nihilii

Scrapper's Strike increases your critical chance passively, you don't need to use the power it's slotted into to get that bonus. As for Critical Strikes, you want to use that IO in your highest recharge power. With the PPM changes, the highest recharge the more chance to proc. Sticking the Critical Strikes ATO in Rend Armor makes it proc more than half of the time.

Scrapper gets more out of Blinding Feint, because their base damage is higher and their native damage buffing lower (= no Fury). Brute gets an aggro aura in SR, which is nice to keep things nice and tight for your cones. Play scrapper for damage, brute for tanking/convenience/survivability.

Unbelievably cool. I got to say, the dev team's efforts to include all perspectives whenever possible really shows commitment to Homecoming's "play your way" mantra. :)

As a Sentinel, your role is to confuse your team about your role so you can do absolutely anything you want to.

This is incorrect both on a theoretical level and on a practical level. Something being more powerful than its contemporaries can result in negative consequences given specific circumstances. But something being more powerful than its contemporaries does not necessarily result in negative consequences in all circumstances. In the context of CoH, if the "something" is an AT or a powerset, it might trivialize other ATs and powersets. But if the "something" is one power pool pick... You can't exactly trivialize other choices and players, because you're left with many other choices. In the case of Hasten it actually opens the window for *more* choices through builds planning for specific goals (attack chains, power uptimes). Game design isn't quite as narrow as you make it out to be. Just take a look at games played at a professional level. Starcraft 2, a game with notoriously strong emphasis on design and continuous rebalance efforts, doesn't strive for its units to be 1:1 against their counterparts. Instead, every single unit has its very own set of costs, strengths and weaknesses, to the point some units are almost anecdotal in their use while other units are staples you will bring out for every match. Hasten being somewhat close to a "staple" power in CoH doesn't make it a problem in itself. There has to be functional, negative consequences of that popularity to argue a change needs to happen.

You keep making this argument and ignoring the counterpoint a pool power vs pool power comparison in a vacuum simply doesn't make any sense. (By the way, Combat Jumping is objectively superior to Hasten or any other pool power, and possibly any other power in the game, potentially by a factor of infinity. Those who know know. 😉 ) This whole crusade of yours to make sweeping changes to a million variables because a power is strong and popular is, at best, misguided. Gameplay ought to be organic, evolving from the initial theory and not ruled by it. Best example: GunZ the duel. An awful third-person shooter had so many glitches, you could use these glitches to turn the game into a completely different beast, and the net result was an incredibly high skill ceiling experience. Without the glitches, it would have been forgotten 10 years ago. Thanks to the glitches, it still enjoys diehard fans and even has a sequel where the developers incorporated the glitches as gameplay features. When something doesn't behave as expected, bad devs try to force the game to behave like their original vision (hello Jack). Good devs take a serendipitous approach, evaluating the unexpected to see if it's a positive or a negative. You still haven't started to make a case for Hasten as a negative. "It's strong" is not a negative. "It's popular" is not a negative. "It's better than other pool powers [except Combat Jumping]" is not a negative. Personally, I wholeheartedly believe it's a positive, have argued why previously ITT (in short: it makes the game mechanically more interesting and psychologically more rewarding). It's been part of the game for so long it's very easy to argue it's part of the core gameplay loop, too. Don't mess with core gameplay loops, yo. Unless you've got a very, very good reason to do so.

Alternate suggestion: can we change every other PBAoE power animation in the game to use Eye of the Storm's?

I've done that three times, they were by far my most powerful characters at those levels. It's like people forget TW starts with a fast recharging divine avalanche CONE ATTACK as soon as level 1. Defensive Sweep - Crushing Blow - Defensive Sweep - Titan Sweep lets you annihilate any low level opposition. Then Follow Through and Rend Armor aren't too far behind. IOs and incarnates don't increase the gap between TW and other sets. The gap is far wider at the SO level. TW is more end efficient than most other powersets, provided you tag multiple targets with your AoEs. I could see a scenario in which a hypothetical TW player who refuses to use inspirations or recovery serum, refuses to slot end reduction in attacks and insists on using cones on a single target might feel like the set is end hungry. But that's really trying to work against yourself. Perhaps more likely: people pick Hasten, spam attacks, drain their own end in the process and fail to consider they've dealt more damage per endurance than less powerful characters. Take a fight lasting 30 seconds. You deal 1000 damage for 40 endurance. The next guy deals 600 damage for 30 endurance. Are you end-hungrier than the next guy? If your answer is "yes", you need to learn to pace yourself. In this scenario, by using only 30 endurance you would deal 750 damage, and still come out ahead of the other guy. (But really, it's better to deal the maximum damage then take a knee or pop an insp. "End hungry" is a senseless complaint unless it's relative to damage done, not time.)

