DrRocket

This is a good topic, not sure about the solution. It is my impression that some sets holds tend to be more effective than others, but it could be that some mobs have added resistances to particular attacks such as fire for instance. It would be interesting to evaluate how all the mez sets by controller and dominator are actually performing, and do first corrections to bring the performance of whatever set to a standard benchmark. I have a fire controller, and it seems the holds just don't take or are resisted, maybe the MAG intensities are too low or some mechanic is taking over which gives the impression of not working. But perceptions could be wrong as well. I do see the point of a poster of not making the game easier, the comment works great if you are one of those classes that powers line up for them, in the case of the controller and dominator that is not the case, they too have a heart and would like to feel they are truly contributing to the team and not just taking up space

I like the idea very much, especially if the IO can be placed in an inherent power such as brawl, sprint, leap, etc. This way the switch is not robbing the player from an IO slot that could very well be need to gain IO set benefits. I would applaud the concept of inherent powers being IO slottable if implemented, the only inherent power that can be IO slotted is sprint that I am aware of.

By now I have played many different archtypes now and during live, and have noted that endurance issiues at low levels are true for all archtypes but some seem to be more accute than others. At times, I figured it has to do with how much real damage you do to a target and the energy cost in doing so as the driving factor. I remember in th elive days, my defender guzzling through the endurance bar to just kill a white mob, then it was a retreat or quaff endurance inspirations to keep fighting, while with my scrapper it was hit bam, bang and done, which resulted with modest endurance consumption. In today's reload, I feel the Homecomming developers have really done alot to make the game more playable for fun sakes than for grinding. Travel in the live days was horrid, now you can buy incredibly good travel abilities, teleports to missions, and more. The game is now less grindy and actually I can focus more in enjoying the game than being a meter-made. I also remember at low levels, there was a huge need for more attacks since many of the support classes damage was akin to a wet noodle, and they would strike for litle effect a mob and then wait to get a chance to get to use their wet noodle again, now with all the prestige powers you have an ample number of attacks both melee and ranged to indulge yourself. To me those are great Quality of Life improvements. I know that endurance at 50+ incarnate is a non-issue, but it sure suxors for many players wanting to enjoy the game and their character is continuously detoggling or gasping for edurance. Some classes their endurance woes comes from the large number of toggles they must utilize to attain a reasonable level of performance, perhaps a reduction on endurance cost on toggles would be appropriate. Some classes their endurance woes comes from the low damage output of the attack and requires many, man uses and thus perhaps a reduction on endurance owuld be appropriate.

To be sincere, my post was mainly as a reaction to what MIDs and clicking on the powers button in game is telling me, when I saw reasonably good defenses, I went good deal, but when I checked on resistances and saw Zero in just about all forms of damage but Psionic, alarms went off. For I view survivability being a combo between defense and reistance to damage. When I play my widow, I find it to be an odd experience, at times I can jump in behind the brute, ensure all those wonderful buffs are covering him, and then I go about reducing the mobs about him (I do not use AOEs by the way, because I am making sure I steal aggroe away from the Brute or Tank). The attack sets are a very nicely balanced between ranged and melee that are a distinct pleasure to use. When it gets to status effects, I am up there with the tank, which are exceptionally good since I am not an aggroe magnet. But then at times something odd happens, and start getting hit, not a lot to be sincere (yet enough to go down very quickly if I don't react quickly), but my health bar significantly drops on a single hit. The class gives me no relief buttons to push for a quick heal, so it's inpiration time. Once I get tagged, its inspiration time and trying to get the heck out of dodge, normally I do manage to leap and get around something out of sight as the pre-programmed attacks are pounding me; and barely survive, as I said most times. But it is the significant decrease of hit points at my health bar from a single hit, that has me concerned, usually my widow is a three hit death if I don't get out of harms way very quick and pop several green inspirations. This is the reason for the suggestion, perhaps as a less than cordial commenter blurted, I need to learn how to play the class better, does has has some truth to it, but frankly I don't think my approach to the class is that much of a neophite. This said, I am very open to advice on how to play the class, and even IO slotting it. Thank you to those who have been constructive and have gifted me with knowledge

I support the idea to allow a stone granite tank to have some jumping capability as opposed to none. Perhaps let it work like a debuff instead of a binary approach to it.

