Parabola

I don't see team balance as being a binary choice between rigid trinity gameplay and 'city of soloists'. I don't want people to be forced to bring something in particular to a team but I do think that whatever they bring they should feel they are contributing. I enjoy building characters that can solo ridiculous things but it doesn't make for a good teaming experience when you are hanging on the coattails of a character like that. It's all very well living out power fantasies but this is an mmo and teaming is the foundation of the game. I think it should be possible for the game to provide enough challenge to improve the late game teaming experience but the power of IO'd and incarnated characters will have to be taken into account.

I've had a lot of fun with an elec/mental. Drain psyche helps with sapping but importantly it also massively boosts your survival while doing so. You won't sap as quickly as an /energy or /elec but I think it's safer overall. On the subject of elec blast and its lower damage. Yes it does lag behind other sets but I'm strongly of the opinion that all blasters do plenty of damage. The trick is surviving long enough to output that damage. Having so much damage that you burn everything to the ground before they can harm you is one way to go but not the only way. Elec has been helped enormously by the fast snipe changes and given a melee power or two from the secondary does just fine.

My late to the party take on all this is that I don't think the game should be entirely balanced around IO's, but they shouldn't be ignored in the wider balance conversation. The fact that players can ignore the crafting and market side of this game entirely and still have a good play experience is a huge strength. However IO's (and incarnates but that's another discussion) do distort the playing field at the high end of the game. Solo this isn't a problem but on teams I feel it is. I'd like to see some rebalancing for the late game in whatever form that takes. I don't see intentionally gimping myself or even worse being expected to ask others to gimp themselves as being the answer. The game should be capable of providing enough challenge to match the capabilities it provides the players (in particular to provide a satisfying teaming experience). But I don't want to see SO only players left behind or feeling forced to play in a way they don't want to. So an idea I've mentioned before is that the balance changes could start with a buff to SO's. If the power gap between SO'd and IO'd characters was narrowed it might allow wider balance changes with less risk of leaving anyone behind. One thought I had was to allow SO's to ignore a little of the ED cap like the alpha slot does. That way SO's would be able to achieve higher raw enhancement values than IO's on a power by power basis which wouldn't overtake the advantage set bonuses give you but might close the gap a little. I'm sure there would be many other ways of doing this too.

There is something known as the 'rule of 5' with IO set bonuses. It means that you can only use 5 of same named set bonus. You can slot more but they don't do anything. In this case with the obliteration and crushing impact sets I already had 5 '5% recharge' bonuses so slotting another set of crushing impact would have been something of a waste. So I decided to use a full set of touch of death to get a little more melee defence as a buffer against debuffs. But touch of death doesn't offer quite as good enhancement values as 5 crushing impacts + a proc so I put it in the power that won't be used as much, pulverise. As an aside the rule of 5 also explains some of the massive power of purple sets. Without them you hit the limit for 5% recharge bonuses very quickly. Adding a purple set not only gives you a 10% bonus but it also frees up a slot for another 5% bonus somewhere else. Have fun with it!

No problem. As Dark Dove says above DDR is very useful for defence based builds. Super Reflexes has the ability to cap this at 95% if the passives (Agile, Dodge and Lucky) are slotted with enough defence. This will greatly reduce the ability of enemies to remove your primary means of survival but you still have to be careful of enemies that use big to-hit buffs, they can still get around your defences. Devouring Earth crystal emanators, Nemesis stacking vengeance and Rularuu eyeballs are the worst offenders here. If I was going to only take one purple set for this build I'd probably take the Armageddon set in Shatter. Shatter is a hugely useful power for War Mace as it features in both the best single target attack chain and your aoe chain. Basically you should be using it all the time so making it do as much damage as possible is a good idea. I agree about putting Practiced Brawler on auto rather than Hasten. This is what I do with clickie mez protection as it's up more often and the consequences of it sitting idle are more serious. Taking all the purples out apart from Armageddon I'd maybe do something like this: Hasten isn't quite perma but if you take Ageless destiny that will more that fix that and it will also help with any endurance problems remaining. I prefer radial unless I am desperate for end as it provides more debuff resistance on top of that already provided by Super Reflexes and Focused Accuracy. Do try putting procs in your attacks once you've got the basic sets in place if you can afford them - 5 slotting with one set using the proc and an extra proc from another set can provide a decent damage boost over 6 slotting a set. The trick is to pick and choose which pieces you use to get the enhancement you need. In this build for example Clobber needs decent recharge slotting to get a gapless Jawbreaker->Clobber->Shatter chain so I've picked all the Crushing Impact pieces with recharge in them. Anyway, apart from the endurance issues this combination is pretty forgiving build wise. Super Reflexes is pretty simple to hit the positional softcaps with and War Mace just wants recharge and enemies to beat up!

