Ralathar44

Pretty much, I just wish it popped up more. I've prolly fielded 20+ different characters of different types vs carnies and that regen brute was the first one to even notice that existed. Even with my Regen brute only reason I noticed is because I was starting a new team and we only had like 3 people facing +4/8 Carnes with me tanking. In a full team the enemies would have been wiped so fast I wouldn't have had the opportunity to notice. I hope to see that in action alot in the future 🙂. I think that currently exists for solo characters and small teams depending on the AT/power set involve but with other power sets and in full teams it basically ceases to exist. And unfortunately I think if yall design new content that does make people pause and acknowledge threats here and there that people would avoid it even if it was still easy to deal with. While players have every right to play the things they wanna play, that Civilization quote about players optimizing the fun out of things comes back to mind too. It's always a balance.

I have faced carnies quite alot in my gameplay career since coming back to HC and I remembered illusionists and endo drain and etc but until I faced them on my Regen brute I never realized that the strong man mobs actually put a super wicked -acc -dmg debuff on you that lasts for a long time. Because none of my other ranged or even melee characters ever really got hit with it since the strongmen are all lt or minions and my other melee and I chose to focused my regen brute on regen instead of defense with their IOs (suboptimal I know :P). So suddenly CC and proper prioritization mattered on that character where it hadn't in tons of other characters I've faced them on. Because even my Resist armored characters usually had enough flat defense to more not get hit by Lts and Minions and so wouldn't get hit by the debuffs or I had enough AOE to kill everything quickly. (which stone melee definitely does not have lol) It's a perfect example of a relevant mob ability that gets trivialized due to our softcapped defenses and quick our current ability to destroy all minions and LTs of +4/8 within 10 seconds in almost every group. I bet when one of those get through via a lucky 5% - 10% chance to hit people are confused why they miss alot for 10 seconds lol.

No it wouldn't be for 4 reasons. City of Statues was a term coined before the target caps went in, before the global nerfs, and before ED. Damage/Defense/To-hit have almost regained those pre-nerf levels with entire +4/8 groups of mobs dropping in literal seconds despite AOE caps. The situation is drastically different today. 1. Control however does not perform anywhere near described that because it cannot under current hard mechanics. It is hard limited by target caps and has large diminishing returns on uptime in AOE holds due to the purple patch and the inability to boost hold duration to the same level you can boost damage. Even in direct analogs like aim/build up vs power boost it's a day and night difference with AIM buildup having a much faster recharge time, some set combos getting 2 buildup powers in a single power set combo, and having many more AOE abilities to use said booster powers on while the big AOE powers recharge. Likewise the AOE recharge timers are all long for controls where they are often very short for non-nuke damage AOEs. 2. If a couple blasters can just vaporize every mob how is a couple controllers holding every mob any worse than that? In situation 1 nobody other than those two blasters really gets to do anything. In situation 2 people at least get to kill things. 3. There is effectively no difference between mobs that will never be a threat to you and City of Statues. Something moving and fighting back doesn't make it any more challenging if there is no threat because this is not a game where aim is very important. If we were more reliant on cone attacks perhaps this would have at least a small amount of relevance but most group clear is targeted or location based AOE attacks. The one blast set with a cone nuke is one of the least popular sets in the game and part of that is why would you use a crashless cone nuke when you can just use a crashless mob sized AOE nuke? 4. The mobs are going to be dead too quick for it to matter regardless lol. Also as another poster mentioned, it's not even about control duration that is the deal: Their solution was to lessen the damage and that certainly is one solution, but the overall problem is the lack of value of CC with teams so safe and mobs dying so fast. So CC based classes need SOMETHING to make them also feel like gods. How you get there is a different question. Though TBH another poster summarized it more clearly:

