Ralathar44

The overwhelming majority of controllers are the DPS variety playing fire/ill kin/rad. There are more fire/ill controllers out there than literally all other controller powersets and kin/rad is just barely under being the same way. You imply it's nonesensical that people would play non-DPS classes who are nowhere near the best at DPS as DPS, but unfortunately that's exactly what people do. And I don't blame them. Control is not relevant at high level and neither are the vast majority of buffs/debuffs. The whole city of statues that thing was real, PRE-ED. But once the global nerfs on everyone (including control) came through there was no city of statues anymore or even close so honestly that's a weird argument to see resurrected. Especially when average hero power at high end games makes mobs so irrelevant they might as well be statues. What's the difference between beating up a statue and beating up something that never gets a chance to move because it dies to fast and couldn't kill you even if you let it try? Functionally they are the same. You're killing a helpless opponent that is no threat to you and never gets a chance to do anything.

Fire Melee has 2 pbaoes and a ranged cone. It does pretty good AOE damage for a melee set. You see Martial Arts all the time and that has diddly for AOE and many tanker sets only have 1 pbaoe and 1 melee cone. When you say it doesn't do damage well is there a DPS chart or missions clear chart you can point to or is that comment based on "I feel"? Because I'd love to see that data if you have it available.

My first 50 ever was an Earth/Emp Controller and crowd control, even post ED where control was gutted, felt infinitely more useful and powerful than it does today. Like sure, my controllers are safer and kill things faster now but that's never why I played controller. illusion/kin and fire/kkin always existed if you wanted a damage controller. But today control feels as great as it used to up until about midway through the leveling process, then crowd control starts to feel very very irrelevant. In end game today controller is mostly just DPS with different graphics and some minor support usually focused around -res or damage buffs because nothing else is needed anymore.

And all of that makes me sad TBH. Because what we're doing ti careening back at full speed to a pre-ED game and while the slotting part of that was fairly silly (IOs later let you have more choice slotting..without needing set bonuses to do it) the global defense and control nerfs and AOE caps and stuff were absolutely needed for game health, because it allowed every AT and every team member to be useful and feel like they were carrying just as much weight again where before many were basically completely irrelevant. But we're just starting to repeat all the same mistakes again. Once again the game is heavily gravitating towards certain ATs being able to do everything and not needing anyone and the ATs that have more supportive or utillity roles are being left behind. This includes controllers too. Controllers are no longer controllers since end game control gets trivialized by kill speeds. Controllers are becoming just another damage dealer. And yes, Fire/kin and stuff always existed but now that's being forced to be the role of all controllers and indeed alot of the controller suggestions I've seen are all asking for more damage. I've accepted that the train has jumped the tracks and we're headed to a new destination. The HC devs have every right to keep going in that direction if they so choose. Some of the community has every right to enjoy that direction. But without a doubt the game has become almost exclusively about damage and has lost alot of what made COH special. If you're a brute/tanker/scrapper/blaster/controller who wants more damage/corruptor focusing on damage this is fantastic news for you. If you're a defender/corruptor focusing on more support, controllers who wants to actually control/suport/debuff/ the ever ignored MMs/doms who ahve been overshadowed by the rising power of other ATs/etc however it's not the best of news. But we can see that the overwhelming majority of current players play damage classes. Controllers are the only "support" class played as much as the damage classes but their most popular power sets are illusion/fire and kinetics/Rad by a huge margin so they are heavily tilted towards damage focused too. It is what it is. I've accepted that all the offensive classes want to be strong enough to basically invalidate the role of support except as dmg buff, leadership, and -res dispensers. But I'm still going to make noise about it.

Not being able to self buff on those sets is because you can apply those skills with a short cooldown to allies at range and keep them up indefinitely. PBAOE buffs constantly miss people in teams and often have fair sized cooldowns. Also I think staying squishy as a defender/controller/corruptor is core to the AT identity. If you could self buff several sets would basically be brute level survivability from low to mid levels. Logically it makes no sense they cannot self buff, but from a gameplay perspective I believe it's a healthy decision not to be able to self buff.

And as a sideways indirect buff Regen should also get high resistance to ALL debuffs. It's a good way to help Regen feel better without omegabuffing it AND it fits with the flavor and themes of regen. Regen WOULD resist and/or shake off debuffs more than others because their whole shtick is a hyper metabolism and quick repair of any damage/abnormalities.

