CrusaderDroid

So realistically you'll just get told "play Gravity Control", and Gravity Control gets you most of the way there already. That said, a Telekinetic Blast T9 power that is dropping half a parking garage worth of cars on top of an area is hilarious, and I think there's a way to make it work that's meaningfully different from the existing psi sets. At the very least, the animations would be flashy, and flashy animations are like half the reason to play a set. Having a bunch of knockback is pretty bad though. You'll just end up being compared to Energy Blast - bad spot to be in, not just because knockback in general is bad for teams with melee but because getting in a direct comparison makes it easier for one to overshadow the other. If we aren't interested in making new gimmick effects, we could have every power apply varying magnitudes of holds or immobilizes - such that eventually you'll trap an enemy under a pile of debris. That seems pretty fun to try out.

Make your own server. Invite the crew. Create the voice channel. Set it to Push-To-Talk Only. Solved forever!

Derp, am bad and forgot this. Disregard me and take the +1 without reservation.

I guess my issue is that even with the proposed changes, this just leaves Seismic Blast in a rather generic spot. Seismic Blast's secondary effects of choice are generally the dull -def and the occasional -fly, neither of which are huge deals. I think a more comprehensive fix would give at least something unique and cool to the set on its effects beyond just damage. That doesn't make these changes bad. They're sorely needed IMO - you can carry the meh-tier rider effects with good numbers, but these powers don't have good numbers. I think this is a great first step to get Seismic Blast out of the bottom. +1.

Look, if for any reason you think keeping players away from the glory of recreating Dr. McNinja is admirable, just quit game design altogether. Look at this. How do you say no to chainsaw nunchuks?

We already have Super Reflexes, it's not like Ninjitsu is crossing the Rubicon here. +1.

The fantasy kinda falls apart when your Phantom Army starts firing their Blaster powers and pulling out ice swords. It's okay to ask for powersets that don't map cleanly to existing sets, but still cover very common themes in superhero fiction.

I mean, sure, that's one way to do it. Clone Melee seems like a more practical mechanical application of the idea though, to get away from MM's weird powerset rules without giving up on the normal clone fantasy of "let's all beat this guy up together". Also means you aren't stuck trying to make 3-6 different pets that are all stuck with the same powerset as you. I might put together something for that later, dunno.

Ooh. I didn't think about the endurance drain angle. That's pretty good too. I think it's very possible to use the existing mechanics to bump up enemies and make more than just raw damage good at all points of the game. If the need arose for new mechanics, it could be that repeated mezzes slowly build up a long-duration increase to mez protection and/or resistance, such that the weaker mezzes non-control sets get start to fall off and become ineffective. That in turn can help keep Controllers and Dominators relevant in fights against tough enemies since they can crank up their magnitude better and keep enemies mezzed where everyone else can't. I guess the problem there is how many fights outside of AVs can realistically require that, and I don't have a good answer.

Given my recent thoughts, I have to express my support for this idea. The one snag here is that this needs to be in tandem with changes to enemy mez protection and resistance. If you can't mez a boss enemy with your current tools, even for a bit, you have no way of interacting with this system and it's just "everyone that matters is universally tougher". For this to flourish, you'd need to reduce mez protection and increase mez resistance such that you can successfully inflict a mez on key targets, even if it's only a short time. I guess you could also do a big retool of all mezzes so they're layered with multiple magnitudes of decreasing duration, but that gets weird and doesn't help the non-control sets that happen to have mezzes.

Not quite the same. The Souls series of games (which are not comparable in difficulty to Armored Core, their other big and very good series) have significantly more decision points and deliberately play up slow animations to make you think more about when and how you attack and defend. You're always able to access all the base controls out of the gate and can theoretically win with just that. City of Heroes can't accommodate that. I'm not sure you can even get that style of play in an MMO. You definitely couldn't in the design philosophies of that year, which were more heavily focused on socialization and the grind to keep players hooked, playing, and paying. With City of Heroes, you don't have the tools that a Souls game gives you to beat anything at any state just by playing properly. Dying over and over with the knowledge that yes, it's possible, you just need to tighten up your timing and learn the pattern? Yeah. That can be fun. Dying over and over because you can only push a few buttons and your hero can't land any attacks because a random number says so, while they get crushed as attacks hit you from seemingly everywhere even while you move? Not fun. There's nothing inherently wrong with the City of Heroes gameplay loop, but it does mean that certain outcomes that are okay in other games are not acceptable here. All this to say: Jack was wrong and it's good that the game moved away from it.

