BRADICAL

All ATs can solo at +4/x8, with hugely variable ease in building for that and quality of life in actually playing it. The IO system is designed to allow your character to function without other team members, and it actually serves to further and further invalidate the usefulness of the support ATs. It was never about it being easy for them to solo, but it is at least possible to do so, even if it is sub-optimal at best. Not to derail from the RoP discussion, but a high-end tanker build has very little room to benefit from buffs. My Dark/Dark tanker is sitting very comfortably on both the defense softcap, 90% res to all, and with permanent Soul Drain has only a little wiggle room for additional damage bonuses. Recharge buffs are virtually meaningless here, because once you have an established attack rotation and your buffs are permanent, it isn't doing anything for you. This situation can be emulated using several other builds, because the value of things like +def, +tohit, +dmg, and +rech fall off dramatically once you have enough of it. Any debuff that isn't -res works the same way. Most, if not all characters, build to have enough defense, accuracy, and recharge that outside buffs are rarely as impactful as they would be on SOs. That is the standard by which the IO system plainly functions. And RoP does very little to interfere with any of this, except to allow those characters who on the high end have already stacked recharge, defense, and sustain to benefit from the fourth pillar of good build practice in a way that is at least semi-permanent. My Dark/Dark tanker has absolutely zero use for this. An SR/X tanker on the other hand can definitely benefit, but doesn't really need to. A Time/X defender relies on it. Does using RoP make the Time/X defender overpowered by comparison? Far from it, in my experience.

This is the game design flaw that baffles me. If we can make builds that allow the vast majority of archetypes to ignore other game mechanics and completely invalidate the functionality of entire powersets, why is there any upset over a handful of archetypes having realistic options available to them to achieve the same level of protection? On the high end, the buffs and debuffs from any of my Time/X defenders are completely redundant. It's a solo-friendly support set, offering very little to any other well built character who isn't lacking in defense, recharge, or healing. The other support sets are several varying degrees of worse off. The inherent squishiness seems to be designed around the philosophy that the character's powers are somehow more valuable than that of a tanker, but in practice, this isn't true at all. For controllers even less so, because the entire point of controlling things is to prevent damage that the tanker is virtually immune to in the first place. But the tanker can also heal itself, cap its defenses, ignore the blue bar and build towards having enough recharge and damage bonuses that the majority of support powers have very little if any effect on them that matters. Most other archetypes with armor sets can achieve this level of soloability, while simultaneously devaluing the inherent design philosophies of the archetypes struggling to emulate their performance. On the lower end, this all works out fine, but on the higher end, removing viable options to build towards parity only serves to widen an already insurmountable gap.

We do know all of this information, because it's given to us in the form of archetype caps and the current amount of power you can squeeze out of the IO system, when it's used optimally. But everything has a cap, whether it's a soft functional one like defense, or hard ones like resistance or HP. The powers that exist to complement that system, like RoP and even Hasten, influence what holes you can plug in any given build to approach those caps. When it comes to making high-end builds, then, the balance lies not in the ability to solo +4/x8 content (this is an expectation), but in how easy it is to do so with the tools offered by your archetype, power sets and pool choices. RoP was never overpowered on the lower end. The base recharge is way too long, and squishy archetypes would never be able to leverage any amount of resistance with their 75% cap and low max HP. Combined with a build optimized towards defense, high resistance, and recharge, it becomes a functional part of the survival kit that is still fundamentally worse than that of a tanker, brute, scrapper, VEAT, etc. Which is a point that once again bears repeating: the main use of RoP has been to bring parity to the archetypes that struggle for realistic defensive options, and nerfing it does nothing at all to address that much wider imbalance in the game. It just serves to make it even less optimal to solo on those squishy archetypes than it already was, while leaving the rest unscathed.

The problem there lies in the imbalanced nature of the game: there are plenty of archetypes that can comfortably build to survive in situations like that, and the sacrifices they have to make to do so pale in comparison to what a blaster would have to sacrifice to do the same. That's ignoring the fact that a blaster would still underperform in that situation, even in terms of damage output. RoP, at least, helps to bridge the gap a little in that regard. People make builds in this game specifically to overcome challenges like that. With the way the IO system functions, it's the entire point: to subvert game mechanics and shore up the inherent weaknesses in an archetype. It's far easier to do that with some archetypes than other ones. But in the end, the top builds are steamrolling everything the game has to offer because that's what the system allows you to do. Any disruption to that paradigm, especially one that would disproportionately affect the builds that already struggle to find competitive options, is going to be received poorly.

