Eldyem

Going to chime in and say that I am not a fan, at all, of any sort of combo system being add with Fortitude. It just doesn't feel that into the spirit of the set to me, and I'm increasingly tired of combos being the go-to way to "fix" sets. Personal proposals Absorb Pain - I think it'd be neat if the Caster got an absorb bubble for the amount they healed. In another world I'd say making this a toggle that works similarly-ish to Spirit Ward + Oppressive Gloom would be neat, but I think that ship has sailed. This power is honestly in a terrible place considering just how much Heal Other can heal, though, and it needs a serious adjustment. Clear Mind - Add a lot of status resistance to this, and make it AoE. I think all the Clear Mind clones need to just be AoE at this point. Mez is honestly not an enjoyable mechanic but Clear Minding your team constantly is even less so. The Auras - I really do think these should just be bigger AoEs. Gathering for Auras is incredibly unfun and I'm just going to do without 9/10 times. I don't think Empathy will ever be an "impactful" set without these being reliably applied to most of the team most of the time they're cast, and that's not going to happen with the current radii. Adrenaline Boost - I've always felt like this would've been a good choice for being made immune to recharge, but with a massively reduced recharge (preferably low enough to be made perma). Right now a big issue with Emp is that it scales very well - too well - with recharge reduction, which means the baseline without that reduction has to be in an absolutely atrocious spot to be "balanced". While there are builds/teams out there that probably get the recharge under 90 seconds, I think a change to no-recharge/90 seconds recharge would be a welcome addition to the set on SOs while changing barely anything for IO'd out characters, significantly smoothing out the difference. Since both Auras will still scale with recharge, I don't think this would be problematic. I imagine this isn't the most popular suggestion, though. I really like the backup rez idea - I think it's very in the flavor of Empathy as a set and is uniquely strong since you often only rez when things are going REALLY bad or when the same person keeps getting themselves in trouble.

I understand where it is timeline wise, I just feel like the plot is incredibly disjointed. If I haven't done Mind of a King, the idea that they're stealing electricity for an evil plot (or even capable of plotting) is borderline nonsensical. At this point, my character should just think they're annoying wind-up toys that steal scrap to make more. I just don't feel compelled by the Synapse TF, so I feel a little bad for the Clockwork King because I can come up with all sorts of hypothetical, non-evil plots, and also because on some level, post-reveal, I have absolutely zero idea what he could possibly want with that electricity. I get that his motivations are supposed to be nonsensical/crazy, because he's nonsensical/crazy, but Synapse expects me to jump to conclusions here and, considering the Clockwork King's actual backstory, that makes me feel a little bad for him (in hindsight). Like, I just find this plotline incredibly uncompelling and bland on top of being a slog. If I'm going to sit through an extremely long task force, I want to feel like it's necessary and urgent, and the current plotline fails there. Nothing about it (content, storyline, length) is enjoyable to me outside of the Babbage fight, and any rework needs to address that it's kind of a failure on every point (in my opinion, at least).

Storyline-wise, Synapse's TF has always felt incredibly unsatisfying, and a part of it is because I have no idea what the actual stakes are, plus the Clockwork King's backstory kind of has me rooting for him a little. I'd be fine with the slog if I agreed with the end-goal, but because the TF both drags on and glosses over key points, I kind of feel like a bad person at the end. Why does he want the city's power? What is Babbage? Why do we never address what Blue Steel did? The whole arc is built around the twist, but the twist is unsatisfying and answers essentially none of my actual questions and actually just raises a lot more. The Clockwork King gets way better characterization in essentially every mission he shows up in outside of this task force. In all fairness, the shadow clones are only bosses. The worst situations with them are when several have elec or ice power sets and the debuffs stack heavily; otherwise a group should be able to zerg rush them so long as you all target through the tank. They have barely any health in the grand scheme of things.

I think that the Insight lockout is the reason Psi feels so terrible. I understand that there was a desire to not be a "hit three times and then use a big attack" set again but the loooong lockout feels atrocious when Insight is random enough as-is. I feel like I'm doing good, not great, damage with Insight up and trash damage without it. It's just an awkward mechanic that messes up the flow of the set. I actually really like Psi's bizarre animations, very JoJo's Bizarre Adventure meets Psylocke, but I can't for the life of me figure out how they came to that artistic direction.