Perhaps I'm biaised, but I don't see an issue with that. For Sentinels to have a niche in enabling a team to destroy those select few tough targets doesn't strike me as ridiculous, if we assume the AT needs a boost. Likewise, I've always wished Tanker Bruising was unresistable. Such a change could have moved the needle on the Brute vs Tanker conundrum by itself.

Indeed, very hard not to read the thread this way. It's worth remembering "balance" is not a goal in itself. Choices are what's interesting. Balance is the means through which we create choices. When an AT outpaces another AT at the same job and has little to no drawbacks, this is an issue as there's no reason to play the other AT. When a powerset overperforms all other powersets by a large margin, this is an issue in that the diversity is lowered from x * y to 1 * y. If a powerset combination overperforms, it gets even worse as the range of possibilities becomes 1 * 1 rather than x * y. A power pool every character can pick as soon as level 4 doesn't hurt diversity in the same manner. There's only so many power pools you want, if you're even going to grab 4. It doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things if Hasten is better than Grant Invis, provided Hasten doesn't make you invulnerable. While +70% recharge is pretty fantastic, it's not an I Win button. The ultimate balanced game has every power an identical clone. Maybe the perfect balanced CoH would have every power be Fire Blast. Nothing but Fire Blast. You're a Tanker? Have Fire Blast in your primary, and Fire Blast in your secondary. All scales for all ATs should be 1.0 on everything. Absurd example of course, but the point is: balance in a vacuum is not a goal to strive towards. There's little question (to me) high recharge makes the game more interesting both mechanically and psychologically. Mechanically: each new level of recharge is incentive to rethink your attack rotation. Long cooldown powers can be chained in new different ways (perma or not; frankly, the focus on perma here is hardly relevant). Psychologically: character progression becomes more obvious, thanks to the significant rise in power. So any proposal to nerf Hasten is really a suggestion to dumb down the game. Even the revised suggestions reflect that: let's give everyone inherent recharge, instead of having them manage a click power with slots, a cooldown, and an endurance crash. For a suggestion to dumb down the game to even make sense, there ought to be an upside that is at least as great. So far no such upside has been put forward. Incidentally, we now have an announcement telling us Force of Will ("new" power pool) is being worked on. This is the right way to do things. Add options. Make us feel the crunch between picking Speed/Leaping/Leadership/Fighting and Speed/Leaping/Fighting/Force of Will and Speed/Leaping/Leadership/Force of Will and... You get the point. The "smart" way to nerf Hasten is to increase the opportunity cost we face in taking one pool just for that power.

Recharge isn't a complex problem requiring great levels of ingenuity and determination to break. Each power has a duration and a cooldown, and the recharge cap is base / 5. If (cooldown / 5) < duration, then the power can be permaed. The idea devs were somehow helpless against the scourge of perma powers or unaware of their repercussions is basically the same as calling them criminally stupid. We're not playing a game where devs acted as very remote entities making changes from the top down without explanation. Castle and others were active on the forums, involved in deep balance discussions, and no matter if one agrees or disagrees with the devs' stance on things, it was at least clear they were NOT criminally stupid.

Is this the jump the shark moment for S&F? Starting to feel like some of you are playing a game inside the game where the goal is to make increasingly absurd and eye-catching suggestions. 😛

To be fair, you can more or less do that right now by ticking "enemies buffed" on every TF / ouro story arc, and not using the P2W double XP. Likewise, it's significantly harder to fight (say) PPD Peacebringers or Rularuu than Council or Freakshow. But people will pick Council or Freakshow. Players will go for the path of least resistance. There needs to be a carrot to encourage them otherwise. I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to add more vanity rewards for hard content, badges have been successful in nudging players towards harder tasks.

Tank SR is absurd simply because you stack +12% to +18% res from your ATO and +12% res from ATO set bonuses, on top of higher Tanker values on Tough. Hitting the 90% S/L resistance cap at low health is common, and coupled with incarnate softcap defenses and capped DDR that's essentially immunity against the most common damage types.

