BRADICAL

Thanks for the heads up! I'm feeling more optimistic about things now for sure.

I mean, playing at the recharge cap isn't even a factor when IO'd at 50, much less during the leveling process, so I have my sincere doubts about that. RoP is pretty underwhelming on SOs, overtuned or not.

THE DREAM.

I'm not sure the efficacy of these powers is directly comparable, because defense and resistance don't have the same inherent value across the board and definitely not to every character type, and I can't think of a single build that would even be able to benefit from a short-lived defense power like Unleash Potential in the first place. Defense is already heavily saturated everywhere else in the game, in other power pools and in set bonuses in a way that are all functionally superior to that power as it is. Full stop, both examples are just kinda bad, but that shouldn't be a reason to nerf a power that has already proven its worth (and with no real data to prove that this functionality was ever, as you put it, "insanely overpowered.") Strong numbers on paper don't always translate into overperformance in actual gameplay. I'm not saying RoP isn't an exceptional power in a very small number of cases, but there seems to be little reason to defend its nerfing without any evidence that the power was causing problems in the first place. And having played with it extensively in every single one of those cases I can think of, all I can really say it was ever doing was making things feel better for the underdog.

Personally, I'm of the belief that we should be creating more competitive options in the pools to force some actual hard decisions in the character building process. RoP already had that effect on several of my builds. I don't see how buffing the rest of sorcery is going to make it any more desirable to the characters that were previously interested in it, without one of the other powers also being survivability-oriented, so the idea that the one "good" power people actually wanted from the set had to get nerfed to bring the rest of it up to par doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. It's not like the speed pool isn't also full of incredibly niche powers and a single great one that I'm pretty sure is taken by a lot more than 5% of characters, and that power is immediately available in the set. Besides, like I said earlier, point-for-point Spirit Ward is actually an incredibly good power numerically, it's just that the mechanic is virtually meaningless to people. I think that just goes to show how broken the value of support powers actually is.

That's the problem I have with this too, and the larger discussion that it's opened up, because in CoH the "overpowered" ship sailed a long time ago and so any changes made to powers now that don't address the imbalanced nature of the game, on equal terms, might appear to be done arbitrarily. RoP is an example of a power that is statistically niche and yet it serves a very popular function within that niche. The Titan Weapons changes, by comparison, were healthy for the game and for the powerset in the long run: statistically, the set was an outlier, and in quite a few ways broken both in terms of effective damage output and how frustrating it was to make the set play optimally. Nerfing RoP on the other hand won't do anything at all to adjust any real imbalance in the game, because the imbalance lies with the archetypes that RoP is most commonly taken to emulate, and nerfing the equalizer only deepens that rift. The bigger issue here is that it isn't easy to bring the more powerful archetypes in line, because everyone is subject to the same rules when it comes to set bonuses and incarnate powers. The system just allows them to push their already strong foundation into orbit, while other archetypes are required to create a foundation out of the same bonuses. And in the end all that does is allows tankers to exist with near-capped everything, doing enormous amounts of damage with procs and hitting blaster levels of targets with shorter cooldowns, wider arcs and mez protection all at once. I'm not saying it's a horrible bad thing—tankers were always my favorite archetype, even before the buffs—but there's no denying that with the way the system works currently, tankers are at the very top of what is a totem pole dominated by every melee archetype thereafter. And to me it seems hard to justify nerfing anything that would disproportionately affect the small number of squishy archetypes that gain any real benefit from this power without addressing what the other archetypes have been capable of doing all along. And when things like procs are eventually on the chopping block next, defenders are again going to suffer disproportionately because without them, they feel absolutely abysmal to play no matter what content you're doing or whether you're in a team or solo. If would be disappointing to see the performance of procced-out tankers as the justification for that nerf, because even though I think it would be totally justified in that context, it would leave a lot of other archetypes hamstrung in the process.

I actually completely agree with this! The game works, for the most part, very comfortably on SOs where every archetype plays like it's supposed to and everyone has their own inherent value. As you start adding in set bonuses and incarnate powers, that value is disrupted, in some cases dramatically. But I make builds meant to handle +4/x8, and I play that content, because it's the way the game is currently designed. That doesn't mean I don't dabble in self-limiting or play builds that only shine in teams, but the high end has already been well established, and to me it's just part of what the game is.

