Galaxy Brain

Updating old groups > Creating new groups in terms of investment IMO. The models, missions, and so on are already in game and have been run through already. Giving the existing content a face lift is more bang for your buck and would undoubtedly be "harder" than before. The issue seems to be that 10% harder is not enough (given that the speed bump would just be the few days it takes to adapt). We have few options in terms of real difficulty here, and different people have different ideas of what that means. My idea would be needing to do frame-tight inputs on your keyboard/controller to do advanced techniques and power combos, or needing to actually dodge and block incoming attacks or else be put into hit stun. CoH ain't about that though. There's no advanced positioning or targeting or timing really needed in 99% of the game. Scratch that, there are examples early on. Vhaz 'sploding zombies force you to think about your position when they are about to die. But still, that is circumvented by just beating them with a bigger stick so they don't blow up. Having different tests where you need to attack from X position, or approach / retreat from a target in certain ways would add complexity and difficulty, but that is way out of scope and the playerbase would explode. Tweaking existing groups to have new powers that make players think about encounters / scout out the mob like they do for Malta Sappers or Freakshow Super Stunners (which also have the position component of run away after it dies) could do a lot if there are several combos to account for in any given encounter. If we're going by AI, I think there are some like with the Snipers or the Praetorian Clockwork that actually don't just dogpile players in melee range and prefer to run and shoot that could be implemented on different mobs that could make strats like taking taunt powers or even knockback powerful. On top of a setting to add in crazy super-boosts this would be a huge change to difficulty.

Right, so the least intensive would be to update existing groups + add the varied boosts

*Sees talk of enemy resistances and the melee sets* Uhhhh.... wasn't me! 😛

Porque no Los ....tres? 😛 I think new enemies would be awesome, but there are huge swaths of the game that could use a fresh coat of paint too! Updating existing enemies and adding new ranks is fun. Despite the hate they garner, weren't freakshow more fun when super sappers got mixed in and you had new targets to think about? That on top of brand new enemies and a "Super-hero/villain" difficulty with wild buffs would be sick.

Porque no Los dos?

When it triggers, the proc gives you a ~5 sec window where you get +50% crit rate on all attacks. AoEs technically have better odds yes, but honestly the base recharge of the power is a better determining factor 🙂

I think we had the same idea just different ways to communicate it. I wasn't under the impression there'd be +1 war wolf, but rather a bunch of changed entities that when they spawn as a group the random cluster would need different tactics based on composition.

Welp, for some of us the game will never be hard unless we add actual player reaction and thinking hurdles beyond queuing up a sequence of powers and praying they dont hit a 5% miss chance. Having different strategies required will be figured out, but if they are scattered and different with different interactions then that adds to the difficulty, like in Diablo where enemies have crazy random combos of buffs.

That isn't harder either, thats just bigger and badder / false difficulty where throwing bigger numbers at the enemies / bigger boosts for your players surpasses them.

The OP has 1 snippet at the beginning and end that touches on that original point, with the meat of it being about different difficulty options. Most of this page except for Molten and your post is talking about difficulty options as well, and the last page before is mostly talks of making end game harder / different enemy types / fixing certain sets. I am not sure where this is being resurfaced as the OP and most of the thread's posts are not on IOs anymore.

If additional difficulty also gave more reward (Merits possibly?) that would be a huge boost too.

I'm the OP of it, and while yes it originally was musing about how certain IOs are way stronger than others and that skews IO and Game balance, it then shifted hard into talking about advanced difficulty options which to your point would be something you can choose not to use just like with IO's.

Either way, I think that is unused design space that many newer sets take advantage of very well instead of just having BU or Aim. This could be cool too! Like while held, the target gains the Electrical Field damage toggle?

Yeah, the Incarnate Nukes are pretty redonk. I had mentioned this in another thread, but adding more options to enemies that make it easier to damage them if locked down is a path that could be taken. For example, more flying enemies or speedsters that are a pain to fight unless you got Holds / Immob.

