Parabola

I have no experience of pvp and am almost allergic to it as a concept so take this with a pinch of salt. But ... if the armour tier 9's in their current form are indespensible to pvp I would ask the question whether that doesn't say more about how pvp currently functions rather than the tier 9's themselves. It's always worth taking a step back and checking whether the wider picture is itself a problem as two wrongs rarely make a satisfactory right. In any event it would be perfectly possible to have these powers working differently in pve to pvp. They may be working well in the current pvp environment but they really aren't offering all that much in pve.

I've no objection to this idea but if I could add a channel myself it would be a farming one in the hope that looking for group could be spared the incessant spam...

Two versions of what I'm planning for a dp/mc after the changes to the concealment pool drop. The first is a fairly standard softcap s/l/e/r build (using agility): And the second dropping the e and r softcaps for more damage (using intuition): The blanks in both builds are ff+rech procs. Also the selection order in both isn't what I'd really do in practice.

The tanks vs brutes thing does depend on sets as well. Now they've had their damage modifier raised tanks do very well with sets that have +dam. I wouldn't play dark melee on a brute for example as it is the absolute bomb on tanks. Give a brute a set that doesn't rely on a +dam mechanic and has decent aoe without the tank radius/arc buffs and they are golden. Brutes are easier to level as well. Fury does so much of the heavy lifting in the early game. This also means they exemp well. Another thing I'm almost embarrassed to admit I consider when choosing between tanks and brutes is teammate expectations. I build and play my tanks exactly the same as brutes, I never take taunt and I build for damage rather than overprotection. Being a tank on a team can carry some expectations but I just want to dive in and smack stuff. People don't expect anything but carnage from brutes!

You mean aside from the Travel power (which is definitely useful to every AT)? Has some strange timewarp phenomenon happened here?!

Arachnos are a difficult group. They do hefty psi, energy and even some chunks of toxic damage alongside the more normal types. This makes it hard for any one set to cover it all. They also do plenty of debuffs that one way or another can make like difficult. Radiation armour is an option. You can plug psi with impervium armour and the aegis unique and the other hole (cold) can be ignored. Take focused accuracy to help out with debuffs and you should be in a decent spot to go arachnos hunting. They are never exactly fun to fight though!

My response quoted both yourself claiming the devs seemed to be acting out of spite and another poster claiming the devs seemed to be pursuing a vendetta against a power they had taken a personal dislike to. I was pointing out that these attacks on the devs motives are completely unwarranted. You are absolutely free of course to disagree with a change or the general direction of game development but that doesn't excuse those kind of statements. Not agreeing with the devs isn't the same thing at all as claiming they don't have good motives and that sort of posting just makes the debate more toxic.

It would be great if they could open up all the palattes for any power. My biggest bugbear is trying to match colours between primary and secondary if they use different palattes. Another thing I'd love to have would be a saturation slider to use in conjunction with the colour selection. It's frustrating to find the perfect colour but to just want a bit more or less of it.

I was about to say that I think they should be kept for the lower levels as a boost for starting characters. But thinking about it I wonder if the fact that people are used to starting each squishie characters career with always on mez protection is part of the problem we are seeing with the RoP changes. Once you have become used to something it is a wrench when it disappears, far more than if you never had it in the first place. Assuming people are reluctant to keep paying for the amplifiers they then look for the thing they have had in other places and RoP as part of a cycle of powers becomes that answer. So yes, if the amplifiers were removed altogether it might not be the worst thing in the world. People would go absolutely crazy about it though. Mind you I'm coming to the conclusion that people are going to go absolutely crazy about any changes regardless of what they are. I'm in danger of becoming stuck staring at the inside of my own head given the amount of eye rolling I've been doing over the reaction to the RoP changes.

Maybe it just comes down to the power being someone on the dev crew's proverbial personal bugbear? A power they just intensely dislike for whatever reason, and would love to flat-out nuke from orbit if they could? Taking a heavy nerf-bat to it may be the next best thing in that case. If it becomes even more uncommon a pick than it already is, I could see that being counted as a win for someone who really wanted it out of the picture. We all have something like that, I think... Some bit of the game we want to punt right into a volcano... 😝 Or we could assume that the devs are operating with the best of intentions and are being completely upfront with their reasoning as they have done nothing to suggest otherwise.

