Ralathar44

Spot on. My job here is to give honest feedback from my point of view based on the testing I do. I play almost everything significantly, and those I do not feel I have enough experience with I've clearly labeled that....this being blasters (on a balance/imbalanced level), as well as dominators and kheldians across the board. It is the job of the devs to make the best decisions possible based on all our feedback, their own metrics, and their own vision to serve the future health of the game. Nobody is precisely wrong in wanting their version of the game. But obviously there are different versions of the game people want. Some folks want it to be near unloseable in the normal content run, some want a challenge, some want a compromise in between. Some want to feel like all powerful gods and damn everyone else...go away and do something else if you don't like me being so strong, some want a game whee everyone feels roughly (+/- 15%) equally useful, and a few crazies out there even like being underpowered. All of those are valid opinions.

As someone who works in game QA, changes that are not live are subject to change at any time including complete removal. I've seen many things pulled player will never know about. Heck alot of changes that DO go live get significantly changed and sometimes removed. All that data mining means is that they were thinking about it and prolly willing to test it out. We have no idea what the final state would have looked like. Maybe it would have been just like now on HC, maybe they would have been reverted completely, more likely it'd be somewhere in the middle. But it could also be like Starcraft Ghosts...an entire game just completely killed despite so much of it existing. I also do notice how you phrased "the core of the snipe changes". That's a pretty loaded phrase. If I added 1 pet to both T1 and T2 MM minions I could then make a change that also added an additional T3 pet and say that the core of the MM changes were already present...yet obviously a rather severe differential in the implementation has occurred. I don't say this to argue you, but it's an important detail to note. I don't personally mind any of the changes mentioned. And I don't know if Blasters are too strong or not currently, I need more time playing. But if I was to come tot that conclusion it wouldn't be because any 1 change was bad but rather that all of them, combined with the IO availability (the proverbial elephant in the room) was too much.

The vast majority of sets are i pretty good shape up until level 30ish or so. Even TA, which is a late bloomer that needs alot of recharge and powers to really start helping much, still has flash/glue/poison arrow + ice arrow to make a difference + disruption/acid so it performs well mid level after being a bit weak low level. Oil Slick Arrow is where TA peaked on live and then maintained that peak...but thanks to the increased power level of all your team mates on HC Oil Slick Arrow is basically when you start to drop off hard. You get a few levels of feeling good with your new toy but then as you get higher and higher level from there teams get safer and safer and safe until you feel like it'd be better if you were on basically anything else. - Most melee (stalker may be an exception) has a steadily rising power arc as they level. They peak and dip a little at various times but on the whole it's a rising arc of power from 1-50. - Blasters and Sentinels follow a similar trajectory. - Widow/Soldier also follows this trajectory with growing safety, damage dealing power, and leadership buffs. - Controllers bsaed around damage (fire/illu kin/rad) follow a similar trajectory - Controllrs based around support/CC peak around 32 and then fall off significantly by 50 due to increasing team safety. - MMs follow a similar peak and decline due to the way they interact with level differentials with their pets combined with the fact half of their set is often supportive (to keep their pets alive) - Defenders with sets significantly based around survivability (force field, Trick Arrow, Dark Miasma) are quite strong early game (with exception of TA), still pretty strong mid game, and fall off hard late game. - Defenders with sets significantly based around debuffs that have moderate to long cooldowns (20s+ even after 1/3rd base recharge) falll of hard late game even if those debuffs are damage increasers. Kill speed just increases so much that the uptime on debuffs becomes low. Usually around 50% uptime or less. This is due to mobs dying within 10 seconds or less. The more damage you have (blaster nukes and incarnate nukes make a HUGE impact here due to how quickly they kill a group) the more underneath 50% your uptime is. - Dominators I honestly don't play enough to high level to know. - Kheldians I honestly don't play enough to high level to know.

