Galaxy Brain

It has to do with the Mastermind IO's, which also reaches into the pet IO's with their aura's which are predominantly used by MM's

The other half of the thread beyond harder content is looking at how IO's themselves are balanced. The MM pets are a unique case where it is sort of "required" you get all the aura IO's, and then the inter set balance is in question as some MM sets have an extra pet that can mule the auras, etc. Likewise, certain things like Bonfire with Knockdown, how certain powers can be proc bombs, how some AT's get AMAZING bonuses with their ATO's and some don't, or how certain IO sets are for lack of a better term just obsolete. Those are all valid talking points within the thread that do not have to explicitly deal with harder content, but it is linked up with how IO's do make you stronger than what most of the game was made for. Looping back to the MM pets, yes they need more care than just the IO's, but as-is those IOs are a balancing point. If the MM pets get buffed and the IOs remain the same, would they then be too strong? Are they too reliant on them as is?

Hi @twozerofoxtrot

So this is definitely super cool, but mechanically it is sorta just Beam Rifle again. What could be cool is a set where there are *many* Piercing Beam style attacks where your lasers are all thin cones, treated like ST attacks with the bonus of hitting +2 targets in a line. Edit: I have personal bias against War Mace and Battle Axe basically being the same set except one is better (same with BS and Kat), and I would hate to see that happen with new sets. Lets assume for a second that there is a breakthrough and we can decouple weapons from sets and add weapons to sets (You can throw lasers and use a beam rifle for ice blast, etc). What would Laser Beam do different then?

I feel like this needs a debuff somewhere... like in Fungal Armor it could have an AoE debuff off yourself with the spores or such? I like the idea of Verdant allowing you to receive more buffs as well, maybe that could be a theme in the set?

I wonder if this could be emulated by granting the pets Elusivity to counteract attack accuracy from AoEs, which would then stack with other defenses in much the same way,

The other ATO's are all varying degrees of good, do you think they should all be buffed to be "Game Changers" like the ones mentioned? Also side note for MMs, but all the pet aura IOs are something this thread is definitely made for. They totally "band aid" the issues with them as an AT.

I kind of want to out of pure academia, like redo the tough tests or run in with a blaster with just some added inspiration to see how impactful they really are, but it'd be more like "how impactful is an insp in general" vs redoing whole swaths of data

It is also too big a variable with what others bring to the table and how they interact. With the note on insps, we could say "test with 1 purple insp on at all times" and that could emulate a support character on the team with defense boosts. In fact, a quick eyeball between Corruptor, Controller, MM, and Defender versions of Cold Dom > Ice Shield, the average value (unenhanced) is 12.19.... very close to a small purple's 12.5%. Enhanced, this would be just under 20%, which we could fudge and say 2 purples / 1 medium purple on at all times could be the same as having a defense oriented support character with you (if they also have Maneuvers, etc).

The MM aura ones are totally gamechanging for scaling up content with MMs

I love seeing posts like this! Curious though, do you not find it weird that stone is set up to basically not have half the set get deleted once you get to the ultimate power, and until then it's kinda meh? That is my ultimate issue with the set as a whole in that it is basically Granite, not "Stone Armor".

What I mean by this is agreed upon parameters for testing stuff out as it seems discussions about certain topics vary wildly depending on the point of view, and it ends up with the discussion / balancing point (even when testing in beta) being lost in the fray. I'm not asking anyone to "play this way or else", but rather to find a way to have structure when it comes to balance/etc talks given we do have thousands of ways to play the game. If we can get to like "here are 5 concrete tests to go off of" that represent dozens of styles and approaches, then great! Otherwise, we could have any anecdotal evidence come in and be unsubstantiated such as "Oh, I bought 10 super inspirations and was able to do X, so Y is fine." which does not point to Y being fine as a very big variable was tossed into the mix. The ultimate goal would be to have community-agreed standards that we can weight against. If sets A/B/C can all do X/Y/Z thing, but then Set D (which is in the same group) can only do X/Y and not Z, then there may be something to look at with D. We just need to determine XYZ.

