ZemX

Originally... Super Jump. I just loved hopping through Steel Canyon across skyscrapers or going rooftop to rooftop in Founder's Falls. Now... Teleport. Not because I love it more for travel. I like it less, actually. But it's just so damned useful INSIDE missions. I wasn't expecting that. Sure, Combat Teleport is faster, but for ONE power pick in the pool that handles both travel and gets me through/around obstacles in a mission? Can't be beat. Doorway blocked by a mass of enemies? BAMF! Feet webbed to the ground and I need to be up on an overhead walkway tanking right now!? BAMF! It's Monday? BAMF! Really fun thing to do as well: Bind a key for teleporting to a target. Pick a teammate, punch that key, and appear right next to them... even through walls. Next time an annoying Sky Raider or Sorcerer teleports away from you while you're attacking? FOLLOW him. It does have some quirks and gives you a blocked message in caves sometimes. But often it works and I've literally bounced between two split halves of a group tanking for both a few times. It's wild.

The counter-counter argument is economics. If there were no value in soft-capping anything, nobody would be doing it. But really, come on. Your counter-argument here depends on always having those buffs on a team, always having them applied consistently, etc. The obvious reason people build for anything at all is self-sufficiency. These ARE the minimums I can count on when I can count on nobody else. That has value. Before IOs, if you wanted that, you needed to invite it onto your team. Obviously if you are on some sort of regular team where you know what will be available, you can specialize more. This is particularly true on Incarnate level teams where everyone is walking around with stupidly good team buffs. This is why I included Incarnate powers in my accusation about what has destroyed balance between ATs in this game.

Your reply is all about difficulty, which is not really what I was getting on about at all. My bad if that wasn't clear. I am talking about balance between archetypes mainly. I am not quibbling with IOs and Incarnates making people more powerful. That's entirely the point of that "lateral progression" system you mentioned: Making characters more powerful without increasing level. My point is that they could have chosen to keep the ATs distinct by having the IO system enhance instead of add bonuses. Just like the Alpha Slot. But the rest of the Incarnate system would have been better off with AT-specific powers. It was of course easier to just give everyone the same stuff, but it's also more boring.

There's no telling where the game would be today if they had chosen differently though. Adding a lateral progression system wasn't a bad idea. HOW they did it, is where we may disagree. When someone says something like "IOs broke the game" I assume they mean they broke balancing the game. And they very much did do that. The mistake I think they made (and I realize not everyone considers it a mistake) was abandoning the original notion of enhancements being multiplicative, or in other words, only improving on what you already were capable of doing. IOs multiply via their enhancement strengths but also ADD via their set bonuses. It's the latter bit that broke balance and blurred the entire concept of archetypes having defined roles. It made teams less interesting and content more trivial. Then Incarnates came along and did even more of that. This is not me saying I wanted this to be a strict Holy Trinity game. And really, it never was, even before IOs. People were doing wild shit like trashing everything with 8-man Defender teams and the like. The game's basic design still allowed a ton of freedom. More than most. The ATs didn't need to be made less distinct. When you couldn't rely on dodging 95% of attacks on your squishy Blaster or Defender, you had to rely more on your powers and/or teammates. That wasn't a bad thing. Obviously water long run under and past the bridge. but I still wonder if set bonuses couldn't have been made multiplicative as well, with their effects ignoring ED limits partially, the way Incarnate Alpha works. And Incarnate powers being AT-specific instead of just handing everyone a shield and a nuke.

Corruptors are not really the "villain version of Blasters". The whole notion of assigning counter-parts on villain-side from hero-side is a bit flawed because it's never been exactly a 1:1 thing. Generally, the Redside ATs were designed to be more offense-oriented versions of Blueside ATs. Corruptors are essentially just Defenders with the powersets flipped around so the offense is primary and the buff/debuff secondary. They honestly don't end up being that different than Defenders and ever since Defenders got a bit of a boost to their offense when solo, Corruptors haven't been exclusively the choice for those who like to play buff/debuff solo. There's no Redside Blaster, on other words. All the ATs are generally designed to be a bit more offense-oriented than their blueside counterparts, but that couldn't be done to Blasters so instead they spread the offense out to all the red ATs and added Masterminds instead of creating a new top ranged blaster type. Some people will still try to tell you Masterminds are the redside Tankers but this is b.s. and always has been no matter what some Live dev is rumored to have once said.

