nihilii

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Change is scary! So, it sounds like we're losing the inherent (getting another one, of course), in the interest of more even performance. "Comparable to scrapper damage but not equal" - cryptic! I wonder how it'll all shake out. I feel there's a tendency to look at performance in a vacuum (4 + 2 = 3 + 3), when in truth, it's better to do 4 while you fight and 2 during your downtime running to the next mob than to do 3 all the time. If we lose the -res, that's also a significant hit as a force multiplier or even for your own Lore pets, even if raising the damage scale or what have you puts our hypothetical damage at the same spot. But then I might be biaised... I greatly enjoy the feeling of ramping up in power as a Sentinel. The big numbers stick to my head, the small numbers I forget. If nothing else, the changes will give us opportunities for more brainstorming. 🙂

For me, in the context of buffs it seems logical to not break things others enjoy just because I don't enjoy them. *shrug* We've got endless ATs and powerset combos to play with, it just seems selfish to want to make the whole game conform to your playstyle at the expense of others. So I would say in a 1:1 ratio, the opinion of someone who currently enjoys something should definitely have more weight than the opinion of someone who doesn't. Now, if the group who dislikes Sentinels greatly outnumbers the group who likes Sentinels, that's another thing entirely and might warrant taking drastic action. Either way it looks like the sledgehammer is coming for the AT, so the argument is moot now - and we're losing this feast/famine (cool term!) that made the AT so fun. Bummer. It's more fun to alternate 400s and 200s than to hit 300s reliably, if you ask me, because the 400s are memorable. But then again it's a glass half full half empty sort of thing, and presumably there's people who remember the 200s only. "Comparable scrapper damage" sounds nice from a performance standpoint, hopefully we don't lose the -res from that.

We're all circling around the elephant in the room: this whole thread is a bunch of people playing TW yelling at people playing even more TW they want to nerf TW to oblivion because they're jealous of TW. The debate is between people who like being OP vs people who like incentive for diversity in their alt lineup. Everything else is smoke and mirrors. 😛

You're missing the point: I'm telling you your suggestion would make me, or others who currently function fine, lose damage. Opportunity doesn't work for you - I acknowledge that. Opportunity works for me (and presumably an unquantified number of others) - you're failing to acknowledge that. Your suggestion would make Opportunity work for you - I understand that. Your suggestion would make Opportunity not work for me (and possibly a number of others) - you're apparently not understanding that. Which brings us back to the conclusion of my post you replied to and also seemingly misunderstood... If you don't enjoy something ("in its current state, as much as others who enjoy it fully in its current state", if you want to be pedantic about it), it'd be neat to avoid suggestions to break it ("for those who currently enjoy it in its current state"). Compare and contrast with Zepp's suggestion, which would (presumably, you're free to weigh in) give you what you want, without hurting players like me.

This is one suggestion that would break the AT for me, for example. There's a reason Null the Gull offers an option to hide the Mystic Flight tray - enough of us dislike randomly popping trays. Tying Opportunity activation to another power would also imply a separate activation, meaning lost damage, and one more thing to keep track of. Personally I never stop attacking, nor do I see a reason to. When my bar is full my Opportunity goes off, if I see the circle I make an attempt to aim towards the toughest guy in the room but that's it. Free damage. I suppose you're mixing T1 and T2 in your chain and want specifically Offensive or Defensive to activate. That problem would naturally lessen over time once you have more recharge. In general, I wish people who don't enjoy an AT/powerset wouldn't suggest "buffs" breaking it for those who do enjoy it. Well... That's perhaps a little strong. Everyone can suggest anything. But I'm going to vigorously plead "please don't break my favorite toy". 🙂

I would not buff Sentinels as a whole. I think Sentinels have better balance than other ATs, both between different Sentinel powersets and as a whole. I see the perception of Sentinels being lacking as part unfamiliarity, and part other ATs having much more variance in performance (that is to say, specific overpowered builds) which end up overplayed and which people start to think as representative of the whole AT (and on the flipside, those other ATs also have clunkers). Many (all?) of the suggestions ITT would be a nerf to my own Sentinels. If you really want to buff Sentinels, then functionality has to be improved or added... but not removed. But really, I'd rather see chirurgical changes and bug fixes, rather than taking the hammer to the whole thing. AR could use a little help, I think everyone could agree on that. Most Sentinel primary ports tend to be: 1) snipe becomes strong T4 attack on 12s recharge 2) ST mez power becomes strong attack (archery, elec, sonic all follow this pattern) For some reason, with AR Beanbag became "Disorienting Shot", a sad T2 level attack; while Slug was moved up as if it were a T3, despite being a bog-standard T2. It would make more sense for Slug to become the alternate level 1 pick like in every other version of AR, and Beanbag to be a 10s recharge power dealing 106 base damage. Just that change alone would probably do a lot towards bringing AR up to par.

