JasperStone

You have been given some great suggestions. @Ukase ... wow as always 🙂 I have been running a Sonic/ Marine Affinity, which has been lovely. Sonic has a tic of -res, which is nice. Example: Screech is nice to pummel bosses and AVs with as it has a fast recharge - By bursting forth with this hypersonic Screech, you can inflict high damage and disorient a target. This power applies short Sonic Vibrations, which have a lower resistance for 8s, and prolonged Sonic Vibrations for 15s. By the time it wears off ... the power has recharged, and you hit them again. Marine Affinity is loaded with buffs/debuffs—team and self—which is nice. It's really nice on a team with three other Marine Affinity, and nobody really worries about the green or blue bar much. Soothing Wave is a team heal that also hits you, not big green numbers, but enough and debuffs DMG on your foes. Whitecap - is a self-teleport that does knockdown and -RES. Nice to use with the nuke in your primary Shifting Tides is subtle but can be impactful if you chose the right teammate...usually the tanker - Select either a friend or foe to create a field of shifting tides around them. When attacked, foes within the shifting tides will provide you and your allies a stacking Rising Tide buff that increases ToHit, Damage, and Recharge. Enemies may also take bonus damage, with the odds rising per stack. So that is a perspective on that combo. I ran it successfully solo, mostly at level since I am chasing badges. 🙂 But ....... As @Snarky said ... play what you like.

Dinner first, mmmmmkay? And not until after the third date

I just ran a Sonic/ Marine Affinity Corr. Marlo Polo Bio: Yeah.... my brother ... the famous one

Leaders need a popup menu power that lets them boot someone from the team

OP.... With much love..... Are you having a fever dream? Mushroom induced hallucinations?

I got chu ...

Thank you @Snarky and @Laucianna for your much valued and knowledgeable responses. My response was based on the OP having only four posts since 2021.... I felt that it was best to give them a direction so they could evaluate their proposal.

Good suggestion. Have you checked out this thread?

Wow..... Good find and Thank you.

Lovely. and if someone forgets to switch to Self and Pets only, they can be asked to do so and won't lose flying

Thank you. But .... Dark Miasma - Focus the dark power of the Netherworld to weaken your foes. Dark Miasma focuses on draining your opponent Electrical Affinity - control and manipulate electricity to aid your allies and weaken your enemies. Kinetics - manipulate the potential energy found in objects to aid your allies or weaken your foes. Marine Affinity - Command the various powers of the ocean to buff your allies, and wash away your enemies Nature Affinity - command over the forces of nature and are able to call forth primal energies to aid your allies and hinder your foes Pain Domination - Ultimately this grants the user powerful healing, buffing and debuffing powers. Its healing output is unmatched Time Manipulation - Time Manipulation allows the wielder to inflict crippling debuffs, buff and heal allies, and also be able to empower effects on single targets through careful use of Time Crawl and Temporal Selection So yes, they heal. And they DeBuff your foes. If you want that, play the sets that do that. I have heard that advice in other threads about a player not liking how Powerset1 doesn't perform like Powerset2. Well ... play powerset 2. Empathy - Empathy gives you the ability to heal and aid allies as well as yourself. Empathy has no offensive powers, but its heals and buffs are unmatched*. The team focus is its uniqueness. Empathy has three heals. DM and Kinetics requires targeting foes so they can miss Nature has two minor heals Pain does very well with 3 and an aura - evil side of Empathy - I run it and like it. Time does well with 2 plus a good regen. Why does Empathy have to be like them? I will say yet again. Empathy does need addressing. Bolster the healing somehow. Add aspects that other powersets don't have. Can Absorb get stacked via an Empath? Can you get a FULL bar of Absorb via an Empath or by having multiple Emapths on a team? Bolster the buffs. Consider adding something like Natures Bloom that boosts certain powers or aspects of powers. OR The more Empaths on a team the greater healing ability etc. (with a reasonable cap) Make the Green numbers from an Empath unobtainable by any comparable powerset Keep it Team oriented. Keep out any offense. *but its heals and buffs are unmatched* this was written prior to some of these sets ... buffs are so now not so much

Its uniqueness is that it's Team-focused Heals and Buffs. It is only a generic Heal-bot if you play it that way. Every AT can be turned into a Generic. A Tank just Taunting - doing nothing else. I just played with one recently. They never threw a punch, lol. A Controller just spamming holding with no concern where mobsare. A Blaster just hitting the nuke and running out - doing nothing else. Etc.

I have stated within my posts that the set needs to change. Repeatedly stated it. As a Legacy set, the game is in a different place now. Your changes strip the set of its uniqueness and make it a generic set. You cite external reasons to make those changes: Play *4 content (this itself is problematic as I see teams being built around specific ATs) poor ability of players to play the set None of that should be considered. If it does this time, then every powerset needs to be addressed this way. Precedent matters. You purposely misrepresent the powerset and its powers and how it contributes to a team. That, again, can become a precedent for other players to do the same to make changes. I do want to balance the set for where the game is now. This can be done by looking at other sets and making changes to Empathy that make it akin to them but still maintain its uniqueness. Your changes do not that. You and others have also misrepresented my response to the proposed changes. As I was reminded recently, this is a forum. ALL topics are open for discussion—for and against. I see more and more people getting upset that they post something they think brilliant and get pushback on it. We are not minions We won't blindly cheer every proposal.

It was part of a research project lol.