I'm going to make an assumption that your primary was Superstrength? It's not the fastest set out of the blocks. All the powers are balanced around rage which sucks before you have it. Lv32 is a long time to wait for aoe too. Regen is a bit lacking and you should have an easier time with willpower. Of course no armor set really comes into its own until slotting comes together at later levels. But fury does mean brutes can get away with less slotting in attacks early on and devote more slots to defence if they need to.

I've had a stab at this combo: It's a bit more expensive with the purples and ato's etc. I dropped Mu for Energy - War Mace is a pretty self sufficient set for aoe (particularly at perma hasten levels of recharge) and doing that will help out with the end issues and free up the alpha to take musculature instead (radial if extra end mod is needed). You may have concept reasons for using Mu though? I also dropped Bash; with the recharge available in the build you should be able to use Jawbreaker->Clobber->Shatter as a single target attack chain so even Pulverise is basically a mule. Putting more defence in the passives gets DDR closer to the cap - if you +5 a couple of them it will get there. You could also free up a slot from somewhere to mule a second pair of Blistering Cold in Brawl to cap the slow resistance.

You can do something like this by running an appropriate story arc in ouroboros. It exemps you down to the right level and you still earn xp and best of all merits. I spend a lot of time running lower level story arcs as I really like the feel of the early game and the rewards are often pretty good.

It's worth mentioning that brutes are very good at low levels. Fury gives them a massive leg up in the damage game. They have added lots of boosts to make the low level game easier. I don't see this as a balance problem, I haven't found the character yet who is in any danger of soloing at 4/8 out of the gate. It's the high level game where balance becomes more of a problem.

Brutes have some advantages. Vs scrappers they get taunt auras in all secondary sets and they have higher resist caps and more hp. They also get their damage in a very predictable straightforward way. The crit mechanism is inherently streaky, sometimes you waste a load of crit damage on a target that doesn't need it, sometimes you don't crit when it would be useful. Scrappers do more damage than brutes in general but I'm not sure that the gap in damage is as big as the gap in survivability. Vs tanks, brutes do more damage in single target and sometimes in aoe. This is a bit muddy with the arc/area bonus tanks get and the fact that they can leverage procs more effectively (needing to slot for survival less). Under high damage buff scenarios a brute will way outstrip a tank though (hence farming brutes). Tanks are a lot tougher than brutes though, particularly taking ato's into account. I often struggle to choose between them. The other factor vs both scrappers and tanks is that brutes are a joy to level. Fury really takes the pain out of early levels. They also generally have better power progression than tanks with getting attacks earlier and at the same time being tough enough when compared to scrappers that can feel a bit squishie at lower levels.

I've been looking at my dark/ta too. It had bonfire in it originally but I may swap that out for oil slick. Is it autohit when lit as well? It does look like it does good damage, I wish it had the area of the defender version though.

I now have several dark melee tanks, it's hands down my favourite secondary. One tip: if you split the gauntleted fist set you can get the 6% en/neg res bonus twice which I find really helpful. I put the three pieces with the most rech into soul drain and it doesn't need any more slotting beyond that (this also gives it the absorb proc which is nice). The other three pieces I put in shadow maul leaving room for procs. I'm just eyeballing your build but I'm not convinced about having cloak of fear with no end reduction slotted in it? Touch of fear without damage (or damage procs) too? And put the theft of essence proc in dark regeneration, it completely changes the power. Overall I suspect you will have endurance problems with this build. Cardiac is a long term fix but I'd prefer to build in more end management earlier on.

Yeah I'm wondering why 17 was chosen too. Presumably it had specific significance over 16 or 18. Anyway, in my opinion an aggro cap is absolutely necessary for the teaming dynamic of the game and the current cap of 17 seems about right. As much as it would be satisfying as a tanker to 'herd all the things', it would be more boring for everyone else. The current set up does create some odd situations where mobs over the cap are standing around looking at you but that's only really a solo thing, on a team those mobs would be making life exciting for the squishies and that's a good thing.

Hi @Bopper, just wanted to thank you for your work on mids (and anyone else involved). CoH would be just about unplayable for me without it!

Shield is a scrapper set. Shield charge is better on scrappers, against all odds works better for them due to higher damage modifier, same defence softcap, not enough res to hit caps either way and scrappers still get a taunt aura. It's not a bad on brutes because it's a great set but scrappers get more from it.

Hurricane is a set defining power and the repel is a big part of that. I would much prefer to go the other way and restore the repel chance back to what it was before it got nerfed (in pve anyway). It is much more difficult to use now than it used to be and that does lead to more scatter than used to be the case. On the subject of the debuffs, I believe the debuff area is bigger than the repel area? So, mobs at the limit of the repel are still debuffed? I could be wrong about that though.

