Ralathar44

You bolded and colored it and still misread it. It doesn't say through, it says though. Two different words with two different meanings. Replacing that word for a synonym it reads: This does not explain the variety of ATs and power sets being created and played however. Edit: and before the argument is made that quoted sentence was in response to a comment of mine and in context through does not make sense, it was not a typo.

I agree there is value in having separated data sets, but that is a different argument from the one I responded to and thus is a moving of the goal posts. Regardless of where they are being played and how they are being played, they are being created and played. The original comment I responded to stated they were not as because "Reality and posted metrics say otherwise". If we really want to say AE vs non-AE then we need an AE vs non-AE list. But we don't have that data. We have leprechaun wishes and unicorn dreams. Also the reason they excluded firey brutes did not mention AE, that's an incorrect attribution: Because of the prevalence of Fiery Aura Brutes, we have included an additional graph for each category which excludes Brutes with Fiery Aura. I'm not going to say whether they typically exclusively farm or not. It's a very popular farming set, but what % are farmers, what % are not, and what % do both I cannot say because I do not have the data.

AGAIN the original argument being made I responded to was: "This does not explain the variety of ATs and power sets being created and played though. Were this absolutely true, we would see nothing but tanks, brutes and scrappers and no one would team for anything. Reality and posted metrics say otherwise. " Yall just keep moving the goal posts but I'm going to keep moving them right back using the original comment and original context. The metrics, without the cherry picked removal, show that this statement was pretty inaccurate.

I hope people are keeping in mid that we are a very self selected group commenting here. Most of us are very deep into the game and mechanics to the point where we not only play a 16 year old shut down game but indeed are actively commenting on its forums. The internet 90/9/1 rule has largely been borne out in research so (in general) we're basically the 1% of the 1% most dedicated players. We're prolly not even in a position to know what actual casual play is really like or what is easy, simple, or hard. Remember, dunning kruger goes both ways. People do not know how much they do not know BUT people who are very knowledgable about something vastly underestimate how much there is to learn to get where they are. All of these hours you spent learning and getting used to your current level of knowledge are condenses down into "sound bytes" in your head that forgets about all the time you invested during the process of learning.

Soren Johnson: “Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.”

If we drop fiery aura then we need to drop the most popular powerset of every class otherwise you're just blatantly misusing the data set via cherry picking.

The data means that the overwhelmingly most played AT is brute. Almost played 5 times as much as the next most played AT, which is Tanker lol. AE players are CoH players. But for the sake of argument let's say that 75% of the playtime of brutes was on AE. That's not a note for excluding them from consideration, if anything that just means AE farming is keeping this game alive and that the entire teaming experience is prolly not that important at all to the majority of folks putting time in and that development time is best spent on AE instead of on giving us new arcs. But the original argument being made I responded to was: "This does not explain the variety of ATs and power sets being created and played though. Were this absolutely true, we would see nothing but tanks, brutes and scrappers and no one would team for anything. Reality and posted metrics say otherwise. " And so keeping the context, and keeping the goal posts firmly set, that originally argument is plainly not entirely accurate since we are literally seeing the opposite of a variety of ATs and power sets being played.

From a feels perspective I agree with you that alot of animations need speeding up. Some animation's speed makes me die inside. Heck, even the minor hitch of re-draw really bugs me. But if damage is not adjusted accordingly then this just results in massive buffs and there are already enough teams where even high level enemies just evaporate.

"Nothing but" is an exagerration that puts a narrative in my mouth I never expressed. But we are well on our way to your hyperbolic version. Look at how silly the differential in playtime is :D. You chose a poor argument in this case since reality and metrics actually overwhelmingly support what I stated. I also want to be clear that I have no problem with Incarnates playing lower level content. However they re not appropriately scaled down to that content, they are more powerful to such a degree that it breaks that content.

I agree with this as a general concept. The problem is that one AT/power set having the capability to do something removes things from the possibility space of people they team with. If I control an entire map's aggro on a tank and can survive it then defense/survivability buffs/debuffs become uneeded. If I can perma hold an entire map of enemies with my controller no other controllers/doms are needed. ETC. This was the pre-ED situation and it's not an opinion, this was the verifiable history of the game. ED was an exaggerated version of the problem and We are not to back to pre-ED power levels yet, but we have been steadily moving in that direction. IO'd out incarnate tanks/brutes are almost back to the same power level of pre-ED tanks, hampered mainly by aggro and AOE caps atm. However the same cannot be said of every AT. Group damage and survivability has skyrocketed with the additional of sentinels and the repeated blaster buffs. If we decide to bring up MM/defender/corruptor/dom/controllers to the power level of brutes/tankers/blasters/scrappers then honestly I don't know what content in the game would be anything more than dynasty warriors lol. And the irony is that the people who farm up their incarnates still spend most of their time in non-incarnate difficulty missions.