For the most part, the existing structure and incarnate powers already make that entirely possible. I agree that the design philosophy of the archetypes themselves goes against that idea, but the global philosophy of the game being essentially a sandbox of building tools and incarnate powers at least allows for this sort of thing to happen. My only real argument here is that the nerf to RoP is affecting that minority of builds attempting to do exactly that, by using the tools available to them to build in ways that deviate from what the game expects of you. In my opinion, that's what makes CoH so unique. If RoP has to be nerfed specifically to rein in the builds that are deviating, I can understand that on a design level, but I've already stated how I feel about the discrepancies surrounding the system as a whole when these deviating builds were never overperforming in the first place. A team of 8 anything can reliably steamroll through most content if only by virtue of the outgoing damage being far in excess of what enemies are equipped to handle. A team of well-built blasters, for example, is basically just one nuke after the other, and that's just as functional as a team of scrappers tearing through everything, or tankers blasting through 16 targets very consistently with their high damage AoEs. As far as squishies go, I can't vouch for controllers on most teams like these, and support powersets rarely make any actual difference. With IOs and incarnate powers in mind, things are kind of a mess.

It isn't a judgement on the worthiness of anyone's playstyle as inferior; I see builds as numbers and sometimes silly ideas until they're put to the test and judged on the merits of their performance. I realize that the whole "non-viable" thing is rubbing people the wrong way and I apologize if that comes across as callous or elitist! My opinion in this case is very heavily skewed towards the far end of difficulty when making builds, where certain archetypes and powerset combinations are either very difficult or impossible to run comfortably when approaching that content in a solo setting. When I say non-viable, I mean that it isn't capable of approaching unstoppable murder machine territory, not that it's inherently flawed as a character concept or personal preference. Heck, Gravity is one of my favorite sets but its abysmal lack of AoE damage makes it non-viable to me in the context of soloing +4/x8. I still play it, but if I were to try and take it into a mission and pretend to be a scrapper, I'd be disappointed, because even though it's doable it feels like a chore. All that said, I actually prefer the way the game plays on SOs myself, mostly because I love the support sets in general and enjoy it when they're actually useful. That's why I go looking to build defenders and controllers in the first place, which already tend to underperform in any +4/x8 situation whether solo or in a team of similarly built characters who steamroll through everything before the activation time for your -res power even finishes. And nerfing RoP just makes those builds, which already have kind of a hard time and will suffer even more disproportionately whenever procs are the next thing on the chopping block, a little less viable to me.

By average I mean that it's more widely possible within the spectrum of what those archetypes have to offer, rather than the quality of the build being played by them. I would never suggest that playing any kind of sub-par build makes sense under those circumstances, only that they're far better equipped to make that push than any squishy characters attempting to reach for the same numbers are. The point there being that RoP is a pretty useful tool under those circumstances and its nerfing will only really affect the performance of the defender in this case, because melee builds already have plenty of options available to them to reach that level of survivability without relying on a niche power pool. I'm not saying the Time/X defender explicitly needs the power to function, either, but it is demonstrably more effective on them than any other archetype.

