Eldyem
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Posts posted by Eldyem
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5 minutes ago, arcane said:
I have a feeling Assault sets are going to be ranked near the bottom by a lot of people. I don’t really agree that Electric Assault is a bad dominator secondary, but most dominator secondaries are going to struggle to look attractive next to pure ranged with nukes and pure melee with heavier hitting attack chains. It’s just an awkward comparison.
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. -
4 hours ago, Snarky said:
Elec Blast and Radiation Blast (ranged) do the exact same damage as Energy Blast and Dark Blast (PBAoE) tier 9s. Not sure where you are getting your info. AR has always been an odd duck. It is not comparable easily due to it being a cone rather than a circle. Plus, wasnt it crashless right from the outset, built in? Archery is also completely different.
Atomic Blast (the Radiation Blast T9) is a PBAoE.
23 minutes ago, ForeverLaxx said:As it's only good AoE option. Frost Breath and Ice Storm are just not great options by themselves, especially when you consider how strong Ice's single target game is.
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.
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On 1/19/2021 at 8:03 PM, Dracomicon said:
3) No under or over performers.
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.
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14 hours ago, Zepp said:
Note: I do not take ST immobilize; I am not alone in this.
Observation: Some have requested damage-related adjustments / more variety of accessible IOs.
Query: Would creating 1-3 Immobilize sets along the same lines as the new Endurance Modification sets (Power Transfer & Synapse's Shock) wherein damage is modified by some/many of the enhancements change your calculations?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.
14 hours ago, tidge said:Obviously this question in geared towards primaries, where there is a choice. My answer is I never take a T1 Single-Target Immobilize, if I can help it - see point below about secondaries being forced to take them.
My dislikes:
- At low levels, the Immobilize offers very little practical benefit when facing enemies. Many enemies will still be able to attack, meanwhile you have the other enemies in the group who are not immobilized.
- Single-Target Immobilizes require slots/investment to be reliable (because you must actually HIT) and/or try to leverage them into having an expanded role.
- IMO, the Immobilize enhancement sets are among the least useful in the game... despite the fact that they have a Very Rare set, while powers using Fear do not. Almost every AT with a ST immobilize has a better place to invest slots. Seriously: why does Immobilize get enhancement sets love (and bonus from sets) while Fear did not?
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.
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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.
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8 hours ago, EmperorSteele said:
One of the devs, I forget if it was 6 or Powerhouse, opined that raising the agro cap actually makes Tankers even LESS desired on a team, because you need fewer Tanks to control all the agro. If one tank can herd an entire room/floor/map, why bother with a 2nd tank, especially when the need for more AoE damage becomes more apparent?
I was fairly on the side of raising the cap until I read that, and really have had a really hard time trying to come up with a suitable a rebuttal.
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.
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1 hour ago, siolfir said:
I agree with you, but in the Energy Melee discussion it was brought up that Total Focus (same damage/recharge/endurance cost) hit too hard to have a full damage critical. I was also pushing for a higher percentage on Total Focus, and instead critical damage was added to Energy Transfer. That's why I suggested - since it also recharges Power Siphon, and Total Focus now grants Energy Focus - that it share the critical damage percentage that Total Focus has (28% of base damage).
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.
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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. -
15 hours ago, Take One said:
Or put Hero/Villain/Winter Packs up for sale on the merit vendor, for 100/250 merits a piece. It makes more sense to roll random loot this way than to be told to buy some meta-salvage enhancement converters, sell it on the AH, then use the inf from that to get what you actually want. At 100/250 merits I think they are competitively priced compared to buying the exact ATO you want, instead of rolling for it randomly. You usually get some other nice stuff in the packs too. But if other people have a better grasp on what you usually get in a pack, and think my prices are way off, then I'm sure they will show up to tell me.
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.
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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.
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19 hours ago, Heraclea said:
The only support set I can really get my head around is Poison, this mostly because most of the powers are aimed at enemies rather than teammates, and not having to worry about the durability of your 'anchor' makes it much more fun to play. I have a poison/dark defender at 50, also a plants/poison controller.
Venomous Gas is underwhelming, one of the few Poison powers I might suggest is skip-worthy. It basically works as a taunt aura. Most of the time you will be avoiding melee on such a character, so it's rather hard to say how valuable its debuff is. Most of the time what it does is get you killed, where you forget to turn it off and it spoils your stealth.
I do have Time on a Beast/Time MM, but I don't have a whole lot of time racked up on the character.
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?
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13 hours ago, Brutal Justice said:
I feel like a lot of people try to use IH as a save click. Clicking it when they start to notice they are in trouble, hoping it will save them. It’s much better used as a preventative click. Proactive instead of reactive. As a toggle it filled that proactive role and performed much higher.
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.
