Galaxy Brain

Earth Control also has poo damage potential in exchange for its control

I like the idea, but thatll be a little ways off to make all the new assets

T I M E M I N E But anywho, they are essentially the same dang power with the same model placed, same animation, and same general effect with just a different way to cause the detonation. Of the two, keep trip mine and free up design space over time bomb

Perma pets in a handful of sets will not step on MM toes any more than Blaster Melee attacks blowing Scrapper melee attacks out of the water steps on Scrapper toes. The choke point thing is legit, but I think that can be solved by making pets not have strict collision with players.

Honestly, can Trip Mine and Time Bomb just be combined and a new power for all sets that have these be put in?

That's awesome, congrats!! Concept builds are fun as hell with IO's too, just ask @Sir Myshkin😉 Loading up with tons of procs and/or even taking weird powers just to put procs in them is hilarious at times. That said, like with the power %'s it will be interesting at the least to see what the most taken and least taken IOs are.

Not even basic ones? Anywho, youd count towards the peeps who use the IO system. The goal here is to shed light on how many people actually use it, given that the forums/ etc are a tiny fraction of the community who actually play. We of course all have the most uber builds and starts on the forums, and thus we must rep all the players 😉

TBF, this is being fixed on Beta

Bumping this to see if we could even just get a number on the amount of players who have slotted *any* IO's vs just SO's?

Can we agree that it appears to be AoE KB specifically that is the issue, and not so much ST KB?

First off, I kinda wanna afk in a mission for 27~ hrs to see my pet expire lol Second, pets like Dark Servant / Etc practically do not benefit from Recharge to begin with since you cannot have multiple out. The only upside is to replace them faster if they die, but that is a sort of X factor to all this. The vast majority of the time they work as intended but then you have to just refresh them randomly.

No, all these pets we are talking about are essentially perma out of the box and its just annoying to have to resummon them when they have 100% uptime already.

This is another very fair point. Many AoE control effects essentially give you AoE hold mitigation already. Elec's Sleep Patch, AoE confuses, Earth's and Ice's KD Patches, Dark's Fearsome Stare and so on all essentially lock down enemies from attacking you back, which combined with an AoE immobilize shortly after will mimic an AoE hold in most cases. The difference being you need to combine the effects, but still.

The game is balanced around SOs to a degree, in that they are the bare bones "oh look I got stuff" item that somebody brand new to the game would get and have immediate knowledge of how to use. Unlike even the basic IO enhancements which require further research on how to use, you get normal enhancements all the time via drops, stores, and missions where they appear in your enhancements tray and are immediately slottable. They are the baseline for effect. Are they also much, much worse than IOs? Yes. Do we know that literally all players, or even a majority are using IOs? No Until we get metrics to say that "oh, 90% of HC players are using IOs", I dont think it's good to balance around them. Especially since they are so varied in terms of what you slot for.

By doing so, you played into the meta for knockback. You went above and beyond to use control in a way that was beneficial, which is something a casual player would not do. In this particular example, doing so saved the team's butt given the circumstances by the sound of it and the dps part of your character may not have been as optimal there. A casual player would have just kept trying to kill stuff in front of them and possibly knocked enemies away and into a scattered area since those powers were available, rather than think about the effects of said powers as they are chosen. You had awareness well beyond that level and could leverage the tools available to go beyond what they say on the can, which is essentially what meta gaming is (game within the game). At much higher levels, sure this is sub optimal due to how much faster and safer people can plow through stuff. That is a seperate discussion when it comes to overall difficulty, but I feel it has a place on the table here if just a corner seat. As for the charm of CoH, I think it will take a lot more than boosting knockback to get rid of that. You said it yourself, the charm of CoH is being able to make fun combos and thematic characters from a titanic array of possibilities and have them all actually *work*. There is no "bottom tier trash" in CoH where it is utterly unplayable or downright broken. Can everyone do "everything"? No, but so many can and everyone brings value to the table so it's hardly an issue. A boost to KB to make it a "meta" choice compared to KD wont just cater to the high end players IMO. I have several people who are brand new to CoH and are surprised to see that powers like Gale dont do bonus damage when you get a guy off a high spot, or across the room, and so on. Flinging people doesnt always feel right when it comes to the actual impact / progressing through an encounter. In other games, high knockback that had an animation like in CoH (as opposed to just pushing ala Repel) always has great connotations. Looking at some of the greats... Super Smash Brothers is like the antithesis of this whole thread lol. That game is all about knockback and using big, meaty hits to launch foes to win. In CoH, launching foes is not currently tied to winning directly even if it has situational value, much like how keeping an enemy still and doing damage to them is useful in Smash, but generally doesn't win the game. The objective in CoH for both casual and meta is to beat up the bad guys most of the time. The issue currently is that while KB can make it safer to do this, it is also one of the only effects that can hamper you from beating up bad guys depending on the situation. If it had bonus bad guy beating effects, it would have thematic impact for casuals (itd be fun as hell to use power push and have KB slotting be the primary damage component as you launch somebody to space) and meta implication where you could net more output with the drawback of a learning curve and the general KB issues we see presently.

