Ralathar44

They are all bad options. We're in the snake pit dug in deep. There are no easy and good answers at this point. Creating hard mode content as I said earlier has significant issues and would also take significant man hours itself. It's not an easy feat. It's prolly close to the same level of work as rebalancing the entire game. Rebalancing the entire game or heck even just rebalancing IOs is already mentioned to be more work than is practical for the HC team. We're prolly more or less stuck in the current situation by practical realities. Many people will enjoy that, many will not, it bodes ill for the overall future of the game though since all routes to significant improvement and change are prolly cut off by the brick wall of work required. So we'll get some more sets, we'll get some more arcs, and we'll get some tweaks, but unless HC teams pulls a rabbit out of a hat then we're prolly going to be in almost exactly the same place due to those brick walls. That being said, never count a hero out of the fight :). Maybe one of them is magic origin and can pull that rabbit :D.

Datamined changes made live on HC are not changes done by Paragon Studios. Those are theoretical changes they were testing out that they may or may not have done and might have changed significantly or pulled. Again, I literally work in QA and I see stuff like this on a monthly basis. And additional changes were made on top of the theoretical ones. Big melee buffs were definitely made on HC. HC is where set IOs were made incredibly available without any rebalancing (because it'd take way too much man hours to rebalance) and reward merits increased. Again, these kind of changs were likely made with the best of intentions and you can only know the cascading effects by implementing alot of times.

Post ED/GDN/AOE caps the game was in a solid place sans maybe blasters being a bit rough. Interset balance issues were actually a good bit smaller than they were now because some sets were better but all sets could contribute a good amount. Doms and MM needed some adjustment too prolly, (still do). Honestly most of what has happened is free power was given to literally everyone, blasters got omegabuffed, and melee somehow got even stronger, and Sentinels got added only for Blasters to be buffed so much they were immediately invalidated. HC has done alot of good things for the game but alot of it is mixed too, prolly with best of intentions. After all alot of times the only way to see the problems is to cause the problems :P. People who wanted to feel like gods still could post incarnate. You didn't need softcapped defense and IO set builds for that, it happened at the point in the story at which they basically told you that you were becoming a god. But now we've stacked godhood on top of godhood for god squared :P.

Both are incredibly huge projects. I think you're underestimating the errr....difficulty of creating new difficulty options that won't screw over anyone that isn't neck deep in the IO system or basically enforce specific IO builds. Heck last I heard the overwhelming majority of folks barely messed with the IO system unless I'm misremembering.

They've already expressed a great hatred of Jack and mentally separated him out from the rest of the Devs like they were all somehow held at gunpoint for the changes he was the spokesperson for (because that was his job). I've been called Jack several times in this thread, intended as a grave insult, for saying that the ED/GDN/target cap changes were ultimately very positive for the game by allowing room for an end game and allowing more diverse teams rather than 1 tank stacking things into a dumpster while everyone else AFK'd at the door.

Yeah, the game being too easy is not the problem. I enjoy Dynasty Warriors and that's not exactly a huge challenge. I enjoy alot of games you cannot even fail. I also enjoy Darkest Dungeon and that game hates when you win and does everything it can to prevent it :P. All are valid and fun styles of game. The problem is not the difficulty, the problem is that the way this game handles power scaling invalidates significant parts of support/control powersets at high end because everyone has outscaled the enemies in terms of survivability and damage but not in terms of support/control. Damage/survivability scales UP to godlike levels meanwhile Support/control scales DOWN. If we set the entire concept of difficulty aside for a moment if we handled all the ATs and powersets with a fair and even hand both support and control would also scale up just as much as damage/survivability do. Everyone could still have their ability to solo +4/8 missions, but now controllers could fully lock down +4/8 missions and support could fully carry teams solo with their support (like half the AT's powersets can with their damage/survivability). That would be even scaling of everyone. It'd be easy yes, but it'd be equal treatment. So if we're not worried about the game content being too easy just remove purple patch diminishing returns from control and debuffs and problem solved. (or significantly reduce it for control and debuff). That way everyone gets to feel like gods and not just a fraction of the sets. Granted, i'm not advocating for buffs/debuffs and have made it clear i think support/control is in a good space in and of itself. But if difficulty is not a concern at all that's your fix that nerfs nobody....and more or less finishes our transition back to pre-ED lol. (with the exception of aggro/aoe caps)