Metrics are far more reliable. Humans can't even remember what cars are on the road we see every day. We buy a new car and suddenly our car is everywhere. But the care didn't change in prevalence, we just started noticing it more. Even worse people divide themselves readily into camps over even the most trivial stuff, look up the minimal group paradigm. So once folks form an opinion they seek others of like mind and start subconsciously identifying with them and confirming their own biases. We quite frankly suck at observing the world around us accurately lol. I mean you could say that about anything. A great many people enjoy claws/sr tanks. We have enough people playing those across our large number distribution (playerbase) that it's a true statement. But what % of support players like/don't like/don't care about that state of the game? Old school CoH had a huge amount of fire tanks that enjoyed soloing +4/8 missions, unfortunately that kind of stuff basically invalidated the ability of many other people to have fun. ED was a harsh blow but it blew wide open what you could bring to a team and be effective. Not "effective", not "viable", but an equal member of the team. Because anyone could make those kind of "a great many statements all day" and all it really means is "this is what I think/want". This is part of why metrics are so important.

Practically in a team though that's exactly what you are doing. If you have a tank or brute then you're only facing 1-3 targets at a time of +2-+4 level. If you've got no tank/brute you should still be aggro splitting between those capable of dealing with it. As a scrapper those targets are usually bosses and lts that hit hard enough to kill squishies in just a few attacks. But if you're expecting to tank large groups of mobs....honestly that's not the role scrapper is supposed to have and being able to do so effectively is the sign of a problem. If you believe a scrapper should be able to solo an 8 man group then we're going to have a clear disagreement in where the power ceiling should be. Even soling a +3/4 mission is prolly a bit much since you're essentially saying +3/8 is a 3 person job when that's intended to be a full team difficulty setting. I know that might seem weird to you due to where we are in power creep allowing end game melee/sent/blasters to solo excessive difficulty content, but that's how I look at it. If endurance management becomes a non-issues depending on "buttload of variables" then endurance management is not a non-issue :P. Also what % of characters even make it to 50 and incarnates? City of Heroes is a very alt heavy game. Look at the commentary on TW. TW eventually gains momentum with powers and accuracy and gets alot faster. Most people who don't like it never got that far. Stone Armor ironically has this problem at both ends. The early game is unattractive due to the lack of mobility from rooted (seriously they could reduce that slow by 50% and it would be mainly a QOL buff...rooted is a strong buff but rooted SUCKED to deal with) and the late game is unattractive due to invalidating your costume, debuffing your damage, and invalidating your other skills. If we looked at stone armor at a 50/IO/Incarnate level only you'd miss a significant part of what makes stone armor the experience it is.

Here's the problem, all but the very most successful games are always essentially slowly dying. If you do nothing the game gets stale and everyone quickly gets bored and leaves. Content development takes EXCESSIVE amounts of time and resources and has a bad return ratio. If you spend 1 year creating something your players will prolly blow through it and get bored of it in 2 months. So what does that have to do with balancing? Effectively balancing is quadruple in purpose. 1. Make the game more balanced by reigning in overperforming items and boosting underperforming items so that everything is a viable option. 2. Fostering community engagement. Each new balance change provides a puzzle to solve and new discussion. The cycle of "what is best, what is the state of X, what does X need to be better, what does Y need to be less OP?" starts all over again revitalized. 3. Extend the shelf life of a game before it becomes stale to a player. Everyone is going to burn out eventually, but if the puzzle they want to solve keeps changing then players trend heavily towards being MORE engaged and continuing to play, not less. That doesn't mean that some people are not put off by this and even leave over it, but rather that the number of people who leave over it is far smaller than the increase in player retention and engagement. 4. Essentially creates "new content". Lets say you hate Titan Weapons because of momentum but then it's reworked where momentum is no longer a gameplay experience destroying factor for you. You've now gained more "content". Let's say an old set or AT receives significant changes so you play them for awhile again even though you'd effectively "retired" them by not playing them. You've gained more "content". Players, in general, are not fond of looking at balancing this way, but this is how it functions in the gaming industry and it's well studied. The great grandaddy of studying this is Magic the Gathering and alot of modern game balancing/design considerations are directly or indirectly from their work. Identifying player types and catering to different playertypes with different content, the Jedi curve/Mana curve of balancing within +/- 15% of a central power target with some cards intentionally a little to strong or weak, etc. Players whine and gripe and complain and etc, but ultimately what matters isn't any of that. What matters is "does it make them keep playing/spending/etc?". And properly dne the constant blaancing adjustment cycle is proven and pedigreed at helping retain player interest, play time, and enjoyment for much longer than simply focusing on new content alone. The more super another power set or class feels, the less super yours feels and the more "unfair" the game feels. That's just how folks work and think. And it has direct impacts too. If content is designed for the average power level and someone in an OP character joins, often you don't have very much fun because you don't get to do much or feel useful. So that's a direct impact. Good example here is everyone who has all this defense at high level, in almost all content they no longer need anyone to keep them safe with buffs/debuffs and so anyone who enjoyed keeping allies safe no longer has that enjoyment. There is only so much possibility space for fun and enjoyment on a team regarding the mechanical (ie balance related) aspects of play and if someone takes up more of that "fun budget" because they can do everything and make you feel unnecessary then you receive less.