You make a good point, but similar situations do arise during TFs where as of lately I see many Brutes undertaking the traditional role of the Tank, which as an ancilliary player in such groups, I feel they do resonably good enough, but they are not tanker class good. In a TF the number of mobs they have to hold aggroe can be fantastic, and the rate of punishment they endure is quite comparable to farmer class of punishment suffering, perhaps worse because there is a greater range of sources of damage. In my experience for a brute to achieve across the spectrum of damage resistance for sources is actually very difficult for a Brute to achieve (not sure it is even possible); at the end the Brutes choose about half of them to be really resistant to and then go survive, reducing the resistance cap on brutes would be simply said, cruel. With regards to increasing them to Tank level hit points, would break the archtype description that places them somewhere between tanks and scrappers. Remember that compromise is what justifies the brute's damage output. I give you this, interesting tweak, but not sure if it would be a good one overall, would support some beta testing of it though.

Hey folks, really thank you for all the responses and documentation that came with them, it truly helps me understand the game beter and to adapt to the various sitations as well. Once more my gratitude.

Fantastic suggestion, as I said, I was looking for a solution for an SG composed of Alt-O-Holics players, Just about everyone in the SG I belong to has at least a dozen alts, even at 300 it does not take long to fill up. The suggestion was more in the lines of a primary holding company with subsidiaries, where the SG is the holding company, and then each SG members' own SG that holds all their alts would be subsidiary. In the real world, the subsidiary companies have access to the main company communications, so it would be for the subsidiary SGs. The problem with coalition solution, beyond requiring a discipline to use the coalition channel, is that it does not differentiate between allied SGs and the SGs formed by members who hold their many alts. I think a mechanic where the count is based on the account and not the player is rather good idea, like the OP not sure about how difficult it would be to implement. Would welcome the concept that SG shows handles and the current alt being played at the time. This way the player when playing any of their alts, has access to SG chat and can freely participate in SG activities. Difficulties with my suggestion if you want to have alts in different SGs, or some not in an SG at all. Not sure how to work that issue.

I do stand corrected, and you have my appreciation for it. I am also very grateful that you gave me samples and explanations that gives me an opportunity to learn. To expand in the psionic and toxic comment, I noted it as pragmatic, and I also noted that for analysis purposes, that they ability had to be across all archtypes and not where one could fish out a few out of the dozens of available archtypes and be able to check the box. For the resistance to be effective, there should be a relative ease to achive the archtype class cap whatever they may be. For example, I noticed for Scrappers the ability to cap defense in both positional and typed all over, is rather easy, while a bit tough for a defender to achieve and usually they are only positional and nearly impossible to accomplished typed. I do conceed that any archtype could use these IOS but the problem for many is that the only way to get a chance to slot resistance based IOs is through tough and maybe an epic pool power, so they can't build it up to have any significant relevance, lets face it 17% resistance is pointless. With regards to debuff resistance once more you are right, you can buy IOs that help. On the otherr hand there are no powers that provides it. Take a tank or scrapper, they have one or more powers that gives them status effect protections, and resistances, yet debuff goes unacknowledged. Once more thank you for your response, and sharing of yuor knowledge

I would say it is somewhat of an interesting proposal, when you look at the Sentinel, it is in fact a Blaster that gave up range but gained status protections and survivability powers. Your Guardian is similar in concept to the sentinel with regards to the Defender, thus you have a defender with no ranged secondary, but has gained status effect protections and survivability powers. I am not sure, I would wish on any Archtype the damage nurf Defenders have to endure. Despite the other posts, I believe your suggestion does have merit for consideration. For wehat it is worth...

Interesting proposal, but not sure it is a good idea, and this is why Say you do increase HP, so things gets better, but reducing the damage resistance cap may not seem much of an issue when you are engaging one or two.... but sadly there is a but! When you take the good ole brute farming, they are taking on about a over a dozen mobs, and they are getting hit, and with reduced damage resistance, the modest increase in hp will not last long under those conditions. As a result, in my opinion, the Brute would be less survivable because the hit point lass per round is greater than the gain in regeneration and possibly in that very same round the loss of hit points could be greater than the increase of hitpoints..