No you're right, it was freaks. Sorry about that I've played alot of TFs recently including Synapse, which is the clocks and I got my wires cross on the TF name/mobs. The one I was talking about was based out of independence port where the same chopper being half the missions so it's definitely yin and freaks. I know the team mates and the level range since I had oil slick arrow but not emp arrow when exemplar'd down, but mixed the enemies up for some reason. End AV was Clamor in the Terra Volta room, which honestly is pretty ideal for the TA I was playing due to the multiple waves of enemies in the same area and my persistent debuffs. (had to shrug off a little debuff aggro but meh, expected) As mentioned even council and freaks are a notch harder than clocks. But nothing like Arachnos or Carnies and mission was definitely at +2 and our tank went down a few times during the TF. I was on my TA and there was another defender and a controller all helping out with buffs/debuffs/heals to help keep the tank alive on the larger pulls. The times they went down was when they broke LOS from us and pulled a larger group. Freaks are pretty toothless honestly. Their heavy hitters are mostly s/l, minor knockback mostly from freak tank grenades and clap. Stunners and Juicers go down too easy to be a real threat. The only actual threat in Freakshow is the super stunner who does decent end drain and mostly the self rez drains quite a bit and then shuts off your recovery for awhile. If you avoid that self rez though freaks are easier than Family and Council are. Family is s/l but they do good damage with alot of holds (bosses tend to murder squshies) and their -def stacking can lead to cascades on alot tanks or others taking aggro. As you get more def the amount this affects you diminishes in a multiplicative fashion ofc. Council isn't much to worry about at high levels when everyone has stacked defense from IOs but in mid levels the AOE can result in squishy casualties pretty easily. Also the cold marksmen giving -recharge can actually make a significant difference if your team is roughly even on power level with the enemy mobs. We had absolutely zero threat from the AV, remember the end mission of that is the TV defense and is just a horde of freaks.

The difficulty on the TF was set much lower than the difficulty on the PI Radio mission. I think it was at +2/8 vs the +4/8 of the PI mission IIRC. The mob grups we delt with were smaller and defeated far less quickly and clockworks are inhernetly far less of a problem than Carnies and Arachnos or even Family/Council. Talos Island is terrible for radio missions because it often sends you across the water constantly for long distance hikes. The story arcs are actually way better...especially Ray Cooling's arc. The building burning mission is a bit of a lull but the rest of them provide a bit of variety while still maintaining constant fighting and a fairly good rate of both challenge and exp for teams of that level. Deaths are not uncommon if the difficulty level is set right and the pace is led appropriately. That being said Talos Radio missions are nowhere near as cake as PI radio missions because the average level of player power relative to enemies is dramatically different. There won't be hardly any Talos radio teams cruising at max speed on +4/8. +2/8 is much more common and +3/8 for the better teams. I've leveled so many alts through Talos recently while running teams so I've got copious and recent experience with this. Prolly 50+ hours in the last month leading teams through Talos in various ways. (most people avoid First Ward sadly or I'd mix it up more lol)

Honestly that's pretty close to what we see. Top 5 classes at 50: Brute, Blaster, Controller, Scrapper, Tanker. Controller originally looks like an outlier here until you realize the top 2 controller powersets are fire/illusion kinetics/rad and those are more popular by such an extent that they are like 50% of all controllers. So the majority of controllers are damage focused as well, not support focused. There are as many blasters alone at 50 as there are Defenders and Corruptors put together. In fact once you get past the melee/blaster oriented classes (plus dmg controllers) you can see the popularity immediately fall by almost half. In fact, the only damage oriented class that isn't at the top of the most played list by almost double the supporting classes is Sentinel. Because blasters are so survivable these days sentinels don't really have a place, they are essentially just lower damage blasters since blasters are not dying in the vast majority of level 50+ content.