While this is true and completely fair, I think I'd rate Earth Assault above a lot of other Earth sets, and Psionic Assault is probably up there too (are we counting Mind Control as a Psi set? Illusion Control? Willpower?). If we're giving a bump for sets compared to other sets on the AT, I think some of the assault sets could come out on top. Earth Assault - Everything I've ever wanted in a melee Assault set, only held back by having some of the absolute worst ranged attacks, most notably no Snipe. But Seismic Smash + Mud Pots gives this melee DPS potential far beyond essentially any other assault set. Seismic Smash's synergy with Domination is also pretty nice. Earth Control - Extremely reliable control set that is negatively impacted by long animations. The AoE Hold puts most other AoE holds to shame. Stone Mastery - Seismic Smash has ridiculous DPS (a recurring theme), Rock Armor is nice for getting S/L defense, but Controller Ancillaries have very stiff competition. Stone Armor - Extremely meh set in a modern environment, Granite Armor is overkill in most content people do without IOs, and redundant in content most people are doing IO'd out. Has essentially no niche. Non-granite builds are just sort of mediocre. Stone Melee - Has essentially nothing over Earth Assault but several negatives in comparison to it, is relatively forgettable as a set, only saving grace is that Seismic Smash exists.

Atomic Blast (the Radiation Blast T9) is a PBAoE. Ice's single target hasn't been specifically notable since the snipe buffs (procs aside) as far as I'm aware. Blizzard is the set stand-out, I do not think this was a balancing decision, I think it is just the natural end result of power creep. I will say that while I do not think more power creep is a good thing for the game, I am also willing to say that I'm not sure it'd be bad for the game. I do, however, think alternate choices are a can of worms that the current devs are right to reject, because there's no world where it doesn't immediately devolve into constant begging for very specific RP-oriented powers. It's a lot of dev resources for a small handful of people per individual power, and a massive undertaking to appease only a portion of those people.

I strongly disagree with this; Ring of Fire outdamages several Blaster T1s in terms of damage per animation. Stone Prison is outdamaged by several pool powers.

I'm not slotting these powers for immobilize, so short of having some truly absurd set bonuses I don't see what this would possibly change. Immobs already take a fairly decent array of procs, already have a great uptime to recharge ratio, and already take damage sets. In all fairness about slotting, Control set Immobs have 90% (1.2x) accuracy baseline. While there's some outliers that would probably need looked at (Fire Manip's Ring of Fire, maybe), I don't think it'd be that absurd to apply this (or a slightly lower version of it) to the in Secondaries.

These are primarily taken for damage/setting containment (to do damage) on Controllers. To this end, I personally would like if some of the longer animating ones (Earth comes to mind) would do a little bit more damage. It's sort of unfortunate that Control sets with a lot of damage already like Fire (and I think Plant?) have the significantly better versions of a power that primarily does damage.

I think this would be a great response if we were in a situation where even one Tanker (or Tank at all in some upper-level content) was preferred, but we just aren't. When the desired number of Tankers for most content is zero, multiplying how many I want or need still leaves me with zero. There is no min/maxed content where I actually want a second Tanker in any situation at the moment, and exceedingly little where I want a first one. at the same time, I'm not going to reject a Tanker for any content at the moment either. The current aggro cap is irrelevant to this; we'd either have to have a punishingly small aggro cap for me to really think "maybe we need a second tank" from a min/max perspective, or we'd have to have content that throws difficult to kill, gruelingly strong hordes of enemies at us at reliable spots. This game has neither. As an aside, off-tanks exist in other MMOs because other MMOs have tank swap mechanics. If any given Final Fantasy 14 or WoW or whatever other MMO team could drop a tank class for another DPS, they would in a heartbeat; CoX lets us do so, and so we (theoretically) do, except there's not really any content where people feel the need to push the envelope that hard.

I'm fairly certain it also buffs some defense buffs that aren't flagged to ignore outside sources. It's supposed to make other powers stronger, the way Power Boost does.

I get the logic on some level, but I think as just a design philosophy there's something incredibly unfair about Scrappers and Stalkers getting variants of sets that just ignore a portion of their mechanic - it feels like there's something intrinsically wrong with the set design if we can't just make them work with the mechanic but somehow can make other sets work with it. Pushing Scrapper/Stalker damage down while leaving Tanker/Brute damage in place feels unfair. If the disparity of Scrappers/Stalkers getting Power Siphon AND crits while the other two get nothing is a problem, then add the Power Siphon recharge to Brutes/Tankers. KM is, to my knowledge, middle-bottom of the pack, and I don't think pushing it up a few places is problematic, especially if we fully uncouple Power Siphon recharge and crits so that ATOs don't make it too crazy.

My biggest issue with KM's design is that I just don't care about the last 2 powers. I can have my full game single target rotation down by level 4, which leaves very little to look forward to. I think there's plenty of issues with the set - Repulsing Torrent has a bizarre design philosophy for a melee set, Power Siphon doesn't feel like it works right, and the overall damage feels like I'm working extra hard for middling gains at best - but by the time I have Burst the set feels "over". Focused Burst and Concentrated Strike feel bizarrely bad. I've seen a lot of suggestions for Concentrated Strike, but I think it should also just have a normal crit for Scrappers and Stalkers. I also generally agree with Power Siphon either refreshing all stack durations or having much longer stack times; it's presently worse than build up in a lot of situations, which is a terrible thing for a build up replacement to be. As an aside, I think the animations with /Shield look really awful, but I'm not sure what could be done to fix them.