It will, but in a very boring way that pushes things further towards "kill everything right now" - and possibly not even in a way that scales up well. If your team can clear out all the things you can mez without your mez, increased damage against mezzed targets isn't going to move the needle. The fix has to be enemy-side, not player-side. Player tools are good, they're just in the wrong game system to flourish. Once you make it easier to inflict any mez at all, and combine it with reasons to mez (like, say, amped up Tanker auras that significantly slow down kill times or pose scaling damage threats that also get suppressed when mezzed), you'll start seeing control be more popular.

Controllers and Dominators would be more relevant if enemies had less mez protection outright and more mez resistance so at least some CC would get through, coupled with either very big, interruptible attacks or damaging/debuffing auras or armor powers disabled by CC. Currently, neither is true, so with any team that has any semblance of good damage, the only targets you can CC are the ones about to get wrecked by AoE damage flying around, and CC doesn't end the fight faster by itself. Kneecapping tanks is the worst way to address this - you need to change enemy design, not player design.

It doesn't need a tradeoff - that assumes that Medicine currently exists in a perfect state of balance. Medicine is bad. It'll be less bad after this buff, but still bad. I'm honestly baffled why you would suggest it needs a tradeoff when characters are worse off in general for picking it. The very least we can do is bump it up a bit so it feels better to use if we're not going to commit to a full blown rework. If you're still insistent on a tradeoff, I'd love to hear the practical applications of current Medicine in a build that make it powerful enough to merit that tradeoff.

It took you until just now to start trying to be part of the solution instead of arguing over a game state long since past. With all due respect, Shin's been trying to get things on topic while your posts were more likely to cause off-topic detours.

The tradeoff is you had to spend a power pick on one of the least essential things in a team. Once we're past that, multiple support ATs can pick up AoE heals that very quickly put single target heals to shame, which is all Medicine gets. There's really no reason to shoot out Medicine's kneecaps like this when its specialization is already very weak by nature.

I don't think so. Brute scalars were balanced around Fury. Removing Fury outright, even if you gave them Blaster's inherent, would take away too much damage to where they wouldn't be able to compete with Scrappers at all. Since Tankers have higher target caps and higher values on their armors, pretty much any other possible inherent that doesn't use Fury would leave Brutes at the bottom of the pack.

It's a really fun idea! I'd test it, honestly, if it were up to me. It would play into the low-maintenance idea of Brutes, not needing quite as much support. I'm just not sure how useful that will be. The problems here are that a lot of those are focused on defensive effects that are hard to notice, and that armor sets already tend to grant at least one power that offers solid protection against multiple mez types. I'm spoiled by Shield Defense's Active Defense in particular, which grants a lot of protection against all mez types. The really tricky bit about defenses is that they're much harder to appreciate since they're largely invisible. You have no big visual effect when your status protection negates a mez - you're unlikely to even notice you were targeted by a mez in the first place. You can't really notice toHit buffs if you were already hitting reliably before. These kinds of invisible powers are difficult because that means even if it's completely busted, a player can reasonably come to the conclusion that it isn't helping at all. It's wrong, but it's still not helping Brute as much as we'd like. I think some elements of this might be part of the puzzle though. A more resilient offense sounds good, but I think it needs to be paired with something active that the Brute can interact with, instead of being solely reliant on negating incoming negative effects.

Because Scrappers do AoE damage too, except they can crit. AoE isn't as useful anyways since just about everyone gets it and any combination of AoE quickly cleans out everything it should be hitting. Once you're out of minions and lieutenants, you're left with the really big single targets where AoE powers end up weaker than ST powers. You can verify this in-game with pretty much any mission or TF with Elite Bosses or Archvillains - after five seconds, which enemies are still left standing? Making Brutes the AoE specialist would hurt them more than help them, and then we're hitting Tankers as collateral with this change. I think we can give Brutes an identity without having to hit Tanker to do so.