It's literally literarily accurate in the last post I made :D. Figuratively speaking. Nice deflection into grammar policing and/or ad hominem (depending on intent) though.

Well prepare to be upset when said sets are nerfed or adjusted as expected then. Expecting them not to be is like walking outside on a rainy day and expecting not to get wet. Mudsling all you want because I forgot that the debuff rules for CoH are not consistent. I play other games too. If a simple mistake invalidates someone's entire opinion then none of us have valid opinions. -res is subject only to purple patch, -def is subject to AV resist power and purple patch, -dmg is subject only to purple patch but -to-hit is subject to AV resist power and purple patch. As well as a buncha people judging experiences on their level shifted incarnates in content not designed for them instead of the +4/+5 non-incarnate characters face in high level zones reducing their debuffs (all of them) to 48%/30% of their original values. A simple 10% to-hit debuff becomes 6.5%/4.8%/3% debuff against +4/+5 and a single +1 level shift literally makes your debuff over 50% more effective. So a level 45 sidekicked into a level 50 team is level 49 vs level 54s (+5). A natural 50 is vs +4 and a level shifted incarnate is vs +3. That same debuff would be 3% for the sidekicked character, 4.8% for the natty 50, and 6.5% for the shifted incarnate. The incarnate literally has over 100% the debuff effectiveness compared to the sidekicked character. Meanwhile buffs are 100% as effective for all 3 characters. (level wise)

If you have 2 out of 16 sets overperforming by a significant margin and all other sets are handling content just fine then you nerf those two sets....you don't leave them alone and you don't buff everything up to their level. That's literally just how balancing works.

Someone did that earlier with -to-hit but for some strange reason they used a level 52 AV, which would only be a +1 and only have a 10% reduction from the purple patch. And they used a enhanced out Hurricane and Blackstar + other dark blasts, which is hardly representative of the values normal to-hit debuffs get and certainly not representative of supportive power set debuffing. The problem is +4/+5. +1/+2/+3 everything still has a decent effect. Level shifted incarnates going into non-incarnate content is understood to be broken characters going into content not designed for them. If you join a level 50 PI team as a level 45 for example you will be level 49 facing level 54s and your debuffs are not going to do anything but your buffs will still be very effective and thanks to all the stacked leadership you'll be able to hit and kill just fine too.

"Given the opportunity players will optimize the fun out of a game". Nerfs are important to maintaining fun too. Having a balance of nerfs and buffs is like having a balanced diet and exercise. Yeah, we'd all rather just pig out on whatever and not exercise but you still pay a cost for that. The cost just happens later instead of right now. A game that continues to make buffs but does not make nerfs will eventually nerf the fun for basically everyone. Good example: if everyone becomes powerful enough not to need supports or CC or anything except kills...you're effectively nerfing everyone who does support/CC/utility even if no direct nerf happens. There will always be a large drop in playerbase when a game goes live. That's literally normal. Only the most hugely successful games grow significantly after launch. 95% of games, good and bad both, will lose the majority of their playerbase within a year of launch and then slowly lose more players over time after that.

When on a scrapper normally I'm not doing much in the way of tanking. I take incidental aggro perhaps but mainly the aggro of 1-3 things at a time. Early game your passive regen is often enough, depending on your melee set (knockdown/up, disorient, self defense buff, etc) to take on lt's or bosses. And if you take a few bad hits you click your heal. Integration is toggle and forget. You eventually add dull pain but honestly that's not even needed until like 30+. You're a regen scrapper and nobody expects you to tank aggro so you are free to just kill things. Meanwhile you don't have to constantly worry about endo management from running toggles + attacking. You don't have to worry about typed damage or defense. Because it's not your job to tank damage, nobody expects it off you, and everything is dealt with via the same 2 heal clickies. So I think it's more that expectations and your approach is different allowing you to just focus on scrapping and then rarely hitting your heal button.