Technically all ATs/powersets are still useful or "valuable". OFC technically A scrapper with only Air Superiority, Jump Kick, and Flurry is still useful or "valuable". Realistically we'd all know that they would contribte very little relative to the average scrapper ofc and that's the problem alot of sets find themselves in. They contribute, but the amount of their contribution is pretty token. This includes Trick Arrow. I don't actually thingk Trick Arrow needs significant help (maybe not any) because I don't think it has a powerset issue. I feel like the set performs pretty well on all content +3/8 or lower, +4/8 cutting it's debuffs enough to make them token values (48% and 30% of original values respectively.). 40% -res gets cut down to as small as 25% -res in +3/8. So assuming you captured a full blaster rotation and you had 4 blasters you're doing a blaster's worth of damage. Ofc mobs wont survive that and it's 20% AOE and 20% -res stacking onto a single target (or small cluster) but it's for illustrative purposes! . That's significant and worth you not being on a blaster yourself. Even though you wont hit that full potential most of the time the potential is theoretically there so combined with your other debuffs it's effective. But you get to +4/8 and you're facing +4/+5 level enemies and the debuff goes down to 19.2% and 12%. So your max theoretical pull from 4 blasters (which again mobs will not survive a full rotation from) is theoretically as up to 48%-76.8% of a blaster's damage. So we're already down to the point to where, if mobs survived long enough, you'd be better to just bring another blaster as far as damage goes. But that's ok, it's not all about damage right! We have survivability debuffs. Oh, they also get murdered by the purple patch and oh nobody needs them anyways because nobody dies. But that's ok we have weak blasts ourselves, we can make up that damage differntial. Oh, mobs are killed so fast your disruption arrow is only up every other mob group and Oil Slick Arrow is only up every 4-6 mob groups. Well #@$@.

Your suspicion is wrong. I build seat of the pants and the game is still a cake walk. I'm an experienced MMORPG veteran across much harder games than COH, but HC COH is really easy even by COH standards because of the IO availability difference and the prevalence of leadership in teams (primarily there are other reasons too ofc). It's a cakewalk even on my stone/regen brute who is not pursuing +def in his sets. He focused on +regen in set bonuses and resists. He's not optimized by any means, he's still got alot of frankenslotting, he doesn't even have great set bonuses currently and no ultimate set bonuses, no set +recharge to speak of, regen is one of the weaker defense sets, and he just barely started to get incarnate abilities. I can solo +2/8 and I can tank +4/8 for teams and I've got a huge amount more power to gain still. Heck on most level 50 teams enemies are dead by the time they are done bouncing from Fault + Tremor. Now I'm getting incarnate levels on him and slowly replacing weaker set bonuses with better ones and i'm sure he'll be able to solo +4/8 by the time it's done. My brutes/tanks/scrappers using more powerful armor sets would already be completely untouchable at this point.

I don't think you can just make new difficulty options for the same reason you can't re balance IOs. Too much time investment, too many people left behind, and essentially fractures a playerbase that's already spread thin. It's a huge amount of work for little return. - You can't just scale up the current system, purple patch is already eating into alot of classes like MMs and +5/+6 is not viable as a balanced difficulty since we're talking debuff/control getting 30%/15% of the original value. - If you scale the new difficulties to challenge the defense softcap then you basically screw over anyone who didn't softcap. - Same thing with to-hit. You can't just scale the difficulty to all the set bonus levels of accuracy because anyone that doesn't have that is completely screwed. It'd just force people to bring leadership onto the team and it's already over-prevalent. - How do you balance out the risk reward of the new content vs the current +4/8 if it's actually challenging with assumedly more deaths and less kill speed? - This is a horrible state of game balance mentality to be stuck in, if no significant nerfs are acceptable and only buffs are acceptable then it's only a matter of time until your game goes off the rails or becomes stagnant. Even adding new content will not help hardly because the new content will have to follow the previous difficulty for the reasons already mentioned and thus after an initial spate of novelty it'll either become the new farmed content or we'll just go back to the previously farmed content within like 2 weeks to a month. We have a crapton of great content in this game people already never touch. - After all this work if you actually made it challenging a significant amount of people who currently run content at +4/8 would still never touch it and 90%+ of teams would still be focused around. It's clear that some folks want to scale to a point there they are never threatened by content again. There was alot of talk earlier in the thread about people wanting to feel like a god and if we didn't to find another team. If that's them being genuine they are not going for the new content. Genie is out of the bottle. so long as +4/8 is super easily rolled and lucrative people are not going to stop doing it for the same reason people are not going to stop rolling fiery aura brutes and choosing fire farms. And just like AE farmers influence the market and availability of team mates as they farm and powerlevel people so too will folks rolling easy content. Finding teams for the new higher difficulties levels would be difficult and only the most dedicated players would do it.

