Rimerat

To expand, I'm not sure why rage was tweaked to begin with. Why is SS being looked at when we have powersets like Kinetics that makes 95% of the content in the game a joke?

I have shelved my SS characters because the unavoidable -def in the rage crash made the builds I run with them unfun. I hope this gets addressed soon as a result. I also hope that some variation of the rage crash remains; having to play around the -damage was kind of fun, though maybe it's just nostalgia. Please get rid of unavoidable defense debuff.

IMO, as any melee-focused character, it's definitely good to reach defense softcap in smashing & lethal and/or melee. This is more than possible to do with a Spines/Fire combo. Reaching 45% defense will net you a ton of extra survivability, moreso than stacking resists. You will need to use many IO sets to achieve this defense softcap. 45% defense will mean that any attack of X type or position will have a 5% chance to hit you.

I could get behind self damage as a solution.

Right, right. By picking Super Strength, people are only allowed to carry a full tray of t2 purples any time they want to do challenging content. Seems fair. Looks like I've been intellectually checkmated.

I know you're trolling hard but I wanted to address the 'use insps' topic since some people legitimately feel that's a solution. Try doing a speed ITF with rage running. Even if you use the ability conservatively, you won't get enough purps all the time to mitigate the crash every time it happens. Source: I've done tried it. Why not just use it less? Well, that's kind of why this topic got made. Not being able to use your abilities is not fun.

Yeah I don't know. To be clear I'm 100% for Rage no longer being a 'set it and forget it' power. I just don't think a defense hit is a good idea. No matter what armor set you're talking about, it would be a massive hit. In regards to some armor sets, it would make the skill borderline unusable at all when doing high-end content. If rage can't be how it used to be, I'd suggest disabling 'rage stackng' altogether and just converting it more into a standard build-up. It's a boring solution, but a solution nonetheless. Alternatively, just nerf it hard. Reduce the damage/to-hit, reduce the duration and cooldown so the crash happens more frequently, increase the endurance cost to activate. You could also change the defense debuff to a recovery/regeneration debuff. Just please don't implement a solution that leans Super Strength heavily toward being used with specific armor sets, and leaves other sets hanging. Every Primary should be viable with every Secondary.

I think straight up removing it would have to come with some other downside. The thing we want to avoid is it becoming a "just set it on auto and forget about it" power, as that runs counter to the intent of both the original design and Castle's redesign of it. Even removing the damage penalty (due to the mentioned smashing resist issues) isn't out of the question if we can come up with some kind of alternative mechanic. If the -Defense has to stay, it seems simplest to let it be resistable. I firmly disagree with this. I would point to the suggestions I made in my post on page 5 instead, and the reasoning behind why a defense downgrade at all would be completely unacceptable. There's many other options. I don't think making Rage only viable for defense-focused sets that can easily overcap is a good idea.

Hi all. I made an SS/Fire brute assuming Rage still functioned as it did on live. You can imagine my disappointment when I was unable to stack Rage to mitigate the defense crash; thus rendering my pricey fantasy build crippled. My fault for not researching more. I'm not going to claim that Rage stacking wasn't very powerful. There's a reason I gravitated toward making this character. I'm also not going to advocate reaching a compromise in regards to the defense crash. In endgame City of Heroes, the ultimate goal for every tanky character is to reach the defense softcap (in s/l, or positionals). This isn't just for defense-focused sets. You want to reach the softcap on resist sets too; like my little Fire Armor brute. Without hitting the softcap, Fire Armor becomes significantly worse when looking at high-end content. This logic can be applied to any resist set; not just Fire of course. The current Rage crash, or any compromise regarding the defense debuff would be totally unacceptable in my opinion because of this. A compromise (10% defense) would still render it unusable for many sets, and only open it up for use with defense -focused sets that can easily overcap. That's just not the City of Heroes I knew and loved. Any Primary set should be viable with any Secondary set. It feels like a major betrayal of the games core values to leave this unavoidable defense crash in, in any form. So, here's some suggestions if a change is deemed necessary: - Reduce the +damage and/or +tohit of Rage. - Reduce the duration AND cooldown so that the -damage crash happens somewhat more frequently. - Increase the endurance crash/initial cost. - Prevent Rage from stacking altogether. - Allow Unrelenting in Presence to *passively* mitigate the crash. - Just turn Rage into a standard buildup (my least favorite option, Rage is a unique skill for a reason!) Thanks for reading my wall of text. ;)

Something I don't see many people talking about is that the -def debuff from rage crashing is now unavoidable. On live (or at least, when I played last) you could avoid the defense debuff by having at least one extra stack of rage when the previous wore off. In other words, if you had enough recharge you'd pretty much never suffer the defense debuff. Now, you suffer the defense debuff even if you have rage going when the crash from the previous happens; and in a way having more recharge is kind of a *bad* thing because you suffer the crash twice as often. I've heard the unrelenting power in presence circumvents this, but I'm not sure how - is it passive? Anyways, I made this thread for advice/discussion on this since it's been kind of frustrating to me. As a SS/Fire brute barely reaching the def softcap through IO sets, I basically cannot ever turn on rage while main tanking or I splat.