By now many, for better or worse, have seen posts by me asking for change which could be viewed as good, bad or indifferent. My Systems Engineer's view of a sense of balance can be easily go along Newton's law of physics "For every action there must be a reponse of equal magnitude in the opposite direction" It is not a bad rule of thumb to follow for just abut anything you design and to be mindful of. So when I look at this game there are attacks, which comes in various flavors, and thus under Newtons' law of physics there must be a corresponding defense, resistance, and protection. Why is this important? When I began many, many years ago, I played Dark Age of Camelot which is a very good PvP game at the time, unfortunately the faction distrubution in the server was heavely unbalanced, thus the developers decided to achieve battlefield balance to make up for numbers to give the minority faction especial attacks that came to given players "I Win" buttons. Of course if you were the player with the I Win button that was great, if you were in the receiving side, it was not so good. The "I Win" buttons were so powerful that no one could conceive a good tactic to overcome them with the exception of a mass surge to the overpowered oponents, within a month, I terminated my account with DAOC and began playing CoH. So if you observe at many of my posts I have been honestly snipping here and there at symptons to a problem I see in my opinion. So in this post what I am trying to do is to establish a context. In the game there are in general three forms of attacks: Damage, Status Effects, and Debuffs So we have have an action: Attack, There must be a reaction just as significant to have balance. In a balanced world the reaction would be composed of Defense (avoid being hit which is balanced by the attack's accuracy which helps you hit), Protection (think of true armor) and resistance (damage mitigation, under armor padding) With the above in mind, lets take a look at the three attacks from an overall all archtypes perspective in the most conservative manner (that is take the hardest requirement, and don't go with the one class exception has it thus there is no problem) Damage: 1) Defense available except when attack is non-positional in nature thus breaks the Attack accuracy and dodge balance 2) Protection as in true armor platting concept not available, possibly an unbalance situation, need to look at big picture before making a resolution 3) Resistance is available against all attacks, yet pragmatic resistance to Psionic and Toxic is not present and thus an unbalance. Past this unbalance the concept that resistance can go as high as 90% can mitigate the lack of protection. Note 1: The various archtypes havfe different magnitudes or caps to resistance, which is fine as long as it is not binary (some has it and other does not) and they do make sense from an archtype perspective. Examples based on MIDS analysis for instance Tanks have a 90% resistnce cap, while I noted that Defenders have a 70% resistance cap which is fine, would be nice to see the resistance caps published, to allow further analysis. Status Effects: 1) Defense available except when attack is non-positional in nature thus breaks the Attack accuracy and doge balance 2) Protections is binary in nature, thus pragmatically unbalanced in a sense. Tanks for instance enjoy MAG 12 which is rather good, while Brutes and Scrappers enjoy MAG 8, other archtypes have zero; this does not make sense from a balance for those archtypes do not follow Nweton's law, I would suggest a MAG 4 protection to be more in line that follows the numerical sequence (12/8/?) and still observes the differences between the archtypes. 3) Resistance is available to all archtypes, for some it is easier to raise than others, but it is fine from an archtype differentiation perspective. Psionic and toxic resistance acquisition is much more difficult than the others and could possibly be viewed as unbalanced. Why give PvEs and some Archtype classes "I Win" buttons? Debuffs: 1) Defense is available except when attack is non-positional in nature thus breaks the Attack accuracy and dodge balance 2) Protection is unexistent, potentially very unbalanced 3) Resistance is unexistent, combined with absence of protections, there is a clear unbalance. Note: I have noted that some mobs seem to have a resistance or be impervious to debuffs, not positive if this statement is true but it is just a feeling so it does not truly count. Suggestions: Debuffs should have a mag value, just like status effects, and archtypes should have debuff protection as described in status effect section of this post. Would suggest to keep matters simple that "Hold" status protection could be used as the means to protect from both holds and debuffs. Taking this a step forward, use the "Hold" resistance as the means to mitigate the effects of both holds and debuffs A final observation, the use of a band-aid approach is not really acceptable to regain balance, for example using inspirations as a band-aid is not good design and breaks the entire concept that inspirations are there for that emergency moment that seldom happens as opposed to the must have it in order to survive every single battle an archtype may enter in. I have mixed feelings on the use of power pools as a solution to unbalance situations, but coding wise may be the most practical way to go about it, of course this article may result with major reqork or updates of the pool powers. Please think of the concept I am trying to explain, and please contribute constructively to this concept. It is great if proposals on how to solve a problem or two can be made that have easier implementations, etc. Thank you

