Galaxy Brain

I've shared similar ideas before, and I think it'd be a welcome change if the Knockback is effective. Like, if an explosion yeets all the minions and defeats them, whod actually be mad when only stragglers survive?

I used more than council in that! This needs updating, but it pulled resists from all factions that had data available at the time and averaged it out.

I agree here, Lore has a kind of bad uptime as-is and might be worth holding off on depending on the map / encounter. I'm curious though what each "step" of incarnate adds, like not using Judgement but using Alpha + Interface + Hybrid "passives", etc.

Semi-related, but AA is going through some testing and noted that Incarnates had quite an effect on even a "procced to the gills" character.

This is where I think some confusion seeps in. At the absolute pinnacle of play, yeah there are the folks who do all you describe and then everyone else (generalized). In terms of impact however, those folks are generally rather insular and a rarity "in the wild" compared to the step below which could be seen as the "upper intermediary": folks who are not the best of the best of the best, but are rocking IOs + incarnates + good combos. They are not generally part of a "competitive" team or the like, but you can tell they make waves when you are teamed with one and you are not one yourself. In a team setting where players in the Upper portion are in the mix can zoom ahead at blow stuff up with ease and safety (like my blaster can), it means that there is less things to do as another player who cannot outpace or at the very least match the pace of said player. Whether it be it actually getting to fight, or more esoteric things like "welp, my controls / support abilities don't do anything...", the game allows you to have more agency than other players due to power scales and that is disheartening to many. To be fair, you do not see this everywhere, but towards the end game it can get silly and something that many folks have gone on record avoiding purposefully. This is of course expanded upon by what some others have mentioned with end game arcs, but still. I guess if we are looping all the way back around to the main question though of "is the game too easy?", I would say it actually is not, but you get copious amounts of tools to make it so which is a very weird grey area. The abilities of players can quickly outpace the content the abilities were made for, but if they do not lean into that the players can still be in a good balance vs each other and the content.

So, the thing about this and why it worked (beyond writers making it work) is that not everyone was doing the same thing. You had people fighting specific enemies, you had people with different objectives like distract Thanos / get to the van / move the gauntlet / etc, that allowed each person to contribute in a manner that was fitting for them. This is easy to do in a movie or show, now so much in a video game where Arch/Trick Hawkeye is meant to be on roughly equal footing to Eng/EA Capt Marvel on a conceptual level (their attacks hit roughly the same, they have the same ballpark of "HP", etc). The above example also had different goals where each character felt important and had moments to shine, as well as no aggro cap so they all could get a share of enemies 😉 I get it given the source material of CoH, but at the end of the day it is a video game where people get to CHOOSE their powers. When that is the reality, there needs to be some semblance of balance.

So there is a spectrum of players that cannot as easily be defined as casual/try hard. In HC, you can "casually" get Incarnates by just playing and never touching the market, allowing you to get lvl shift / destiny / judgement powers. Would such a player who never looked into guides outside of eyeballing and slapping stuff they saw in their trays and thus get to be +1 with nukes be a casual? Would somebody with a "bad" IO build be a min maxxer since they went beyond the game to figure out mids and whip something up? @BZRKR, I do not necessarily hate powerful characters, I have a blaster that can rech cap itself and fly through missions past whole teams. It can be fun as hell! However, on the opposite end there isn't much that this character struggles against if at all on top of how I do not need to be with the team feels like it sort of defeats the purpose of teaming (outside divide and conquer I suppose). To me, I would love more stuff to chew on that requires characters that powerful which could be engaging for many folks, and allow people more room to participate and team up and feel meaningful as opposed to either being carried or soloing together.

I mean, this is kind of the same idea as me saying "the other guys should do their own thing". Its a viable solution, but the root issue is there are a lot of folks that are put off by the "norm" of what the game has become. By running the show, I mean that players with maxed out IOs and Incarnates literally play a different game than people who do not in terms of how much more effective they are. It takes away from engagement when the content you are facing can be mowed down by 1/8th of your team, so when you are all attacking as a group you can at times feel like you aren't contributing much. this effects different characters to varying degrees of course. Agreed with @Snarky, this is a super slick idea! As to @Blackbird71's comment about the TF settings... what just hit me was that Story Arcs can be a bit "lame" at times in that if you join a friend for 9/10 missions, skipping the 1st and not having the content... only your friend gets the completion bonus. I wonder if that were fixed, more people would hop in?

The frustration is more directed at the common answer of "oh, you can find ways to make the game engaging if you turn in these settings, and ask everyone to play your way!" What is often missed with the defense of "you are not forced to play their way" is that it can easily be reversed when you are making teams / asking folks to change on their end too. The dampen bit refers to two things which are hard to communicate around, especially if it is prevalent. One, having all these PI teams / Farm teams boost lowbies only takes away from team prospects in other bits of the game. Why play story arcs when you can go to PI or Doorsit? Two, joining teams with super powered lvl 50+ folks is like you two are playing different games. It is often not too fun to feel like you can't even get your powers off, let alone your powers don't matter when they do land with others blasting by you. The game naturally sort of pushes you to Incarnate/ IOs as you peruse your dropped items or exp last 50, and everywhere a player asks they will be pointed to builds on reddit, discord, and Facebook to tips on how to get powerful quickly. Combine it all together and you get a double whammy where folks fly by most of the game to 50+, and once there they are much better at content than you are of you go "all naturale" due to lvl shifts and the like, assuming you both play well. With not much to do with all that power, they go to the most bang for their buck with Radios / farms / weekly targets. Other things like incarnate clicks making whole ATs sorta "eh" at end game is an intertwined subject too. The solution to this should be to make the tasks available to such powerful players worthy of their skills. A new area of content meant for players that are beyond the base game on top of cool merits for the taking could be something that helps mitigate the issue of super characters running the show in the 40s. Would that stop PI radios? No. Farms? Likely no as well. Would it give people something new and engaging to do with their higher tier characters and possibly "free" up earlier content for those who can't compete in those? Maybe!