Post ED/GDN/target caps but pre-everyone having IOs and Incarnate. When IOs and Incarnate were rolled out they took huge amounts of investment to progress in. So someone having a significant amount of them was a rare exception, not the norm. Progression in those has been made infinitely easier and thus has changed the norm. The possibility was there, but it wasn't realistically achievable by 99% of the playerbase. Now it's easily achievable by anyone. People not being able to achieve progression because of insane grind walls was a problem, but everyone being able to achieve that progression has shown that the progression itself was not balanced properly and that's also a problem. If we had that fatalist point of view then blasters would never have gotten any help and we wouldn't make AT wide and powerset balance changes. This argument is pretty self defeating as both the live team and the HC have consistently made changes to try and even out some of the power levels between Power Sets and ATs. Similarly Titan Weapons isn't that great early on but it's in the crosshairs of a rework right now and the fact it overperforms once you get high enough level to get it running is part of the reason it's being reworked. OFC, however the goal of any "balanced" game is to make everything viable within roughly 15%-20% of a power benchmark. This is not my invention pulled from my arse, this is consistent game balancing design philosophy started way back in the Magic the Gathering days with the Mana Curve or Jedi Curve and is still followed across the industry today. It takes into account not only what is realistically achievable but indeed delivering content appealing to different types of players too. So if we had some theoretical "power level" it'd be ok for one AT/Set to be at power level 115 and another to be at 85, which is a fair sized difference. Unfortunately with COH that's closer to a 200 vs 50. It's not just that some power sets are weaker/stronger than others, they are weaker/stronger by a ridiculous order of magnitude.

That is a contradiction. The current status quo is some ATs/powersets can solo content at difficulty levels intended for teams and some cannot. Some ATs/powersets are far more valuable than others in high levle content as well due to the base game mechanics of how difficulty scales, what IO sets are available, and what aspects of your character (dmg/to-hit/defense/resist/recharge/control/debuffs) you can boost huge amounts and which you can only boost minor amounts. Unfortunately these are almost exclusively the same ATs powersets benefiting with mostly the same losing out in both scenarios. Harder content will not solve the core issues, it will only make the gap wider between those powersets and ATs that benefit much more from the current framework. IOs and Incarnates do not benefit all power sets and ATs equally or even close. Some it makes into unstoppable gods, others merely become strong. Similarly difficulty scaling does not affect all powersets and ATs equally. In all honesty I do hope they take the path you speak of regarding higher difficulty content because all it will do is shine a brighter spotlight on the existing problems making them too visible to ignore as the gap widens even further.

That's literally what most people did. Controllers are the only non-DPS class that's highly played and if you look at the power sets of controllers played you'll see that Fire/Illusion Kin/Rad are the top played controllers, being literally over 50% of all controllers. So even the Controllers are being DPS. So why play a controller if you're just going to DPS? Because DPS is pretty much all that matters end game. Most people are going to be soft capped on defense and not even at risk of dying with or without you adding control. The idea of AT identities is a good one, but not a terribly viable one in the current state of end game. People are too safe, things die too easily. There is no space for controls and most defbuffs. -res/-regen and everything else is pretty unneeded, you'd be way better off just bringing another DPS.

Look, we need to decide folks. Either we want folks to feel like gods and be totally overpowered for the content, in which case EVERY power set and class should feel like gods, OR everyone should have strengths and weaknesses and significantly benefit from all manners of controls/debuffs/buffs even if they are tricked out. If the answer is "let us be OP" then you need to let other ATs also be OP. Folks arguing that they should be allowed to be OP for current game content but that other ATs are not allowed to be as OP as them in ways that matter are hypocrites IMO. In end game teams thanks to the level of player power controls are just not near as valuable and can be determental, so damage is really all the Dom brings to the table. I don't personally thanks that's balanced, but I don't personally think the current state of the end game is balanced either. If the current state of the end game is fine then Doms getting additional damage to better compete with blasters/scrappers is also fine.

It should be noted that the wording they used in the original post was rework. Not buff/nerf. They noted it was overperforming so assumedly the rework would involve addressing that too. I'd imagine their goal would be to reign in it's top end power level, have it useful for all ATs, and rework the momentum mechanic because a great deal of people hate playing the set because of the momentum mechanic.