Once again this is another reply I like because it's more telling that perhaps the commentor intended and it stands for itself. Once again a poster paints everyone who feels less valuable as a bad player. I'm relly confused as to why yall believe this is a good approach lol. Yall are really having a field day with the attacking other people. +4/8 content in the current state of the game is the most difficult non-incarnate content available in the game proper and it's so easy for the average team that nobody dies and mobs die in 10 seconds or less. Currently all of that content is completely trivialized past level 30ish. 1-30 or so has a good spread of power and I've faced +3 as early as level 8 on some really good teams but people don't start trivializing content until 25-30ish. 30-50 is a complete mess that becomes an utter cakewalk on the vast majority of teams. Incarnate content is a mix, some of it is challenging and some is not and there is quite little of it. Heck, my high level blapper has tanked +2 for teams and he's not even close to optimized yet since he's just frankenslotting for power enhancement values lol. And blasters are the least survivable AT...or at least they used to be lol. These day's the average level 50 blaster with IOs is prolly more survivable than the average pre-IO level 50 scrapper on sunset :P. So my option to "get the challenge I want", which is just the challenge the game used to have pre-sunset, is basically limited to a fraction of incarnate content or custom created AE content. And, ironically, I'm being told I want the rewards without the effort while being told I want more challenge...which are contradictory statements because more challenging content actually requires you to work harder for the same rewards. Also, my goal isn't the challenge, my goal is to have content challenging enough for all ATs to be equally (roughly) useful again like it used to be. While I personally enjoy more challenge, it's not the goal here, the goal is to make every AT valuable at using their full set as much as they used to be able to on live in high level content.

This is a false dichotomoy. Support was much more valuable post-ED but pre-homecoming and never was there a time where you NEEDED support characters to clear content. There is room for everyone to be valuable but that does indeed mean that no one group can get too powerful or they remove the abilities of others to feel powerful. That's means non-supports can't get too powerful and that means non supports can't get too weak. That means supports can't get too powerful and that means supports can't get too weak. I too firmly believe that a flexible team comp is a core feature of the game and we had that along with supports feeling super in every part of the game pre-sunset. And every other AT felt super too. The one AT that prolly needed help pre-sunset was prolly blasters faceplanting a little too much and between direct HC team love and plentiful IOs they've gotten huge amounts of power increase to their survivability, offense, and sustainability. So they are definitely not hurting anymore, they might even be too good, I need to do more testing. So far results are not encouraging since I've actually tanked on my high level (but not 50 yet) blapper on multiple occasions and he's nowhere near optimized.

Why would you say "even in the pre-ED days". That implies that's the best time for support characters, which is not the case. Pre-ED was almost as bad as now. It was worse in some cases but less consistently. The best time for support characters was post-ed until sunset. Even after IOs were introduced they were not common enough for most people to be min/maxed like they are now and so support felt like a worthy and powerful addition to most teams with the godly teams being more of a rare exception instead of the normal like it is today. Pre-ED days support was useful based on the team. If the team had a high level tank then support was only useful for the same thing it is today, -res and +dmg. If the team did not have a tank then support was very useful unless you ran into the odd scrapper who controlled aggro. (most were too busy scrapperlocking). On a non-tank team there was plenty of useful room for multiple supports or 1 controller...since back then controllers could permalock the entire mob. Right now support is rarely useful outside of -res/+damage. Teams where you are useful do happen, but they are fairly rare with the average being teams in which nobody dies because enough to the team has good defenses to soak all the aggro. The amount of damage a +4/+5 mob can do is finite and every point of damage they aim at a godly defense character (built out tank/brute/scrap or softcapped through IOs character) is effectively negated. Especially since each mob tends to only get 1 alpha of damage and then instantly die these days.

People don't like nerfs, nerfs were badly needed. And I say this considering that my first 50 was an Earth/Emp controller and my second was a Stone Stone Tank. I hadn't really played around with many defenders yet at that time. MMs and brutes and etc didn't exist yet. When ED, GDN, and aggro/AOE caps happens rolled around it GUTTED my most played characters. But I did this weird thing where I tucked away the pain and waited and evaluated the situation critically. Multiple tanks could now be on teams and be useful. Multiple controllers on a team could now be useful. Tanks now had a use for support rather than just needing more people to DPS the dumpster...or the more common task of "don't kill anything, just fill and sit at the door" as the fire tank gathered the entire map into a dumpster and killed them. They just needed you to ramp the difficulty up because you couldn't choose it back then. RIVETING gameplay.... At lest the current situation on homecoming takes multiple people to make you feel like a useless lackey of the gods. Pre-ED/GDN/Caps it took 1 tank or scrapper lol.