Apologies if this has been mentioned before but I'm seeing animation errors on a dual pistols sentinel using the ninja run stance. Empty clips is the most common power that goes wrong as I tend to use it first when engaging the enemy, she often doesn't come out of the bent over stance and fires the bullets behind her rather than towards the enemy. This doesn't seem to effect who gets hit - just an animation error. I'm using no redraw on the pistols which may be a contributing factor.

You missed out arch/nin sentinel but that may have been deliberate?!

It's worth emphasizing this point. The recovery given by sustain powers is huge, and slotting end mod in them is more efficient than any other end gain slotting. If you're thinking of adding slots to either health or stamina for end gain, no matter how expensive the proc you are thinking of using, a simple end mod in the sustain is way better. Unless I am really desperate for a set bonus (usually ranged defence) I always slot the sustains with two lv50 end mods and two lv50 healths.

I agree with the general sentiments about which tf's could do with work and why. Less repeating missions, less hunting and more map variety and interesting mechanics please. I wanted to chip in on the scaling to 50 idea though to say I am strongly against it and that's putting it mildly. The game does need more incarnate content to give incarnates something to do other than trivializing regular content, but giving them more regular content to trivialize certainly isn't the answer. The experience of teaming as even a highish level character sidekicked up to tricked out incarnates is seriously lacking, as a genuine lowbie there is no point whatsoever other than doorsitting. Also the progression through the levels with the tf's as milestones is an integral part of the game structure. This game thrives on encouraging people to roll alts and enjoy the journey, allowing people to sit at 50 and play all content at 50 would in my opinion undermine this. The exemplar system is already an elegant way of allowing lv50's to do anything in the game, they just have to accept losing access to some of their powers to do so. With much better slotting and access to extra powers an exemped character is already way more powerful than a character actually native to the level. In fact needing to keep half an eye on exemplar performance is a useful constraint on endgame builds. I always try to make sure my characters function reasonably well at lower levels where possible and if not there are always second builds. And of course there would be the technical challenge of making all the enemy groups scale to 50 and how it could then be balanced for such a wide level range. Posi 1 would be lvs 8 to 50 ...

I like the idea of playing up the 'armour set that debuffs' angle of ice armour. Might there be mileage in making some or all of chilling embrace unresistable to help out against the purple patch? Less cold res and more fire res seems very sensible, might there also be a way of throwing it a bone against psi somehow? Psi tends to be from ranged sources so debuffs aren't going to help much there. Maybe some psi defence in wet ice which would provide an excuse to open it for defence sets at the same time?

You point out that it has the word 'jumping' in the name but it also has the word 'combat'. It is clearly not designed to be a travel power but to provide extra movement and defence for combat. Functionally it is the jumping equivalent of hover, being the combat counterpart to fly.

Yeah DA/MA is up there in the list of toughest all around tanks. You can layer soft controls, defences capped to all positions, mostly capped resistances, arguably the best heal in the game and if you really want it a self res. That's a lot of layers of protection.

There is a difference in many cases between potential damage and realised damage. Blasters tend to have massive potential damage but they can't always realise it. Mez is an obvious reason, death another. But there is also the simple fact of mobs not always playing ball in terms of positioning. The standard mob behaviour of 'crowd around the hero and smack him' is a problem if you have cone attacks and have no ability to position the enemy for example. Melee types have huge advantages in all this. Not only do they get mez protection baked in but for them positioning is simple. If the enemy are uncooperative ranged types, melee characters can corner pull, if not they can just jump in. They also often have taunt auras to help the process. Blasters (and other typically ranged type damage dealers) often work best if they have someone else to position the mobs or if they adopt a blapping playstyle. Another advantage in realising damage that melee types have (particularly solo) is their greater survivability and what that allows them to do with inspirations. Squishy types tend to have a few different demands on inspirations, from keeping a couple of break frees to shoring up defence, emergency heals and maybe even a rez. Melee types can typically boil inspiration use down to one thing: damage. The farming trick of turning off large, mez protection and rez inspirations and setting up macros for converting everything else into reds, and eating them en masse is an enormously powerful mechanism. I set this up at level 1 with every melee toon I make and never look back. Initially I set the missions to -1 with as many mobs as I can reasonably kill and plough through with the inspirations raining in. All this in my opinion adds up to a situation where although blasters do the most damage on paper (and can realise this with outside help), melee types are often able to deliver more damage more consistently, particularly solo.

A well argued idea. I like the idea of diversifying builds but I suspect this would be a problem for the already fragile endgame difficulty (or the lack thereof). Currently high recharge often comes at the expense of defence or vice versa. Winters have defence but not recharge, purples are mainly the opposite. The same is true of many sets, it tends to be rare to get both defence and recharge. If we free up build pressure on recharge we will effectively make it easier to build for yet more defence and that's probably not a great thing.