The last part is sort of where I am too, though everywhere you look (Reddit, Discord, Facebook, these Forums) they are always talked about especially with the ATs I highlighted. Combine that with how you only need 100 merits to get one of your "gamechanger" ones and I feel it may be more common than we think

Brining up a topic from earlier in the thread, but how do we feel about ATOs? Currently, it seems a few ATs are basically defined by their access to them (Scraps, Stalks, MMs, Tanks, etc), while some are not. Should this be something that is more emphasized?

Locking out judgement is good for the game

@Apparition, @DreadShinobi, this is the chance to actually measure their impact as opposed to just speculation!

Firedrive, my new Fire/Nin blaster

Ditto this, if the tech was able to do it where we could just match a whole bracket of animations, like a Sword Slash to shoot a Fire Blast, use Power Bolt's animation to fire Bullets from your fists, etc, it'd be amazing.

Oh, god yeah testing all bonuses would be goofy! What would be way, way, way easier and more likely would be to test out certain brackets that people shoot for: add in 35% / 70% / 140% global rech add in 10/20/30(?) defense etc

Mids can show the bonuses, but how they actually play out and the relative impact is much different. Part of why I do what I do on SO's is to then circle back and compare that SO baseline to "Ok, same thing but now I have all the def/res uniques" or "now I have Achilles Heel" etc, to show the comparative power in an actual scenario. Part of what I need help with is coming up with an accepted standard we can all point to and say "Ok, if we run this (set/power/combo) through the agreed upon standardized tests, we have a basis to talk about how it would perform as we have existing things that went through the tests too". The point about IOs vs Incarnates would be a perfect one to measure! Decked out IO build with no Incarnates, vs an SO build with full T4 incarnates tackle the same scenario, which is more impactful for that character? etc

Which is why I want to try and get some community benchmarks and whittle them down as far as possible. If we can agree on like "run these X missions with Y slotting options" then we can get a good idea when a new set pops out, and currently live sets could be run once and used as a benchmark.

This matters on what you are looking at. If we take the BIGGEST step back, I believe my definition on the last post is pretty on point for the core gameplay experience of CoH. As for datamining, while I am sure it can bring up "X amount of people play on 4/8" I think it is more reasonable to show how certain things perform on different settings as there are a lot of factors that could skew that data. All you need is 1 person on the team to set the mission, so it could only capture 1/8th the amount of actual data, etc.

