drbuzzard

You are correct.

The absorption shield is actually quite a bit of regen, and honestly it's an elegant solution to make the set work more like the old pre-nerf regen than any other version of regen in the game. It just has a cap on it because the amount of absorption is limited. This was (IMO) a brilliant way to give back regen the old feel of shrugging off a certain amount of abuse, without it being so over the top as toggle instant heal used to be. It's well known that a saturated WP brute or tank are what demonstrates real regeneration as opposed to the sets of that name. Sentinels come the closest of all the sets. Regeneration for the melee bros is all about click heals, and the very temporary boost of instant heal.

The tanker will be easier to solo (IMO) if that factors into it.

Either you didn't take instant regeneration, the absorption toggle, or you are not paying attention to it. On my elec/regen I have 475 points of absorb which replenishes very quickly. I don't know the exact rate though. Even combat log doesn't tell me anything, but it's quick enough that (with my ~56% l/s resistance) four knives of artemis minions beating on me at even level couldn't get past it and do any actual health damage.

Yeah, I pick whichever attack is better. If the numbers justify it (good DPAS), I take both. I never take them because I want both versions of opportunity.

It's a lot easier to boost defenses than damage. You can leverage procs, but really that is about it. Though procs really are rather broken. I have both elec/claws and elec/fire tanks, but didn't want to make a mirror. Both do a good bit less damage than the brute in question. They also have better psi and neg energy resistance (capped, and 80ish then tanker proc). I admit I use the tanks for DA content instead of the brute because there's so many flavors of damage in there (certainly a lot of negative energy). If I could be sure of getting Tsoo missions every time, I'd use the brute always. He does kill faster.

I find that tashibishi does a pretty good job of keeping things out of your face. Mind you the rest of that epic set I consider to be crap, but the caltrops are quite nice.

I remember before I tried ice, I had been thinking that perhaps frigid shield's absorption shield might make the set reasonable, the way the absorption shield in regen does it. Heck, regen on sentinels is excellent because of how that toggle absorption shield works. However the amount of absorption in the ice power is less than a single hit from a minion, so it is utterly worthless. I ended up respeccing out of the power.

The thing is, you're using one of the outlier cases which is what gets you so close. If the comparison were, say, war mace, I'm reasonably sure it can demonstrated that the difference is more in line with the durability gap. After the tanker boost, I still see plenty more brutes out there and I'm pretty certain the player statistics data will bear that out. Heck, you're really picking on two anomalies here in your comparison. First is the damage distortion of follow up, and then there's the incarnate softcap. You might ask why I consider that a distortion- but compare it to resistance sets. A brute and tanker both share a 90 resistance cap, and it is fairly attainable for many damage types depending on the armor set (I have a rad/elec brute who caps lethal, smashing, fire, cold, energy at 90% with decent values for psionic and negative energy- leaving only the toxic hole). This 90% resistance doesn't care if the game content is incarnate or non-incarnate. I don't think you are being disingenuous or anything, you're using the characters you have and like. It happens to be that your characters are sort of edge cases.

I suppose I could mention it again- this demonstration is picking a comparison which does not favor the brute here. Given that we're doing ratios, using procs and a set (claws) which gives a permanent damage boost which favors the tanker and that is clear if you just look at the numbers. It's not enough to close the gap, but it has to narrow it. I'll do some lazy numbers again (same, I'm still lazy) . tanker at +100% damage enhancement for power doing 100 damage is 190 damage (.95 scalar) brute at +100% damage enhancement plus 75% (another 150% damage) fury (low honestly) 262.5 Which gave us tanker damage at 72%. Say we add in follow up stacked twice: +40% damage tanker goes to 2.4 x.95 x 100 =228 brute goes to 3.9 x .75 = 292.5 and the ratio becomes 78% Make that a triple follow up stack for 60% damage boost and we get to 80%. Throw in procs and it gets closer still. You see, Bubba, the thing about CoH is that it isn't balanced. Has never been balanced. It likely never will be balanced. There's simply too many nooks and crannies of power interactions which would have to be accounted for take try an make everything work. You want your brute and tanker to be balanced? OK, we'll get rid of how follow up works, and give you build up. There, problem solved. Be careful of what you wish for. The anomaly here isn't a tanker/brute imbalance due to the buffs, it's follow up (or we could bring up rage or soul drain).