I think we all understand that CoH is fundamentally flawed. The archetypes are themselves imbalanced against one another to the point of redundancy when paired side-by-side, we've been able to build unstoppable murder machines for the majority of the game's lifespan, and several mechanics that should be core to actual gameplay are phased out by virtue of a well functioning build. Recharge breakpoints ensure that your buffs and debuffs are permanent. There are a half-dozen different ways to build without paying attention to the blue bar at all. Healing and defensive support from support sets is virtually meaningless on the high end. Arguing that something like RoP is overpowered in a situation where it is functional is dismissing the fact that it remains a choice only for those who actually need it. We make builds to circumvent the limitations of the game all the time. A well built tanker has zero need for a single other person in the team: they cover their own defenses, healing, endurance, and still do very high damage on top of being walking, permanent soft control auras. The current game design and its limitations, then, is in favor of tankers. A full team running maneuvers is already softcapped to everything. One really dedicated guy can throw Injection on everybody and solve the whole mez problem. This is all normal, expected, and remarkably easy to achieve in even the most sub-optimal of circumstances. The problem is that RoP gives those squishier archetypes a solo-friendly option that brings them up to the level of those archetypes who have it handed to them. The solution to a flaw, not the cause of one. In actual gameplay, blasters have few advantages over tankers to justify their severe handicaps. Controllers have zero. There are no significant abilities that matter here, and it's not as if a Sonic/X defender is going around feeling particularly overpowered having Sonic Dispersion toggled on. It's a deeply complicated design flaw that has caused this (IOs really do be like that), and encouraged the perception that a power like RoP (which, numerically, should appear to be overpowered) is the crutch, not the meta.

I'm definitely not happy with the idea of lowering the resistance component either, but I can at least understand the justification for that in light of its performance in the handful of cases where it is exceptionally strong (SR tankers, widows, and frankly most defenders getting a whopping 40% res all out of it). Whether that is in itself overpowered or merely serves to level the playing field with characters that have native access to that level of resistance (and have no use for RoP as a result) is debatable. Cutting that buff in half would sting, but I tend to run most of my squishy characters with every inspiration turned off except the orange ones anyway, and I'd probably just see myself popping a couple more often than usual. Besides that, it would line up more evenly with the +res from melee at that point anyway. Significantly less annoying than plugging wider mez protection holes with break frees.

The solutions are inelegant and dismissive of a fundamental problem. Break frees, defense amps and Clarion are the other widely available options here, and they're all either annoying to maintain, an outright tax on your gameplay or require you to be level 50 and sacrifice what could otherwise be a more useful destiny power. Either way, though, these are the solutions we're stuck with in the absence of a functional RoP. I second Linea's proposal to at least consider bringing down the effectiveness of RoP instead of the duration, keeping the mez protection uptime intact for the sake of those archetypes who actually need it, and to consider other viable alternatives for the future. A power like Experimental Injection being self-targetable would actually be a pretty good example of a way to expand on that diversity and make that pool more appealing at the same time. As it stands, incoming mez is only a problem if you don't have protection to it. This applies to 4 archetypes out of 15, with a couple of edge cases like human warshades and non-perma dominators. Those archetypes are still going to find a way to get that protection if they care about their long-term survivability at all, which usually means being able to hold your own solo in the middle of a crowded +4/x8 room. RoP facilitates this in a way that the other options don't. There is no deeper game here: in CoH you either have that protection, or you don't. Food for thought: knockback as a mechanic presents itself somewhere in almost every enemy group, and is hugely common throughout the game. In many cases all it takes is a single slot in any number of powers to obviate that mechanic, and rightly so.

