BRADICAL

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.

By non-viable, what I mean to say is that without RoP, any one of my Time/X defenders is going to have it much harder soloing even something simple like a fire farm set to +4/x8. Against mez-heavy enemies, it would be that much worse, and the alternative solutions to this problem are limited and unsatisfying, thus I consider it non-viable. With RoP nerfed, it will just be more annoying to achieve the same level of performance—performance that was already below par compared to what other ATs could achieve for less. That's the crux of my argument, really. Every other character leveraging it for similar reasons will have a drop in performance too, but not always as severely due to the defender's better scaling with the +res part. All I can say about control and range is that in practice, they rarely offer any real benefit and it always feels uncomfortable having to trust any portion of your survivability to something like a hit check, or gaps in control durations, or the very limited radius on most debuff powers especially when accounting for things like multiple spawns. You could argue that those feelings are anecdotal, but the real-world performance of an AT that can dive into a spawn versus one that has to exercise caution for whatever reason is already pretty clear: RoP has a 2 second activation time. Just to clarify, my opinion is very heavily weighted towards the high end of building, where you assume the IO system is being used to its fullest potential to get the most out of any given AT and powerset combination. I don't mean to sound condescending about it, and I'm not resorting to personal attacks against anyone here. When I say that CoH is fundamentally flawed, I mean very specifically that it is imbalanced in a way that the game actively encourages because of the enormous amount of power you can glean from set bonuses and incarnate powers. It's a topic that has been discussed to death and won't really add much to this discussion, but it's an objective fact that CoH allows you to create unstoppable murder machines in spite of what's written on the tin. Many, many characters are capable of soloing challenges meant for entire teams. And the higher up you go, the worse those flaws start to look, because it shows how deeply imbalanced each individual AT is when compared to the capabilities of the others, and what features have actual meaningful value in the end. This RoP discussion just makes it all the more obvious.

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?