I assume you're talking more about Melee/Blast T1s than other ones, because that's where the choice is less "Does this offer utility I need?" and more "Which one of this is the objectively better attack?" And in those situations, I just check, but I usually wait for a level 20-something respec to do so because I don't want my opinion of any given set tainted (though I will say Psychic Blast managed to taint my opinion of it all on its own). In all fairness, most T1s and T2s don't have a big difference, and I personally find I usually want both anyways. For those that don't fit that mold - most notably a good handful of Melee sets, especially on Tankers for some reason - I just don't ever use the "bad" power once I no longer need it. You usually have enough room in any given build, even relatively min/maxed ones, to fit a couple powers you don't intend to slot, and while it'd be nice to fit a global bonus like a Luck of the Gambler in there, I don't really feel like I'm missing that much by losing a power choice to Jab or Mental Blast or Entangling Arrow. As for T9s, it really depends, but I do feel like a large portion of T9s, except for Armor T9s, are good nowadays. Mastermind's Pet T9s aren't skippable, Control T9s offer pets for every set except Mind Control, and those T9s do a large portion of your damage and I would very very strongly recommend against skipping them. Melee T9s, along with Dominator Assault T9s, are just generic attacks and may or may not be skippable based on the set, though the majority of them are usually pretty good powers. Blast T9s are incredibly strong nukes and I would personally recommend taking them. Blaster Manipulation T9s are all over the place and need to be taken on a set-by-set basis. Support T9s are usually cornerstones of the set, but some of them questionable, redundant, or just kind of weird and bad (Time Bomb in Traps is all three!). I think trial and error is the main way to really know if a power is skippable; while there are some powers that look bad on paper and turn out to be bad in practice, you have enough power choices that you can often experiment, and, in all honesty, the game just isn't all that hard after a certain point so no one will ever be upset that you took Shiver or Clarity or most other powers that really aren't all that great - with the main exception being Intangibles, which might upset a few people because they do actively get in the way of other people's enjoyment of the game if they're used improperly while being sort of inconsequential when used properly.

I don't think this really fixes the issue at all - a pack is generously worth ~14 million inf, and 100 merits spent on convertors, sold at 50,000, is still 15 million inf. If, say, Winter Packs were buyable at 100 with merits, I think there'd be a strong incentive towards buying them with merits during non-Winter months, as it would vastly increase the inf per merit of buying the pack. But it also makes winter IOs extremely accessible - is that something we actually want? Or, perhaps, if there were merit-exclusive Enhancement sets. But I think that takes out some of the fun of random drops - is "saving" merits worth alienating some of the playerbase?

I'm also going to recommend Defender, but not for the same reasons as everyone else; Venomous Gas, the T9 power (for everyone except Masterminds; I also think their variant, Noxious Gas, is amazing, though) is an absolute game-changer for the set, and getting it sooner makes the set feel better faster, in my opinion. Poison is, in my opinion, quite a bit under-tuned as a set overall due to specific values (mainly -Regen) not being comparable to other sets that offer similar values of debuffs, but Venomous Gas requires minimal effort to apply an honestly fairly absurd debuff in a large area with minimal effort beyond standing a little closer than you might otherwise. In terms of alternative sets with close-enough visuals, I honestly think Radiation Emission can look very poison-y, as can essentially all Dark sets, especially Miasma/Control if you're willing to put up with the bizarreness of the pets (though Haunt in particular can be "explained away" as a Scarecrow-esque take on Poison, to me). And there's a Toxic-damage build for Arachnos Soldiers out there somewhere, though its something of a gimmick in my opinion due to Toxic being a type that is resisted strongly when something does resist it.

The email menus are currently awful to navigate; the email menu itself is so small and trying to expand it just expands the wrong side.

I sort of agree with this honestly - Venomous Gas is a fantastic power but the implementation of it is so wonky that it often feels like more trouble than it's worth. Otherwise, sets I think need to be looked at a little; Force Bubble - I actually like this, but the existence of Hurricane in /Storm makes me really question why it's not... better? Like the few times where I've really felt like Force Bubble would be notably useful, Hurricane also would've worked. Painbringer - Worse Adrenalin Boost is... sad? I don't personally see AB as being super great - it's not bad, but it's not like Fulcrum Shift or Chrono Shift - so having a powerset get a worse variant is really unfortunate. Liquifey - Another power that's not terrible but being so meh while coming at the tail end of a set that is already somewhat unimpressive really makes me question this design choice. Also, as a side note; it really does feel like the worse a set is, the worst it's T9 is. Sets where the first 8 powers are great get great T9s (Kinetics, Time, Nature) and sets that are sort of meh otherwise get terrible ones. What's up with that?