I dislike people who waste my time for no good reason. The other day I was recruiting up a TF, and it took a while (was morning). Then when I finally get a team of 8 together and am about to start, one play says "I'm switching to an alt, brb" and logs. WTF. They were an early pick to the team, and it took 10-15 minutes to get it all together, and at no point during that waiting time did it occur to them to change their damned character if they wanted to? Someone earned a global ignore spot right there.

I may have to finally get around to building a super reflexes brute to see how much trouble it would be to incarnate softcap it. Tanks are trivially easy to softcap, and even incarnate softcap (iirc you can normal softcap easily with just SOs and weave). Since that is so easy, I can't imagine it will be impossible to do it on a brute, it just might have some annoying tradeoffs. Just need to pick a primary, and I'm running out of ones which interest me. Honesty the thing about the tanker changes which I have liked the most has been the expanded AOEs, and when I switch back to brute versions without them they feel so small (but fierce because of the higher damage).

Yeah, I tried to make an ice armor sentinel. I dragged it over the lvl 50 finish line and spent a fair amount of influence decking it out to an acceptable level. I still considered it crap. It was the last of the sentinel secondaries I tried, and was clearly the worst. While I have not deleted it, I have stripped it of useful IOs and will probably never play it again. WindDemon pretty much covers why it is awful. Moisture absorption is a clear demonstration of how bad the set is. On every other ice set, that's the cornerstone power (pumping defense to crazy levels). On this it is single target, and actually has to be targeted. Then for that you barely get anything in defense, and you also have to use it for your endurance recovery tool. Contrast that with dark armor on sentinels where obscure sustenance is a PBAOE, but single target so you don't have to actually target anything to make it work, just be vaguely near a target. Then it gives you a heal, a bunch of regeneration for a while, and an endurance recovery boost. It's actually superior to the versions on other sets. It's really quite odd in that a strong case can be made that sentinel sets of armor are the best versions of those sets except ice (and arguably willpower, but the change there was sort of mandatory). Ice is pretty clearly worse on sentinels than elsewhere and that's got nothing to do with the lower defensive scalar.

Yeah, I know about that, but use it for caltrops.

Only place I have played electrical blast on homecoming is on a couple of sentinels. I quite like it on them, but bad memories of electrical from other ATs on live means I don't bother using the other versions of the set. The sentinel version is quite nice in general. About the only things I wouldn't mind seeing changed are: A) making voltaic sentinel less clunky with continual resummons and why does it have to be placed anyway? Have it just summon in place near you like auto turret in devices. This will save time and bother. I'd also not object to seeing it have a chain effect since the chain gimmick does seem to be universal in the other electrical sets (save armor). B) quicker animation on thunderous blast. Otherwise I don't mind it at all, and it's one of the best of the sentinel sets.

Not really sure what one can do about leveraging back out the effect of the damage boost powers in certain sets. It would have to be individual treatment to those sets since they are anomalies.

That seems like a reasonable test and not even tedious. Go for it.

But because of the tanker having a higher damage scalar, the power closes the gap in damage output between the ATs. Rage and soul drain do it as well. Those power de-emphasize the effect of fury which is the core of brute damage.

I would never inflict the tedium of beating down a pylon on anyone I like.

Oh, I should also mention the case that certain sets close the gap between tankers and brutes because of built in damage boosting powers which leverage the higher damage scalar of the tank. Claws (this case with followup which can stack 3 times for +60% damage pretty easily), rage, or soul drain. You picked a test which isn't all that kosher. Pick a set which doesn't leverage a constant damage boost (and yes, build up will always help close the gap, but not as much).

It's more than that. When you push in damage which will not be helped by the inherent, you basically discount the inherent. Brutes and corrupters have damage boosting inherents (defenders do too, but it's not to the same degree) which don't help procs.