Most powers have an uptime of 100% well before approaching the recharge cap, and many of those are significantly more impactful (and far more prolific) than RoP. I don't want to say Hasten, but, uh, Hasten. This perception of certain things being insanely overpowered relative to other, similar powers remains dismissive of the cases where this power is actually used. RoP has close to zero appeal to any archetype that has access to consistent mez protection, and that's most of them. For the handful that remain, it's a crutch often used to facilitate more comfortable gameplay in an environment that is extremely hostile to any character without the bare minimum protection. Soloing most +4/x8 content, you'll quickly realize that the average defense build is nowhere near enough for what the game throws at you. Cycling powers like RoP, hybrid melee, etc. and hopefully a decent amount of regen going on in the background is what makes it comfortable for squishier archetypes. This brings parity with the ones who have native access to that level of survivability, and it already comes at a cost, especially when you consider the enormous differences between survivability across the archetypes vs. their average damage output. It's a problem that nobody really talks about, but most of the building that goes on in this game has to do with defense, resistance, protection and recharge breakpoints. You can have too much of any given thing. Tankers, for example, start with an enormous advantage in some cases to both defense and resistance, and always have protection against anything that matters. Blasters on the other hand have nothing, and they barely even have an advantage damage-wise to make up for it. When you start factoring in things like how much easier it is to slot procs on a tanker build, the existence of Fiery Aura, and permanent Soul Drain, it seems almost like an insult that tankers also have over twice the max HP cap. And that makes sense: they're tankers! They should be survivable. They should be able to do damage too, because otherwise they'd be boring, and we all remember how that was. But then why can't the reverse also be true, if you choose to build for it? The overwhelming sentiment towards building things in this game is that buffs should, in a high recharge build, be permanent. Does anyone else remember the original Dark Affinity changes? Both Fade and Soul Absorption were initially slated to have recharges that would have made it impossible to maintain them permanently. That was quickly changed for all the reasons they should have been, because when it comes to survivability and endurance-related buffs, permanency is quality of life in this game. Nobody wants to cycle inspirations, and even doing the RoP - hybrid shenanigans is tiresome enough. This change only makes things that much worse, while blatantly ignoring the fact that the majority of archetypes have no actual use for a power that some seem to consider overtuned. Thus, an overtuned power is being used almost exclusively by archetypes seeking to gain parity with the others, and in so doing they've already paid a price and are still worse off in the end. That underlying problem should at the very least be addressed here.

I think the lens has been on those handful of squishy builds that are capable of overperforming (and I stress: relative to their peers, not the game at large). Time/X defenders, X/Dark controllers, not so different from when power boost was in the crosshairs. This is another direct nerf to those builds. I have several characters using those powersets, and while they are strong they're also exhausting to play, and still don't manage to come anywhere near most tankers in terms of survivability or damage. And with this RoP nerf, they become demonstrably less fun than builds that can reach for the stars without nearly as much of an investment both build-wise and energy-wise.

But in the absence of any discussion related to it, RoP absolutely is the band-aid solution for that problem and it's inequitable to dismiss the underlying concerns because the one solution builders have right now is considered to be overperforming relative to its cousins. Compared side-by-side to certain things (armor t9s, most notably) it is remarkably powerful, but it's also worth noting that the t9 powers in armor sets are largely redundant in terms of the survivability they offer to those archetypes, just like RoP is redundant to them. RoP is an optional choice for squishy archetypes otherwise lacking in consistent mez protection uptime, and it seems like the design intent here is that it shouldn't be possible, or should at least be even more annoying to maintain that uptime than it already is. I definitely don't agree with that particular sentiment. RoP is an option that requires a significant investment both in a build and, assuming you're rotating defensive cooldowns, in actual gameplay. There is very little tangible reward for this when you compare the results like-for-like to a tanker, who has all of this stuff handed to them as part of their kit, except that there are at least some paths to build towards the squishier archetypes being able to comfortably hold their own in a situation where the game mechanics are otherwise stacked against them. This change will force some uncomfortable choices on people at the very least, like picking up Indomitable Will on controllers in spite of the set otherwise being pretty awful. For other archetypes who leveraged the uptime on actual survivability, it will just make them less fun to play, and encourage awkward solutions like running defense amps or carrying a tray full of break frees instead. It seems inelegant and needlessly punishing to the builds that already have to overcompensate for their defenses, and driven by a remote comparison to powers that are themselves flawed.

