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

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 no

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 t

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 t

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

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

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 hav

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 i

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 th

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: So

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. Unles

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