Whats to stop making some AE enemies using the existing enemy models then? Also, I don't see how this wouldn't make the game more difficult if enemies had different strategies. I get its nothing like "You have to defeat this guy in this order because they are casting a shield on the other guys", but at the least anything that makes players think for a second more is instantly more difficult. I wonder if adding more diverse powers could help though. Writing this, for some reason I thought of an enemy with the Super Speed power that would hit you then run around the map... or essentially making "Rogue Supers" that are like player-builds but controlled by the AI. Imagine an AI Stalker, or Tanker that taunts you, etc.

Did you read the thread?

So, its been a little while and I would like to talk about where we are so far. The Test Overall: At this time, we have 301 runs of the mission across 19 powersets! The design of the mission and the enemies makes them really only dangerous when they swarm you / when there's a boss or two which tests your skill in both herding for efficiency as well as using the tools in the primary for safety. Being able to round up enemies was dangerous but it was the fastest way to clear the map, and it allows players to have to handle X factors such as enemy placement and how the AI navigates around you / decides to run to emulate a bit of team chaos in a way. This meta was able to show that nearly half the runs had recorded DNF's (Did Not Finishes): Battle Axe - 2 Deaths, KD did not proc in time to prevent death Dark Melee - 2 Deaths, vs a ST you are invulnerable but the lack of AoE damage and mitigation is very risky when tackling groups Dual Blades - 2 Deaths, unlike other sets it had guaranteed Knockdown mitigation but the lengthy animations meant missing those leaves you open to several attacks. Elec Melee - 2 Deaths, mitigation is tied to very slow powers, or ones that scatter the mob everywhere and then slows you down considerably Fire Melee - 2 Deaths, no mitigation aside from well.. killing with fire. Several moments where kiting and pausing needed to happen Martial Arts - 2 Deaths, the % chance to mitigate enemies is a gamble as always, making it almost all ST attacks to do this is even riskier Rad Melee - 4 Deaths! Lack of guaranteed soft control is noticeable. The heal relying on Contamination is funky. Savage Melee - 2 Deaths, no real mitigation outside of a ST knockdown with RNG Sets not on this list had no defeats recorded and in general all had an impact in the general performance due to the time spent adjusting to danger. Most all sets with deaths are on the lower half with an exception being Rad Melee that had great performance when the ball was rolling in it's favor, but had some luck issues with how it's mitigation works. The Standings: Looking at the overall averages, we can see significant time gaps between certain groups of sets that I have decided to rank into tiers due to similar average clear times. I'll go over the tiers based on my personal experience and what has been noted from the other testers. S TIER: Titan Weapons On top by a significant, 46 second gap, TW has big advantages over the other melee sets. To start, it has generous +Range on all attacks which helps with it's cone positioning and general utility when it comes to moving about the map. It has several ways to get knockdowns on enemies and a parry for safety, and it also deals huge damage in tiny windows thanks to how momentum works. In my experience I never missed a momentum window, which allowed for 80% uptime for extremely fast attacks. TW has great AoE and ST capabilities which makes for great consistency between types of enemies as well. A TIER: Rad, Spines, Staff, Katana These 4 sets are all top performers and have two things in common: AoE potential and Consistency. Rad and Spines could just delete whole spawns of minions by accident while focusing on single targets, while Staff and Katana had no moments of pause much like TW where you could throw them both at anything really and expect tight results. The former two have much higher standard deviation than the latter, but their ability to wipe mobs effortlessly kept their average times extremely fast with Spines sporting the fastest clear time. Compared to S tier, these sets seem to lack either the added safety/ST for consistent encounters, or just the raw stats to reach that next level. B TIER: Psy, Claws, War Mace, Battle Axe A near mirror case to