I feel your pain, but yet in an ideal world, yet because we are not in ideal world it does not mean we should not strive for perfection... Every form of attack should have a form of defense and protection, in my opinion that is a true balance. The moment exclusions or exceptions occur the chance for an unbalance in the game to occur becomes rather likely, the game is so complex it pretty much guarantees it. It does not matter if the attack is a status effect, debuff, or plain damage the recipient of the attack should have "defense" to avoid being struck by the effect and "protections" to mitigate the effect regardless of archtype. I do support the levels of defense and protections should vary between Archtypes, but they do not need to be binary in nature but shades of gray. Take status effect protections for example, either you have lots of it or none, which I think is inappropriate from a design stand point. While a tank has MAG 12 protection and Scraper/Brutes/Stalkers (samples) have 8, the rest have zero; this is a sample of binary thinking; why not let the support classes have MAG 4 protections? Think of the sequence 12/8/? obviously the next number in the sequence is 4. When it gets to Debuff, it is broken no doubt about that, player debuff attacks are usually a sub effect of an attack in most cases, thus you must have a "hit" component to the power and thus the victim have an opportunity to dodge the attack (defense) unless of course the attack is non-positional and the attack automatically hits (see what I mean about broken system?), then to make matters worse, the second half of the balance system does not exist at all, there are no protections similar to the MAG system for status effects nor resistances to reduce the degree of the debuff and its duration. I would support that debuffs should come with a MAG value and perhaps the same MAG defense system used for Status effects be utilized, thus a Tank would have a MAG 12 protection against debuffs, and would take a bunch of hits to add up beyond 12. Resistances to Debuff could be arbitrarely matched to a particular resistance that already exists, for example a psioninc attack with a debuf would be resisted by psionic resistance, and dark could be resisted by energy resistance for example. But I do acknowledge there is some ferocious coding ahead to balance out the world in this respect. In the same vein, Hold MAG protection could be used for debuff protection for example in order to reduce the large amount of coding and recoding...

Please read the context for the suggestion... You may have a different opinion then. Just saying

Awesome! Thank you

This is a Quality of Life suggestion I for one, and not alone, can be accused to be an ALT-O-Holic, is there a class and combo set, yeap, I am going to build it and raise it up. This said my main problem is that SGs have a limited number of character slots that can be a member of the supergroup. If I have 20 alts, and others to, the supergroup would only have like 5 players total, which defeats the purpose of having an SG. A solution to the problem maybe to increase the SG size to have several hundred membership, or do something else. Since I have so many alts, I created an SG for them so I can store stuff and share among my alts without using the email system, the real reason I did the base incidentally, and then do a coalition with the SG as a player want to "operationally" be in. The problem is that players in the SG talks in SG chat and not in coalition as a practice, so if I am playing one of my alts that are not in the SG, I do not get to hear and contribute to normal SG traffic. Thus the request, could there be a special say Coalition Plus arrangement, thus being able to read and write in the "host or main" SG, thus rendering the personal SG a bonafide extension of the main SG. Only a thought

Rune of protection is a new one for me, appreciate the advice, can you tell me more about it? is it an IO that any class could use? Sounds like an awesome solution to me. In general I don't have issues with debuffs, as long as they require a "to-hit" and are subject to resistance. Otherwise, you may be correct that I may object to those powers with the only difference being that I don't advocate, as suggested, to delete the powers but enforce a balance, in short for every attack there is must be a capable defense. Thanks for the advice

Mmm, thought the streak breaker number was 9 misses and then bang in the tenth you get a hit. If it takes 99 misses to get the 1 hit, then you are right, streak breaker is not a threat.

I recently generated a widow and find the class reasonably enjoyable. As I finally got her to 50, I began to play around with MIDS to find ways to make her more survivable. It was then to my horror that I learned that they have "Zero" resistance to all forms of attacks with the exception of Psionic. While they quickly achieve high levels of defense, they are going to be hit, if anything the streak breaker rules will make sure the hit does occur. When the dreaded hit does occur, it reall hurts, more than half of the their hit points go poof, the second hit will likely be lights out; to make matters worse, there are the non-positional attacks whuich are auto-hit that makes the issue even worse. Widows do not have like other classes a power that can click and get a boost of hitpoints or endurance, they do not even get accelerated regeneration either among their powers, ouch, that is harsh. When I looked at the epic powers, the widow could not choose from other pools only the patron ones, and not one has a resistance protection ability. I would happily would have gone for fire and get that plasma shield which would give me and assortment of resistances. Tough cost a lot of endurance and gives trivial resistance to lethal and smash only. I would suggest that one of the class inherent powers to provide resistance defense against all forms of damage, which can be slotted to at least give her a chance to achieve say 50% resistance to all forms of damage, this way she can take 4 hits before going down, and perhaps this added hit survivability give the class a chance to get out of the danger zone and heal up.