I agree that changing any foundational system in this game seems unrealistic at this point, not when you have to account for so many variables and risk the whole thing coming crashing down in the process. That's why I hesitate to propose any change to the way mez currently works. But to outright discourage that change goes against the spirit of what has already been accomplished with CoH, change that we once thought was impossible. Also, I disagree with the idea that we're still somehow laboring under the impression that heroes are equivalent to 3 even-con minions, or that set bonuses and incarnate powers exist outside the normal structure of the game and its operation. The game has evolved over time, but every archetype still has built-in caps that limit how much of any given thing they can have. Anyone can at the very least infer what impact any given power or effect might have in a wide variety of situations, including how for example a power like Fade might function on the high end, with a high recharge build and the sentiment that such a power should be perma-able because that's the expectation, with every other set as a precedent, for a support power with a long base recharge. That was a deliberate example of taking the IO system into account when designing powers. Similarly, the recharge of a power like RoP takes IOs into account as well, by virtue of it being astronomically high on SOs to prevent it from ever being perma-able. It's acknowledging that such things are possible within the game, and that it would be problematic to allow such a thing to happen, regardless of what impact that has on the power at the SO level. Fade is a significantly better power with set bonuses and a high recharge build. Most of the buffs and debuffs in support sets are. To say that these were designed without ever taking into account the full spectrum of what is possible in the game is simply untrue. This extends throughout the majority of the character building process. Hyperbolic language aside, I've made my perspective clear to those willing to hear it. If soloing +4/x8 content (the "maximum difficulty", as far as this game is concerned) is possible within the limitations of the system given to us, then there will be people who do that, and those people are as affected by changes to the structure of the game as anyone else. RoP getting nerfed in this way will most notably affect the performance of my squishy builds that leveraged the power to more comfortably deal with that extreme end of the difficulty spectrum, where melee ATs are already in the meta and won't be affected by this particular change much if at all by comparison. It's valid feedback. For as long as it remains possible to push high end builds and solo +4/x8 content, there will be people who do it, and playing at any difficulty level less than that isn't part of the equation because it would be conceding that the build is non-viable. And if a build is non-viable, you rework it until it's better or you move on to something else. My defenders are taking a hit to their high survivability uptime. Yes, this is in the context of soloing at +4/x8, something that melee builds have been able to do free of charge for a long time. I'm not complaining that defenders should be able to do the same thing; that's entirely within the hands of the powers-that-be, and what they determine is the fair course of action. What I am doing is explaining that these discrepancies exist in the first place, and that this change will make that very small percentage of builds less viable than they already were. Feel free to disagree with me for my playstyle preferences (which I confess, I haven't ever shared outside of my very specific feedback about soloing +4/x8 content on builds designed to do so), but be careful that disagreement doesn't start to look like some kind of personal attack. It's not lending much to what is otherwise a pretty informative discussion so far.

The game is already easy. The problem is that it's disproportionately in favor of certain archetypes, and has been for a very, very long time. Calling attention to that discrepancy isn't the same as demanding that every underperforming archetype be made overpowered all at once, or even that they should be on the receiving end of changes that would ultimately facilitate that. The problem goes deeper, because (blasters aside, I really can't defend the state they're in at all) these archetypes do have powersets that should have more value than they currently do. That's a larger problem with the way the game works and how much power you can squeeze out of the system, and it's unlikely to change in any meaningful way that wouldn't cause a ton of drama among other players. Support sets work on the low end. Being squishy is fine there, and controllers even make sense on teams running only on SOs. Nobody is pushing the limits or breaking the game by being more valuable than their peers, because most of the power is derived from the powers. In this situation, RoP is an extra break free and might give you a little more breathing room, but the recharge is already too prohibitive to make it anything other than an occasional gimmick. Go higher and higher and the squishy archetypes begin to see less value in their entire powerset choices. For all the powers a controller has in their primary and secondary sets, very few of them are actually useful here, where a procced out single target hold is one of the best things you can hope for unless you're Plant. Buffs, debuffs and control are all reduced to a novelty, and I don't think I've ever used an actual heal power from a support set in +4/x8 content. Certain squishy characters still have options available to them to push the limits of what they're capable of—RoP being one of the more infamous choices here—that can be layered with some of the solo-friendly advantages of support sets, hybrid melee, procs and a few other things to create the facsimile of a functioning character: by which I mean to say, an unstoppable murder machine. But a true unstoppable murder machine they are not, because they require constant vigilance and have gaps in their performance, not to mention worse damage. And the tradeoff for these disadvantages doesn't apply here, because there is no value in them. Still, I concede that this game is largely impossible to balance in its current state, because the massive differences in power don't scale at the same rate across every possible level of building. For example, a level 36 Time/X defender can comfortably slot and boost Farsight on just SOs, becoming immensely valuable to a team also playing at that level or limited to SOs. This same degree of power becomes largely redundant at 50 with set bonuses and incarnate powers, which are a fundamental part of the game, and so the defender's usefulness becomes largely based around what else they can do, and the same system that allows a tanker to become an unstoppable murder machine has so far allowed that defender to become, well, sort of decent. There are no tactics that will save you if you're getting mezzed while standing in the middle of a +4/x8 spawn. You aren't jousting these groups or pulling them around corners. Most of the time, you aren't even fighting them at range, because the distinction is largely meaningless. The entire point of a strong build is to be able to survive in situations like this, to be able to survive the hardest possible difficulty without actually faceplanting. A build that has to run away or use onerous tactics in these very specific cases is non-viable. For builds playing at lower difficulties, not leveraging the power of set bonuses and incarnate powers, this logic doesn't apply. Otherwise, it's pretty clear-cut, and the only disagreement then is about whether or not it should be possible for a defender to do the same thing that the average tanker or scrapper can do without breaking a sweat, because we've come a long way from the opinion that soloing +4/x8 in itself is overpowered; it's merely what the system allows you to do, love it or hate it.

