Parabola

Buy an enormous stack of envenomed daggers. I was amazed at what I could solo throwing one of those every few attacks.

If I could make only one change to the incarnate system it would be to remove the level shift during normal content (or possibly altogether). As it stands the system gifts the player a huge amount more power at the same time as stripping the world of challenge. To me this is ultimately unsatisfying. If I could make more sweeping changes Judgement and Lore would have to go. They work to homogenise the AT's and were in my opinion terrible design decisions. I would want to replace them with systems that reinforced AT roles and the differences between individual powersets in those AT's rather than giving everyone the same powers to spam. In other words when I'm playing a debuffing defender I want abilities that make me a stronger debuffing defender not access to the same nuke and pet that everyone else on my team is using. The others seem more or less ok. The Alpha slot is the most interesting to me with the scope to use it creatively in builds. It also seems the most integrated of the incarnate powers, sitting naturally with the rest of the game (other than the level shift!). Unfortunately the rest of the incarnate powers feel very much to me like they were tagged on as an afterthought (which of course they pretty much were).

I've a thought experiment. What if we logged on tomorrow and the game had been changed so that at level 50+ the +2×8 difficulty had been made exactly as hard as +4×8 is today. But also the rewards had been changed so that +2×8 gives what +4×8 does today. The game experience you have smashing through your favourite mission is utterly identical, the only difference is that you are doing it on +2 and not +4 and there are a whole 2 more levels of ceiling. What have we really lost if the only difference is the colour of the enemies? This is a simplified example obviously and isn't actually what myself and others have been asking for but I think it illustrates a point. It seems odd to me that we consider it normal that anyone can solo any of the game on +4×8 no matter how easy the content. Where is the room in the game experience for teaming when individuals on that team could solo the same content at the same settings? I don't want to lose any of what makes this game great. The last thing I'd want to see is mandatory trinity gameplay or having only favoured powersets being viable at the high end. But I'm pretty sure that it should be possible to raise the ceiling a little in one way or another without these dire consequences.

Energy aura. They look great together.

I'm one of those who have generally backed away from these conversations. I genuinely feel that there is an issue with the difficulty of the game at the high end but appreciate that opinion is divided on the matter. Unfortunately these discussions are tending to become less helpful the longer they go on as they move away from being a discussion of ideas and turn into points scoring arguments. My only hope is that there have been enough of them now for the devs to have taken notice even if ultimately nothing changes. (I would love to hear their opinions on the matter). For what it's worth I will reiterate what I said in the other thread about where I have got to with this. I take the point that there is difficult content out there but that it is often ignored in favour of 'stuff that can be facerolled'. I feel two things need to happen: 1) Difficult content should be better incentivised somehow. More xp, better drops, whatever. 2) Easy content should be made a little more difficult. This could be as simple as tweaking some of the enemies that are currently cannon fodder such as council. If something were to change it should be focused at the very high end where IO's and incarnates are in play. I also wouldn't want to impact the solo game if possible as it is the team dynamic that I feel has suffered as a result of power creep (and the homogenization of AT roles due to incarnates but that is a slightly separate issue). However if it were up to me I wouldn't make these changes optional, I feel there is a baseline balance issue here that needs addressing for the benefit of the whole.

I've had a bit of fun with kill x missions when using them as an opportunity to work on that factions defeat badge. It takes longer as often you are hunting bosses but it's far more satisfying to assassinate 10 bosses than to mow down the first 10 minions you find. Of course this only works with certain factions and certain locations.

Further to this and as a general comment about the idea that we already have the tools available to make the game harder for ourselves: Yes, any individual can choose to not incarnate, or to not use IO's or even to use TO's at 50 if they want to make the game really hard. However that is beside the point because in the team setting it isn't just that one players level of performance that dictates their experience of the game. When I was kicking around an idea for a buff to enemies in another thread I specifically wanted it to only apply when teaming for this reason. Solo it really doesn't matter how op or how gimped a player wants to be. Whatever they consider fun is fine as nothing they are doing directly impacts anyone else. However in the team setting each individual is affecting the game experience of everyone. We all need to feel like we are contributing, that we are collectively working towards something. Playing on teams where individuals in that team are perfectly capable of soloing the content is in my opinion never going to be fun for anyone else.

