Ralathar44

If the suggestion to buff it would make it better than primary pool powers then yes. Weak powers can be deserving of buffs AND can be overbuffed by certain suggestions. Both things can be true. It's not an either or. I'd certainly be ok with a pool power being roughly as powerful as primary set powers, but suggestions to make them more powerful than primary set powers I'd be completely against. Truthfully the power level of high level heroes has creeped to such levels it prolly does need to be reduced overall. The game has became alot more about instantly deleting groups and this squeezes out alot of utility and support. This kind of thing is what prompted ED to happen, certain power sets and ATs became so powerful that others became trivial by comparison. Why would you have a controller that actually specializes in CC in end game when you can just delete the mob and move to the next and you never die anyways? The threshold for what a challenging mob group is has risen to like +4/+5 and this also completely shafts debuffer sets vs buffing sets (as well as a couple buffer sets). There is a discussion right now abut how Wormhole needs to affect higher level targets to be useful. This is one of the casualties of the power creep. Masterminds are another since when you get to +4/+5 their pets start having extreme problems and on +3 and below in teams things explode before pets really have a chance to do anything. I make flavor toons all the time, but there are definitely limits as to what I'd skip. On a Force Field defender I wouldn't skip one of the big 3 bubbles for example. Sure I COULD make a FF defender without any of them and just use force bolt and repulsion bomb and etc, but that's not being very respectful to any people I team with honestly. If I take a rez power and it has the cheat death option then I'm using the cheat death option because not doing so is basically choosing to potentially wipe my team and I'm not that selfish. Pretty direct cause and effect there. It's definitely not hard to do at low to mid level. At high level tanks not being able to die is definitely a balance concern. If you can tank +4/8 without any team assistance and without incarnate (which I'll give a pass as it's own separate thing) then tanks are too survivable. They should definitely be able to tank that....WITH a team backing them. The whole point of each AT is that it adds things that other ATs cannot do. If a tank does not need support/crowd control then the only thing a tank needs is more damage. Which is pretty close to the current state of things. A set like Force Field is fantastic at leveling but then at high levels they are significantly devauled because mobs just explode before they can really do much. This does not create a space for people keeping the team alive as tanks don't die and unless there is crazy overpull the mobs evaporate before they can target anyone and deal any real damage. Heck we're pretty much back to the point where scrappers stop dying too. ED happened for a good reason lol and at this rate the game might need another hard nerf pass like that.

I'll actually disagree with this, with a caveat. If there was a new power set that was built and balanced with the idea of having a free cheat death in mind I could see it happening more often. Or maybe it can trigger more often but you are noticeably debuffed (stacking) for a significant time span each time it triggers after the first so that it's more of a soft "nah" instead of a hard limit. I do think there is nuance and room for such a mechanic, just not shoehorned in as presented in this thread as a straight up buff to the powers that's better than the original ability by far.

It's very simple. Being able to have invulnerability for free without going down or losing aggro or getting debt on sets with a self rez by itself is rather broken. Much less the other effects like DA's life tap + stun, FA free damage + knockdown, or WP's to-hit + damage buff. It's not anyone else's fault you forget to use your powers and so want your self rez to be a cheat death to buy you the time you need to remember them. I admit, I'd love to see how broken Regen would be since you'd be able to eat any alpha strike, become invulnerable, and then just heal or pop MoG after not going down. And able to do this like once every 2 minutes. More or less removes the intended weakness of regen.

That's not the same as not affecting me. The option now exists and thus if the option is more effective (which it very much is as explained) I will be expected to use it and so I will end up using it for the sake of the team. Not going down at all is way better than going down, losing aggro, 2 people getting downed, and then me coming back. This is literally just blatant power creep. It'd be like asking for all status protection in armor sets to be either toggled or clicky depending on what the player chose. 90% of people are going to choose toggle because it's just better unless nerfed so much as to not be useful. It's like changing a knife fight to a gun fight and then telling someone it doesn't affect them because they can still choose to use a knife lol. No change happens in a vacuum, when you change the situation and you change the options it affects everyone. There is no "it doesn't affect you", because design/balance is an entire ecosystem. That's game balance/design 101. If, say, all clicky mez protection got a 20% acc/dmg buff built into it that would change the meta and affects everyone who runs a set who do not have clicky protection by making them worse by comparison, especially toggled protection.