This should probably be a discussion for a separate 'HC design philosophy' thread. Personally I am encouraged that they are prepared to make bold changes, feel that underpinning everything with solid numbers is a good idea (original devs not balancing around activation time being a huge failing is this regard for example) and generally I like combo mechanics as they add interactive interest to the button pressing. It also seems to me that we can infer from these changes that they are trying to improve baseline performance while limiting it (where they consider necessary) at the high end and again that seems a very sensible way to approach things. As ever though it would be really interesting to get some commentary on the thought process behind changes such as these (alongside the bare patch notes) so we can look at the changes in the context of the design goals rather than trying to guess what they are. I don't imagine it would cut down on the back and forth and it certainly wouldn't stop the flow of 'I don't like it therefore you must change it' type feedback but it might help to inform the debate. Currently feedback that seems like it should be a more general 'I don't agree with the design goal' is often coming out as a specific 'I don't like this change' or 'This change isn't working'. If we had the goals stated up front to work from we might be able to separate those out a little. I could be wrong and it might just cause more arguments though!

Are you fighting enemies lower in level than you or ones like clockwork that are vulnerable to kb? In both cases the mag of kb can be increased enough to become actual kb rather than kd.

This has been superseded now hasn't it?

You would hate my current project - I'm running all the content blueside on a staff/dark brute. Locking xp every 5 levels and tapping out every single contact, doing the safeguards, tf's and collecting badges along the way. I am REALLY enjoying it! For me the journey is the game no matter how many times I've done it before - particularly in light of the current endgame 'balance'. I have tried farming to 50 in the past and I felt no connection to the character. I ended up immediately rerolling and levelling in the normal fashion. It does mean that I don't particularly enjoy AT's like dominators that are very backloaded, but as I said before I see that as being a problem with the design of the AT rather than the way the game is played (still hoping for a total redesign of the assault sets). I totally understand your reasons for seeing it differently though. As I say my worry with the idea of allowing all content to be run at lv50 is that would become the only way teams would run anything. I would hate to see that happen as I don't think it would be healthy for the game overall.

The thing is that often you aren't having to make a choice between recharge and defence - they can go hand in hand. If you want to slot a load of lotg +rech you need defence powers to put them in and many sets have both defence and recharge bonuses. For this combo you have both ato sets, coercive persuasion and sting of the manticore available that all give recharge and ranged defence. Here's my planned build (that I still haven't got around to levelling): Hasten is perma with s/l/e/r all softcapped. The force feedback in psionic tornado will help drain psyche towards being perma and bring psychic wail up more often (it's under 38sec as it is). And the build still has +33% damage without really looking for it. I don't think it would be worth actively avoiding defence in order to push those numbers any higher.

Yup. Dark melee is fantastic on tanks these days. I have the three you mention, a shield/dm and a da/dm. Eventually I'm going to run out of armour sets to run with it!

I'm a fan of this idea. Hard to know without seeing the backend but it might be simpler than auto exemping to contacts (another idea I'm a fan of). This I don't like so much for a few reasons. I enjoy the exemping mechanic, different levels of play in the game have very different feels. If everything was only endgame incarnate fueled insanity it would turn me off massively. There would be a danger that such a change would hollow the game out, with the only teaming available being at lv50 regardless of the content. This in turn would further encourage farming straight to 50 before playing any real content in order to keep up. And having to keep half an eye on exemping performance is one of the few remaining brakes on IO builds and provides interesting challenges in it's own right. Some more backloaded AT's and powersets suffer a little because of this but that's a design problem with them not a reason to make the entire game lv50.