Both of them are part of the issue. IOs and incarnate alpha slot level shft + diminishing returns break (with icing of abilities) both give large power boosts that allow spines/fire to be the farming beast it is. Sure, it could prolly functional with only incarnate or only IOs at reduced efficiency, but farmers are going to be using both and both together stack multiplicatively since the level boost + diminishing returns passive and the IOs compliment and strengthen the benefits of each other.

The incarnate ABILITIES are just icing on the cake. The level shift + diminishing returns piercing passive is a major shift in both damage in survivability. The effectiveness bump from +4 to +3 enemies is very large. +35% damage wise and even more survivability wise due to the multiplicative nature of how damage mitigation functions with healing. There are also additional considerations like how scaling debuffs and endo drains and the like can go from being annoying to absolutely crippling or vice versa with level differntials and the enemies diminishing chance to hit (and thus proc secondary effects).

Honestly this makes me want to roll a fire/spines for normal content just to test it out. I ended up plenty tanky with a stone/regen brute, so I can't imagine Fire/Spines would have any real problems. You can hit soft defense cap with IOs and still have 30%+ resist vs all but psionics, 50%+ vs s/l, a pretty good self heal, and a reliable endo restoring tool.

The fact that they have the damage to be farmers is not an issue, this again comes back to defense which largely comes back to IO/Incarnate level power being used in content that was never designed for it. Pre-IO/Incarnate they just wouldn't have the survivability to farm like that. But turns out a free soft cap of defense to back up your res and self heal makes a big difference. Then you add diminishing returns breaking incarnate passive and level shift. The problem isn't the base sets in most cases, the problem is that IO/Incarnate being used in content not designed for it breaks everything.

This is definitely not the case. Superheroes run the range from Superman to Daredevil with a complete range of power. Being skilled enough to take on even super powered threats is quite a bit different from being godlike themselves. Batman for example can take on Darkside, but not directly. Direct fight he gets smooshed. Because Batman is not a god, outside of maybe being the god of plot armor. But when well written his victories over infinitely more powerful foes make sense. Confining superheroes to "everyone wants to be a god" is honestly just throwing 1/2 to 3/4 of the entire superhero mythos in the trash. City of Heroes for example has Manticore, who is just an archer but who's smart thinking has saved the entire team multiple times despite his relative lack of power level. Pony up torchy.

TBH I don't think the problem is necessarily difficulty even though I personally prefer the option of facing missions difficult enough to wipe teams. I think the problem is uneven power distribution. People have communicated several times in this thread that they like being fully IO'd and incarnated level overpowered because they enjoy feeling like a god. And that's fine. But the problem is only so many people can feel Super (much less a god) on a team at a time. The more people who are walking around in a team overpowered the less people can feel overpowered in a team. If there are 3 blasters rotating nukes then basically the only 3 people getting to really feel that power are the blasters as everyone else mainly watches. If there are 2 unkillable melee taking all the aggro then support sets no longer get to feel like they are super that makes other gods via buffs and debuffs...they're just -res or +dmg bots at that point basically. ETC. Every mission has a finite amount of "power budget" available that can be experienced by the team because there is a finite amount of mobs, incoming damage, and etc in each encounter. So 2-3 people feeling like unstoppable beasts is usually a feeling purchased at the expense of 5-6 other people's ability to feel super. Sure, they can still contribute, but they don't get to leverage even a fraction of their power because the power budget has already been eaten up by the 2-3 people dominating the mission. On teams with incredibly powerful characters in it I think you pretty much have to go down into a 3-4 person team for everyone to really be able to leverage their role. Maybe even 2 with incarnates or the most powerful/impactful builds.

There's been a great deal of ad hominem and snarkiness honestly. But it's not actually personal or targeted at anyone...even if they specifically call someone out. That's how people get when they feel their toys are threatened, they get defensive and often passive aggressive or even outright aggressive. They're lashing out at what they perceive as a threat against their fun, and the internet is anon so folks don't really see other people....they're more the representation or avatar of whatever was said. So people get boiled down into pretty simple labels and ideas instead of actually treated as people. Same thing happens in tribalism. Because of that dehumanization/depersonalization along with the anonymity people are way more prickly, opinionated, and less are understanding online in general than they would be IRL. Online is a terrible way to communicate...and yet here we are. Specifically here though people get emotionally invested in their specific bits of the game. Most people wouldn't hack it as a game designer/balancer because one of the core attributes is the ability to kill your most loved features/ideas if needed and most people wouldn't even let themselves become marginally weaker without a drag out fight :P.