Judgements were added in i20 iirc, and the nuke changes were all slated in the i24 patch notes, so Judgements as a concept predate that by quite a bit. Also, looking at the issues I am shocked to see Bruising on Tanks was only introduced in i18??? Anyways, incarnates are part of the game and would definitely be a category to look at. The highlight here I think is too ambiguous as it could mean anything from high lvl power gaming to making fun costumes and hanging in Pocket D, or anything in between. That said, I do feel the following definition to be the most true for the most people: Playing CoH = Designing a highly customized character in order to use super powers and defeat hoards of enemies in specially instanced missions. Even at 0/1 difficulty, your average mission has dozens of enemies to where I'd call it a hoard! The main gameplay loop of CoH for the vast majority of it is going into instanced missions and kicking ass. How you go about that changes, but that is the core of it. You kick ass, get experience and get more opportunities for growth in your own way, and gain inf to further improve yourself. Yes, there are outside missions / events / etc, but tbh 90% of all missions are instanced beat-em-ups. There is stuff in between with travel, stories, side games, etc, but the core gameplay loop is Go Hunt Kill Skulls. With that in mind, I would imagine test parameters around balance would have to do with a mission format. "How fast / safe can X help complete a mission?" would be the ultimate question asked per test IMO as that is what it all sort of boils down to in the end for everyone. In my point of view, the two variables to this question are X and Mission. X we kind of went over, but that is the wildcard. Powerset? Power? Inspirations? IO's? Incarnates? The list goes on, and we definitely need to come up with something there otherwise it'd be endless. On the Mission side, we at least have more refined control in terms of the content. The map I feel is more of a player issue than a power issue most of the time, and with them being random per most missions can probably be excluded as a wild card unless we have a set task. So that leaves Difficulty and Enemy groups as the main factors. Starting with difficulty, we have the ability to tweak the enemy's level from -1 to +4, the team size from 1-8, enable or disable bosses, as well as enable or disable AV's. off the bat, I feel that AV's should be disabled as honestly beating them down solo is more of a gimmick than an expected task. Likewise, I feel Bosses should be enabled as normal content seems to be built around boss-tier enemies being standard. The next step is a doozy with a possible 40 combinations... but I feel we can narrow it down to 6: +0/x1 = The absolute standard, bare minimum default difficulty. This will determine the baseline of baselines in all scenarios as this is what the game itself sets you to. +0/x3 = After some research, I found that in a mission with 10 encounters, a x1 difficulty averages out to about 25 enemies per mission. At x3, this averaged out to 61 enemies which is a little over double the amount which seems fitting for a next step up. Avg group size goes from 3 to 6 as well as more frequent boss encounters. +0/x8 = The max team size, this puts AoE to the test with an avg of 131 enemies per mission in the 10-encounter tests, a little over double x3. Likewise, avg spawn size increased from 6 to 12~13. In my research, other difficulties between 3 and 8 did not provide avg spawn sizes greater than 10 which is where AoE coverage comes into play with a decent chunk of AT's capping at 10 targets. x8 will be able to showcase why target caps matter more than just raw AoE potential. +3/x1 = Instead of jumping to +4, +3 offers a mix of +3 and +4 that is a little more palatable. In the 10 encounters, 40% of the mission had a higher lvl enemy every time so in this case it would be 60% +3 and 40% +4 (same at +0 but still). +3/x3 = Like both above, this will test a group of harder enemies per fight. Odds are if you can breeze through this, the higher difficulties would be doable. +3/x8 = Essentially the max difficulty with a decent portion being +4, also mirrors end game a bit due to the +1 level shift capping you at technically +3. This gives us 6 distinct challenge ratings that would likely cover a large swath of content options, without having to do 40 per test. Thinking about it more, we could probably even axe 3/1 if need be, and if we really want we could average it all out and have +2/x4 be a default test as a sort of "medium difficulty" option. x4 had 89 enemies on avg, 3.6x more than x1 and about 67% of x8, combine that with +2/+3 enemies and you can have a decent benchmark. I think this category has to weigh time as a factor to get the most data in the most effecient way possible. What do you all think?

A lot of controversy comes from perspective and the multitude of different ways we can play CoH. You can adjust basically any part of the game to your liking, and tackle any kind of content you want, even make your own content! With all these options, it is sometimes hard to decide what lens to view something through. Do we look at things purely on their own merits, with 0 outside influence? Do we look at how it performs with no holds barred, all the outside abilities stacked on? Somewhere in between? In a test environment or throw them into the meat grinder of soloing a very hard task? Just one way is clearly not enough! I would like to take an opportunity for us to come together and devise a handful of "Community Parameters" that we can judge things on. It won't be just one point of view, but each lens I feel should be weighed equally and represent different aspects of the game. Just to start things off, some of the categories tossed around I see are: "100% Pure", no bells and whistles outside (SO enhancements) and using only X thing as isolated as possible "Mid Tier" investment where you use a lot of common tools (LotG, etc) but nothing extreme (no purples, temp powers, incarnates) "High Tier" investment where basically anything you can use on a build goes (purples, incarnates, etc), but still no "outside" factors like temp powers, boosts, or inspirations "Freeform" where there's no rules outside multi-boxing / other oddities There are probably many more permutations when it then comes to what content you face, difficulty levels, and so on and so forth but I'm confident we could come up with a list of parameters that could accommodate many different viewpoints without going too crazy. Thoughts?