I will repeat this again, everyone CAN feel awesome. If you are on a team where you are not feeling useful, then find another team. If you are staying on a team where you are not having fun or feeling super, that is definitely a you problem not a game problem. Socialize, make friends with like minded people and go have fun together. More importantly, no matter what level of nerfs are applied, there are always going to be players who are simply better and will outperform others. Instead of advocating to nerf everyone down to a level where no one feels super because they need 7 other people to cross the street, we should be advocating for more choice in my opinion. TBH I really like this reply. It shows exactly where you stand and where you are coming from to a rather unflattering level. I can be accused of being imperfect, and that's totally fine :), but I have been arguing for having a place on every team for every AT and every power set as much as possible so we can all have fun regardless of what role we want to play. That's where I'm coming from and it can be seen over and over again in my comments, flaws and all. Someone can say I'm mistaken in some of the details, but the overall idea is nonetheless sound and the issues i mentioned are nightly occurrences. You have provided the other side of it. Rather than trying to make sure that the game let every AT and every power set feel valuable on as many teams as possible your solution is "leave the team and make a specialist team" so that you can also have fun. And then you insinuate that all of those people are bad players who are not doing good because they are not "better players who outperform others". And you pretty directly call them special needs in your last sentence. This is also counter-productive because if you really think folks are bad and that's why they are performing poorly then why would you believe them capable of forming specialized teams to have fun in? That's highly illogical, even most good players won't form teams. Wouldn't you rather mentor and help people you feel are "less skilled" to give more players to the server who have a better experience instead of shunning them and trying to drive them from the game? If you really believe in your point of view, I'd advise being less vocal and losing the insulting edge. Your poisoning the well of the position your trying to advocate for with the tact you've taken and the insults you've slung at people who do not deserve it. It's not just "people being bad". Game Balance controls team, AT, and powerset viability. A good player make a powerset focused around making their allies more survivable useful on high level teams that die to nothing in 90%+ of the content they run. Changing characters is a viable answer to fix that problem of feeling useful, but if the answer is almost always to change characters that's a balancing issue. Same story with pug teams vs curated teams. If you have to cherry pick a team to make survivability buffs even be useful because PUG teams are so safe they never use them....that's a balancing issue.

Just had another example of it tonight. Mentored down to a Penelope Yin TF on my TA defender and felt very useful and we had actual fights. Joined a PI radio team afterwards and groups were literally dying by the time my second debuff landed. Disruption Arrow > Oil Slick Arrow and the mob was almost dead by the time Oil Slick Arrow had landed. And Disruption Arrow was hit before any AOEs did. So technically I got Value from disruption Arrow I guess, but then on to the next fight with both on cooldown. Level 54 enemies so +4 to most, +3 to level shifted, +5 to sk'd up.

I think the goal is that everyone has space within the team to not just be useful but feel awesome. This is actually a delicate balance because there is only so many mobs and so much incoming damage and a finite value of to-hit checks coming in. So if any 1 person or if a few people are TOO awesome then that takes away from the ability of everyone else to be feel awesome. Now as a sometimes thing, that's not a problem, but when everyone is too awesome as a matter of course it becomes a problem because again, there is a finite amount of awesome to go around because the mechanics by which we obtain the awesome are based on finite values. Jimmy said as much on page 2: This is crucial IMO - but it cuts both ways. It's pretty difficult to feel super when one team member can solo the entire mission without breaking a sweat.

Yeah, admittedly there is prolly some hyperbolicism to it but it's hard not to feel that way when in the average high level group the mob literally does not survive long enough for my TA/A to deploy all his debuffs. And people are taking little to no damage whether I help or not. Against +4/+5 no less. People on level 50 teams used to love seeing Oil Slick Arrow and it used to be super effective. But since the power creep has bumped the average level enemy faced by 1-2 levels it's alot less effective than it was AND my team mates are alot more effective than they were on average. So how much it helps the average team now is a tiny fraction of what it used to be.