A tier but with worse averages, we see Psy and Claws have good AoE potential but with inconsistent results due to the nature of Insight as well as Follow-Up potentially missing which causes swings in your clear time. On the latter end, War Mace and Battle Axe are essentially the same set with a key difference being that WM has a much better 2nd cone in Shatter. Its a pleasant surprise to see Axe perform as well here based on the negative press it gets on the forums! Compared to A tier, the sets lack the raw stats in animation time / AoE potency to hit the same level, but are still great. C TIER: Broadsword, Dual Blades, Savage Melee, Street Justice, Ice Melee, Elec Melee, Martial Arts This tier is the definite mid-tier where we have a grab bag of different sets with different strengths and weaknesses. Broadsword and Dual Blades have similar issues looking at them again where their animation times leave room to be desired. BS is just a slower, thus worse, Katana and likewise the fancy DB animations leave you wide open and frustrated if you miss and on top of the wait time would break it's combo mechanic. Savage Melee feels incredibly average on the whole, but has potential to be very good with certain outside powers thanks to it's +Rech mechanic. Spending Blood Frenzy stacks is still confusing... Street Justice feels great, and is really only in C tier due to limited AoE potential causing you to take longer clearing mobs. Skipping ahead a bit to Martial Arts, it too has very limited AoE which both affects kill speed AND safety compared to StJ's multiple AoE knockdowns. Ice and Elec both have great AoE potential but oddly enough share a similar issue with mitigation and ST damage. Ice is incredibly safe, but sacrifices speed and positioning time in order to leverage it's powerful Ice Patch fully, and it's AoE seems to be much better than it's ST with an amazing cone and Footstomp. Elec on the flip side also has great AoE.... but very poor mitigation and ST damage which bit into it's time. Compared to B tier, these sets suffered with poor animation times or AoE output specifically. D TIER: Fiery Melee Fiery Melee is a shock due to it's only effect being more damage. Nearly every fire set in the game tops the charts in this regard except for this one... What the Melee Set is lacking is solid / reliable AoE damage out of the gate unlike Fireball / Hotfeet / Etc, where you have a slow PBAoE and a narrow (though ranged) cone to work with. More troubling is the sheer lack of any mitigation which allowed other sets to buy time to deal damage in big groups, and made Fire pay for time spent adjusting position for safety. E TIER: Kinetic Melee KM is a very safe, but very slow animating set. So while sure, you had no trouble with actually finishing the mission the time it took you to kill enemies was hindered by the long attack times and the need to ramp up your +Damage tool. Having a slow cone that also deals knockback, albeit at a range, was not much of a help either. Really the main issue is the animation times being counter productive to the set's build up mechanic on top of having one of it's only AoE's scatter enemies which further makes it hard to use it's siphon. F TIER: Dark Melee Lastly, Dark Melee has the slowest averages due to having the worst AoE of all the tested melee sets. While a great pairing with many secondaries as time has shown, by itself it can be downright tedious even with Soul Drain to have to cycle target to target with the occasional line up of Shadow Maul hitting max targets. This even lead to some death's as the set could not mitigate a crowd's damage quickly! Its interesting to me that the lowest sets on the totem pole are either hyper-offensive or have a unique, ramp-up damage buff. I feel with different secondaries or simply IO's to help them survive we would see much different results from these ones in particular! Consistency: For giggles, I have also tiered the Standard Deviation to see which sets are most consistent per run. Next Steps: Going forward, I am going to re-run the tests given the IO spread for WP given by @Sir Myshkin. This will give a ton of survival which should ease the lives of several sets that had to pause for safety at times, as well as an overall Rech / DPS boost to several key powers. If anybody would like to continue runs on here on SO's, or even try with another secondary given the standardized parameters, please give it a whirl! The more data we can gather the better!