I'm signing this suggestion, and adding my own: sentinel damage should be quadrupled. If people hate it, they can just not team with me. No harm done.

Something something Tiananmen Square protests.

Staff gets little damage buffing (which scrappers benefit a lot from, and tankers get more out of it than brutes), has +DEF (which benefits all forms of dark armor) and +RES (which won't benefit scrappers and tankers as much due to being so close to their respective resistance caps). Scrappers don't get a taunt effect, meaning their targets will run in and out of the damage aura. Staff has lengthy animations and low/standard radius, so keeping things close is a must too. Brutes might get the most out of a Staff/DA. If the current set of tanker buffs on Test goes to Live, the tanker version might be an interesting alternative if only for turning Eye of the Storm and Death Shroud from their piddly 8 feet radius to a much more comfortable 12.8 feet hitting up to 16 targets. Scrapper seems like the lesser choice, relatively speaking.

Like Hopeling say, you're simply never going to be as efficient as a full tanker by playing half of your tanker. At the very least you should spam your T1 for Bruising, and AoEs for crowd control and aggro management. But as far as resist-based half tankers go, DA is probably the best choice indeed.

It used to be somewhat hard to justify scrappers over brutes. With the new IOs (and the sum of all IOs), the game has changed. Critical Strikes and Gaussian BU give scrappers incredible burst damage ability. Shield Wall, Reactive Defense and brute ATO set bonuses give brutes a good shot at making use of their resistance caps (as previously mentioned, it's a significant increase of survivability - 2.5x rather than 1.5x, even, as if you have 75% res you take 1/4 of the damage, while at 90% res you take 1/10 of it). I really like where both ATs sit right now. It's only a little bothersome some scrapper secondaries get taunt auras and some don't - especially as the top performance secondary comes with a taunt aura. There's more variance in performance between individual scrapper choices, whereas brutes are probably better balanced as a whole.

I've always liked the art direction in CoH. Blackbird put it well: it's minimalistic and genre-appropriate. Cel-shading breaks that feel for me. It's cool we have both options for different people to enjoy the game, though! I'm not overly fond of the "every game must have a highly stylized art direction" trend we've seen since Crysis melted everyone's computer and also made it obvious the arm's race for photorealism was over (at least in terms of 10x gains you could use as marketing). Sometimes something more steeped in realism can be more appropriate. It's rather interesting video games inversely mirrored the evolution of the web, where everyone abandoned flash and flamboyance to become minimalistic in an attempt to ape Apple. 2007 was a weird year.

Hmm. You can prioritize the mobs with the strongest debuffs, pull mobs instead of jumping into the pack, focus and flee, KB mobs, switch aggro between teammates, split aggro between teammates. Night Ward mobs are actually good difficulty design for me, in that they force you to rethink the zerg rush approach. It's strange to me you claim this is a number vs number thing after advocating for LGTF Hami, which uses extreme numbers to nullify powersets and force specific approaches. In LGTF Hami there is one intended way to beat the fight plus a couple hacks you can resort to, the breadth and depth of strategies are limited. Night Ward mobs play by the rules and leave you your entire toolbox. They're just better at countering players who whittled down their own toolbox to one hammer and one screwdriver (which is understandable, given that 99% of the game doesn't ask anything more than a hammer and a screwdriver). Granted, you can STILL sleepwalk through Night Ward if you bring a big enough hammer - which perhaps is the root of your point, as opposed to LGTF Hami being so restrictive you have to do something different from zerg rush no matter how strong your build? Personally, I can enjoy both types of content but I much prefer stronger mobs behaving by the rules (which lets me try unorthodox ways to tackle them) over encounters straight out breaking the rules (which has a tendency to become about following the One Right Way To Beat This Encounter, especially because rulebreaking stuff happens most often in large team content). If the former is artificial difficulty, then give me the fake stuff. 🙂

You can actually take down green mitos without holds, provided your team is very heavy on damage and great at coordination. LGTF mitos have about 800hp and (I believe) 90% res while unheld, so "all" you need is the ability to spike ~8000 damage in a couple seconds (so other mitos don't have the time to heal them). Assuming a full team, most DPS characters can reach that level of damage in burst (500 per character), popping rages. To be fair, that's such a high level of effort compared to simply holding the damn things, my post is almost pedantic. 😛 Hamidon is poo poo and breaks all the rules.