We've got a ton of IO sets in the game that no one uses because the bonuses are not considered worthwhile. At the same time we (I am among those that argue) have an overperformance problem due in large part to the power of the top end IO sets. I think we should be looking at what we have and tweaking that before adding any further complexity and power into the system. That said if we really have to have some new unique top end enhancements it might be fun to consider packaging them with built in debuffs to balance things out. +x% res all with -y% def all for example (or -to hit, - damage, etc.)

I tend to think of thermal as a better primary for defenders than secondary for controllers. It's quite a busy set with buffs, debuffs and heals which would conflict with another full time set. That said it might pair well with a hands off control set - ice perhaps?

Any chance of this being looked at somewhere down the line? ☺️

There's trying to keep the team alive and then there's FWOOOSH spamming the FWOOOSH heal aura FWOOOSH while standing FWOOOSH outside the FWOOOSH mission.

Pretty much the most important piece of customisation available in CoH this. I bind my numpad keys to powertray slots (with shift+number for tray 2) and fire off all my powers by spamming the buttons. That recharge sound would drive me absolutely insane if I hadn't killed it. However just to say that I would caution against binding your aura heal to your movement buttons. The sound that it makes is quite invasive and rocking it at all times isn't the best form. I've actually had to strip that sound out as well to make teaming a less stressful experience.

Still makes me laugh out loud every time. It's the attention to detail as much as anything - the attempt at drawing the UI elements in is just great. Also I concur - WM is very strong and EA is very pretty (and also very strong).

Really don't see there being this kind of problem (also a Reunionite). Hell, I'd probably still play if it were just me and 7 others on the server. We'd just have to get to know each other and organise when we were going to be playing so we could team up.

Yeah it would be nice to use an ato enhancement to buff scourge. Interaction between the ato's and the inherent has done wonders for stalkers. Well as it stands for most of the available buff set/blast set combinations rolling a defender is the default choice whether you want to solo or team, primarily blast or primarily buff. Each AT should have it's niche and at the minute corruptors seem to be struggling for this. It will be interesting to see what they do with this. It wasn't clear if it is going to be a large scale revamp or just an adjustment of some edge cases (proccing out epic holds etc). We will have to see if it has a significant effect on the balance between defenders and corruptors.

I could get behind giving hostages much improved perception so they can follow even a hidden stalker. The mechanic of leading them to the door through ambushes isn't my favourite thing in the world but at least it's variety. The pain of it is them losing track all the time.

Unsurprisingly I have voted for there being a very definite need for more difficulty in the game but I can see the merit in pretty much all the different suggestions for getting there. I take the point that there is challenge in the game if you go looking for it and perhaps my thinking about this is coming around to there being two main things to address: 1) Challenging content should be properly rewarded to encourage more people to play it. 2) Steamroll content should be made more challenging. Maybe point 2 could be as simple as buffing specific enemy groups so they stop being quite such cannon fodder. Council at lv50+ for example really don't stand a chance - how they manage to keep recruiting so many soldiers is beyond me. The idea of giving some bosses leadership toggles (or an aura similar to masterminds supremacy) was suggested in another thread and I rather like it - it's thematic, it scales and it seems a reasonably simple way to improve the chances of the whole enemy group.

As I understand it the epic pools are designed to fill in specific gaps for specific AT's - they are tailored to that purpose. If it was a free for all there might be significant balancing issues and the strength of the epic powers would probably be lowered. I'd certainly like to see more epic pools to give a greater range of thematic choice though.

The only thing in this vein I keep wishing for is being able to take tough and weave without boxing/kick to free up a power slot. Even that would be power creep we don't need overall though. The trouble with freeing builds up for more flavour is that 99% of players would drive straight by more flavour and simply stuff more performance in.

The homecoming team seem to be trying to run these servers in as professional a way as possible. That is going to mean careful changes and as much testing as possible. As many have mentioned they are also working under the hood to improve the game for the future. The pace of change may pick up when they have these foundations in place, and particularly if they are able to break cover and go legit. In the meantime there are other servers available which are being run in a different way. I know who I trust but others may of course feel differently.