Power Creep hurts the sets that are not as good since you do not feel as super

Had the same thought in my earlier post 🙂 It would be super thematic!

This could effectively be done by attaching those effects to all "Mez" powers to emphasize the effects as you stack up to a hold. Sets like Ice Control already sorta do this as the ST hold applies a slow regardless of if it holds. The debuffs could be increased for sure. As for the base idea, I feel that is a natural extension of their Containment inherit already! Applying a control effect -> double damage, it should also apply where applying a control -> double mag on the next control, or at least a +1 mag if you have already hit with a primary / control power to allow better stacking.

I think simply adding in new powers / more powers to existing enemies would be enough of a change. From my own experience in modding games (myself and 2 others created Borderlands 2.5 which revamped tons of enemy encounters) simply making enemies "bigger and badder" is not more difficulty. Changing the behaviors players need to approach content with does. Look at Malta for example. In every group you look out for Sappers specifically which is a player difficulty dynamic not present in most other groups. Adding in special mobs that make players act differently is where the fun comes in.

❤️

More likely that the 1 tick was enough end to run any power they want. Bosses have 200 endurance, elites + AV's have 800. They all share the same endurance costs though, so their recovery gives back proportionately way more per tick compared to their costs.

All Elec Blast powers except for Thunderous Blast have 100% -Rec for different lengths of time https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AW5_KjMAykxJhSdMflR1uSfOsfknNvSyZDsLmoFohjw/edit#gid=0

Im just gonna quote myself from the Elec Blast thread in the Blaster forums: Honestly, End Drain as a mechanic is fundamentally wacky and not worth rewriting enemies for. When it works, it works as I detailed in the sheet posted prior. Elec Blast on a blaster can drain most enemies dry in about 12ish seconds of continual fire with VS helping out, and even faster if you slot for end mod or lean on Short Circuit / Thunderous Blast. If anything, frankenslotting End Mod sets for End/Rech or such could be useful here or there to leverage the attacks better. End Drain is binary and non-immediate. Ice's Slow or Sonic's -Res is immediately useful and stacks up to become better as you fight. Elec's Sapping is only useful vs targets that can survive blasts long enough to be drained, and then it takes time to actually drain them down to a safe level. Even if they can fire off a high-power attack if they are allowed to tick end once in your assault, the net safety gain is pretty dang good. Its just that as an attacking set, having essentially just 1 power that excels at end drain in SC (Thunderous Blast is not consistent enough to rely on just for Sapping purposes... though it's really nice) makes the secondary effect just kinda.... odd. Elec Control is really the only Elec set in the game with great consistent end drain as it has multiple powers that can drain groups efficiently as opposed to just 1 power (usually Power Sink or Short Circuit) that does all the work. All the other elec sets are awesome due to powers not directly tied to end drain either, though it is a perk. Elec Melee has Lightning Rod and a Chain Attack. Elec Armor has great passives, energize and power sink. Elec Manip has amazing melee attacks, and Power Sink. Elec Blast has Voltaic Sentinel, a very slow PBAoE, and a Ranged Nuke. Thunderous Blast is awesome, especially with the overall changes to nukes which lets you actually leverage it's drain effects but as a nuke its on such a long timer to not be a staple like Rain of Arrows / etc. SC loses out on damage and animation time in exchange for radius (it is decent there) and end drain, which requires slotting + other powers to be effective. As we have all gone over, unless you have Boost Power or Power Sink on top of SC, the drain is sort of meaningless as even ~70% of an end bar gone is nothing to an NPC. Power Sink does not match the range of SC, and neither does Ball Lightning IIRC and the latter can only be boosted to about ~14% end drain via enhancements (Blaster Values), leaving enemies still with enough end to matter (Another 15% ish). You would need to then use a couple of ST attacks per enemy to fully drain their end, by which point the -Recovery on other targets probably would have worn off. Elec Blast by itself does not have the power to effectively use it's side effect. Other elec sets besides elec control focus on other electrical tropes, or if they do drain it uses Power Sink which Returns Endurance to emulate Electrical Power. I say if anything, pull away some of the -End from Short Circuit as it is not enough to focus on anyways. Add back damage and/or animation speed to it instead. The way it is animated + the massive graphic makes it look like it should be a massive, dangerous electrical discharge instead of an end drain. As mentioned before, Aim is a slot that has room to play with. Looking at /Time and how it's Build Up variant trades 20% damage for 20% Recharge, Aim in Elec Blast could probably pull the same thing. Take say, X% away from the massive +ToHit it gives (even if you axed like 25% it would still be overkill tohit for most content) and apply that to +End Mod and/or +Rech to boost up the set's natural end mod and/or electrical "Speed". Also make Tesla Cage deal real damage like Sentinels. Not the same scale sure, but enough to be worthwhile. Sparky could probably use a bit of love too with either a faster or harder hitting bolt. Those alone would make elec blast feel much more effective IMO. For more far fetched ideas, perhaps Zapp could have a chain component where it can jump to 2-3 additional targets (Damage adjusted of course). The attacks that have a 30% chance to return end could just have a 100% end return if you don't miss for less end returned than we have now, or at least the Aim replacement could make the powers have a 100% chance while active.