wait, wait. You think that the undisputed king of farming needs to be buffed? The powerset that has 8 times more players (according to Cipher's numbers here) than all of the other powersets combined. And you think that powerset needs to be buffed?

I've never been happy with the weird way the detailed power descriptions are in game and with the fact that the wiki doesn't have actual numbers.

Focused Accuracy is why I have Energy Mastery. Of course this means that I only get Laser Beam Eyes, which I love for thematic reasons, but is hardly great DPS-wise. I'm starting to think that I might have to create an entire second build for this character. A tough tank build and a damage build.