Has anyone actually admitted this is a glitch? Because it's sort of a nice compensation for losing the cone AoE. I hate how most Stalker sets lose an AoE instead of replacing one of the usually very redundant ST attacks in the set with AS. Ice Melee is a good example of one that did it right by replacing the lackluster DPA Greater Ice Sword for Assassin Strike and not losing either of the AoEs. They've had plenty of opportunities to "fix the glitch" as well, in this case. And haven't.

The all Ninja team! (see how many you can spot in the photo below!)

You answered your thread title with your first sentence. 🤪 The answer is: animation times. This is also why being a Stalker helps. You do lose a cone, but you gain a MUCH better DPA single target attack in Assassin Strike and an unusual 100% AoE stealth crit in Burst (that also helps that 3s animation time PBAoE do better). So on a team with the Stalker ATO slotted in AS, you will very often be able to crit Burst after an AS. Secondary answer to the thread title: The sound effects. I once heard this set referred to as "NASCAR melee" and now I can't think of anything else whenever I team with someone who has it.

I think that goes for any container you have open as well. Open an enhancement storage bin in your base and double-click stuff into or out of it.

Frozen Aura wouldn't break its own Placate same way it doesn't break its own Sleep. The Placate would happen after the power's other effects. It would last until you attack that target again some other way, such as with a damage aura or taunt aura. So in that sense, yeah, it's not likely to do you any good. And if it affects a target that Frozen Aura has already put to sleep, it's doubly pointless. As for taunt THEN placate... placate "wins" because taunt isn't an override. It's just a threat multiplier. It means every attack you make after taunting will count more threat towards your tanker and thus help keep enemies focused on you. But placate prevents the target from attacking you, meaning it will attack someone else in your team if you don't follow up by attacking the placated target again. But it maintains its high threat counter for you, so as soon as the placate ends or is broken, by anybody, it is likely to resume attacking you. And Placate + Confuse is pointless, yes. Confuse already prevents the target from attacking you OR any member of your team while at the same time making the target attack its allies. The only thing you might do by adding a Placate proc to a Chance of Confuse power is increase the chance that any given target is affected by at least one of those two effects: confuse or placate. e.g. If confuse misses its "chance of" roll, the placate might still fire on that target. But again, any damage or taunt toggle aura you're running will spoil that very quickly.

Not at home right now, but I also can confirm I am using one of the extra buttons on my mouse. "Button 5" does sound familiar though. Might be that.

It's even better than that since Stalker's Grant Cover also grants stealth to nearby teammates when the Stalker is in Hide status. Stalker: "Shhhhhh! Everybody behind the shield! They won't see us! It's got a tree painted on the front." Scrapper: "We're in a cave." Stalker: *assassinates the Scrapper*

Not really. Wouldn't need to do much more than tack on a AoE taunt to the ranged/AoE defense toggle, similar to what was done to Evasion in Super Reflexes. Your dodging literally pisses people off all around you! And Stealth is not weird for the big guys either. See also: Dark Armor. But yes, silly. Then again, theme when out the window when Stalkers got Stone Melee and Stone Armor... *clomp* *clomp* *clomp* *Assassinate!*

I should clarify that when I said it "made sense" to me to nerf Tankers instead of buffing Brutes, I only meant that given the devs felt Tankers were overperforming, it was far less risky to nerf Tankers than buff Brutes because it then would have required buffing Stalkers and Scrappers. I don't think much needed to be done, as I said. Maybe just Fiery Melee (look up Ston's old testing data if you don't know what I am getting at there. It's wild) and the proc math fix for AoE sizes.