How would it not affect me in any way exactly? I have 3 pages of characters and many of them use self rez. Many of them tanks too so the toggling all the things back on is definitely something I face if I faceplant. You can get your key toggles up very quickly. You don't need assault and tactics up ASAP after hitting floor, you need to get back up and stay alive so you're talking like 2-4 armor toggles and then tough/weave/combat jumping really. And if you need more than that after going down AND you already used all your panic buttons and inspirations then that's the penalty of riding the bleeding edge of what you can handle. Suck it up and go to the hospital. Self rez doesn't mean never hospital trip ever. Not everything is 100% viable with no concessions in all situations, if it was it'd be broken AF. Everything has limits. You chose the difficulty, you chose the build, deal with it. I do :). As a side note Leadership is prolly too good and that's why you see it on almost every single character at high level. Some other pool powers need a boost and leadership prolly needs to stop being a no brainer power selection for 80%+ of characters. That being said i expect people to fight to keep it the same way they fight to keep the broken mess that is Hasten.

I don't even play a grav controller but this seems like a good fix that's balanced honestly.

Nope, I like how they currently function and when used correctly they work well. Depending on the set you rez in teh middle of the mob or you understand that when things go bad you need to get a touch of distance before you go down. In the hands of a player that understands the limits of their character and how their powers work they're pretty effective. Kinda like when I suicidal jumped into death yesterday to howling twilight the tank that went down. I understood I would die, but I also understood that if I did not do this the team would wipe and that the tank could handled the weakened mob once they got back up. Gotta know how to properly use the cards in your hand. Self Rezs are powerful cards in many situations and QOL cards in others. Changing them to your suggestion just makes them additional mitigation and robs most of the nuance from them. Qualifies as power creep too since it would make them stronger overall. Even if everything else worked the same not dropping aggro, not getting debt, becoming invulnerable, and not losing that precious 2-3 seconds when you are downed and then self rez and retoggle is not an insignificant buff to alot of sets that do not need it.

Squid form is useful for very low level where you get very early access to copious AOE for teams. Separate cooldowns for squid AOE and human AOE adds to this. Used at the correct times it's a huge benefit during early leveling curve. But later on in the life cycle of that same PB forms definitely seem to be more flavor than function. TBH I'd say there should prolly be a feedback thread on whether the PB forms are competitive and what can be done to make them more appealing.

Hard disagree. Some people put themselves in a box and never leave it until forced and if you push them out of that box they take their ball and go home. Example: most of the fire tankers who left the game after ED bitter. Most good players (players who are willing to learn and adjust) will find a new equilibrium and excel in each new state of the game. Improvise, Adapt, Overcome. Doesn't matter if your mechanical skill is a little lower. If someone is a 20% less good player mechanically and learns 20% better then they are a 50% better player than someone the other way around. Because the other person is a solid team mate if/when they are in their comfort zone and the moment builds change or the situation gets out of control they tend to fall apart. I've seen this in PVE, I've seen this in raiding, I've seen this in PVP. For 20 years. You can watch this happen rapidly in highly competitive games like MOBAs where teams will have 1-2 patches they are good at and then fade away when the meta changes while others remain dominant meta to meta. Also, honestly, if first impressions mattered that much then COH wouldn't still be so beloved by us today. Alot of us played before the streakbreaker code, before -def debuff resists, before IOs and a viable endgame via incarnate, the fitness pool was purchased via power pool selection, etc. The current state and the last 2 years before sunset of COH are drastically different from the far rougher state that game built it's name on. Much of the polish and high end game play only happened towards the end of the game's live life. We couldn't even customize power colors for most of the game's life because the colors were baked in. No AE and no Radio/Paper missions back then either :D. The game pre-ED where there was only really room for 1 Tank or 1 Controller on a team. Posittron TF being a death arc that was so long I fell asleep in the middle of it once and got razzed for like a week by my friends for haha. First impressions only matter that much for people who give up easily and want easy answers to game problems. They will float from meta build to meta build as they get nerfed and, while the build is good, they hold their own. But then when not in that comfort zone their lack of experimentation and understanding of game mechanics and possibility space shows pretty heavily. If you're only a good player when things are under control and within expectations then you're not a good player :P. It's a learned skill and to learn it you have to be bad at it for a while and that means it's not easy (because failing is part of learning) and work sometimes has to be put in to learn.