Honestly the travel pools are already on the docket to be looked at along with power pools in general IIRC. Travel powers are already acknowledged as a pain point. There are strong arguments to be made as well that some sets like Regen basically caannot perform without tough/weave and thus tough/weave is being used to band-aid non-competitive sets into being useful. But likewise the presence of tough/weave means if you buff those sets to be competitive on their own then they will still take tough/weave and thus end up stronger than you balanced for. So it's a catch 22 where those sets cannot be buffed because the fighting pool exists. As far as making Hasten inherent? Whatever for? That's but one option upon many, one that is an overall buff...which I know people fight 90% for more buffs more buffs more buffs but nerfing is an option too. But again, it'll never happen, hasten isn't going to be touched. The HC devs would have to have harbles of steel to touch hasten because half the forums would lose their @#$% even if it could somehow be unquestionably proven it was best for the game as a whole.

Let's be totally honest. We've refused to let hasten, a power half the builds are based around, be fixed for years and years despite how ludicrously broken it is. Why in the harbles would we fix the much lesser powerful clicky of power boost?

Please re-read what I wrote: "I run teams all the time, there are already precious few enough folks running teams many nights" . Like all populations there are peaks and valleys in the amount of people playing and it varies night to night. Sometimes predictably, often not. Sometimes very few people are on, sometimes they are all in the wrong level ranges, sometimes everyone is soloing. I've got tons of global friend requests from running teams and I keep getting happy hails from people who recognize me from the teams I keep running. All feedback has been good and I'm an experienced team runner. I use all tools available including the lfg chat, and in game search and tells and etc. Some nights dead is dead. Not excuses, LFG chat dead, broadcast dead, everyone afk/solo/etc. This was not near as much the case about a month or a month and a half ago but the population has noticbly dipped since then and this is noticeable even on the server load screen. If you only play prime time perhaps you don't see it as much, but I play CST from prime time (7PMish CST) and then often deep into the night (as late as 3amish CST sometimes). I'm an experienced team leader though, it is what it is. Server is not as active as it was. Folks who spend a good amount of time off peak see those dips before everyone else is aware of them. Right, so are you willing to concede that maybe it's not YOU being like this but maybe alot of other incarnates are playing as I mentioned? The concern, as mentioned, is certainly not confined to me. And as presented you are not part of the problem here. And indeed I don't think people wanting to play together with other people on Icarnate characters is a problem. The problem is bringing that incarnate power level into non-incarnate missions as the default, which is a systems problem. I don't want to prevent people from playing together, but when a controller can stroll into the middle of the +4/8 group and solo it then alot of people's roles on the team are being invalidated and the fun of the team > the fun of the incarnate. You suggested controlling it as team leader. What if team leader could toggle on/off "incarnate mode"? So that they had a setting which would "pause" or disable incarnate powers and level shifts on their team. That way incarnates could play too, just not be game breakingly powerful and if the group wanted it then the mode could be toggled.