They can already get mez protection 100% of the time, it's just annoying to maintain it for any number of reasons and RoP makes things like this easier. My argument is that outside of the written design of how each archetype should function (fundamentally at odds with how the game is played), there is no reason why a power like RoP can't be allowed to exist in order to bridge the enormous gaps in actual performance. It has opened up a larger and more complicated discussion, but there's zero evidence to suggest that RoP in its current state was ever doing more harm than good. ADDENDUM: Sorcery also isn't exactly a terrible set in itself. Spirit Ward is actually an enormous amount of effective regen, moreso if you boost it. The problem is that support powers like this are severely undervalued, but it's still substantially better than most "ally heal" powers in the game both in terms of its raw magnitude and effect, outclassing a lot of primary defender powers in the process. But again, there's no value in a single target heal power in this game, so we don't analyze that as closely. Enflame isn't terrible either, but it is terribly bugged, and unless the attack powers in the pools suddenly change Arcane Bolt is pretty much just a given.

Squishy archetypes only begin to approach the damage output of melee archetypes when you factor in procs. Blasters are largely redundant, especially now that tanker AoE caps are at 16. Even the best controllers have poor AoE damage output, and if they aren't outright slowing things down, they're going slower by themselves than most other ATs trying to do the exact same thing. This would all be justified, if the buffing/debuffing/controlling powers themselves had any actual meaning, but like I said before the game just doesn't work like that once you plug in set bonuses and incarnates. Unless you're playing at lower difficulty levels or forcing yourself to play in teams that only slot SOs, those powers are all a novelty at best. There is simply no direct, equitable comparison to justify the status quo when you account for the disparity in power that the game allows you to build towards. That it is disproportionately in favor of the melee archetypes is a discussion prompted by this nerf to RoP, a statistically niche power itself that brings some measure of balance to the bigger picture here, but it's still terribly broken at its core. Balance isn't about whether +4/x8 is possible or not (it always is), it's about how easy it is to achieve that level of performance within the limitations of your archetype, powerset, set bonuses and incarnate powers. The game has encouraged this for a very long time now. Given that we have a pretty clear understanding of what everyone's defense, resistance, and recharge values tend to hover around in the end, it's impossible not to account for things like the overall efficacy of buff powers and the effect recharge has on their permanency. But different archetypes operate on very different ends of the same system that is, for the most part, pushing them all towards the same goal. That is the problem.

I'm not trying to prove that. I fully agree that RoP is a high value choice for anyone in the same niche position as something like a Time/X defender looking to rotate their defenses in order to become survivable in a way that many other archetypes don't have to do in order to achieve what is often worse performance than those who can do this without breaking a sweat, and I'm confident that this position is well understood by the powers-that-be. What we may disagree upon is whether a defender should be capable of it at all, versus something like a tanker or scrapper. Either way, the system is there to push the limits, and a fire farm isn't exactly the hardest thing to tackle but it does serve as a reasonable baseline for how well you can soak up damage consistently. Soloing a +4/x8 fire farm is still entirely possible without RoP (and even moreso with RoP merely nerfed in duration) under these circumstances, to clarify; it's just less comfortable, and does more to push things towards the melee meta than they already were.