Essentially, any pet that you cannot have more than 1 of and are essentially perma out of the box should just be made perma

As soon as its active, and you can only have 1 at a time anyways

Right, people do not scatter for efficiency and I did not imply otherwise...? I knocked that behavior as it is a sign of poor KB management either from lack of experience with your powers or lack of care. The rest of this paragraph makes note of the general gameplay loop of CoH for many, many powers which is unfortunately interrupted by poor KB use. It can be enhanced by good KB use however! Its just that those who use it poorly stick out more and give KB-ers a bad name. Tbf, a Blaster with Nova probably knocked them away too 😛 But I think this comes down to how much that impacts damage. Like, lets say there is some function that treats KB as a damage proc based on the Magnitude and the Chance. Higher the Mag, the lower the Chance, the better the bonus damage. Power Bolt for example has a 20% Chance to cause Mag 1.2~ish KB on a Blaster. That is a low mag, but the low % chance should boost whatever value that the bonus damage is up a good bit to be essentially a damage proc. Energy Torrent has a 60% chance to cause Mag 5.0~ish KB. A good deal more Mag here would mean more damage, but the much higher chance could weigh that down, on top of being an AoE. Power Push has a 100% Chance to cause Mag 13.2~ish KB. When 100% Chance for very high mag KB comes into play is where it gets a little weird, but I feel if a change like this was put in place then the stats could be altered for the power itself and/or the damage for 100% chance of KB powers is weighed heavily so that it is not too much, but still I imagine the following is what Power Push should be: Fling one dude across the map and they splat into something anyways. Anywho, if Knockback were treated more like the above gif where its a fight-ending event or at least way more impactful like you see in that one episode of JL:U where Supes punches Darkseid through multiple buildings (High Mag), or like when Storm blows all the rando mooks the Xmen were fighting across the room and they are incapacitated (Gale), and so on, it would be seen as something really cool and powerful more often than annoying. Like sure, Explosive blast yeeted 1/2 the mob into the wall across the room, but those yeeted enemies are probably dead due to the KB proc and the ones who didn't get flung are prime to take more damage and be herded / etc. Yes, which is an awesome use of it! That said, it required you to use the map, careful coordination and expertise, and dedicating time to doing that (not to mention being the only person doing AoE KB in the group) Problem here is that while yeah it is an issue that goes away as you learn how to use and leverage it, during that time your powers effect the gameplay of others which is where this whole divide came from in the first place. Players trying out KB sets will either adapt and find joy in using it, or they see that it is a nuisance and avoid the KB powers / slot them away asap. The players that learn to use KB are also then stuck with needing to learn maneuvers and the like to leverage it when other types of CC or raw damage would do the job just as well if not better without needing the steep learning curve and time spent on positioning. A boost to KB powers is not just a boost to "Meta" players, of which you are one by stating you are playing to the KB meta of how to properly use KB at a proficient/meta level, but to anyone who may find high knockback fun by rewarding them relative to how KB may otherwise be difficult to use.