Sovera's experience sounds accurate to me. Farm mobs may be weak individually, but you end up with 10+ bosses whacking on you. Softcapped defense + ~75% resistance to their damage type seems to be the breakeven point to survive on the edge, without significant regen/healing or active control (KD etc.).

1. You can definitely get away with just the one slot with Gaussian BU. Your global recharge, Hasten and Quickness will carry you a long way. 2 and 4. If it were me, I'd cannibalize a few slots from one of the Red Fortune sets in your toggles, 3-slot LotGs instead (which is enough to bring you to the ED cap for defense) and get an extra 3 slots to play with this way. This way you've got a slot for Reactive Defense, a slot for Panacea, and even a slot for something else (could be the Unbreakable Guard +7.5% HP in Tough, for example - extra hit points are nothing to scoff at :) ) I'd definitely keep the Kismet, outside of Aim this is your only source of +tohit which is very important against defense buffing or tohit debuffing enemies. 3. One more Thunderstrike sounds good. :)

You just need to have everyone logged off at once. As little as 10 seconds should do the trick if you can get everyone to coordinate that well. Realistically you'd likely want to tell people to log out for 2 to 5 minutes on a PuG.

This is the kind of suggestion that is so obvious in hindsight it makes you wonder why we all live with the annoyance. Forget about 30 pages Rage debates, my own beef with SS is that footstomping a crowd melts my own eardrums unless I turn down the volume to half of the usual value.

I think your build would be fine as is. Few things come to mind if you want to (possibly) improve it: - Gaussian chance for Build Up is a beautiful thing in Aim, as it procs almost all the time, turning your Aim into Aim + Build Up. This is compounded on Sentinels, because Aim and your nuke have the same base recharge. So you can open every fight with an "Aim BU" Inferno. For that reason alone it's worth sticking the chance for BU in the base slot. Personally I slot the whole set for the juicy +2.5% def to all and to get that recharge down to sync with the nuke. - Try to fit the Reactive Defense scaling damage resistance somewhere. It starts at +3% resistance even when you're at full HP, and grows to up to (I think) 10% res if you're hurt. So this is at least as good as Shield Wall, and stacks nicely with it + your passive SR resistances at low HP. - Decimation chance for BU has a very low proc rate in Fire Blast. I would not bother with it. - The Panacea proc is great on any character, the endurance part alone is 1.5x as good as a perf shifter +end. I think SR benefits a lot from that proc, what with having no native healing.

This. My favorite tank takes alphas quietly and efficiently. But really, my favorite tank is more defined by the things he DOESN'T do than the things he does. My favorite tank does not: - herd. Not only it's boring, it's also slow and inefficient most of the time. - spam taunt for no other reason than he feels bad if he's not getting all the aggro. - spread mobs apart running to the next group after aggroing them because "I'm here to tank, you guys deal the damage". My favorite tank acts as a cushion for the team. My favorite tank does not use said cushion to smother the team to death.

I wonder if there is truly anyone who considers Pylon tests as a competition. It seems like one of these ideas we assume about other people, while in reality there isn't any such people. i.e., we've seen claims from player A that player B is making a dedicated Pylon build, but very rarely is player B saying directly "I have made this character to be the destroyer of Pylons, and destroy Pylons exclusively he shall". Some people want something efficient at all levels, some people want a ST monster at level 50. If competition exists, I think it's some sort of underwater competition where we argue OUR build is the best at things *other than Pylons* (while still getting a decent time on a Pylon). 😉

Good grief. I deleted a whole post about the misconception, bowed out of the convo, and you ping me hours later just to rehash that same misconception of my actual point. I'm not suggesting there should be a Red/Blue presidential vote on Opportunity where my tribe gets double votes. I'm saying good suggestions for radical changes are mindful of a diversity of points of view. Even if you disagree with that, please learn to take "let's agree to disagree" for an answer.

Agreed, it's an odd design choice. Gun Drone found its niche for me as a "one hit shield". If you like soloing AVs this can be the difference between life and death sometimes. But frankly, sticking taunt onto a pet that dies in a single hit from anything beyond a lieutenant isn't so helpful in a general sense.

The eyeballs shoot autohit beams. Those autohit beams debuff defense so everything else also hits you. It's so wonderfully evil.

I feel it's easy enough to reach even incarnate softcapped defense you're better off going Musculature. Events where you will need extra defense will be extraordinarily rare, whereas more damage tends to be helpful all the time.