Back on live I never was a fan of redside and so it was only the going rogue expansion that opened up the villain AT's to me. I became a big fan of them all and found myself rolling brutes instead of tanks, stalkers instead of scrappers and particularly corruptors instead of both defenders and blasters. Corruptors just seemed to be more fun than either; more survivable than blasters and more offensive than defenders with generally better power progression. However I'm now struggling to roll a single corruptor on homecoming. The i24 updates have made blasters way more survivable (and fun) and with their inherent and particularly the ppm mechanics defenders now seem to be encroaching on corruptors from the other side. Every time I kick around ideas for a ranged character I think about making it a corruptor for a bit and then roll it as one of the other two. Is anyone else finding this? Do corruptors need a bit of a tweak to make them stand out more? Scourge always seems to promise a little more than it actually delivers, perhaps there's room to do something with it?

But it isn't. Low level enemies are heavily limited in their power selections too. You couldn't just scale a hellion up to 50 and have it be on a par with a carnie. Not saying that the work couldn't be done to make every faction work up to 50 but it would take more than just removing a cap off some numbers.

All fair points. I would say on the subject on people being picky about who they take on teams; as mentioned it already happens and in all likelihood the people who play like that would probably continue to do so even if the difficulty was lowered overall. Some people are just that way inclined. All of this is a thought experiment into what else could we do to address what I am convinced is a real problem with game balance without wielding the dreaded nerf bat. At the end of the day the most direct way to address the problem would be to reign in the high end performance of IO's and incarnates but I worry that will never happen due to how it would go down. The point about needing to bring under-performing sets up to par is absolutely true but I think it needs to be done in the context of the overall game balance - we can't just aim to make everything perform like titan weapons and not degrade the game experience further (as I see it). On the subject of the disparity between SO and IO performance and the implications that might have for SO only characters if the game difficulty was raised in some way. Approaching the problem from the other side we could think about simply making SO's better. If we close the gap between SO's and IO's by buffing SO's then there would be more room to make the game more difficult and so bringing the relative performance of IO's down without direct nerfs and without affecting the 'game is balanced around SO's' idea (which these days I don't fully subscribe to but I know many do). Now I have no idea how exactly to go about buffing SO's with ED in place but anyway it's a thought!

Yeah this is absolutely the reason behind scaling to team size. I don't see solo performance as a problem either way because it doesn't directly impact the game experience of other players. There are arguments about solo performance such as that around whether AE farming is good for the game but that's not what this is about. I feel this kind of buff would actually be of direct benefit to many underperforming powersets. If we take something like forcefields, this is a powerset that is almost universally regarded as underperforming in large part because it is considered redundant in the high level team environment. People tend to not need the extra defence because of IO bonuses and incarnates. If the enemies were buffed with +to hit they would start to punch through the current soft cap and so there would be more value in extra defence buffs. The point about solo performance has been covered but I also wanted to reiterate something I said earlier. I am not setting out to rebalance the game around the high performing brute and making everyone else's life miserable in the process. Quite the opposite. The current dynamic is that on high level teams you have some players that can easily solo the same content and so they tend to engage in a race to kill as much as possible as fast as possible. Other players with less fully built characters end up basically tagging along which isn't so much fun. If the challenge level is raised then all of the characters become more necessary to complete the mission. That SO only defender that had been sitting around at the back watching the show is now finding their buffs and debuffs are needed even by the billion inf, tier 4 brute squad up front.

I imagine the actual numbers used would have to be the subject of significant testing and adjustment. I'd also hope that the devs would have a feel for the sorts of places to start. That's why I didn't even try to think up some numbers to suggest and instead just went for a general framework that might have some benefit. Having said which it occurs to me that in many respects this whole idea is based around trying to come up with a different way of providing lv55+ enemies. It has been suggested many times that what we need is a +5 option on the slider but then people have pointed out that lv55 enemies simply don't exist in the game and adding them might not be straightforward. If these buffs were tuned in such a way that when at full strength (party of 8 at lv54) they adjusted the enemies so that they were effectively fighting at 55 (or even 56) then we would have a reasonably simple balance point. If your team was struggling then you could knock a level or two off and you'd be back to where you were before. My take would be that you have to balance the game around a certain presumed level of player power. I think it is reasonable to assume that the vast majority of teams are going to have some mixture of AT's and that even without the trinity you are going to have people performing different roles on a team contributing to a 'greater than the sum of it's parts' level of power. Even on an all blaster team someone takes or mitigates the alpha in some way. Adding extra challenge into the game would of course make it harder for everyone and if you were deliberately running a very unorthodox and underpowered team then the experience would be a bit rougher with these buffs. However the difficulty slider would still be available; you could still knock a level or two off the enemies to compensate.