That's not an identity. You might be able to make an argument that role compression is a useful thing to have, but a party size of 8 and some very broad coverage from other ATs (with Controllers able to cover both CC and supporting sets, just as one example), coupled with general redundancy (both Scrappers and Blasters make things defeated, just as one example), means that you don't really need to worry about carefully selecting your party and compressing roles to make room for other critical roles. This also gets worse when you go through some of the arguments already posted in this thread: despite the increased resist cap, Brutes have Scrapper scalings on their armor set. That means that with their enhancements, they need to pick between staying power through full set bonuses, or damage with procced out powers that skip sets, which defeats the purpose of being between the two. "Middle of the road" means you crash into the divider between lanes. Hence: an attempt to define Brutes without direct comparisons to either Scrapper or Tanker. We move Brute out of being "middle of the road", and we're a step closer to making the game as a whole better. Not everyone makes it to the point where the differences between ATs is not only relevant but important. This would be the equivalent of balancing League of Legends strictly around Bronze/Silver play instead of pro play. They're popular because if you aren't going to go super deep into the game, they deal huge chunks of damage no matter what your investment in enhancements is, what your team composition is, or if you even have a team. Nothing wrong with that, but the 1-50 leveling experience is not the whole game. When you take the whole game into account, Brute's limitations start becoming clearer since it's stuck in that middle road state in a game that doesn't need middle road ATs in teams. I think Brutes are always going to be popular no matter what changes happen. It's a fun fantasy, and Fury is a fun idea. I think we can make a change to address its late-game stuff and give it a proper identity without losing what makes it so popular now.

In the very worst case, you revert a change in open beta before it hits live. You still get the data such that everyone knows "well, that didn't work", and you go from there. I don't really buy into this defeatist outlook that we're stuck with the way things are. I'm optimistic enough to think that there's a way to puzzle this out so we can untangle Brute from the Scrapper and Tanker so we're not looking at these direct comparisons any more and so we don't ever have to think "is Brute better than Tanker this patch". I love the gif, but it's better to ignore off-topic posters than to mock them. Keeps the mods happy and the discussion flowing.

We've already got several spinoff threads from this one, so we're doing better than it may seem!

Short version: Title. Long version: Making Taunt and Confront inherent clears up a space on melee sets that can be repurposed for a new power unique to each archetype that can be used to further define itself and push its identity further, such that we can see a meaningful difference between a Scrapper, Brute, and Tanker all using, say, Fiery Melee, that extends beyond just scalars. (Actual specifics probably merit another topic.) It also means that you don't need to lose a power slot for basic endgame competence in those roles. I don't believe the opportunity cost/skill test of careful power selection applies to Taunt very well. Bonus: Now Scrappers will actually use Confront. Single target Taunt in this game is beans as an investment.

You might be able to sidestep @Shin Magmus's concerns (and my own) if Roar didn't drain Fury, but locked it at its current level for the duration. That way you aren't trading away your offense for CC when you could have just AoE spammed your way to victory without it. Also: Careful about theme! Themes are great guides for gameplay, but gameplay is more important than theme. Ideally we get the two to work together, but janky thematic mechanics are worse than generic mechanics that Just Work. In this case, I can just as easily argue that a Brute angry enough to be Roaring at people has hit the point where their Fury really isn't going to stop.

You get a like for the attempt. I like the core idea a bunch! My main concern is twofold: Bottoming out Fury will require having to build it back up again for your normal damage. On live, this is a non-issue - three swings and you're capped off. This does limit other possibilities that may require slower Fury gain, though. The magnitude doesn't scale, and Brute can't really access the +Mag benefits of Controller and Dominator, so realistically the targets you can hit with this are the same targets you can mow down with your own AoE attacks. That's a problem - especially since you've removed Build Up completely, so it now takes longer to clear the same enemies. I think something in this ballpark might be part of the puzzle for Brute, though. It's worth considering and worth further drafts.