BuildsAllTheThings

Spent a decent amount of time thinking about it, so I'll post this and have done with it. TL;DR for those notinclined to watch a stranger ramble about design philosophies, damage values, and set comparisons: The changes presented in this proposal would be a net good, straight up. With some caveats. Namely, that it likely can't be released alone, other sets would need similar buffs. But over all this would be an amazing change. The long version: So, the proposed changes here represent at once all the good that was ever in city of heroes power sets to begin with, and some of the problems that come both with buffing them, and making sure that everything has a place somewhere in the game. What do I mean by that? Well, the changes here actually wouldn't be format warping. I've spent all day going over the math, for - hilariously, unrelated reasons - namely in measuring brute damage performance versus scrapper damage performance. Now, provided both at's are playing KM, brute's maintain a slightly over all higher sustained dps, scrappers higher burst, when appropriate crit windows line up. You'd think then that this would be truly horrendous for other sets in general. How could most sets ever hope to keep up with such a ridiculous damage boost. You would however, be surprised. Most of the top performers would continue to perform well. In single player scenarios, this might be the case, but most of COH's content is community focused. At most you might find that this is the new most effective sets for farmers, but even then. The thing about that is like any game's "meta", the power economy of farming has continued to evolve, itself a more communal affair now more often than not, with needs for people to talk to, buffers to look for, hitters, etcetera. And the set doesn't have a tremendous access to great and consistent aoe's, even with the change, so it's unlikely to beat out radiation for aoe damage parity, or any of the other big hitters like Titan Weapons, Mace, or Battle Axe. This should be a good change! The issue lies in its actual design philosophy, because the proposed changes make it an extremely generically good set. It goes with near any power combination, you have every reason in the world to run it with competitors like bio, fiery aura, radiation armor, etcetera. And Homecoming's developers have expressed through actions, if aught else, that they've a dislike for things that would be overwhelmingly and generically good. The likely effect of this hitting live, would be a fantastic set, and then wanting to hit the reset button. More over, it pushes out sets that already -are- underperforming. Your staff melee's, your scrapper StJ's, etcetera. This wouldn't inherently be awful mind you, it would just mean that more sets would require more changes like this. And that in and of itself I think is a meaningful, and altogether welcome breath of fresh air for players and designers alike, but! If someone wanted to implement and execute on these changes, it couldn't be released standalone. There would need to be another melee set brought up with it, that competes in other categories to really shine, and continue to encourage build diversity. And it would mean COMMITTING to continued changes like this for other sets to carve out a niche, as development continued. Itself not a bad thing, but it is the sort of change you'd want to keep eyes on.