This is starting to be the universal argument from defensive people all over the forums, and at this point it's hard not to see it as low-effort trolling, when other participants go through the effort of posting detailed number breakdowns like Hopeling did. Perhaps there should be one simple rule for balance changes: the second someone says "if you're going to balance it based on pylon times", nerf the damn thing. Even if it's ice melee. Edit: and for people who mean the argument earnestly, take a moment to consider the following: how many "nerf Storm" topics have you seen? Storm tops the Pylon charts. Edit 2: also apparently it has to be specified I'm not seriously advocating for game balance to be done flippantly based on forum posts. Jesus Christ, people, take a chill pill about your beloved overpowered toons.

Couldn't you reject and queue again immediately? If there's no team during the minutes you were searching for one, it's unlikely there would be a team forming and launching and skipping you within the 5 seconds or so that would take you.

Is that so? Every time I forget to set the "lock the event for your group" option, the game takes several minutes to give me a trial window - suggesting to me it's in fact looking for a group to join.

If you're not enjoying a powerset in its current form, I feel the rational answer is to reroll, rather than to suggest the powerset many other people enjoy should be radically changed to lose unique properties they enjoy. The problem with SS lies in SS being iconic... Perhaps it wouldn't be a bad investment to have a SECOND super strength existing next to the former super strength, with Build Up instead of Rage and slightly buffed numbers as needed. (But then, people might be disappointed by the result, because the idea SS underperforms heavily without Rage isn't supported well by the numbers)

Seconded wholeheartedly! I think we have tentative evidence lowering minimum players doesn't negatively affect task forces and trials, as people are still eager to form full teams as the default for these tasks. Players like to team up for these tasks and don't need to be coerced into it.

Sadface. Completely understandable, though. Still a great buff.

All oldschool T9s can't actually be permaed and share a base recharge of 1000s - meaning 200s at the recharge cap, with a 180s duration, leaving a 20s gap (90% uptime). Newer T9s can't be permaed either. You've got Willpower with a 120s duration and a FIXED recharge of 300s, so you will always have 3 minutes of downtime (40% uptime). Shield has a 120s duration and a fixed recharge of 360s too, so 4 minutes of downtime (33.33% uptime). Radiation's T9 is affected by recharge buffs, but at 60s duration and 480s recharge, the best you'll get is 20s of downtime at the recharge gap. (75% uptime). That's it for "real", defensive T9s - although it's worth noting none of the "different" T9s are permaable either. Short version: Unstoppable is already the closest you can get to perma T9.

Coup de grâce. Unless you're hitting him with your belly. 😛 I can understand where you're coming from, but I think it's also plain as day modest overinvested himself into incorrect theories, and now there's cognitive dissonance being protected. I made (make?) my share of questionable posts due to being too committed to my position, so I can relate with modest... and I can also relate with Obitus, because I must have lost a couple hours of my life writing and deleting long posts to "call out" modest since the beginning of this thread, in full XKCD someone-is-wrong-on-the-internet fashion... Look at me, relating with everyone. I'm such a people's person. But seriously, we all make mistakes. No big deal, and no reason to let it get between good conversations and good data.

After giving several tankers a go on Pineapple, I hope we keep the AoE radius changes no matter what (and keeping target caps would be nice too). Couldn't care less about damage scale, damage cap or maximum endurance... It'd be cool to have these buffs, but if broots start having panic attacks over the idea of not being the supreme farming choice, we wouldn't want to cause such anguish. 😛 Hitting a lot of stuff from far away is the fun part, and it does make you better at tanking by virtue of having to spend less effort to grab targets and applying more CC/damage to them.

There is no worse blind man than the one who doesn't want to see. 😉 I think you'll find there's no shortage of people who think /bio is top dog by a wide margin (especially on scrappers, due to combining an aggro aura with a damage aura and a -res aura). As for theme arguments, I think it's pretty cool 277 players made the concept of having a badass weapon while covered in gunk work for them (that's the number of titan/bio scrapper taken to lvl 50). Kinda strange it's more popular than Wolverine (108 claws/regen scrappers), or indeed any other scrapper combo save for Elec/Shield by a factor of two, but what do you know. I'm no comic book expert. 😛