Saiyajinzoningen I hear you, and thanks for spell checking me, I tend to be phonetic when I type. Still I feel when a player goes to great lengths and influence cost to optimize a character, it is inherently wrong to have game mechanics that arbitrarely denies the effort. I only seek to have my perceived deficiency in those powers that effectively are auto-hit have thier auto-hit eliminated. As I indicated resistance is of very marginal value, for all it does is reduce the duration of a status effect, it doe snot provide real protection. Sappers are devastating to all classes, very good concept of endurance drain as an attack, my only objection to this is their auto-hit ability. While Incarnate powers can mitigate the effects of "auto-hit" powers, they are not present during a character's development. Not al players play characters with the intent to do incarnate material. Some just enjoy creating new concepts and leveling to 50, before they go to a new concept. There are those players, who actually try to enjoy the content and level as it was in the old days as opposed to use fast leveling TFs such as Death From Below, and then thre are the AE farms... In this thread I am not advocating giving support classes any added survivability powers, just allow their defenses to actually work all the time. Thank you

In general the use of fly is to get you from one mission to another, it has nearly no practical use when within a mission, for that you would use hover. In the old days, there was a common courtesy practice for all team members waiting for their team mates to enter the mission before clearing the map, now some as soon as they get in, they get down to business and often those with slow travel powers or not as experienced in the ways of inter map travel miss a good portion of the exp to be gaiend and in some occassions the stealther got to the clicky and clicked it before their team mates got to the location. Because of the above, is mainly the reason I sought a faster fly power, the purchasable flight is much faster, and I am yet to hear cries or complaints on how unbalanced that is. The truth is that the purchase flight is about the right speed to allow the game to be enjoyable and prevent the travel time from turning the mission from fun to boring. As it is for my fire/axe tanker with 10 toggles, I decided to buy the vendor fly despite of the detoggles, focused on getting combat jump for the knockback protection (I can slot an anti-knockback IO there and a stealth too!) Between my mission teleport, and the vendor flight I get to the mission with the rest of the group, and as the inconsiderate ones go to town killing the mobs in the map, I spend the time bringing my toggles up while the rest of the team assembles. If those who were to rude to wait for the rest dies, I chalk it to poetic justice, there is a reason the TFs are group events.

This is a request more in the lines to aid support class survivability. It is common wisdom that for a support class to survive in the high level battlefield that "Defense" is a prime consideration, after all if you can't be hit - you don't die In general support classes do not haves no overall protections against status effects (such as holds) and modest resistance to damage, yet the poor widows have zero resistance to all damages but psionic, talking about a glass jaw! Making Defense a critical element for in the battlefield survivability. In general support class can get modest resistance to status effects, but the problem is that the best they can hope to achieve is reducing the duration of the status effect by half, which gives the mob plenty of time to close in and kill the player, so resistance is not really an effective choice. Through the use of IO sets, the player can achieve reasonably high defense values to reduce the odds of being hit significantly, and thus becoming survivable and becoming more reliable to perform their support functions. So far defense works well, but when they are attack for instance by a Rickti Mentallist whose hold attack is non-positional, it becomes for all practical purposes and auto-hit! Rendering the player's huge investment in IOs useless. Same true is for the infamous Zapper, another guy that just auto hits. In many ways having mobs or players with powers like this in my opinion unbalances the game. So could it be possible to ammend the powers that do not have positionals, to be positional such as the Rickti Mentalist to be a ranged attack hold? Thank you Ps: I know that some incarnate powers can mitigate the hold fest that Rickti spams so well, but it is not an honest or full solution to the inbalance, for instance what incarnate actually would provide protection from the zapper?

Why force a player to essentially waste a slot for a knockbac to knockdown? Why not add the option in the Options section? Just like we can have teleport ask us if we want to be transported. The player should have a choice in the matter, in real life we do, so why not in the game? I can seldom see a melee type ever wanting knockback, while blasters would want knockback when soloing but never when in a team for very obvious reasons. There has to be a mechanism to be able to go back and forth, and using the IO system simply does not meet the criteria.

Not quite, but they should have respectable DPS, Tankers for instance where not originally not intended to have dps as a balance for their awesome armor and protections. With the IO set and Incarnates my tanker can hardly be accused of not having moderate or better DPS now days. What I seek is a balance with different shades of grey and not just black and white. Thus you have a range of DPS from decent to extraordianry, instead of nearly non-existent in the case of controllers. The game has addressed resistance and defense for most classes thru the new epic set of powers for example, a move in the right direction of giving protection shades of grey. Status protection is still mostly balck and white, I have proposed the lowest MAG protection for heroes/villains to be MAG 4, note that Scrapper types have 8 and Tankers like 12. Just trying to expand a bit, if you have shades of grey, soon any class could actually farm for example, of course some classes would be much better than others, but at least any class could it in reason.

I thought streak breaker was after 9 consecutive misses, its bingo we got a hit! It is done individually and not by group, so even with a group of 100, it would be 10 rounds before you are obliterated by design.