Galaxy Brain

...not removing, adding

You can already horribly clip certain costume piece combos + powers, if theres a big red text or something under "clippable pieces" then its up to the player when they decide to use them with certain sets.

Gonna link to my old thread about KB here: TL;DR, Knockback is in a weird spot for CoH. The immediate benefit is that the enemy is stuck in an animation where they cannot act for a certain amount of time, which both Knock Down and Knock Up accomplish as well. That said, the meta of CoH favors enemies being in groups to be targeted by the multitude of fun AoE powers or location based abilities, and it stinks when enemies go out of those ranges. When used well, you can leverage knockback to put enemies *into* these areas, but that takes time and coordination that other effects do not need in order to be leveraged. When used poorly, you actively knock enemies away from formations and can actually make it more dangerous as enemies with ranged attacks can now fire at you separately and increase the time to defeat of the encounter / risk of taking damage. Knockdown / Up has the benefit of locking enemies into an animation without the drawback of needing to be accurately coordinated or (usually) flinging enemies outside of attack zones. In my opinion, Knockback has too much downside compared to other options and it'd be nice if it had a benefit over the others so it is more of a tactical choice or preference. Examples could be... KB has a damage proc when you fling a target, Knockback has a much longer "getting up" animation than KD for control, or so on. Until that, its my opinion that KB is strictly worse in the grand scheme as evidenced by how much better many powers become when you convert it, and why it is such a struggle to leverage the limited IO space.

I mean sorta. WP is a better "I have a natural healing factor" set, while Regen is more like "I'm the bad guy from terminator 2" set where you have unnaturally quick damage recovery. WP trades some of it's "nickel and dime immunity" for the ability to help vs Alphas which Regen is more extreme against in both directions. Having the ability for Regen to tank an alpha every so often or with prep of some kind (like building up an absorb barrier over time) I think would be thematic and still set it apart from WP.

In b4 "Standard code rant", but on a more serious note I think that porting over certain costume pieces should be done as well. I know there are concerns about clipping / etc, but honestly it should be the player's discretion with that and the sets they choose.

Right, but I meant compared to the bio and rad recovery auto powers that also give regen

Does regen's quick recovery give more than Inexhaustible and the Radiation +Rec?

PvP should have it's own pass, the back and forth for this is confusing.

If we're talking MM stuff, there is also a thread here:

I dig the concept of a PBAoE that scales based on targets drained at least 🙂

Just saying, but the reason we even have these threads is due to IO's allowing a Brute to take a Tank's place while a Tank cannot IO their way to become a Brute (currently). If we were to only buff IO's, the same core problem exists. Any tweak to them that takes away, even if "good" is a nerf in some way even if its like @Mr.Sinistersays with Defense and Offense being shuffled around. This is a separate topic sure, but I actually would love that where you can build hyper-offense, hyper-defense, or somewhere in the middle.

What I mean is, all buffs will lead to more imbalance. Choosing not to nerf IOs at all is something that won't help in the long run. Separating bonuses is a nerf in a sense to those who have both bonuses now, which I think would be a healthy direction to make it so you have to choose. Then again, this is all speculation unless we have metrics on how often IO builds are even used...

No nerfs leads to imbalance

Bot/Trap is gonna be lit

The AI changes on test will help a lot of sets, but let me throw my 2 inf in: Mastermind Primary Attacks: Double the Damage / Recharge of all these to make the end cost worth it, as well as make them good for Procs and generally whacking a target or two every so often. MM's cannot make traditional attack chains as-is, so making the few attacks they get actually worth using as a pick would be nice and give many pairings a bit more to do as they level. If this is done, maybe alter the effects of the T2 attacks to be more mez / debuff oriented compared to the more DPS oriented T1 attacks. General Pet QOL: Make them faster moving, dragging your guys along is never fun. Increase the base HP / Regen of pets to help scale vs higher end content. The resist/defense auras help here but the HP is lacking. When summoning pets, provide a bigger window of intangibility or a massive absorb shield to help with bigger fights where re-summoning happens often. Ninjas: Add in some /Martial Assault and /Ninja (Blinding Powder?) abilities to the pets to update their offense a bit. Smoke Flash should grant defensive stats to the selected Ninja on top of offense. Make it a TAoE as well for other nearby ninja to benefit. Give the personal Archery Attacks something special... right now they're the only MM attacks with no secondary effects. The Oni should get Warmth from Thermal Radiation to help survival a bit? Ninjas downfall is they are made of origami, any added survival like Smoke Flash giving +Def or a heal would be amazing. Mercenaries: The recharge on Commando Attacks is atrocious. If Assault Bot can launch missile swarms twice a fight why cant this guy be Rambo? Same deal with Spec Ops crowd control. The Medic is in an odd spot as a T1 pet. Maybe it could be a special, 4th pet and have a 3rd normal soldier? Serum is in contention for one of the worst powers in CoX. The effects are essentially only good for the commando who has his own problems, and then it is not up nearly often enough + has a devastating crash. I'd rather replace this with the Gun Drone from /Devices, but revamping this power to either effect the whole squad and be a 3rd upgrade of sorts or something would be groovy. Really anything would be better. Thinking on this more, replace Serum with "Field Specialist". Straight up a 7th pet (the medic) who has the current layout of the Medic. This new medic can administer a Serum that boosts the defense, resist, stamina, and damage of allies for a short while and then costs a small amount of endurance afterwards (watered down old serum, but is applied much more often), and can summon a Gun Drone for added offense and covering fire. Zombies: Soul Extraction should work on defeated enemies. The rank determines the soul's strength like with the zombies. Perhaps even lower the recharge and duration and allow for multiple ghosts? The set has a unique 7th pet that unfortunately relies on your pets going down and eats into your gameplay. Making it rely on defeated enemies fits the theme and allows you to more efficiently play. Beasts: Not enough exp with them, but they seem to have messed up attack chains. Looking into this could help a ton with how they are supposed to be high-offense. Make the Pack Mentality stacks actually stack higher and be easier to obtain while fighting. Overall net boost to the set. Robotics: Repair should have either a shorter cooldown or maybe a slight "splash" of healing. It's good but sorta situational.

Should be yes 🙂

Yep, it's made by @Hopeling on test as "Mission Simulator" for our work on testing melee primaries in a standardized environment 🙂 @Infinitum, you can try gunning for the EB and testing numbers there. They have no debuffs or armor themselves.

@Infinitum, use the Mission Simulator

The issue is that the most valuable stats from IOs are defensive or "neutral" (recharge), not offensive. A Brute can cover the survival gap between themselves and Tankers with sets while the reverse is currently not true for offense. Increasing the base offensive abilities of Tankers to close the gap even with IOs would be healthier and sort of like the mentioned Defender vs Corruptor comparison.

Even if its like, new map design where 1/2 of the team start on different end and the goal is in the middle

If not a limited team size, maybe more content that encourages teams to split off to do simultaneous objectives instead of sticking together and steamrolling?

It honestly seems that the issue is 8 man teams, I wonder if some content could be made that forces a set number of people?

I really think the sentinel regen would be better for all /regens

I would go as far as to say that these dont need actual PvP fights, just the objectives being player vs player.

As long as you fight more than one target at a time, it will always have an AoE lean. If AoE across the board is nerfed, or you can rotate through ST attacks fast and efficiently enough to match an AoE power then they would be on more equal footing. If there were cases of say, you have to take out individual targets first (classic example being one enemy being invincible while another is actively buffing them) then ST would matter a lot more as well. Unfortunately, the game as is throws tons of targets at a time at you which leans to AoE value.