Sorry, but this is dead wrong because considering the damage scalar without considering fury is utterly farcical. For the same of simple numbers we will look at a tank with +100% damage enhancement (slotting and some bonus, though mostly because I choose to be lazy and use round numbers). Then we will set the brute at +100& from enhancement, and then another +150% from fury (which is actually low, but I'm being nice and like round numbers). We pick a power which does 100 (lazy me). Tank will do 190 damage. (2x.95) Brute will do 262.5 (.75*3.5) As we can see, natively the tank is nowhere close to doing 90% (or even 86% of brute damage). (number here is 72%) Then we add in procs. They generate a constant number for damage. We'll call it 50 for a proc. So a tanker has a proc go off and his damage is 240. The brute's goes off and damage is 302.5. Tanker has gained a 26% damage boost from the proc. Brute has gained a 15% damage boost. As you add in more procs you will close the damage gap between the ATs. Here the damage gap goes from 28% to 21% (tank does 79.3% after proc). You add more procs, you get a smaller gap. Also the greater the damage value of the proc compared to the power damage will also close the gap further. So as I said before, procs distort the hell out of AT comparison.

I'll be the first to concede I'm not nearly as good a player as you. I'm getting a bit long in the tooth and my reaction time isn't what it ought to be. You posit range being important because you're constantly jinking back to avoid melee attacks. I don't know that I could pull that off well, and I'm certain I wouldn't like to. There will always be a gap between what the best people can do and what is the norm (best defined in both play ability and formulating builds). You didn't, however, address that some factions are equally dangerous at range (or they sure seem that way). Banished Pantheon hits like a ton of bricks at range.

We're getting into where procs distort the hell out of AT balance, so you're introduced a separate can of worms into your comparison. If procs are large chunk of your damage, then they disfavor the brute since their inherent will not affect them. Personally I think damage procs need a severe nerf beatdown, even if that's an unpopular view. As I said in the other thread, brutes have plenty of mitigation. Only on the hardest possible content do you really noticed the difference between a decked out tank and a decked out brute. A bit of support on the brute, and you are fine. Do I have a numerical case to be made? No. I merely have experience across a bunch of different tanks and brutes. About the only place I ever note a brute being a bit too soft is when I do +4x8 incarnate stuff in DA. Everywhere else I rarely notice the green bar move much at all.

Not sure where you get the idea that tanks are at 90% of brute damage. And honestly you have to be pushing it pretty hard for one to find a place where the survivability edge of tankers over brutes means all that much (though leveling up, it's pretty clear, but then the damage gap is even more clear). Once builds are done, both tankers and brutes are pretty close to unkillable in normal content, and brutes can take what is handed out in incarnate stuff with a bit of support with no problems. Perhaps if you have a kinetics buffer in your pocket all the time, this may be the case, but in the world we actually play in, tankers do a lot less damage (and I play a whole lot of tankers and brutes). It takes very little support to get a brute to tanker level defenses. But back to the topic at hand. I would love to see them buff the hell out of sentinels, but having moments of acting like a grownup, I accept they can't be buffed too much. While I'd like crits and to keep the resistance debuff of opportunity, I can't see that flying. Likely it will be one or the other. As I tend to like consistent performance from my characters, crits are not exactly ideal, but I'd rather just have them on, and at a picked value which is deemed to be where the damage should sit. This can be tuned pretty specifically. So I'd probably just ditch the opportunity mechanic altogether, increase defensive values to 75% (over 70%) since defensive opportunity is going away, increase the scalar to 1.0, and add crits which are finely tuned to make damage where the devs think it ought to be. Oh, and as to range as defense, yes in many cases it works quite well, and can make some content almost laughable. However that is nowhere close to 100% of the time. There are of course 2 main issues. First is if you are in a mission where space is tight- then you simply don't have range as an option, and the enemies will be in your face and you can't avoid it (even caltrops don't guarantee anything). Second is when you fight enemies heavy on ranged attacks. They do exist and can hurt quite a bit. I was playing my elec/bio stalker who hovers and uses caltrops to keep things out of my face. I was doing incarnate content (DA arcs), and had it set to +4x8. I went into a mission where you deal with the BP, and damn if those guys aren't heavy on ranged smackdown. I got slaughtered. Caltrops didn't help. Being at range didn't help (they happily blasted away). Having defenses past softcap (but not to incarnate softcap) didn't cut it at all. I had to tune the difficulty down to finish the mission. I have tanks and brutes that can do that mission on that setting without a hiccup.