Thats the key here, either running through content in ez mode, or having a godlike character carry you, it seems to be an unfortunate gamble of if you get to feel appreciated or engaged a lot of times.

Its complicated. The main issue is that of scale, if this were a game at a tabletop with your friends or a local co-op game then communication is key. When it comes to swaying the predominant way thousands of people play where on any random team you join or form you would be swaying how *they* play? That's where it gets frustrating. That should not be taken away, however there should be ways to... well for lack of a better term "guide" the folks who dampen the game for others in team content to spaces where their godhood is needed?

Yes, you can control these factors to a degree... but if it is rampant to where the majority of teams you encounter have these unless you specifically seek out players who fit your style? That can be disheartening / the norm for the average.

These threads keep popping up for good reason, but I think we are all a little guilty of not seeing the forest for the trees. Individual procs as a whole are not an issue by themselves outside of very specific instances, but they do exacerbate issues with power creep + encounter design as a whole which has a lot of interlocking parts to it that go beyond just IO slotting.

The external part has to be the way to go else nobody (tm) will realistically do it. Yes, you can restrict yourself in a lot of fun ways but it is usually annoying to do so as opposed to testing your mettle vs more challenging tasks that require all the tools you have accrued 🙂

This is what we should really, REALLY, be thinking about. Yes, you could take a belt sander to everything to make it perfectly "balanced", but at the cost of players being flung out in the sawdust as you strip away what is fun about the system that is being balanced. Perfect balance rarely if ever equals actual fun. The issue though in my opinion is that procs / slotting options cause inequity. Think about how many sets people go into thinking "sweet, I can slot the FF proc here, XYZ things there, etc". Not all sets get these opportunities nor the best version of said opportunities. Sure, a set with a KB power may be able to use FF or SA for great effect, but a set with a few AoE KB powers gets WAY better results. Sets without -Def powers end up with a slew of powerful options that are not available, sets without +Def have less pool power flexibility, so on and so forth. Another bit that AA did touch on is that most of the game "checks" the same skills: can they hit you (likely not) and do their hits matter (usually not)? Players are able to circumvent a lot of this by having near always 95% hit chances vs enemies while being nigh untouchable themselves, which devolves into "damage wins" as that is the only relevant stat left when you can easily smack everything. With that in mind, a lot of bonuses that could be introduced need to compete against more raw damage + the attributes that let players successfully apply it. As long as encounters can be simply won by more firepower, more firepower will be the best solution as defenses / etc are accounted for. In terms of proc diversity, cool procs like unique mez effects / turning powers into a Parry / etc are sort of invalidated by how encounters scale. Combine that along with how certain powersets / power types / or even whole AT's get wildly different IO experiences, and we get threads like this. Incarnates do not help matters, though they are a different can of worms. Neither exist in a vacuum as an IO'd build + Incarnates should be demonstrably be better than the sum of it's parts.

The only issue here is that the level shifts are optional on the player's end, and fighting beyond +4 for those who we cannot guarantee are shifted is simply a slog and a half.

Let them fight

You are set on a damage proc, and these are your options for this power. Would you go for one over the other?

There is only 1 power that can take this proc in your build, with 1 slot open. Is one better than the other?

If you have to choose between the two and they can go into the same power, is one better than the other?

Is a smashing damage proc with 4.5 ppm better than a smashing damage proc with 3.5 ppm?

People can certainly like procs that are not as good as others, just as much as people can like running X challenge builds! It however does not mean there cannot be an objectively bad proc not only due to the proc itself, but for how it exists in relation to what powers accept it + the "competition". An example of a proc that is just sort of poor could be Tempest with it's -13% End Drain. For one, it is end drain of which it's use is a bit dubious, and it's position as an ST Ranged proc means it really only Synergizes with Elec Blast type attacks, of which often get more out of End Drain slotting given it is not a guaranteed to go off per hit, let alone focusing on Sapping with ST attacks when you have Short Circuit + X that does the job to an entire spawn. If it is not slotted alongside -End synergies, its use is very questionable alongside what other options can be slotted not only from Ranged Sets alone, but also from whatever secondary sets the power may take alongside stuff like Sniper Sets, and so on. All things taken into account, I could confidently say that Tempest is not a very good proc option compared to most anything else you could slot into it's category. You could have a proc that does something amazing on paper, but in practice due to what accepts it and how it goes off / interactions within what accepts it, it can end up being an objectively worse choice than other options. That is not to say other procs should be brought down, if anything it makes a case for Tempest to be brought up to snuff for those who find the idea of it fun. As for the seismic smash example, it is a good case to go 👀 over due to the silly amount of procs it can take + it being an amazing attack as-is, unlike some other examples where they do like 2 base damage + accept a lot of procs. The DPS view of it seems a little off tho, as wouldn't the DPA combined with other attacks be where it shines?

A note on that, new content then has to take into consideration who / what will be running it. If new content is "made for the IO crowd" it'd then reinforce that all these things are needed, and so on and so forth for other permutations of that argument. So while yes, new content should be the number one thing, making sure the new content can hold up to the players is another beast which may need to take a look at the player power-creep in order to future-proof content.

Missed that part! I agree tho, the big glowy target has a really cool something waiting to be unlocked... its just not quite there.

I agree with this take. A far bigger issue that somewhat feeds into this is that a lot of procs are honestly just... bad. Of course when compared they lose out to damage procs, but if they were on the same level they may compete for slots.