Yup, there are a variety of opinions on the state of the game and what it should be. Some folks miss the greater variety and/or challenge of live servers and the more even spread of ATs/power sets even though live still wasn't perfect ofc. Some folks enjoy the current level of power where pretty much every AT can solo level 30+ content meant for teams which leaves the game heavily tilted towards melee, blasters, and damage controllers ( which is not debatable ). I think there has been enough discussion and different opinions to show pretty clearly that the current status quo is not ideal to a great amount of players and indeed this thread itself pretty directly states it's not ideal to the devs either. The question is in trying to find a balance to fix some of those issues folks have without overly stepping on the toes of the people who don't want their characters to be even the slightest bit less godlike overpowered vs the current level 30+ content. Both sides are very invested players not representative of the casual crowd composing much of the playerbase. I speak for myself and I've made that very clear, but some folks here attempt to speak for all players and what they should do and how they wouldn't need changes when they are plainly not representative of most players :P. I think the devs are going to end up doing some good work but are going to get alot of pushback for it considering the original post.

Yup, it's a rock and a hard place. It took awhile to bloom into the full issue but the live team of CoH left the devs quite a pickle to try and navigate around. From earlier in this thread it's clear that there is a significant portion of at least the forum going readership that absolutely loved feeling that overpowered as well so there is a split community on what is desired, which is honestly pretty common in game dev. They'll get pushback either way lol. Prolly not from me though, this is a pivotal junction, which is why this thread exists, and so this is where I put my feedback. Unless something is particularly on fire with the path forwards chosen I'll just adapt to it and avoid the trouble spots in the game the best I can. A quick look at the AT numbers from the statistics thread paints a clear picture that people are playing supports and control less than ever before. Support/CC is normally underplayed in most MMORPGs, City of Heroes was a rare exception in that regard and especially post ED support and crowd control were super common, Definitely more common than they are now. Folks in this thread are very defensive, but I wonder if they realize I've never actually proposed any changes. I've never called for any nerfs or indeed any buffs either! All I've done is said "this is an issue and this is why". The unenviable task of finding a way around it falls to the devs :(. There are no easy answers here, the situation is too much of a cluster. I'm realistic. They get love and hugs from me just from tackling this beast and my thanksl for doing everything they do :).

They literally can't make most of the currently run level 30+ content harder, because if they do then everyone who isn't a power game IO setting out will be destroyed. The power gap between the haves and have nots in that regard is quite ludicrous indeed. Same AT, same powerset, same level, IO sets vs common IOs is night and day and sets are very much a power gamer area only a portion of the community heavily participates in.

Yes this has been said by me quite directly like half a dozen times already among others too. This is part of why online conversation is so poor, everyone catches bits and pieces of the conversation and often the context is lost and individual comments are reduced down an inaccurate interpretation. Everything is this disconnected sound byte that then gets processed through someone's biases and whatever is on their mind atm. Affects you, affects me, affects us all. Not to mention the dehumanization where people often are not interacted with as if they are people, the way people would behave face to face, because of both the disconnect from body language/expression/tone/etc and the anonymity factor. Here's the most recent time I said exactly what you just told me and it's literally on the same page as your reply: The problem isn't necessarily the ATs themselves, there is individual stuff in need of nerfing/buffing sure but it's not causing the issue of supports and crowd control losing significant amounts of their usefulness in large swathes of level 30+ content. The problem is that the vast VAST majority of the 30+ content was not designed for the levels of powers that IO sets bring. Much less IO sets stacked with incarnate level shifts. That's why I'm not seeking buffs or nerfs to any specific AT or power set. Because the problem is bigger than that. It's not a powerset or AT problem even if some power sets or ATs are disproportionately affected.