That's because it's not as tough, i think that's the point. A fully IO'd Regen brute can still benefit a good bit from team survivability buffs/debuffs where something like a fully IO'd Super Reflexes brute really doesn't even need them.

TBH my stone/regen brute has felt darn solid, I know people like to bag on regen but he ran teams and tanked from 28+ when he started putting slots into defense and he was well capable of tanking +4/8 anything but Malta for a team by the time he hit like 40. In the rare occasions he does suddenly get spiked (usually because I'm running out of gas at the end of a session and don't self heal in time, my fault not the character) he's instantly back on his feet, regains aggro, and MoG is used if needed to regain control. I know there are stronger sets out there but honestly I feel like Regen brute is closer to where defense sets should be. If you're tanking +4/8 indefinitely with no buffs/support/help IMO the defense is too strong. This is a team game and there needs to be room for the team as more than "my pocket dps" in at least in the highest difficulty or two.

War Mace has grown so much, I still remember when Clobber did minor damage and was a disorient only power :D.

Hmmm, honestly I think that proves what I'm saying though. You used Blackstar and Hurricane, both enhanced for -to-hit and both of those are pretty unique cases. Very effective during that time frame mind you, a good use of powers, but that is definitely an exception and not the rule. Normal -to-hit debuff values are nothing close to those numbers and hurricane's is supposed to be balanced out because of it's repel properties requiring you to use it very carefully vs most things as it scattered mobs and pushes targets out of melee range of allies. Blackstar is a nuke from a blast set, which is ironically more effective at debuffing to-hit than any debuffer set....even better than Radiation unless it also uses dark blast. So as has been stated by others -res doesn't have any special debuff resist like other debuffs and so translates largely through other stuff has to have huge values or high stacking of smaller values to amount to much. So -res is useful, -def has generally high values that could make a difference, -def debuffs get pretty high so they can translate some useful % through at least. -% damage is going to be reduced to trivial numbers, - recharge from debuffer sets is going to be reduced to almost nothing, -spd will be reduced to very small amounts and is generally not useful like it is on normal mobs, endurance drain is possible but takes ludicrous amounts from a specialized and enhanced power combo to have any effect. That explains the disconnect on AVs, thank you. It's weird that -res is the only one that doesn't get such severe diminishing returns when even -def does. It's no wonder AVs/GMs is all -regen (normally super high base values), -res (not subject to AV specific resistances), and -def (high enough base values when fully enhanced to make at least SOME difference+alot of small incidental sources from attacks). But purple patch would still affect all so against +4/+5s all debuffs would be reduced to 48%/30% of their values while buffs would retain full values. Prolly not much of a problem for most folks commenting here tackling things as a +1 level shift so 54s are in reality only +3 to them. AS I stated, incarnates break everything lol. A non-shifted level 50 applying a 10% debuff to a level 55 would get 3% debuff in effect while a +1 shifted incarnate vs that same enemy would get a 4.8% effect. That's over 50% more effective. If we lower the mob to 54 then a +1 shifted incarnate would get 6.5% and a normal 50 would get 4.8%, in this case the incarnate is 35% more effective with the same debuff. This is in addition to any incarnate passives/abilities that might potentially affect their debuff in specialist builds. Basically the experience of a level shifted incarnate applying debuffs in a +4/8 mission and that of a non level shifted natural 50 is pretty significant. Between 35% and 50% depending on the mob group. If you're level 30-49 and a further level down being sidekicked up to 49 the difference is even more severe with that additional 1 level difference. I can see why people think there is no issue if their primary experiences are formed based on incarnates with level shifts.

I'm pretty sure that AVs/GMs had separate debuff modifiers from the traditional level based reductions unless that's been changed. Against +3 mobs I've been consistent in saying I believe all set types are fine, albeit with indidivual sets potentially needing tweaks. The problem level wise was +4/+5 which I've been very clear about. But AVs/GMs to my memory, and in all the searching I've done, have their own separate table of level based debuff resistances that caps out at 87% at 55.

Then what I believe you are saying is that resistance debuffs are not subject to traditional debuff resistance and instead processed through their own separate mechanics. Which would ironically make debuffs that are not -res (outside of -regen, which is a special case) incredibly less valuable and thus only make the problem of everything being focused around killing worse since even the valuable support sets are focused around killing lol. So say -def and -spd would be subject to ridiculous debuff resistance and yet -resist would be subject to a much smaller reduction, as shown in the picture Doomrider posted above.. That might be worse than all debuffs being resisted heavily if that's the case.