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No Roy Orbison? Kill Orb Be Killed? One Way Orb Another? Disorbpointing.

That kind of design doesn't belong in this game. And if your redesign is so complicated that it mandates players undergo a hand-holding session to untangle it, it's not simple.

I'm allowed to be concise and direct once or twice a year. Ask the mods!

No.

It's Co*. There's always a butt.

https://cod.uberguy.net/html/entity.html?entity=redcaps_jack_in_irons <-Normal Jack in Irons https://cod.uberguy.net/html/entity.html?entity=event_jack_in_irons <-Event Jack in Irons The only difference shown between them is the internal level range (normal Jack is 25-34, event Jack is 18-54), and normal Jack is Raid tagged (bonus effects for some archetypes).

What's your proposal for maintaining the economy when pack prices are reduced? They're the largest inf* sinks in the game and provide a significant stabilization effect on the economy. They can't simply be price-slashed without a corresponding sink of equivalent value and expected use. So what are you going to sell, and be certain people will buy, to compensate?

I play non-standard characters. Petless mastermind. Petless dominator with only two controls used frequently (Possess and Fearsome Stare). Melee sentinels. So if I do find myself thinking I could do what someone else is doing better, they really have to be screwing the pooch. But I wouldn't comment on it, because I also know I can be humbled at any moment. I'm not perfect. I'm not exceptional. I'm not the best, or the smartest, or the wisest. I assume there's always someone better, smarter, more capable. Moreover, I'm not the one playing that player's character, or using that character's build, so I'm in no position to say what he/she could or should be doing. If he/she is enjoying it, that's reason enough to keep my nose out of his/her business. My foot belongs in enemy faces, not in my own mouth.

Eden. All of the hazard zones still have electricity going to them (visit any of them at night, you'll see the windows light up in buildings, even the half-destroyed buildings), and plenty of standing structures in which one can squat. It's not like civvies are going to come knocking on the door, demanding rent or payment for utilities or cups of sugar, which ensures isolation and serenity. So I'd move into a Crey building in Eden and use the sci/tech goodies to set up comfortable bunker (reverse osmosis water filtration, aquaponic garden, heat, light). Outside, I have a forest to enjoy, and it's even filled with targets I can use to stay in shape. Just need some cats and it's home.

I agree, it's broken. It hasn't removed my costume once. Goddamn power can't even take off one of my boots. USELESS.

So you've basically just deleted SOs and renamed IOs, in an unnecessarily convoluted way. The exemplar system already does that. A reduction in enhancement strength is applied when a character is exemplared. The lower the level exemplared to, the greater the reduction. The total reduction does go slightly below what a native level enhancement would provide at the exemplared level, but that's intentional, a balance measure to account for the greater number of slots available to the exemplared character. The basic enhancement boosts themselves, such as Damage, or Accuracy, or Endurance Reduction, are never completely disabled. Only set bonuses are shut off when a exemplared below a power's availability. Even though the power itself might not be usable, slotted enhancements will still provide boosts to that power. So this entire subsection is unnecessary. I'm not going to go any further. You're proposing a complete redesign of the enhancement system without a corresponding rebalance of the game to account for it. That's not going to happen. The game is, still, balanced around SOs, because SOs provide the baseline for development expectations. That 33.3% that a +0 SO provides is key to creating a playable experience. Trying to redesign critters around 19.2% at this level and 36.7% at that level, fiddling with their HP and powers and creating new critters and powers to fill gaps, would be a massive amount of work. It takes our boys and girls on the HC team several months to create a few missions with a handful of new critters or revamped old critters. Redoing the entire game around a new enhancement system would take them years, and they wouldn't be fixing bugs or working on new content in that period. Unless you're volunteering to spend the next several years doing all of the balance work to make this functional, in which case, go for it. Some of us will still be here in 2035, when you're finished. Oh, hang on, I do see one more thing that I want to address... Nope. Diversity comes from choice, not restriction. I choose to pursue certain set bonuses, like +Movement, because I want to. Take away the ability to make that choice and you don't encourage me to diversify my slotting, you take away a reason to play. I play Co* because it offers me the option to create my characters my way, and set bonuses play a big part of that. Start locking me out of choices and I'm not going to try to find different sets, I'll find a different game.