I can understand the justification for nerfing RoP based purely on its high value as a choice on squishy archetypes or even ones that just scaled phenomenally well with it (widows and SR tankers get a lot of bang for their buck here, in the absence of needing any actual mez protection). The problem is that squishy archetypes that absolutely would take RoP for the mez protection (every single defender, controller, and MM that I play) are going to feel gutted by this, because RoP has nothing even remotely like it to be compared to. Defense amps and break frees are fine, but annoying to maintain, and Clarion doesn't come online until 50. Making viable builds for squishy archetypes already feels like paying your taxes: you have to compensate for an incredible number of holes in your survivability in exchange for, in my opinion, nowhere near a proportionate amount of power. It's a complicated facet of the game's design that might make sense on paper, but in practice, it just feels terrible. On its own, that kind of heavy-handed nerfing seems fine to fix a glaring issue with the efficacy of the power pool choices available here, and a difference of 30 seconds isn't exactly going to bring the sky crashing down, but it does seem to be tone-deaf with the current state of the game. Arguably, RoP is a band-aid and I definitely treat it like one in all of my builds. At best, it's an equalizer that helps to bridge the gap between squishy ATs and non-squishy ATs. And it only costs a power pool, 3 power choices, a lot of global recharge and constant vigilance to maintain a comfortable level of survivability relative to the others. I'm not exaggerating my opinion when I say that post-tanker patch, every squishy AT feels like a chore to play at best (and just kinda redundant at worst). But that's on the high end, trying to make like-for-like builds comparing things that matter like survivability and damage parses. Getting mezzed in this game is the absolute worst. Half the archetypes in the game never have to worry about it. The other half has to jump through hoops to make sure they get enough of it, to no real advantage over the archetypes that get it naturally. Plenty of things in this game are broken, but the current state of RoP in my opinion was doing more to fix a problem and exacerbate it.

Compared side-by-side to other support sets, the powers are statistically weak. If the design intent is that elec affinity is supposed to keep people alive, it's doing that job fundamentally worse than many other sets out there. The action economy is a problem, of course, and static is a little contrived, but the raw numbers just don't line up with even the underperforming support sets—least of all for playing its intended role. Anyone can power boost spirit ward, for example, but that amount of absorb won't do much in the absence of meaningful +def, +res, -tohit, -dmg, or even -rech. And if a support set isn't capable of meaningfully (and single-handedly) ensuring a team's survival through several layered mechanics or providing substantial force multiplication, then it's going to be a low tier set regardless of its capabilities at a glance. Healing and absorption don't lend much to that survival, when the magnitude of incoming damage can be so heavily modified by buffs and debuffs, and once you've reached the threshold where your incoming damage is marginal, they lend nothing at all. That's why so much of the set feels skippable. Even disregarding the numbers themselves, there's no variety in the effects they provide, when support sets are judged purely by the value of their buffs and debuffs. That's why a set like nature is considered average: it's heavily weighted towards healing output as a form of support. It still has decent -tohit, -dmg, and overgrowth, but rad has all of these effects as well—except it also has an AoE -res debuff. On lower level, smaller team sizes, maybe without IOs, elec affinity in its current state is fine: healing works there, you're a power battery, and you can cycle most of your powers easily on just SOs. The problem is that the higher you go, the less important any of that stuff actually is, at which point people will start looking at what else they can do with the set. And that's when you realize that a small damage buff, a small damage debuff, and amp up in its current state are all pretty underwhelming. Faraday cage is a good power, at least, but when you compare it to sets like dark, kin, storm, time, etc. the whole package just pales in comparison, and without any +def or -tohit in there, you still aren't going to single-handedly keep a team standing on the low end. If I were to make any suggestions, the few I can think of are that the set should come equipped with +rec and better +rech at the very least, and find some way to incorporate a -res debuff in there, or else this set is going to struggle on the high end unless the +dmg numbers go way up. I'd also like the galvanic sentinel a lot more if it were a stationary, ground-targeted totem kind of thing with resistance numbers on par with singularity, and overhauled debuff mechanics (periodically casting a modified 25ft discharge around itself would be cool, though). Relying on squishy pet AI to do support stuff for you is otherwise pretty bad, no matter how good its actual effects are.