TBH I was pretty surprised to see that too. Support has wavered in value from patch to patch and major change to major change but Defenders were borderline worshiped at one time and this was striking for me because it was a major difference from other MMORPGs...especially since so many of them did it without any significant healing. Seeing a Forcefield defender join the team used to be a cause for celebration even if you were on a tank. It kinda still is that way today at low levels. There is the odd team here and there at high level a bubbler still feels useful on, but most of them these days have zero use for you. Even Traps used to get praise. TRAPS. Because yeah they knew your regen triangle would be unreliable from mob to mob but it was great for stationary fights and your FF generator provided defense and mezz resist. Those two things alone were enough for teams to love you joining. Now they don't need either of those in most high level teams and the average kill speed is so fast now that your immobile nature is more of a liability than ever before.

Unfortunately it only takes between 1-3 people (depending on AT) to reach the "only -res/-regen/+dmg is useful" threshold. A godly tank or brute is enough to invalidate all survivability debuffs/buffs. I know because I've done it. Unless you break aggro cap by a significant amount nobody is going to die and you're not going to die either. A couple godly blasters is enough to raise the kill rate enough to invalidate not only the survivability buffs/debuffs (because mobs don't live long enough to matter) but offensive increasing debuffs (because mobs don't live long enough to matter and you're on recharge for every other group or more) Think of it as an overall "team survivability" and "team damage" rating, and when either exceeds a certain point survability is no longer a concern. When team damage exceeds a certain point your -res/=dmg also is no longer a concern vs all but maybe AVs. Godly Tanks and brutes can raise team survivability to max all on their own easily. But so can any soft capped character that can take aggro first and can hold most of it for 3-5 seconds on high damage teams.

That's not true at all though, Post-Ed and pre-IO support characters were amazing. Melee could not survive +3/+4 mobs like they can today and everyone wasn't soft capped on defenses. That free 45% softcap everone gets now didn't come without a cost. The survivability provided by the free 45% everyone can get now was previously provided by supports and controllers. Same story with accuracy and global recharge and every other set bonus. All of that is power budget removed from supports. How can you even make a statement like that when we're talking about everyone in the game gaining such massive swings in power pre-IO and post IO and knowing that most character simply could not survive +3 consistently to the same standards people now survive +4/+5? And then for fun add on level shift. We must have played a different game. There was a time were my Trick Arrow Defender, one of the lesser of the defenders, was LOVED for being on teams. Post-IO pre-HC that love was less but still there. Today on HC nobody needs what you bring because they have everything they need from their own IO sets or someone else on the team who is IO'd out carrying the team. The difference is incredibly dramatic.

That doesn't matter if blasters are still tough enough to survive doing their job and not die. If blasters are not dying on teams and sentinels are not dying on teams then who do you bring? You bring a blaster every time because they are just as safe and deal alot more damage.

But the entire niche of Sentinels is "lower damage but less prone to sucking floor". So once blasters get to a certain safety threshold sentinels essentially become pointless. Blasters were supposed to be the riskier but higher damage option.

What you responded too never said they were NECESSARY. That's a complete shift from what I expressed. What I said was that the available useful powers you have as support actually get smaller as you level now. Survivability assistance is not only not necessary it's not even helpful in most cases now because the average level of defense people have is so high. Same with utility. There are basically 4 distinct stages of support usefulness I can recall. - Pre-ED: Tanks did not need or really even benefit from your survival buffs, some scrappers didn't either. Everyone else did. Not every team had a god tank or uber scrapper on it. Your utility and damage increasing powers varied in usefulness dependent on the team but were almost always pretty useful. CC was useful or not dependent on whether a tank (who could control and survive all aggro) was on the team. - Post-ED: but Pre-IO: Survability buffs were highly valued and again, not necessary, but quite helpful. Utility and damage increasing powers were also very helpful. This was basically the golden age of supports. Control was highly useful. - Post-ED and Post IO on live: Very similary to post-ed and pre-io except now you had the rare godly character that made your support/control less useful. The impact depended on the character. Some were gods who invalidated you, some simply lowered your usefulness a good bit. - Today on Homecoming: God characters are everywhere end game. Survivability support is almost worthless since enough people on high level teams are soft capped that people almost never die or take significant damage even vs +4/+5 and even then they have more than enough inspirations to cover it. Your support is of minimal value. You are there to provide +dmg and -res primarily. This is the worst state I've seen the value of support in since...ever really.