I don't know of any games which use a true random number generator, all of them, including this one, use a pseudo-random number generator. PRNGs only give the appearance of randomness. It's more accurate to call them number generators with somewhat randomized results, than random number generators. They create results which are statistically random, but not truly random. In large samples, PRNGs display deterministic outputs. Meaning, patterns. In this image, you see true random number generation plotted as points on the left. On the right, an image generated with results from a PRNG. This is how Co*'s RNG works. This is why it streaks. The streak breaker addresses a single aspect of the pseudo-randomness, forcing hits after X rolls at Y hit chance, but it doesn't address things like drops, or non-sequential deterministic results (such as having an attack miss, continuing to cycle through your attack chain, and having the same attack miss again when you return to it, and that sequence repeating on the third cycle, the fourth, et fucking cetera (yeah, that shit really does get under my skin)). I don't know if it's due to the narrow output range (00.00 - 100.00), or the seed itself, but streakiness in this game is definitely "a thing", and it's not limited to hit rolls. So yes, your drops can be terrible, or incredible, and then suddenly turn around, because you're on or off of a streak.

A C R U M M Y C O M M E R C I A L S O N O F A B I T C H

I use my hands. I can't find a working neural interface, and I'm shite at writing with my other appendages.

That still doesn't mean it's invalid. It was an impersonal comment which was no more an attack than asking a server in a restaurant if he/she can break a $20 constitutes an inquiry into his/her personal finances. You're overly sensitive. I finally understand why you focused on Soldiers of Arachnos now. I thought it was a really odd choice, since a single Kin can do more, but you showed your hand this round. 14x Assault, always on, always active. You're discounting everything in the game that doesn't meet that stricture, which is, effectively everything except Assault and SoA Assault. Build Up, nukes, Fortitude, FS, Siphon Power, teammates, inspirations, all of the click +Damage buffs in the entire game, it's all meaningless to you because it's not 100% permanent, 0.0 seconds down time, absolutely assured +Damage without active input. You want brutes to be balanced in a vacuum in which no click buffs exist, no teammates exist, nothing but the brute and his/her Fury bar. The fact that all of these other buffs do exist, that they would put brutes so far over the top that it would be insane, is irrelevant. I guarantee that no developer, now or in the future, will consider that. Ever. Now you're saying that brutes need Incarnate buffs in order to hit their Damage cap? If you move that goal post any further, you'll need another planet to stand it up on. Whichever /tell came first. That's my honest answer, and it's not an evasion. This isn't a trinity game. No-one needs a tanker or a brute. Neither tankers nor brutes are essential to the success of any team. I proved that in I5 when I tanked AVs and GMs, successfully, with a defender, with no Defense, no Resistance and no status protection. Supergroups like Repeat Offenders, Green Machine, Fruit Salad, Pinball Wizards ran things on every one of the original servers every night, without a single tank or brute, and they wrecked shit. Of equal importance, eight players all going banana balls with attacks so grossly overshadows any difference between tanker and brute damage that it's meaningless. It's not even a notable difference in comparison to the overall output of the entire team. What, 0.7%? Maybe 1%? I'm supposed to pull out a calculator and spreadsheet and base a decision on that, when we'll all be hammering things so hard and fast that we need a better word than "overkill" to describe it? As long as the player is contributing, I'm not going to base any decision on a variable so small in the big picture that it takes a goddamn microscope to find it. I don't care what other people play or bring to a team, because I know the mechanics and I know it always works out, as long as people are having fun.

Target cap 10. Not 1. 10. 15% (mastermind FS) * 10 = 150% 20% (controller/corruptor FS) * 10 = 200% 25% (defender FS) * 10 = 250% 150-250% +Damage with FS. That's not including the buff around the Kin (another 30-50%), which is applicable if said Kin is within 20' of the melee character. Now. It wasn't niche when hyper-inflation prevented many players from using set IOs, ATOs didn't exist, converters didn't exist, catalysts didn't exist, Winter sets didn't exist, Incarnate abilities didn't exist... or even later, when some of these things were available, but locked behind pay walls and exorbitant reward merit costs. Back in the day, having a Bio nuke on hand wasn't niche, it was normal, because they are powerful buffs (400% Regeneration, 150% Damage) and people running around with builds using yellow SOs and franken-slotted set IOs found it very handy. TF? Bring nukes. Hydra? Bring nukes. Kronos? Bring nukes. Terra Volta? Bring nukes. It's niche now because the healthy economy, removal of pay walls and drastic reduction in merit costs have given all of us a laissez-faire attitude. We don't get nukes because we don't need them and acquiring them is "work"... but that doesn't mean using them isn't a valid tactic. The purpose of mentioning them wasn't to sidestep a restriction or cobble together a solution, but to point out that not only does it not require any specific combination of teammates for a brute to hit his/her damage cap, it doesn't even require one support character. Anyone can do this. Everyone can do this. That you don't, that I don't, doesn't mean it can't, isn't or shouldn't be done, or that doing it isn't an acceptable tactic. It's a team buff available to everyone, and it serves as a reminder that it doesn't take seven Soldiers or Arachnos, or seven Emps, or seven Thermals, or whatever, to buff a brute's damage. All it takes is brains. But sure, call it niche. The way I slotted the Fury proc is niche, too, but as is evident in the screenshots I posted, it's clearly the superior slotting approach. Dismissing something that works simply because it's not en vogue is foolish and self-defeating.