Echoing the sentiments that this set is cool as heck both conceptually and visually; an elec support set has been a long time coming! Looking at the numbers though, it seems like it's being balanced in a vacuum. The best support sets in CoH have always been the versatile force multipliers: dark, kin, storm, time. Honorable mention goes out to several of the rest of them, especially the ones with AoE -res (which 11/15 of the support sets have access to). The ones that don't either bring very high damage bonuses (kin, nature) or are empathy and force field, which I think everyone already has an opinion about. With that being said though, elec affinity's strong focus on being a buff-oriented set puts it in line with those two outliers, but mechanically, it still comes out looking worse than either of them. The value of its comparable buffs are smaller or more contrived, it has no defense buff, and it's playing at mechanics that would normally be featured in an attack set with no real payoff for the effort it takes when other support sets just have to recast their two minute buffs whenever the opportunity presents itself. I'll say that if healing had any actual value in CoH, elec affinity in its current state would be at the top for me just because of how easy it is to target people with the chains in a game where people tend to uh... spaz around a lot. But from the perspective of someone who has played every support set on the high end, you kinda forget the heals are even a thing, making half of this set feel skippable and the other half seem weak by several degrees. Shock has very little value in a game where the reality is that a single enemy is never actually threatening enough to be worth the cast time to apply a damage debuff to it, many of which would resist most of the effect anyway. That same logic applies to the endurance drain mechanic; elec blast doesn't need any help with that anyway. (Try an elec/x/elec sentinel sometime, guys. They make sapping seem viable. They also make defenders look bad when they try to do the same thing.) If this power could chain, it would at least fall more in line with similar AoE damage debuff powers, but T1 powers in support sets are always a toss-up and this one might just be following suit. Rejuvenating Circuit is probably the best direct heal in the game now, when you take a look at the full functionality of it and compare it to the way other heals operate. It's fast, it's AoE, and it does what it's supposed to do without any fuss. I still tend to prefer +regen buffs on the high end for covering incremental HP loss, but this one is actually fast enough that it doesn't bother me as much. Galvanic Sentinel has me baffled. Compared to any of the toggle -dmg powers in most of the other sets, its discharge is anemic, and even if the debuff value was brought up to match (hopefully with some sort of addition, since all of those comparable powers also bring -tohit and other secondary effects), I still wouldn't use it. In any +4/x8 situation, this thing will drop in seconds. Its value when soloing is also dubious, considering how poorly the set handles in any solo situation as it is. Energizing Circuit is the new transference, available super early and useful at least on the low end for the same reason: blue bar issues usually don't sort themselves out until you're fully built, in some cases with incarnates. There's some value in that, but on the high end that value falls off completely and the power becomes, like several others, skippable. Faraday Cage is something new. I don't hate the power, at least now that it lasts longer and is fast casting. It still feels like a worse version of sonic dispersion, but that has more to do with how difficult it is for players to reliably herd themselves into the designated Good Places to receive the Good Stuff. I wouldn't expect anyone to stand in this for more than a few seconds, and the idea of having to recast it for every spawn isn't exciting, but on a design level it works and I'd be more willing to forgive it if the rest of the set brought more to the table and made this seem like a compensatory quirk rather than an intentional limitation in spite of its peers. Empowering Circuit is busy, and there's no actual payoff for how much effort this one takes compared to other, similar damage buffs. On the low end, it's fundamentally worse than accelerate metabolism, siphon power and world of pain. Several other sets bring powerful single target damage buffs that you can spread around with enough recharge, and come with a load of other effects rolled into those powers. This one is basically a fussy version of assault. It needs to do more, and really when you compare it to its peers, it needs to do a lot more. Defibrillate brings another AoE rez into the game, the value of which is dubious at best (howling twilight was always a viable pick for the -regen component more than anything else). This one has a unique identity compared to its ally-targeted peers, though, and for that reason it is at least logical. But it's still skippable. Insulating Circuit is unique, and I like it for the same reasons I like rejuvenating circuit. It's still one-dimensional, though, and will serve very little purpose on the high end. Amp Up is also unique, but its actual value as a T9 buff power is questionable. Many characters can't gain any real benefits from +special, and the ones who can are already built to take advantage of it (power boosted farsight, for example). An extra push in that direction wouldn't make much of a difference, and the impact on control powers isn't exactly game changing, either. The recharge bonus also doesn't compare to its peers. Other T9 buff powers have drastic effects—this one feels niche, but that has more to do with the realistic value of +special than anything. Overall, elec affinity is trying to do things a little differently, and that's good. Those differences shouldn't have to come at the expense of actual usability, or versatility within the set, though. Many of the powers feel unconventionally one-dimensional for a support set, where it's common to find a buff or debuff power with three or more effects, and force multiplication is practically an expectation on the high end. In its current state, this set will have less of an impact than any other support set, for lack of any +defense, -res, and lower numbers on many of the effects that it does have compared to other, similar powers. And on the low end, force field is still keeping people alive better than elec affinity is. (And repulsion bomb is at least weirdly useful with procs in it.) It just has me wondering: what does this set actually excel at? And perhaps more importantly, what should it excel at?