This is not an either or, both statements can be true. IOs can allow for more build variety and cover holes that annoy people while also messing things up. Covering holes like KB is both quality of life as well a rather large rises in power vs certain enemy groups. Alot of low level groups have problems with Council/5th Column knockbacks for example because people skimping on their defense sets have not gotten their mezz protection yet. But KB for those groups is essentially just a lesser form of hold/sleep from another group. However since you can get back up and the "hold" is short we get frustrated because our expectations are not properly aligned with the realistic reality of the situation. We COULD use the tools at our disposal and bring break frees for crucial fights/situations but we don't because we are lazy and spoiled. And keep in mind I tanked council/5th column on my regen brute coming up recently and I got ping ponged all over the place lol. After the initial "well that sucked" I adjusted and LOS manuvered and corner pulled and utilized break frees and stuff alot more. It was in my power to eliminate 75% of the problem without needing to rely on passive protection. But at this power creeped stage of the game we have the expectation of just being able to basically turn our brains off and still win. It is what it is and it's not going to change, I accept that, but I'm not about to retcon reality either. IOs both opened the game up in alot of ways and messed the game up in alot of ways. It's neither good nor evil, it's a massive mixed bag.

Most "forum warriors" (or twitter or facebook or etc) live their life 1 post at a time and quickly lose the context of a conversation and it's all about "winning" the current "battle". I pointed the same thing out earlier in the thread, only without throwing someone on a pyre quite as harshly. It shouldn't be that way, but it is what it is. It's part of why online text conversation is a poor method of communication and why modern society is having such a problem with it being one of our main methods of new/communications in the modern age.

A good portion of the active posters here are highly anti-nerf. Like they support it as a concept but then seem to fight any significant version of it. So just expect any idea of a nerf that has any real teeth to be reacted to unfavorably with passive aggressive (and rarely actively aggressive) attacks by some folks here. Some take it to the degree they are willing to defend TW despite the copious evidence and direct developer statement its the most overperfoming set, some are pretty much in the camp of "TW can be nerfed but nothing else significant"...basically using TW as a shield to show how reasonable they are to defend their own toys.

Even I avoid Malta most of the time. Not because I mind the difficulty but equal parts because the difficulty spike for the same rewards is rather large and because sappers are just not fun. I don't mind Carnies endurance drain or The Freakshow Super Stunner drain or the Arachnos Mu boss drain because I feel that I can adjust my tactics or just tank the drain for my team and focus on surviving and keeping my toggles up instead of doing damage. But if Sappers land their drains you're basically guaranteed zero endo toggles down so it's kind of a binary of either you have enough defense not to get hit by them or you're fully drained every other fight (or every fight). I don't mind how much damage they do or the crazy range hold missiles or etc, even when I'm on something that can be held that's squishy, but sappers break them in terms of fun.

Way too late in the game to do this and would require a large amount of developer resources that they don't have. Would also alienate a fair amount of people. For better and for worse both COH is old and stuck in its ways. Honestly even the idea of the community accepting significant nerfs of any sort, direct or indirect, is prolly an impossibility at this point. I don't expect any significant changes to the game at this point, only minor tweaks. And even then I expect the power creep to continue. Blasters have power creeped up enough to basically invalidate sentinels so I expect Sentinels to either be buffed or ignored, either way discovering that once safety is met damage is king and thus nothing Sentinels could possibly bring to the table atm is going to compete with Blasters DPSing them under the table.