Who said anything about testing the limits of your capabilities and skills? I just want all ATs and powersets, including supports and non-damage controllers, to be valuable and useful in all significantly played content. This includes Radio missions and the non-bleeding difficulty TF and trials too. Variability is fine, having teams where you are far less useful is fine, but if it becomes the norm for you to be far less useful than melee/damage powersets in a significant % of played content that's not fine. As was said on Page 2, everyone wants to feel super. Not just melee/damage. I dunno why you have to continue to hyperbolicize things and present arguments that were not being made, you only harm your own position.

Thank you two for so clearly putting that perspective out there. That's valuable feedback from all of us on how we view things and where our values lie in playing the game. The HC devs can read that and decide if they are ok with that being the state of the game that we are so powerful that level 50 +4/8 content is no longer considered high level content as well as people views on where force multipliers should and shouldn't matter. They'll make that decision according to their vision for the game, their metrics, and player feedback.

- Force Fields is very effective with the big 3. I want to say it needs help but I also want to say it's very effective. It's one of those 1-3 I mentioned, but I'm not so sure of it. - Traps suffers worse today from its lack of mobility than it did on live because kill speeds become so fast later on. While there is still a sliver of content in the game it's more useful, it's drawbacks are definitely larger than they were and FF Generator is less useful than it was with so many people soft capped. In it's niche of stationary combat I think it's tough enough, I just feel like that niche has gotten small enough it might need a little more mobility. This is prolly the only one I'd lean towards a buff on, and not a direct effect buff even but more of a QOL/usability buff. - Poison is in a weird spot. It's super good at single target debuffing and it does have AOE but the AOE is small and much weaker. It's also got the proc laden Poison Trap and then Venomous gas. But it's alot of limitations and hoops to jump through which might not be worth it currently. But I can't stand playing Poison for some reason so this is just something I'm keeping an eye on and don't know exactly where it stands. - Trick Arrow is already on the docket for buffs. I've said many times I play Trick Arrow and it was my main on live. I'm honestly not sure I would buff it though. The issues I run into on it are either cases where I'm facing deep purple patch reductions or being on teams where teams steamroll things without any need for me. Or both. But I don't think that's necessarily due to the Trick Arrow being weak. and I'm scared if it was buffed to try and compete in the madness that is high level that'd it'd be totally busted mid level. - Sonic Debuff is something I need to look into. It's the 3rd lowest defender primary, 2nd lowest Corruptor Primary, and the 3rd lowest Controller secondary. Theoretically Sonic has a noticable res buff shield, a significant amounts of always up -res, and an earthquake power (albeit with bad uptime). But it doesn't seem to be enough for anyone to want to use it. I need to roll an alt to see why people won't use this. Force Field gets used by people plenty, but the sister res set with alot of -res isn't being used.

Another reply I enjoy seeing. Max level max difficulty is no longer high level content according to the City of Heroes forums. That rationale speaks for itself in how very very narrow and cherry picked this argument is and how power creeped things have gotten.

TBH I completely agree, I don't think the problem is that support sets are weak with perhaps 1-3 exceptions. I think the problem is that the ability for their strengths to matter is stepped all over by fully IO'd high level characters. They still have great power in survivability and utility, but that additional survivability and utility simply is not valuable anymore in most of the high level content. It's kinda like a scrapper being on a team full of blasters. Yeah you're not weak but you'll barely ever touch a mob so it doesn't matter. Now imagine most teams were full of blasters lol.

Force multiplication matters everywhere people spend time on their high level toons. Saying Force Multiplication counts more on SOME TFs and Itrials is a valid point and indeed I think that should receive greater weighting. However people spend the vast majority of their high level time outside of that content. If people spend 20% of their time in the more difficult content where force multiplication matters and spend 80% of their time in easier stuff where it really doesn't then that means force multiplication doesn't matter 80% of the time. Both matter, ignoring either side of the equation would be silly. As you say though it's a set by set basis. Some sets get hit way harder than others, this is true. But if kill speeds and safety is high enough on content no amount of buffs to a support set will fix the problem and another solution must be sought.