As someone who loved PVP in many games, my first MMORPG being Dark Age of Camelot, I've got to say HECK NO. PVP was never a thing in this game and is not going to be a thing. It's not fun or balanced for most people including people of the PVP crowd like me. All it would result in is frustration in people who wanted to experience the content of those zones and get the badges and people would go to those zones LESS. Nobody wants to get ganked by some twink who spends all their time in PVP and has dumped billions into their build while they are just trying to get badges or experience the content on their mid level alt. Especially since said gankers typically wait for you to have mobs on you in traditional open world PVP cowardice fashion or camp the routes you need for things like badges. (I killed so many would be gankers in EQ 2 it's not funny lol) This game is about making neat characters, experiencing different playstyles, rolling alts, experiencing story lines, farming, chilling with chill people, etc. It's basically the polar opposite of the PVP mentality AND the mechanics of PVP in City of Heroes are quite frankly imbalanced stinky butt :P. And I say this as someone who has gone through all the balance tiltowhirl of DAOC and GW 2 and WHO and EQ 2 and Archage and Age of Conan and etc :P. If someone like the PVP in this game, I hope they have fun, but they need to understand that it's not great and simply not wanted by the overwhelming majority of the playerbase and that's why it failed. I'd even prefer the PVP of Champion's Online, just as broken but at least the zombie mode was interesting in a way PVP in COH just isn't.

DPS doesn't matter if you're dead. Safety first, DPS Later. If your group is in a DPS race with the enemies to see whether you die or not then it's a matter of WHEN you die, not IF, unless you're DPS is insanely overboard for the mission (4 blasters rotating aim + buildup for +2/+3 spawns like the team I was in a few days ago). When safety is not a concern you can use fire ammo. When safety is a concern you can use cryo or poison. You've got multiple secondary effects (including base lethal) that are useful in various situations. That's a level of flexibility most ranged DPS power sets don't have. If you're going max speed max farm.....IMO that's the last playstyle that needs to dictate balancing changes unless something is EGREGIOUSLY out of line. If normal balance is aimed "within 10%-15% of targeted power range" then farming balance is more like "within 30% of targeted power range". (numbers are just a ballpark example) I pulled death groups all last night without issue for a struggling team. A run, a hop, and a power activation so you're still traveling away mid air while your animation plays out. I was pulling mobs with explosive arrow trusting the tanker to clean it up as it trickled in with flash arrow (I was a TA/A Defender) ensuring we didn't get full pulls and making them trickle in rather than rush. If I can safely pull in that situation (even without flash arrow) then snipe isn't needed to pull. The team could barely handle one group but the groups were too close together for the tanker to go in and they tried pulling with their blackwand but too much downtime getting only singles (with and without blind). I have thematic problems with using snipe as part of a rotation. I prefer using it to pull or pick off runners.

New content and new factions (plus a new place to put them) would be an excessive amount of work considering what we know about how IRL missions/contacts/etc work being hard coded and not using the AE system. Unless someone comes up with some sort of hacky but functional way to use better tools I really wouldn't expect new factions/enemies and the zones to put them in. Having ideas is easy. It's the implementation that's hard. Everyone in games has bucketloads of ideas and lore and factions and etc they can come up with, that's not the blocker. Development within the severe constraints they work under is the blocker. TBH I expect almost exclusively just balancing and new power sets, maybe a new AT. And ofc Carp Melee. Beyond that anything else the devs pull off is an unexpected bonus I'll be super happy about.