IOs always felt weird for me honestly. Before them Pretty much everything was about enhancing your powers and your power set. So any power increases were very focused on what you were supposed to be good at and it kept a good amount of identity to each set, good or bad. Power Pools and Epic Power Pools were your only real way of "reaching outside your specialization". So you could lessen your weaknesses somewhat, but not too much. And Endurance was a major consideration for how much you could pile onto your character. Sets being endurance efficient was a notable advantage for those sets. Even after inherent fitness. After IOs though nobody had to have any weaknesses anymore. Everyone can become softcapped no defense, endurance pretty much ceased to be a problem for many sets, and everything got more homogenized. Hasten was already a big deal before, but thanks to +recharge and more endurance management the difference between a hastened character and a non-hastened one became even larger since more characters could achieve and utilize longer amounts of hasten uptime and afford to replace cheaper/faster/weaker powers with heavier/slower/more expensive powers in their attack rotations. And, as mentioned, damage and defense gets way WAY more benefit from IOs than debuff and control, + are supported by leadership stacking (which is much easier to sustain thanks to IOs). So offense and defense and to-hit now scales up enough to punch right through the purple patch and controls/debuffs don't. But as mentioned it scales differently for different sets. COH has never been the most balanced game but IOs took the balance that was there out back and shot it in the head. And power set identity took a few bullets too, not quite dead but wounded since def debuffs, to-hit buffs, self defense buffs, endurance costs, -recharge, - speed, CC for damage mitigation and etc matter less than ever before.

That is the "unsolvable" problem when it comes to any idea of harder content. IOs basically double the power level of your character (or more). So it'd be impossible to balance content for IO characters without screwing over non-IO characters just like SO balanced content is a complete joke for IO characters.

Unfortunately they cannot be separated. Even if someone wants to run harder content that doesn't mean they want to nerf their own returns by seeking more challenge. Harder content will take longer to run by it's very nature, so having the same rewards is a bad idea. That doesn't mean harder content needs to be the most lucrative content, clear speeds matter too. If you do a hard TF and get 50 merits, the easy TF gives you 30 merits, but you can run 2 easy TFs in the same time you can run a hard TF this starts being closer to what is desirable. The Hard mission doesn't have to be hands down better, but it does need a boost in rewards to prevent it from being ridiculously worse. And ideally the hard TF would reward very slightly more for the same amount of time. Not enough to matter or force the issue, but enough to just play the psychology of the gamer brain into being "this was worth it". Because if the challenge is more fun for someone but the reward is far less you end up with a state of cognitive dissonance. Like it or not most people in this game are significantly influenced by reward level because of how the progression is designed.

Considering I said it "prolly" does, I think it's clear that it was my opinion lol. This response is just padding and exact repetition of what you already said in previous parts of the same post. Why did you have the need to quote individual people in the same post just to repeat the same thing? You coulda just collected them all together and gave one reply or just not bothered quoting and gave 1 reply to them all. No need to quote each individually to dole out the same reply individually. Heck, the middle part of your post was all that was needed and the only part of any real discussion value. I woulda just chopped the first and last parts off, nothing woulda have been lost. Individual responses to different posters repeating the same idea gives a different focus and appearance to your comment than would otherwise be there and takes away from the idea you're trying to express. It makes you look more petty and argumentative. Having the opinion that the difficulty of the game doesn't need to change is a perfectly fine opinion to have an express, there is no need to individually argue each specific person as if it will somehow cause harm if they are not individually addressed. This ain't some sort of battle and it's unlikely that any of us have significantly swayed the devs :P. It's just a buncha nerds on the internet discussing a game they like.

It prolly does TBH but that's not a realistic expectation. It's not going to happen because it's way too much work and it's also not going to happen because we seem to be intent on restoring the pre-ED/GDN status quo. Which is why all I've ever really argued for is debuffs/controls to be more useful at 30+ so that the "my character is a god" can be distributed a bit more fairly.

Yup, that's what happens when there are significant amounts of people of differing perspectives with differing opinions in s game they all love for slightly different reasons. Most of it is roughly the same dozen posters or so though with 5-6 being a core that is committed beyond even the rest and seems intent on enforcing their personal views on everyone else to the point of downright ignoring or changing the arguments others have made. (apply that to whoever you wish, matters not really) I've pretty much covered everything I wanted to say so I'm mostly a spectator at this point. This is a discussion, not a debate, there is no win/lose...only a sharing of viewpoints and mine has been shared in full.