You put way too much work into trying to create that specialized team. Team with one Kinetics character. One FS is 150-250% +Damage, depending on the archetype, and that's just FS. Siphon Power is a team buff, too. Or get a nuke. Two players with Warburg Bio nukes can cap an entire team's damage for 5 minutes, including brutes, and with 8 teammates, that's 20 minutes of everyone being at the cap.

I listed pictures of @Snarky and they're not selling. GODDAMN WIZARDS!

I did not. I said brutes have a 700% Damage cap and tankers have a 500% Damage cap, and at their respective caps, the brute deals more damage. I presented no scenarios, I simply pointed out the numbers. You and @Rudra are the ones throwing out situations, all of which appear to be deliberate attempts to portray brutes as struggling weaklings who are overshadowed by tankers. No -Res for the brute, insisting that brutes can't hit their Damage cap without some kind of miracle team... Don't lay that at my feet. I'm correcting the misinformation I see, not twisting the facts to make an archetype look bad. Speaking of which... 275% is +Damage, not the total. 100% base plus 180% from 90% Fury plus 95% from Damage enhancements = 375%. Discounting any other factor, doing nothing more than adjusting your figure to account for the base 100% Damage, the brute is at 585% in your hypothetical team. If you substitute any tanker for the brute on that team, he/she is over-buffed by 85%. His/her Build Up/Soul Drain/Rage/whatever is useless, whereas the brute still has 115% head room before hitting his/her Damage cap. This means the brute can still benefit from those other powers, like Build Up. Just Build Up would put the brute at 665%, a mere 35% short of the cap. Maxing out Fury would reduce that gap to 15%. Yes, it takes more than a single small Rage inspiration to hit that 700% cap, but Fury provides up to +200%, enhancements are good for another +95% (~128% if using Musculature Core Paragon), almost every primary has Build Up or a comparable Damage buff, so they don't actually need 600% +Damage, they only need ~200-225%. And it doesn't take a special team to do that. It's not as complicated or unusual as you make it out to be.

Yeah, I totally don't get why flooding the market with an item would cause the price to drop either. It must be sorcery! A FUCKING WIZARD DID IT!

250.95 (capped, per @Rudra's post) * 3 (300% -Res (capped)) = 752.85 291.97 (ditto) * 3 (also capped, cap is 300% for all archetypes) = 875.91 You were saying? No, please, go on, continue explaining how the brute's higher damage cap is irrelevant because of -Res making tankers hit harder. I'm dying to see where you go with this. And the brute on the same team will also benefit from the same -Res. You're not even comparing apples to oranges at this point, it's stove pipes to potted ferns. Deliberately manufacturing a scenario in which one character is denied access to the same tools as another character doesn't prove anything, except that you're terrible at proving things. Stop. I want to respect you in the morning, and if this goes any further, I won't.

+Damage buffs aren't exclusive to any archetype or character. Controllers, defenders, masterminds, corruptors and Soldiers of Arachnos, more than one third of all archetypes, can buff +Damage. Anyone with Assault or Vengeance can buff +Damage. Half of the Lore pets buff +Damage. This is a huge part of the complaints from players of support archetypes over the past couple of years, everyone can do everything, without specialized team compositions.

You mean exactly the same IOs and *PP powers brutes has access to, which allow brutes to exceed their cap as well? The options are identical across archetypes (Energy Mastery is the only *PP with a variance, tankers have Conserve Power, brutes have Superior Conditioning, neither can be slotted with -Res procs, so it's irrelevant in this context). The brute still has the higher Damage cap, higher damage at the Damage cap and, thus, higher overall damage when equivalent -Res is factored.