OFC not, never said he was the only DEV. And traditionally you have 1-2 people in your company who are the faces of the bad news, because they are the ones that can take it. Other people opt out. This is the industry I work in. Opinion is always split within teams, decisions are made, conversations are constant, and a select few people deliver those decisions and ethos and fight for them regardless of whether they believe them or not. Because it's your job and because if you don't do it someone else will have to. Essentially performing the role of a tank. Only those who worked with him and knew him privately would really know where Jack stood on things. Anything public facing though is persona on and armor up. That's a purity test nobody can win. Pretty common idea these days online, up until people are hoist in their own petards anyways. If who you are is the 3 idiotic things you did then everyone loses because everyone has 3 major idiotic things. OFC its easy to say that kind of rhetoric anonymously on the internet :P. Personally I'm a bit more old school. More of a Scarlet Letter style myself where stigmas have a limited shelf life and the A can later stand for Able rather than today's ridiculous ethos that your mistakes are enshrined in stone forever and are now what permanently defines you. Aye I put in more overtime at the game company I work at just tonight and indeed those considerations of QOL and etc are real in the industry. Though I'll say I greatly prefer it to how working in social media was...even if I did get paid more in social media. Bad ideas in game balancing/design are an odd concept. You have opinions, I have opinions, but we all suck and use such loaded language. I'm not perfect either and speak in ways I shouldn't sometimes too. Perhaps even most of the time. It's a human failing :(. In general gamers hate nerfs and would happily power creep their games into oblivion while also complaining about power creep. Gamer feedback is incredibly valuable, but we speak in emotional terms not logical ones and what we say and what the problems/solutions are often radically diverse, often being opposite to what we believe. You don't normally see alot of good coverage of this but here's a good article around gamer feedback on balancing in games. Pretty darn accurate with a great example: Too Many Skags. And if game balancing and design was so easy we'd all be millionaires. But plainly it's pretty complicated if even the best and most successful developers have plenty of mistakes and things that don't work out well.

I run teams all the time, there are already precious few enough folks running teams many nights and the population (at least on Torchbearer) is currently not at a level you can really afford to be choosey. I also don't feel like running teams literally every time I play, so some nights I join teams instead. TF ability to choose is even more limited. And honestly, you don't want to add any more steps into running teams as it is. Like I said there is already a large lack of team running folks many nights and there are a good number of nights I don't feel like running a team but I see people lfg not getting picked up and so end up running teams. Also, honestly, why should the team leaders be forced to constantly manually stop 1 person from taking away all challenge from the other 7? Like I'm not completely opposed to be carried sometime or even PL'd on rare occasion but once you past level 30ish it happens constantly. But you can do that solo. You're a god, you can handle it solo. If it's just a power fantasy then you can get those some group sizes and levels and wipe it solo. You have the ability to be that powerful without being on a team. So that's not really it. And you're not looking to make other players feel awesome either, because being a god in their mission does the exact opposite. If you wanted to make them feel awesome you'd play support instead of a invincible god laying waste to missions. So it's more about showing off that godhood to other players, because if people were looking to be PL'd...that's what AE is for lol. It's not just that folks want to be a god, they want others to see how much of a god they are relative to them. Prolly about the only time I see teams full of incarnates is incarnate content and WTFs. Otherwise it's usually 1-2 to a group and if more joins others get bored and quit.

TBH I was never fond of the slotting aspect of ED and their idea that it would "diversify" slotting was pretty nonsense. Though IOs later did accomplish that, so they succeeded later in that regard. What I supported was the global nerfs to defense/survivability, AOE caps, and aggro caps so now more than 1 tank on a team could be useful, more than 1 controller could be useful, and defenders could go back to being useful for more than damage buffing again since the tank could just pull everything into a dumpster and control all aggro so nobody needed any support or protection. And I didn't support that at first, I was more of a wait and see approach while the forums burned down with white hot rage lol. After it all had played out I agreed it was a great move for the game. If you want to call me Jack for that, go ahead. I'll take it as a compliment. Man was not perfect, but game developers do more and put up with more than 99% of gamers will ever know. Most folks just focus on 2-3 snapshots of all the thousands of decisions and tens of thousands of manhours they put in. I reject the binary labeling of folks people barely know the slightest thing about, gaming or non.

If they had their own content to go to or if they scaled down properly for non-god tier content then it'd be totally fine. Problem is those gods step down and play amongst mere mortals and so if you don't want to be a god you still have no choice but to be carried by a god or solo. The problem isn't being god tier, the problem is that god tier person in your team trivializes everything for anyone who isn't looking to be god tier. Every mission has a set amount of "fun" that can be had. Fun is subjective, but the resources we use to procure our fun are not. Each mobs has a certain number of enemies with a certain amount of HP. I want to feel super too, but if a god comes in and deals 80% of the hp of every group in at the start of every fight then the most super I can ever potentially feel is limited by the 20% of their hp remaining. I don't get the thrill of surviving hard situations or saving someone else. I don't get to be the protector, the hero, the disabler, the maniacal mastermind commanding their puppies to boop enemies to death. I get to watch the god destroy all the content I'm desperately trying to enjoy. The enjoyment of a mission is finite, and past a certain point someone joy is taking away from the joy of others. Unless you just want to be power leveled of carried, in which case enjoy the ride.