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1 hour ago, Ironblade said:
Overall, I like it a lot. Ironblade is broadsword/regen and he was the first character I made when I started playing just before the 1st anniversary. He has remained my favorite and most-played character.
My only gripe would be that Resilience has such low numbers that it's basically useless. So much so that I have never even considered taking the power - on Ironblade. I DID take it on another scrapper to see if it was as useless as I thought and I decided it was.
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).
19 minutes ago, ShardWarrior said:I agree with Bill here. I can only speak to the melee version as I have not tried the Sentinel version. The melee version needs a complete overhaul in my opinion. The nerf pendulum swung much too far on this set over the years. Far too reliant on clicks for survival and in my own personal experience far, far outclassed by other sets at the end game level. Turning IH back into a toggle would be a good start.
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
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2 hours ago, kiramon said:
I'm fine with them leaving mass confuse as is -- but perhaps they could add a buff to it to make the mobs do more damage (that Seeds does NOT get). Like +300% damage or something, cap them out.
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.
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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.
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11 minutes ago, Blastit said:
The point of game balance in an MMO is so that people can pick whichever theme they like most and not eat shit for it. If the wizard and the knight both contribute to a team "well enough" then nobody is going to feel left out just because they play what they want to play, particularly in a time-intensive genre like MMOs. "Uncompetitive", sure, but just because nobody is getting ranked it doesn't mean that they aren't getting anything for their victories. If one class is much stronger than another then that class can get more resources quicker. This is a concern in MMOs because there is usually an economy of sorts in which you can purchase new gear, new toys, pets, mounts and so on.
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.-
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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.-
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"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.
1 hour ago, Myrmidon said:And now I care less about Energy Melee and more about a Kinetic Melee buff.
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.
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Personally, I want more differences based on AT for certain Powersets. Think the Scrapper-Stalker divergences (Assassin's Strike, etc) but less generically applied to the AT. I'd also expand Inherents somewhat so sets aren't clogged with 20 different ways to format "Hide" or "Build Up" or whatever.
A complete endurance overhaul would also be nice, same with accuracy. I think more modern MMO design has moved away from these kinds of power limiters because they ultimately don't feel like rewards for building properly so much as they're punishments for not doing so. As a thought for Endurance - AT differences - Inherent changes, I think it could be interesting if T9s (in BOTH powersets) built off a AT-specific meter based on playing your AT "right" and you could choose which of the two you wanted to spend it on, with both being available at level 1, unenhanceable, and AT-specific (Blasters keep current nukes and get a strong, secondary themed buff, paired with a breakfree effect; Corruptors would have a more debuff-focused nuke that still hits very hard and a strong, themed debuff; Defenders would get a strong Primary-themed buff and a strong Secondary-themed debuff; some specific sets might buck the trend and have "unusual" ultimates, etc.) Or any other kind of resource-management system that's actually oriented around resource management. OH and I'd give Kheldians three "ults" based on form, maybe even keeping the meters distinct to encourage form shifting.
Accuracy I'd probably just replace with global critical hits, but with Scrappers / Stalkers getting a base modifier to either crit chance (so a Scrapper would always "out-crit" a Brute with similar slotting) or maybe just a crit damage modifier (so a Scrapper's crit would outdamage a Brute's). Or something to that effect - missing is just very unfun but SO slotting would literally just be 3 damage/3 recharge without it, which isn't exactly fun either. I'd keep dodging in the game though.I also think an overhaul of the IO system to be less global-based and more individually interesting (example: set bonuses that add procs, especially in sets that already include procs) would have helped a lot with the recharge creep we've found ourselves in, but that'd be a wildly different game.
I wouldn't really support any of these things happening to the current CoH we have, though. Just general ideas for the future of a CoH2; modernizing the game without losing charm.
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9 minutes ago, MangoKulfi said:
Defender
Sword Whomp
1. Hack
2. Taunt
3. ? Armor (S/L/Energy Resists)
4. Sword based hold (Foot Stab?)
5. Disembowel
Numbers would be Tank attacks and Scrapper armor I guess.
I'd personally love if a Sword-based epic pool had Parry somewhere in it.
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I love the Night Ward storyline and have run it several times, but that particular mission is easily one of the least fun possible if the team wipes, in my opinion. The Magician's arc is one of my favorites in the game, I think in part because the Night Ward is actually self-contained enough that I can imagine there being actual stakes.
I vaguely remember there being datamines that suggest that Autumnal Blast (as seen in the Magician's arc) might be being worked on, and I think it's a little disappointing we never got to see something like that.
That all being said, I fully understand why people don't regularly run that content - the difficulty to rewards ratio is very skewed in a game with otherwise very easy rewards.
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Psi Melee - Why so terrible?
in General Discussion
Posted
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.