Thanks - some of the slotting was lifted from someone else's build so I can't take all the credit - think it might have been Werner's kat/dark? I actually did a load of testing on ToF here (not that anyone seemed to notice!): The upshot is that it does proc well but you have to pick the right set of procs. Better on a tank of course but still worth it on a brute. The reason for taking energy wasn't actually to fix end - I take it on nearly every melee build because of focused accuracy. In the endgame there is a lot of debuff flying around and -tohit is particularly crippling on a resist set that needs to hit in order to heal. The fact that it also fixes end is of course nice too!

Here's mine (planned not actually levelled up so there may be things to adjust in practice).

I respect this point of view and you are far from alone in it - in fact it seems to be the majority opinion. I don't share it however. I feel that it is a failing in the system that any character can solo anything at the highest difficulty levels. That's any character no matter how op the build and any content no matter how easy. Those hardest difficulty settings should be the exclusive preserve of teams in my opinion. The fact that some AT's/builds can solo just about anything on the hardest difficulty settings has (I think) created the perception that in order to feel heroic that is what you need to be able to do. Therefore the AT's that aren't really cut out for this sort of thing feel lacking vs those that do. This brings us onto the main subject of this thread - mez effects and mez protection. Those AT's that aren't cut out for max difficulty soloing also tend to be those that don't have the 'I can ignore the entire mez mechanic 99% of the time' toggle. Therefore lack of mez protection also has the feel of being 'unheroic'. But being mezzed isn't inherently unheroic. In comic books heroes are mezzed in various ways all the time. In fact it is the norm that enemies have to resort to dirty tricks like mez because they aren't able to take the hero on in a fair fight. The problem isn't mez itself but the experience of being mezzed in coh. It does annoying things like dropping toggles, it can last far too long and it takes all your agency as a player away (which is pretty much item 1 on the 'things not to do in game design' list). So if I had the power to do so (and the ability!) I would do two things. One would be to rework the mez mechanics so they are more fun and more fair. I would remove all toggle drop, and introduce a way for the player to actively engage in breaking out of mez so at no point do they simply have to stop playing. I would also rework mez protection so everyone is affected by it to some degree, making it much less a case of the haves and have nots. The second thing (which I know is far more controversial) would be to rework difficulty in some way so it is no longer possible for any character to solo content on the highest settings. I believe that peoples perceptions of heroism would adjust. Wading through a sea of enemies on +0x8 vs doing so on +4x8 is only really different in the colour that the enemies con after all. There is nothing inherently more heroic about purple than red, orange, white or any other colour for that matter. We see it as being the goal because that is what we are used to and it's what we see other AT's/builds being able to do. I have absolutely no desire to remove soloing or the fun of soloing large numbers of enemies but I feel we have to make a choice at some stage; we either have a game where teaming takes a back seat so that we can solo at maximum difficulty or we improve the teaming dynamic by in some way or another adjusting difficulty.

I feel you've rather missed my point. I'm certainly not promoting this particular change as the necessary fix but I do believe a fix is necessary. In terms of the wider debate though I think we all need to be aware of the difference between opinions and facts and how our opinions are shaped by our wider preconceptions.

Was that the old animation when flares had a longer cast time?

They actually did create identical versions of this thread in the defenders and corruptors forums as well as another in the general powerset section. Whether it was necessary to create four versions of the same thread is of course debatable. Apologies if I've misread the intention but there seems a distinct whiff of 'grab your torches and pitchforks, we need to assemble a mob' about this.

Yes indeed. I've certainly become massively disillusioned with these arguments as it seems obvious to me that they are heavily influenced by broader views and we are never all going to agree. Both sides are utterly convinced they are right. Both sides mystified by the others refusal to see what is obvious to them. And both sides essentially feeling the other is being selfish; one side feeling the other refuse to accept any sacrifice for the good of all, and the other feeling they are being dictated to, to no good end. It all sounds so painfully and sadly familiar... I want teaming to work better at higher levels. I feel there are systemic problems in the game that are creating problems with teaming at high levels. And I feel it would be in everyones interest to address those problems. But yes, I've pretty much given up.

What's the difference between a hard no vote and a no vote? Does it count for more? Could it be countered with a rock hard yes vote? Perhaps the Mohs scale could be employed? (Apologies, I'm clearly in an odd mood today)