Who cares who's issue it was? This ain't a blame game. Regardless of who made the calls where this is where we ended up. Please keep in mind I'm not the one who made the separation of live/HC originally, I merely responded to that assertion. What I said was "Post ED/GDN/AOE caps the game was in a solid place sans maybe blasters being a bit rough." and "HC has done alot of good things for the game but alot of it is mixed too, prolly with best of intentions.". And someone else responded with the clarification it was LIVE that did that. I correctly pointed out it was not. And now folks are trying to make that whole thing an issue when it's all utterly irrelevant. I don't care who did what. X was the state of the game on live, Y is the state of the game now. Regardless of whether Paragon Studios or HC devs caused todays problems doesn't matter. What matters is how we deal with them. I've been very consistent in saying that the current problems are the combination of several different major factors, IOs being the biggest one (implemented/balanced by live devs, increased in prominence massively by HC devs). But all the changes are multiplicative with each other. If IO set bonuses fell out of the game I doubt any of the blaster changes would be anything but positive and sentinel would prolly have a place. IO bonuses empower accuracy, endurance, defense, resistance, damage, etc. They are huge force multipliers. So if it helps people's emotional investment and wounded pride I'm actually pinning the vast majority of the blame on live devs, with HC devs only having a small share of the "blame" there for spreading the problematic system. But like I said, again, often times you don't know something will break things until you do it so even there I hedged on any "blame" of the HC devs. Let's not get caught in the weeds folks. Shelve the blame game. It doesn't matter. Let's just say Cthulu did it if that makes it easier for folks. Bloody Cthulu and his insane ways.

More than likely the game wouldn't have been canceled out of nowhere, 2020 wouldn't have been a garbage fire, streakbreaker code wouldn't have been needed to stop 5 95% hits ina row from missing and then getting killed by consecutive 5% hit chances, more than likely a new AT wouldn't be added to a sunset game after many many years, more than likely these private servers would have never existed for so long before randomly coming to light and shocking everyone, etc. Unfortunately whether in game dev or life more than likely is more than likely wrong a significant amount of the time :P. Life is full of those less than likelies and you're playing one of them :p.

I can't say if their process was different or not since i didn't work on their team internally. We only know the player facing stuff. However as a rule I'm not going to treat any pre-live content as finalized either in value or direction. I'm not a predictor of the future or potential alternate pasts either one and I'm going to keep it that way. Anything that didn't actually happen but was only planned remains speculative as per normal. Similarly I wouldn't have predicted the game's shutdown and neither did the devs. I said it earlier on a positive note favoring the HC staff and I'll say it now on a more neutral note. The ticket to the future is always blank. And I'm not trying to take shots at yall btw, yall have done your best to follow the legacy and I'm satisified enough with what has been done. Indeed if I was not interested or have faith I wouldn't be here no?

Yup, that's the beta build yall based stuff off of and modified from there.

Content wise I agree completely. The devs can still make the passion content they want like the upcoming arc but giving a clear and easy ability to find high quality player AE arcs with competitive rewards not buried by farms would definitely help. And players could help curate that too by helping to sift through the chaos and reccomending AE missions that could then be community playtested and rated and the top ones reviewed by the devs for consideration. OFC the caveat being that it sounds easy to make that possible but whether it's easy or not in reality might disagree :P. But until further notice I'll prolly just not be playing support/non-damage controller as much at high level. Because it's just not satisfying to not feel effective or actually useful the same way I do on melee/blaster/dmg controller or even sentinel in MOST high level content. There are times it still feels good, but a significant amount of the time it does not. And as per the playtime numbers many other folks are making that decision too.

Nope. HC Issue 24: Crashless nukes with much lower cooldowns too, Snipe rebuild, T3 blasts got their ranges doubled, sustain was shoehorned into secondaries across the board. More changes made in I25. SOME things were based off of datamined changes that were never actually pushed live. Some are modifications or HC side inventions. A great deal of balancing and bug fixing and testing happens right before release in game dev with alot of things being changed majorly or removed completely so taking a months off build and calling that live is highly disingenuous. Player betas are not representative of that, and that's by design. We try to do as much of the process as we can before the players touch it because players get attached to things once they know it exists. I could go into other HC changes by issue but I think I've made my point.