TBH I stopped joining PI teams before getting full frankenslots for a full 100% accuracy because even with 67% accuracy I was missing constantly. That being said I don't see lowbies being afk in PI radio missions much. They're not really accomplishing much but they are trying to help at least normally. AE farming is different to where it's often alot of Powerleveling going on.

I agree on all points. This is how it was put in, for better or worse, and it's prolly not going anywhere anytime soon. Thanks to ludicrously slow acquisition rates on live they never really had to face the good and the bad of sets and then do balance passes, as the HC team said....the end game is unfinished. We're just kinda stuck for it and have to see if we can band-aid around whatever problems it does or doesn't have. We're gonna need alot of chewing gum and duct tape lol. Also, why are those not invention salvage 😄?

And compound that by how much easier it is to hit 50 now with permanent xp boost at basically no cost. Whatever inf you lose by getting only exp while leveling is overwhelmed very quickly by getting higher level drops and then pretty soon higher level inf gains. Even the leveling process isnt going to cost you because you can just slot common IOs and not have to constantly replace. 1 character making IOs for you is super cheap and just a handful of sold rare salvage is all you need to make dirt cheap common IOs for any alt you ever have. Then add on the inflation and the fixed price of common IO via the workbenches, Common IOs are a trivial expense now rather than an investment that would pay good returns. They took some work to acquire on live. Not super crazy huge amounts, but definitely noticeable. On HC I had full common IOs within the first week for every new character.

TBH I have no preference how the problem is fixed, so long as it's fixed. I think part of the problem here though is that IO sets are such a massive factor. Rebalancing them would take forever and yet they are the single largest thing skewing balance out of whack at 50. Most level 50 content is an appropriate challenge for franken slotting without the set bonuses involved. You'd prolly be running +2/+3 with only the best groups running +4. IO's shift that instantly to +4. The Incarnate (mainly the alpha slot with the level shift) are on top of that. OFC the problem you run into is if you balance the new harder content around IO powered 50s with likely incarnates....non-IO min/maxed 50s get REKT and non-incarntes will prolly struggle. It took time, iteration, and alot of man hours to get into this state. It's take just as much time, iteration, and man power to cleanly remedy this state. If not more. My personal feeling is that being able to soft cap stats via sets alone is way too much benefit from set bonuses and if it was up to me I'd make the range between tiny set bonuses and ultimate set bonuses smaller by a good bit, reigning in the top end. But that's not something I'm going to fight for to change, I've accepted that is just how it is. I just don't like it when your set bonuses can provide just as much benefit as an entire defensive power set. So we've dug ourselves into this hole, and we have the sunk cost fallacy in full swing, now we gotta design our way out of it.

Yeah I'd push back against that idea just as strongly as I do against the idea that supports are in a fine place currently. Doubly so once the ability to choose your difficulty level was in game. Some people are just too stubborn/prideful to drop their difficulty level. Like if you do 3 hard team wipes then you drop the difficulty unless its a team agreement to take on the challenge. If you're just taking some damage and having the occasional down here and there you don't need a support, that's a mission you can handle if you tighten up your play and maybe pull from time to time.

IOs were definitely waaaayy before the theoretical blaster changes. However IOs were incredibly difficult to obtain compared to HC today. I played alot more time on live and was running in mainly common IOs with a few franken sets being on my most played characters. I've been back to HC for about 3 months now and while I've played ALOT (prolly too much lol) it's no more than I used to and all my level 25 characters are running franken sets the moment they hit 25. The difference in ease of acquisition was night and day. I don't know what changes HC made but I can find and afford set IOs infintiely easier than I did on live even having to build myself back up from scratch again. It was actually rare for me to run into non-tank/brute/occassional scrapper who could eat +3/8 aggro much less +4/8. On HC today "squishies" do it all the time. I still remember a Lizard man Incarnate Controller (fire/kin) being able to solo +2/8 without any risk and getting upset if the difficulty went over that because he'd actually start dying 😛. He was temperamental but on my friends list. He was one of the more powerful squishies at the time, im not saying there were not squishies more powerful than him but he was more powerful by a large margin than the vast majority of controllers his level. Which is ironically why I kept him on my friends list. He liked having an excuse to run missions and show off and I liked having the ability to gain a few levels from time to time on struggling toons looking to hit key powers.