I dig it

I'd be behind enhancing Supremacy to include the general pet aura effects and reworking those procs 👍

I'm not entirely sure about this. To me, the root of the problem is that KB as it stands takes too much effort to use well for not enough payoff. Combined with how it's the one of the few effects in PvE that one player can do to affect the powers of another player, with the others being the cage/shift powers that lock targets out of combat with others for a bit, and straight up killing a target somebody else was gonna hit. Of those, the cages/shifts are the worst as they pause gameplay for a bit for everyone, even though they keep you and the team about as safe as possible. Death is the best since... you know, that is how you accomplish your goals in CoH for 95% of gameplay, and it just kinda stinks when you whiff a big attack cus your target does via other means. Though, you still get rewarded for your team getting the KO so it's all cool, compared to your team locking you and everyone else from defeating the enemy with a cage. KB is in between these where it keeps you and allies safe, but it can prevent them from defeating foes efficiently due to moving them away from their powers. This is why KD and KU are seen as so valuable since for most people ot provides about the same safety without the possibility of removing an enemy from play however briefly. Some people take that to extremes though which is unfortunate, much like how some vehemently hate Masterminds for the pets clogging maps or other xyz things. It's just that KB is a lot more common and easier to see in action. However, when teamed with people who know what they are doing with all these things there is almost never any complaints in my experience. Dimension shift is awesome for saving a team, even though it might be awkward for ranged characters at first it still allows you to defeat the enemies. It used to not let you interact at all and that got changed to still be a defensive time-out option, but allow teams to still go into the dimension and kick ass. Masterminds may take up space, but when the pets are taking aggro off you and dishing out damage its groovy. As for knockback, I firmly believe that giving it more value would alleviate some of the gripes people have with it. You throw an AoE knockback power and scatter enemies everywhere, currently it can be annoying in a team setting. If that is changed to where the enemies you scattered either are dead enemies or essentially put of the fight for a while then I think that perception would change for a good chunk of players. Not all, but a decent amount to where it's not automatically seen as bad and it becomes an interesting power choice for the individual, while still having great value either way to the team. Especially if say, if a target cant be knocked back they take impact damage like with Grav Control (as opposed to if you need your powers to being knockdown) then it could suddenly be super good to include people with force on your side. Nothing that can be done would please everyone nor convert the most rabid of haters, but there are definitely options to work for both sides.

Also excluding things like Kinetics where you can siphon speed, but allowing +Passive Speed powers and Sprint/Etc, what build could attain the fastest "normal" travel ability using set bonuses / etc?

Granted, but every elec attack saps you to 0% end, every psy attack sleeps, every Dark attack floors your tohit and perception, and so on. *Lethal Damage can crit you for AS levels of damage, after all it's lethal *Toxic damages you for 1/10th your max HP unresistable per DoT tick *Smashing lowers your resists and slows you per hit cus bruising you, etc CoH hard mode lets gooooooo On a more serious note, this won't change much if players hit first and lock down enemies, or if they are all running around with high defenses and dont get hit by the KB attacks anyways. Hell, as a squishy AT this is the reality vs some mobs in a lot of maps already where they chain KB 😛 If we are talking a truly "universal" change then sure, this would be the case. However this is clearly meant to be a player-specific option instead of game-wide. Knockback to a player has a bunch of different connotations than KB to a mob because the player can react much differently.

The my testing runs I did use CS at first but quickly dropped it in the 5 re-runs I did for KM as even on the SO level I got more mileage out of the lower tier attacks combined with PS. A 20% chance to recharge PS is not worth it IMO for the amount of time it takes to swing with CS which then needs to hit (teamed can lead to dead target or just missing in general), and the damage of the power itself combined with it's speed stats is not that spectacular. I'd rather have CS like... build up 5 stacks of PS when you activate it during PS than giving it a chance to recharge it, since that iirc will build it much quicker than other means. That, or give it some other interaction with PS like a higher chance to recharge PS the more stacks you have when you use CS, up the chance in general, or make it nuke-tacular with *additional* ST damage per PS stack... just something. It is a very fun power thematically how you build up all that power, but the end result is very... eh :S

I dig it