Unlike other MMOs, defensive cooldowns just aren't really a think in CoH, so I understand why people struggle to use click powers like this effectively; every other defensive click, bar maybe Icy Bastion or Shadow Meld, is either (somewhat) trivially made perma or is better off used reactively. IH, in its current state, feels designed for a completely different type of game.

Slotting one or two of the global defense IOs in it is more powerful than anything the power itself does (Grounded in Elec is in a similar spot). Absolutely this. Regen's regen is oftentimes worse than Willpower's; that's absolutely absurd when you think about it. Regen needs some sort of layered defense as an active

I like this idea, but I do think it has sort of a negative feedback loop with the possibility of enemies resisting the confuse. What about just giving it a strong -Res effect for mostly the same general effect, but no possibility of creating an uberboss that one shots me? I'm personally not the biggest fan of a permanently converted pet because, truth be told, I'd just convert a support (Sappers or Force Mages or whatever) 9/10 times and that's really not that fun all things considered. I also think a major issue of slotting a pet into Mind Control is that Mind, especially solo, largely wants to avoid situations where they're accidentally hitting the wrong things, at least from my perception.

Sometimes I find it really difficult to tell if my pets are actually doing anything valuable; for example, Gremlins often feel like they're just kind of causing havoc and not doing much in the way of real damage, I've never really given a second thought to whatever it is Fly Trap is ever doing, since Seeds of Confusion is always rolling and Carrion Creepers are often as well, and I'm pretty sure Umbra Beast just howls on a loop. Singularity is really good at what it does, and Fire Imps are also really good at what they do, but I often feel like the other pets are just there in a lot of content. It's way too late now, but I think putting pets at the end of control sets was something of a mistake design-wise that we're just sort of stuck with now. And the difference in utility between Seeds and Mass Confusion doesn't justify a 4x longer cooldown. I would personally say Mass Confusion's CD should be half, if not a quarter, of what it is right now.

It's also a concern because "well enough" is a variable concept that is in constant flux as part of the notes on difficulty Luminara made. The truth is that (enough) people don't want to always win even when they're doing poorly so MMOs have to have the ability to fail, as group-oriented games failure has to be based on the group working together, and someone not contributing as much as other people - such as by playing a "bad" class - ultimately punishes other players. I want to be able to lose. I don't want to lose. The goal of many MMOs is to ultimately get class balance right such that the majority of content is beatable by the majority of players playing the majority of classes without classes ultimately being identical and while still providing, at the very least, the illusion of skill mattering (unless, of course, the game actually makes skill matter). Applied to City of Heroes, nerfs become warranted when a powerset, IO, or whatever else begins to negatively impact even the thin illusion of skill that the game is wrapped in. Threatening this illusion threatens the core structure of City of Heroes being a game, but as a concept simply mirroring an already subjective standard, this illusion is placed on different levels for everyone and perhaps doesn't even exist at all for individuals who are playing for reasons outside of gameplay per se. Applied very broadly, MMO devs are largely in the business of making money. Nerfing outliers makes them money. Dozens, if not hundreds, of MMO devs are not working together to not make money out of some divine principle of MMO development that is wholly unrelated to the ability to make money - they are doing so because nerfs, at the end of the day, contribute to maintaining healthy playerbases which in turn pulls in more players which in turn generates revenue.

Stalkers - usually considered the best users of Staff due to the act they pick up some great powers that round out the set - only have access to Form of the Body, so the best users of the set are typical single-stanced because they don't have access to the other forms. Probably not helpful for what you asked, but worth considering. Staff's damage is kind of blah on Brutes/Tankers/Scrappers so you probably don't want to leave Body because you need that extra damage; Soul and Mind also just aren't super useful effects for most builds because you generally want to get End-neutral as soon as possible, and you can stack more reliable recharge from other sources (since the fluctuating nature of the stacks makes them not-reliable for builds that need recharge). Using the alt forms when leveling isn't terrible, but it's just not optimal because there's not a lot of reasons to do so unless you're really struggling with End in specific content.

"Fixing" Energy Transfer's nerf would go a long way towards making the set better - I would also consider giving it the (applicable) buffs Dominator Energy Assault received. Energy Melee's current meta flaws are by design and aren't fixable without changing the set significantly. A second AoE would be nice but outside of making ET an AoE or something crazy I can't see that happening. Kinetic Melee is literally "What if we cloned Claws, but made it bad?" which I still can't believe was possible. That being said, I think KM's big flaw is the same as EM's - the level 32 melee attacks, Concentrated Strike and Energy Transfer, are absolute garbage for no reason.