I'm QA right now and I can vouch for this. Maybe I'll be in a better spot to help out in a couple months but right now COH is a Defender supporting my work/life balance and I need it's support for the moment. Once I complete another recipe or two in my life I might have the leeway to start helping out a bit with testing. QA testing is definitely hard and often boring work. I think everyone should try smoke /sanitytesting a game for 20 hours in a week with a focus on efficiency once to see how big of a gap there is between playing and testing :P. And that's not even the hard or frustrating stuff haha.

IMO VEAT have two inherent. 1 is conditioning/the kheld inherents and the other is the ability to spec into literally anything on alternate builds thanks to the different job "classes" they can mix and match. If you ahve the enhancements you can be melee dps, ranged dps, support, tank, and hybrid all on the same character. Team needs a tank, I can just pop by the trainer and change builds and bamf let's gooooo :P.

Yup it's all up to interpretation. In general normal swords and melee and guns are natural, but weapons that are far more advanced than normal in nature are tech. So a normal pistol? Natural. Pistols that fire curved bullets loaded with fire ammo? Tech. Thug Mastermind powerset - natural, Blaster Dual Pistols powerset - tech. Because the thug MM relies on no significant advanced technology, just what is standardly available. Meanwhile the DP blaster is using highly advanced pistols and ammunition not available to standard civilian or military. Basically my rule is that if it'd be consider a huge step forwards in the level technology you'd expect a normal soldier/civilian to get hold of it's tech, but if it's normal every day stuff it's natural. To the Punisher would be natural but Star Lord would be tech. This is relative to OUR understanding of technology. But if you wanted to consider someone with a sword to be a tech hero because swords have never been seen on their planet? That's totally valid. Let's say Grognar Bonebreak of the Ugug clan develops a martial art nobody can beat. Even though it;'s just fighting skill using their own natural body you could RP that as "magic" origin because for their world they very well might consider him magic :D. Any sufficiently advanced technology or skill is indistinguishable from magic :P. Really the possibilities are near limitless and you could prolly make any character any origin with proper justification.

I'll only speak to those I'm fairly experienced with and feel are outstandingly good or pain points to potentially address. Assassin’s Focus: Seems a bit too good. Reduce the bonus damage IMO. I'm totally ok with giving Stalkers some chances to use assassination mid combat, but it's too easy to do and too effective IMO. Containment: IMO this works how it should. Allows more solo play, rewards additional control on teams instead of punishing it, etc. when I'm on my controller I love people who help me get containment and when I'm on other classes I try to help lock things down for the controllers to benefit from the extra damage. It's more than just a solo inherent, it actively fosters good will and cooperation. It's an excellent inherent. Critical Hit: On it's face critical hit is not terribly strong but it still enforces the scrapper status as LT/Boss hunters. Scrappers are quite strong so I don't know what more you could give them. Defiance: Prolly overpowered in the current state of the game. There has been significant power creep since this was implemented. Domination: Broken as heck lol. IMO it's way too large of a dominator's power share. Fury: You smash more and you smash more betterer, it really emphasizes the AT's role and I think it's fantastic. Gauntlet: It's a large part of what makes Tankers tank. You can just smash things and do your job of taking aggro. Tanks get to smash, team gets to have an effective tank, everyone is happy. Tanks are pretty strong so this power seems core and fitting and well done. Opportunity: I personally like it. I like the way that's implemented as well. IMO I think the baseline -res for Sents is good and I think the offensive/defensive opportunity is a good idea letting you choose in the moment according to the situation. IMO it's all down to poor feel for people here. I think the -25 res on a single target should prolly be removed however, put that power budget into making the remaining effects of the offensive/defensive opportunity a bit stronger by making the first few procs of each double the normal strength. Make the inherent slottable and make it slowly unlock slots as you level automatically. With better help text, slotting, and reduced effects it'll be more clear what the power does. With the ability to slot it that'll open up more....opportunities for how to make a build and sets to use. Scourge: I agree with the other poster. It's underpowered and I’d like there to be a (decreasing) chance for scourge damage over 50%. Vigilance: Working as intended, but not particularly sexy. Defenders are super powerful so they really can't have a major passive. I think it's ok to have some passives be more/less impactful than others.