That's the problem innit? The game balance is based around all classes needing each other to some significant degree and filling the holes that other classes lack. Complete IOs and Incarnate basically destroys that interconnected relationship. You do not speak for the majority, even the entire forums here are only a tiny % of the people who play and cannot speak for the majority. Also, this game does not have a holy trinity. Tank/heals/dps is not COH. CC, Debuff, and Buff are so much more powerful than in other games. As someone pointed out earlier a team full of buff/debuffer characters is quite strong, which does not work in Trinity designed games. Nobody is arguing for a Trinity, that I know of anyways. But classes needing other classes to do the hardest content? That's a pretty reasonable ask IMO. Honestly that's the exact opposite because the people that wanted the "my character is a god and can taken on the highest difficulties solo" went away. Because that was pre-ED. ED is what allowed a proper end game to start being made as well as a great deal of build variety to exist via IOs. Solo dolo was never what this game was, though it was a niche some people liked WITHIN this game. But honestly if I want to solo and feel like a god tackling the highest difficulty an MMORPG is not my first choice for that lol. Because it's kind of meaningless if I'm so overpowered there is no challenge left. It just becomes a grind for more money and more numbers that I'll never need. If I want that fix I'll just play an idle game :P.

Ok honestly as someone who is arguing Regen is in a pretty good spot even i'm on board with Leogunner's idea of giving debuff reistances. Regen's overall survivability when properly built out is in a pretty alright spot BUT it eats every single attack and suffers every single secondary effect and gets full effect of all of both the attacks AND the secondary effects. Tying some hefty debuff resistance into the set would be a great way to allow it to perform a little more enjoyably for folks while sticking to the regen theme/flavor and it's general current power tier. All debuff resistance IMO, to-hit/-regen/-recovery/-endo/-damage/-def/-res/slow etc. This would also indirectly help with the spikey nature of regen since -def debuffing wouldn't hurt as bad, give it a good niche for being a set that can handle endo drain really well...doubling down on the fact it has quick recovery so it'd be an even better pairing for endo heavy sets. And the debuff resistance would help give it some further distinction from Willpower since they do have some overlaps in many respects. I'd also be ok with throwing a little more max hp in somewhere, which would help with both spikes and regeneration rate. But I think those two changes are about as far as I'd go.

I don't think you can really do direct comparisons to the classes of other MMORPGs. COH is a unique Beast. For instance Tankers and Brutes in COH would be a tankmage in nearly any other game with the ability to not only have quite good damage but also top tier defenses that make them basically unkillable. Melee in other game typically has to choose damage or surviability and when they have both they are almost universally considered to be overpowered. In alot of MMORPGs it's actually pretty hard for tanks to solo.

I mean I'm not gonna drag you for it lol. My dumb self forgot that -res was not included in AV protections. Some things floated away during my break after sunset I suppose. I'm not exactly perfect. I'm not opposed to what you're saying, which is why I kept bringing it back to the original context. Yall are dragging me into an argument I have no stake in lol. My concern is about a healthy mix of ATs being viable at all level ranges both AE and non-AE and whether things like the extreme power of some sets/ATs, leadership buffs, incarnates, etc squeezes other sets/ATs/players out. If even 20% of the fiery aura brutes were playing non-AE that's a significant amount being cut out from the non-AE numbers. Blaster has gotten a crazy amount of love since sunset so it's no surprise they are high up. With the buffs they've gotten and being able to softcap to be fairly safe I'm honestly not sure if Blasters are also overtuned or not. That's not an implication mind you, I literally don't know because I don't play enough blasters. Controllers I get because controllers start out weak but become monsters late game. For all the concern about fiery aura brutes we can see the old staple of fire/kin controller or illusion/kin is the most played of them so a fair amount of them are prolly farmers too. I feel like folks are trying to force me to take a position that doesn't entirely suit how I actually feel.

There is no win or lose, there is no argument, its just data and it doesn't show what I want either. If its all AE farmers then that has certain connotations I don't like. If it's not then that has certain connotations I don't like. It's basically a lose/lose situation for me lol. There is no win condition because either one tilts what the game is used for away from what benefits my own play style. AE or not.