This is the only part that does make sense to me. There was unfortunately too little space between the melee ATs as it was to buff Brutes without eclipsing Scrappers and Stalkers. So yeah, nerfing Tankers was the easy out. I just take issue with the extent of it. I agree with the way they addressed the unfair proc advantage Tankers had. I think that was really the ONLY thing that needed changing, honestly. That and maybe a look at Combustion as I'll note below. I disagree with losing arc width buffs. I disagree with the overcap nerf. If we do look at the old clear speed tests Ston did, we saw Scrappers and Tankers in a tie and Brutes all of 2% behind them both. And, as I said, that would have been even tighter if they did something targeted to Fiery Melee's Combustion, which was a serious outlier in favor of Tankers. While I am against balance based on solo performance, that kind of test DOES correlate well with the devs' stated reason for the nerf: consistently overcap AoE. It's almost a best case for it. Meaning, Tankers were doing probably as well as they could and even then only just barely edging out Brutes in the average across all powersets. Dropping Tankers another couple percentage points would have been warranted and I really bet that would have happened with just the proc nerf they did and maybe Combustion too. But in that particular scenario... they were dropped by 25% instead. I don't see the logic of such a severe cut. Yeah, it's not 25% in ordinary team scenarios, but it's still pretty significant when there was little reason for THAT heavy a nerf bat. Brutes would have been left sitting between Tankers and Scrappers in most scenarios, which is as fair a place for them to sit as any. One could then wonder if maybe Scrappers and, particularly, Stalkers, are doing as much damage as they should given they lack the crowd control capabilities of Brutes/Tankers and certainly have much less survivability. But that can be a separate flame war, I guess.

Yeah but this is broadly true of every other AT capability except for damage. And I'm simplifying a little with damage vs survival. The more detailed list is Survival, Melee Damage, Ranged Damage, Crowd Control, Support, and Pets. But among the melee ATs it reduces mostly to Survival, Melee Damage, and Crowd Control. And of those, it will sometimes just be the case you don't need as much Survival OR Crowd Control as you have. But you still have those capabilities for when you are in a situation where they matter so... you gotta pay for that with lesser capabilities somewhere else. To put it another way, you can't do everything better than some other AT or else there's a problem. Stalkers pretty much were immediately in this situation when City of Villains released. The devs somehow had the idea that being able to assassinate ONE target quickly would be a big deal and it just wasn't. Brutes were far and away doing more overall damage in combat AND were a lot tougher. Few people played Stalkers outside of ganking people in PvP.

First of all, thanks for finally actually responding to something I said instead of making up strawman bullshit like "I'm quitting tankers!" that I never said. Baby steps, I guess. But second of all, we DO know what the metric was. I've said this multiple times now. The Devs TOLD us what the metric was right there in the dev notes to the patch: Constantly saturated over-cap AoEs caused Tankers to "overshoot" their targets. Now sure, when and where that is happening and what their "targets" were is not being specified. And that is where the speculation comes in. But I've said exactly why I think this is about x8 soloing and farming. More than once, in fact. Because where else can you keep AoEs saturated? Not team content, I say. Feel free to counter that assertion if you can. But my experience on teams is you can't keep packs of enemies around you constantly like you can soloing x8 or in a farm. Teammates control and scatter enemies. Or they just plain kill them before they can gather around you. I try to lead the team when I'm on a Tanker so I can get in at least a few good big AoEs to not just rack up some damage but spread that taunt. But that's the best I do. Quickly, that spawn is cut down and my AoEs aren't hitting 16 anymore. The devs even had a term for this: "Pyramid effect". It's what was supposed to balance the big Tanker AoEs and, I assert, it does... on teams. And we're not just talking about Brutes for no reason either. The four melee ATs exist on a pretty obvious spectrum of offensive vs. defensive capability with Tankers, presumably, occupying the position of "toughest, but least damage" with Brutes being next to them at "not as tough as Tankers, but hitting harder". It therefore stands to reason that if there's any "target" for Tankers to hit, it's dealing a bit less damage than Brutes thanks to being tougher. Fair, right? Except, again as I've said, if we're talking about soloing at all, this is not purely a damage output scenario. Survival factors in as well. So who clears faster is not the same thing, exactly, as "who is doing more damage".

Who cares about noticeable? You think anybody else would agree to a 10% nerf for no good reason just because they'd need a stopwatch and a spreadsheet to know the difference? Now maybe you don't agree with the "no good reason" and that's fine, but this is my argument here at least. Why should I accept any nerf, however small, because of a balancing metric we've never used before? Since when is x8 solo and/or farm performance a reason to nerf an AT? My point is that any Brute was already contributing more offense on any team I've been on, so why I am getting any nerf at all? And this doesn't touch on the argument nobody seems to want to have, which is that Brutes SHOULDN'T just be assumed to solo faster than Tankers at max difficulty. Soloing isn't purely a damage affair, so what exactly was the problem with Tankers and Brutes being so close to the same average performance on x8 solo clear speed in the first place? Not to mention if x8 solo clear speed is the new metric around which we should be balancing melee ATs... uh... my Stalker wants to see the manager!