David Myers - Twixt A professor who did this as a behavior study for a paper. Problem 1: There is no IRB number that I recall. Institutional Review Board. This institutional group provides ethical and regulatory oversight of research involving human subjects. Lacking this, what he was doing was unethical and invalid since it involved humans. Problem 2: Not sure if Devs of CoH were aware or given permission. Huge No no. Problem 3; Can't remember exactly everything he did, but I vaguely remember them being considered dirty Because of Tenure he did not lose his job. Lucky for him. "Dying in PvP doesn't give you debt as long as you die in PvP. Player kills don't hurt your experience. The catch was that Twixt wasn't interested in getting player kills, he would actually avoid it. He, instead, would teleport your character and paralyze it next to PvE mobs that were present in the zone. By paralyzing your character, it would leave you helpless while the PvE mobs actually killed you, thus getting you debt." iltat Also: "If Twixt had been doing the one killing, there would have been no issue at all. In fact, many players used the teleport power to bring victims into little traps (consisting of mines, timed bombs, or other things) to get themselves easy kills without so much as a single complaint against them. Instead, Twixt was specifically gaming the system to cause debt for the other players." iltat His whole premise was ... no RULE said he couldn't do what he was doing. Here is an old reddit link from iltat worth a scroll to see what Twixt actually did:

Thank you. In bold is more of my point. Again, thank you. Making changes because a set is not doing what other sets are doing is not something I am not for. Yes, legacy sets need to be addressed. Empathy among them. I agree with that. Just not these changes and also the why given. This set means more to me than I have addressed. This was my first AT and my main on Live. It's the first one I remade. Like the OP Both of us have played the set extensively. Is my opinion more right? Hardly It does give me just as much right to voice my opinion as the OP. In the forums I have a right to speak my mind This is not Gatekeeping. Not at all. I will repeat it: change is needed. Not these changes and not the reason why. I find the way these recommended changes have been presented abhorrent and unlike anything I have experienced in the forums. Now and Live Repugnant: The entire presentation is off-putting. Despite other disagreements in the forums, I still felt heard. A self-declared master of a powerset, a definitive reworking Claiming all this support of the reworking ... There is a growing sense of division in the forums and in-game, where only certain players are considered worthy of being heard. It becomes tiresome. If the OP is RPing, fine... sorta. But not really. If this is trolling ...ugh. I used to play regularly with multiple alternate characters, but now I have a new job with significant responsibilities, so I don't have as much time to play. I am not known to anyone in the forums because my forum name is different from my in-game name. It might surprise some of the more vocal forum members to learn that I have played with many of them multiple times on different alts. As always, I appreciate the work of the Devs and GMs. Like most, I teared up when I heard the log-in music for the first time in a long time, knowing I would be home shortly. Thank you for providing a space to let me speak my mind about aspects of the game. Thank you for the opportunity to have a space to give life to all the characters in my head The journey with CoH was lovely.

Opinion And desirability on advanced mode shouldn't be a factor. Alot of people don't play advanced mode. Opinion

"Empathy gives you the ability to heal and aid allies as well as yourself. Empathy has no offensive powers, but its heals and buffs are unmatched." Straight from the Wiki, and I still agree with it. Powersets need to be examined without comparing them to what other sets do. Not what this set. So that can go off the list. 6/10 is your opinion ... mine is 8/10 or 9/10 because, yes, when you do compare, some sets are faster ...*shrug* However... Filling your Green Bar is a buff. I point to Absorb Pain, where you sacrifice your hitpoints and self-healing to aid a teammate. Not sure any powerset does that. RAs .... Green and Blue Bar Buff. Let's look at the Blue Bar. Mitigating endurance has been a topic of discussion in a few recent threads. Clear Mind .... Buff Fortitude and AB ... Buffs Your opinion ...this IS what Empathy is so 10/10 for me 3 dedicated Healing powers. Yes, it would be nice IF they added a little to these, but that means you must take away something. Resulting in Slower Recharge and higher Endurance Cost Would it be nice if Healing Aura had an Enemy debuff? Sure, but what is the cost to the power? Less healing? Higher recharge? Higher End cost? I point to Absorb Pain again. It has a tiny endurance cost, and I think even the manual warns about overusing this power. I will almost agree with 7/10 ... but see it more as a 8/10. Full bars and debt protection. Not the worst in the game. Because of experience, I would like this to be: TP to me. Often, I have to deal with a melee type who goes off to the other side of the map and dies. Or somebody goes down amid combat, and I want to rez them out of the fray. This saves me a power slot. I don't have to take tp. If we add other buffs ... what are we taking away? Not what the set is. So that goes off the list. I want a diversification of set options, but given what empathy is, I am not sure that it is feasible. Alot of players are all about procs ... I am more about the set bonuses. Clear Mind and Rez take no sets and it would nice if they did

I feel it is worth saying that changes are necessary because the game has changed I have said that. Not this way. Not this approach. Basing changes on one's opinion of bad play sets a bad precedent. Now, every powerset needs to be addressed this way. Every single one. Then we have a plain vanilla choice of options. I'm afraid I have to disagree with zero reason to bring an Empath. If the bar is *4 ... No. There are players that don't play that content at all, so that shouldn't be a measure of the powerset. Some play only with So's Not subpar and still viable.

You did not. You focused on making derogatory remarks about people's play style. And when a Dev reprimanded you .... you talked down to them.

Got it! Make it so!

Talking down to us and the Devs doesn't help your case

Your opinion of poor performance. Improve the set ... by focusing on the set and the demands of the game.

You missed the people who did not. What People? Agreed. Just not this.