You're ignoring application time and recharge time. - If a team is clearing mobs in 10 seconds then alot of debuffs don't actually recharge fast enough to be applied on every mob. - Debuffs get aggro so you cannot throw them down, generally, before someone takes the alpha or lots of bad things like damage/dealth/held/slept/knockedback/end drained/etc happen. So you're always throwing them down after engage. This might before before the major AOEs land or it might not. In a 20+ second fight multiple rounds of AOEs happen so if some AOEs land a split second before your debuffs take effect its ok because further attacks will still benefit and you've got plenty of fight left to return value. If your debuff lands a split second after a single major AOE in the 10 second clear group however you've lost most of the value you were going to add to that fight. And that's if you had 1 ability to worry about throwing out. The impact gets larger the more abilities you throw out. So lets look at a blaster vs Trick Arrow. Blaster throws out 2-3 AOEs and then uses their single target attacks. In 10 seconds they prolly use 6-8 abilities all with good effect. With Trick Arrow you throw out Disruption Arrow and Acid Arrow and then blast once or twice with your weak blast attacks and everything is dead. You don't use poison gas arrow, you don't use glue arrow, you don't use ice arrow. Oil Slick Arrow has a 60s recharge even at 1/3rd of base recharge, Disruption arrow has 20s recharge even at 1/3rd of base recharge. So realistically you're using disruption arrow every 2nd fight, Acid Arrow every fight, and then Oil Slick Arrow every 5th-6th fight at best. OR, you can play a class that actually gets to feel like they've done something.

If you're based around damage/defense your options just expand as you level. If you're support your options just contract as you level. It's like anti-progression. Exemplaring down lets you experience more of your build again, but you lose powers so you never really get to use all of it in the same way damage/defense classes can. And that's not how the game used to be.

My TA/A Defender was my main on retail and I loved him. I felt effective and useful. I feel like dead weight on high level teams now. My entire job as TA is to shoot off disruption arrow and acid arrow now. That's about all I normally have time for so I doubt the -res/-def is even helping much...especially when reduced by the purple patch against +4, or +5s if you're pre-50 and sidekicked even 1 level up. Even Oil Slick Arrow doesn't feel good anymore. Against +2s and +3s it feels powerful with the damage and falling down enemies. But it does little vs +4 or +5 with knockdown procs happening way less and damage not doing enough to matter. Meanwhile teams can kill the group of mobs before the oil slick even gets more than a few ticks of damage off even if you fire it down first and they instantly ignite it. The difference is incredibly dramatic and disheartening.

Napkin math using only those powers' numbers without seeing something in practical application and comparing data sets is a recipe for making bad assumptions. Feelings are often correct, at least in part, but ultimately are fairly unreliable. Data is trustworthy. MMORPGs and MOBAs have shown time and time again that people, even the vast majority opinions, and even professional players, are quite capable of being wrong over and over again with reasoning that is intended to be honest but flawed or biased in some way. For example a big spanner that could change the efficacy dramatically is enemy resistances. You've formed a fine enough hypothesis but that's all it is without testing and a robust data set.

Blaster verision of it is basically just 1 giant list of PBAOEs lol. Tanker has 2 PBAOE and the ranged cone, and while the cone is shortish its alot longer range than melee cones which have low target caps both mechanically and practically thanks to their much more limited range. (even if they have much better arcs) So really we're talking specifically about Brute and Scrapper versions of Fiery Melee mainly since tanker version might be able to make up some group with the additional PBAOE.. You've mentioned they have bad DPS/DPA and if you can confidently state that again I ask for data. Where is the reasonably up to date testing/spreadsheet/forum post breakdown/etc showing this? You've already mentioned long animation times, and I agree the animation times are quite long on some effects (2+ second animations are kinda ridiculous and are a problem for assault rifle blast set too on it's flamethrower powers), that would affect DPS. But you also said DPA, which is a different story completely. So gimme data lol.