Who? Because that is not what I am saying. I am saying, in fact, that is what I EXPECT to happen... but only when soloing or farming. I have not seen this happen in teams. Almost the opposite in fact. I have trouble getting teammates to bring stragglers like rezzing Freaks to the next spawn even. They single-mindedly want to grind each spawn to dust before moving on. And they sometimes even get upset I've moved on to the next spawn to get it all taunted-up and clustered up on me. Then there are controllers/doms doing confuses and immobs and what-not, further preventing enemy clustering. There's no chance to keep AoEs saturated on a team like that. Not in my experience.

This is what is particularly annoying about the nerf and it's why I say it can only have been motivated by the extreme corner-case of +4/x8 soloing and/or farming. I don't see how, in any other situation, Tankers outdamage Brutes. It HAS to be a situation where the larger Gauntlet AoEs could be kept cranking up to their target caps constantly. They even said so in the dev notes. I accept the proc change. That's fair. And indeed some AoEs always suffered that, like Foot Stomp, because they were naturally 15ft radius even before. Or already wide enough cones they were denied Gauntlet's boost. So this puts everybody on the same page. It's fair. But the overcap damage cuts aren't. I'd need to see data that proves that was ever a real problem outside of farming/soloing and I accept neither of those as valid for balancing because nowhere is it writ that Brutes should solo team-sized groups faster than Tankers. Soloing involves BOTH damage and survivability. It is not clearly in the domain of one or the other AT. And even Ston's testing did not show a significant difference in clear speed anyway.

Few things: 1. It can take a Tanker a few rounds to get some kind of taunt effect going on all the aggro in a spawn if it's not exactly already packed together. It only takes a Controller one press of a button if they get there first. It is therefore a good idea to get there a few seconds, at least, ahead of the team. This means leaving slightly (but not a lot) before literally every enemy is dead. It does not mean playing several spawns ahead of the team like your story, but be sure you're not confusing the two. One is good team tanking. The other is soloing... on a team. 2. Rezzers: Nowhere is it chiseled in stone that if a freak tank decides to stand up three seconds after the tanker has left that you MUST stand and fight it there. Bring it to the next spawn and drag it past the explosions. It will peel off on somebody else if you don't want its attention. This is far more efficient than everybody wasting time standing around staring at dead freak and wondering if it might stand up. 3. Pulling in adds: Provided you never go over aggro cap, pulling in nearby enemies is potentially a good idea too. If they're that close, they might aggro on someone else in the team eventually. Better it's a tanker or other sturdy character who doesn't mind the attention. I do this sometimes in rooms with multiple spawns so that instead of aggroing two at once, I start pulling in the next group before the first is finished, so that we don't end up with groups two and three at the same time if the team is not particularly strong enough to handle that. Double pulls as x8 will go over the aggro cap. Doesn't matter if the tanker can survive that. Others might not. -- Circling back to point 1 there: Remember also if this is a PuG, it can take the Tanker a little bit getting used to how the team is rolling. Might leave one fight too early and adjust later. Point being: Don't be too quick to judge. Someone is not necessarily running off to solo just because they moved a little too quickly. Some teams move fast and you have to move fast to stay slightly ahead of them. It's a balancing act. Also... shit happens. Was on a team recently when the lead got bent a little out of shape saying the team had split when in fact someone had clicked a glowie and caused an ambush from behind. Half the team turned to fight it. Half the team didn't even see it until people started dying. That was the "split". That can happen. Roll with it.

Isn't "Fourth Ear Deaf" just a parody of "Third Eye Blind" though? Not sure which real band Golden Grain is referencing but I'd guess it's the same sort of thing.

One Thousand Cuts would sure look wild!

Doesn't look like it. Weirdly, there seem to be several modifiers that can be used by powers for -res effects. Evolving Armor uses melee_debuff_res_dmg. That one was nerfed to match the other melee ATs. Weaken Resolve, for whatever reason, uses ranged_res_dmg modifier, which has not been touched. Staff's Eye of the Storm bonus in Form of Body stance uses melee_res_dmg modifier to do -10% res for Tankers and -7.5% for the other melee ATs. Hasn't changed. I don't know what the reasoning here is unless it was to JUST nerf Bio.

On that note and while @Scarlet Shocker blathers on about armor, I will again remind everyone what we're REALLY missing in this game: