Galaxy Brain

Agreed with the phasing. Sappers are tactical as you have something to gun for first on order to effect the fight. Phasing carnies you cannot influence and just drag the fight, if say control effects stopped it thatd be cool or even phasing powers by players.

Per intent, it has been said the OG devs wanted to use Absorb in the set going forward. Thematically this also makes sense given the reasoning earlier in the thread. Absorb acts as something you have to hit first before you can touch the player's HP, which is what a Force Field pretty much is. Laying Defense and Absorb together will provide a lot more defensive utility in the current meta as well given many sets have +Def but only one other set has +Absorb. When many characters build to softcap anyways, adding an absorb layer with your shields will help out along with your added def.

I feel that say, small amounts of boost per ally in the team on top of adding unique enemies should do the trick. 8 * 3% acc/dam/def/res = 24% to each enemy before other difficulty settings Add in special enemies to mobs that cause trouble and it gets real fun and real tactical.

Not other people's, but the person's. I personally have a hard time trying certain sets out because I know they are not good and wouldnt be as fun as a better set.

So, if defense is saying that the force field takes hits for you until it runs out... explain when the hits go through via luck? I guess what I am not understanding, or perhaps what I didn't convey, was that adding absorb *on top of* the defense would be bad...?

It's also not the only power in Time. The set has offense, defense, heals, control, all in one that then also has the ability to maintain such a high team wide boost. Playing that can sour the fun of other support sets that dont match up to the power or versatility. Yes, those ones should be buffed but by how much? Buffing them in turn would be "useless" since we are all godlike from IOs anyways though

Another Regen thread had a cool idea for Resilience to help with the Alpha problem: Add a stacking Absorb Bonus of say, 1% of your HP a sec, with a cap of 30% of your HP. In combat, this would be whittled away quickly. But between fights, where you can go 30 sec without being hit at all this can add up to a solid layer of defense. Could also be set to only stack up "outside of combat" like how snipes are set. Anywho, as for the OP suggestion I don't see how it'll hurt.

Why not both? FF would have to be radically changed to compete with 1 OP power. Change the OP power down a notch because it is kinda goofy when combined with everything else, and then bring up FF as well.

Absorb is treated as one of two things currently: 1) Temp HP that enemies need to chew through to hit you. Classically, this is how Force Fields work in most media. You have your actual HP that is bad to take damage to, and then an over-shield that can take all the hits for you up to a point (be it time, a separate HP bar, 1 hit, etc). A FF power that granted +Def and +Absorb of some value would be greatly useful if we do not plan on nerfing the +Def you can get nowadays that invalidates FF's buffs. 2) A Refreshing "Damage Negation". Quick example being some of the Blaster Sustains, "Negating" absorb shields constantly refresh an amount of Absorption every second that acts as a barrier to incoming DPS. Say you gain a shield of 100 absorb every second, that lasts a second and cannot go beyond 100. This effectively cuts all damage per second totals down by 100 before they can effectively harm your HP. These could both theoretically be used by a FF set to emulate the Force Fields being actually "there" on the characters where small amounts of damage simply get ignored by Dispersion Field for example, while larger Absorb Amounts could be on the more focused shielding. Adding absorb is not really "Healing" so much as another layer that enemies have to deal with before they hit your allies, which is the root of the FF theme anyways. Add offense to the *Force* powers, add Absorb to the *Field* powers, and the theme is not compromised while suddenly being fresh and very relevant to the other stes and IO bonuses that have cropped up.

When one TM power more or less makes another set (FF) become obsolete, then it ruins enjoyment

Ideally, but if you just boost everything up then it makes everything OP / Easy... and then you get Brad Bir... er... Syndrome'd

Increasing the aggro cap to 20 or so would be interesting, and technically increase the incoming damage by 25%

At a certain point you do sort of run out of room for "new" if its just like "Oh, Empathy but with 1 Defense AoE instead of this other power". I think tweaking sets retroactively would help to fight this oddly enough, like if FF had great + Def and great offensive power instead of just Defense which other sets cover nowadays.

This is still sort of the case. Mez in CoH is one of the things I feel was poorly handled overall. Your character essentially either gets wrecked by everything, or is essentially immune to everything depending on the AT, with the very occasional exotic mez like confuse getting through that only a handful of enemies have period. This will impact everyone more or less equally since mobs have a base 50% chance to hit you anyways, compared to a player's 75% base hit chance. A Resistance character still benefits from not being hit by 50% of incoming damage, and with more enemy accuracy a defense character will still benefit greatly from avoiding more hits than the resist based guy. This... wouldn't be that hard given all the movement capabilities. Unless you mean like you have to do more stuff in the map like bust through walls / find hidden stuff or something? Resistance based ATs already fear more due to those debuffs. A Defense character avoids *everything* when they dodge an attack, while a Resist character still eats whatever debuffs were attached to the attack they tanked. This is what makes Defense way more valuable than Resistances even if it appears that resists are more stable. Yep! Thats the one 🙂

...are there certain mobs where like, holds dont work but stuns do? Or other combos of that?

I agree that some offense should be added. Force Bolt / Bomb should be treated like extra ranged attacks.

As in p2w?

There was another thread talking about just that, "Advanced Enemies" iirc that had bonus powers or the like. Those two combined would be a ton of fun

Ambushes in missions can already stack up to be like, x24 spawns so I think there is precedent.

I doubt it, farm enemies dont fight back like normal enemies

@parabola had a cool idea in the works in regards to having content also scale per team member outside of the normal diff slider. This could also help?

That is the flipside of the problem. These control sets have too much control, and then they have 1 AoE control power that is super bad for no reason.

Well, if KB got vectored that could be a thing. Actually, doesnt Air Superiority do something similar?

This is another great point! In a team setting, facerolling is super common so targeting teams specifically would be a good start.

Procs iirc are already on Cap's watchlist, but most of them are OK as is. Like, if you proc-monster out a power you trade in actual enhancement value and set bonuses for Procs so that is a balance. Technically, AoE holds are perf for procs if you solve the Acc issues since the Rech more or less guarentees they go off 😛 Purples at least are more contained in that they are all unique so you cant like, stack up 5 Armageddon bonuses. Hell, that might be the most direct way to fix this: lower the IO stacking from 5 to 4 / 3.