macskull

Your first point has been discussed at length but there isn't a way to change HP separately between PvE and PvP and at this point lowering Blaster HP in PvE is a nonstarter. Adjusting Blaster base resistances might be a possible solution but with DR on damage resistance even a 10% or 20% reduction doesn't actually get significant results once you factor in epic/patron shields. Your second point is already being addressed on a case-by-case basis. Defender buffs are definitely not too good because DR means there's virtually no difference between what a Defender can do and a Corruptor/Controller can do. Debuffs are a little different but for the most part they're not in a bad place. The -res from Envenom was reduced in PvP a few patches back to address this concern though - this was never an issue before because Defenders didn't have Poison and the all-over-the-place power proliferation done after shutdown was done with no regard for PvP balance concerns.

If the only thing keeping players redside was the inability to play certain ATs blueside, then that's a pretty clear admission redside needed help and a lot of it. But let's look at the rest of this paragraph: Tankers sort of took a backseat to Brutes post-I18. That's been rectified by buffing Tankers, and now the two ATs have different playstyles and neither overshadows the other. End result of side switching: Tanker buffs. Defender vs Corruptor is only "a nonstop issue" on the forums. There are some powerset combinations which are clearly advantaged on one AT or the other, but for the most part it doesn't really matter and it comes down to personal preference. End result of side switching: nothing really changed, but had the Vigilance buff not happened in Issue 17 it probably would've happened after Going Rogue. Side-switching did make it painfully obvious how underwhelming Stalkers were, even with the scaling out-of-hide crit chance that was added (waaaaaaaaaaaay back in Issue 11, but no one seems to remember that). Thankfully they got some attention afterwards. Now you've got two ATs with different playstyles and different specializations. End result of side switching: Stalker buffs. Your Controller/Dominator comparison is a little weird to me because those two ATs don't really compete for the same role on a team. Controllers are control/support while Dominators are control/damage, meaning Dominators more accurately compete with Blasters. Dominators are cool and all, but outside of Domination they're just worse Controllers and worse Blasters. End result of side switching: Nothing really changed. What do we take away from this? Thanks to side-switching, the game as a whole is in a better place.

I saw an interesting suggestion: mez durations scale with team size so they're longer in 1v1 situations and shorter in 8v8 situations. I don't necessarily think that's the right solution, but mez working in a more dynamic fashion might be the only way to keep it from being next to useless in one scenario and brokenly good in another.

I think the biggest change between live and Homecoming is the accessibility of the "good stuff." On live you had to painstakingly grind out Incarnate progress, and even a modest IO build was hundreds of millions of inf unless you got lucky drops. Here it's very easy for me to come up with a character idea, level it, and IO/accolade/incarnate it, which makes me more willing to play especially compared to the other servers out there where things aren't quite so easy.

I'm referring to "trinity" as "tanks/heals/DPS," which thanks to relative character power level vs NPCs and the insane strength of buffs and debuffs means you never really needed all three. If everything's feeling more "samey" now it's at least partly because the average character is more powerful than they were back on live (this is A Good Thing) and partly because the game's been around for so long people have most of the nuances figured out. I like the ability to hop onto pretty much any team and have an expectation of being successful in most content, though I've found the ultimate determination of whether a team will be successful in any given content is the players behind the keyboard.

You keep doing this thing where you insist something that's broken because it is literally impossible to counter is the same as something that's "broken" because you don't like it. Man, I like you, but goddamn have you been so very wrong about this for the last two years.

The answer to your question is in the post you quoted.

TK's banned in most organized stuff for the same reason you like it - it's a broken power with no counter. It's super fun being able to do literally nothing for 20 seconds because someone clicked a button. At least pre-I13 you could pop a couple breakfrees to get out of the repel effect.

Not quite what you are talking about but there was discussion during the I27P3 beta testing about potentially using the signature story arc tech to assign players certain powers so everyone ends up with the same build, which would probably help get more people interested in PvP, but that's still a huge gap from the organized large-team stuff.

Because teams weren't using them for the mez, they were using them for Blaze -> Fossilize spikes. The hold from Fossilize was largely irrelevant if you had clean spikes since your target would be dead at the same time the hold would occur anyways. That team comp also wasn't really a HC-specific thing, the winning team from the 2011 Freedom PvP League ran Dom-heavy lineups with Earth/Fires for the exact same reason. The key difference between the Dark hold and the other examples you gave is the hold (like any other hold) literally had no counter. You could do nothing to avoid it, save hoping it just missed, and if not you got to sit there for the next 8 to 12 seconds hoping you'd live. The Dark hold wasn't really a problem in 8v8 stuff because as soon as the community found out it was busted they banned the power, it was way more broken in zone where you'd just get dogpiled by half a dozen enemy players with zero recourse. Sets and team lineups can be countered (that's part of the strategy of team PvP), but broken powers really can't be. As far as TK goes that power's been next to useless since the I13 changes, "we" didn't do anything to nullify it. If we're talking about control ATs as a whole, quite a few teams have run out of the box lineups with non-Emp Controllers but they're rare these days - not due to "total disregard of the control AT" but just because it's a lot of effort for mixed results. People point at Blasters and say "nerf these!" and there's been some of that already (Blaster +range from snipe powers is gone in PvP, for example) but other AT-wide PvP-specific changes which don't affect the AT in PvE are trickier. There's been discussion about adjusting Blaster HP but apparently that is a bit of a stretch.

That was a very much tongue-in-cheek post. A "Torchbearer needs your help" thread would be about as useful as this one, and this one's about as useful as a rusty spoon on steak night.

Not really on-topic, but the "holy trinity" was never really a thing in this game.

I'm going to assume you're speaking to the player-driven I27P1 and I27P2 PvP changes in this post, but if not I apologize. You keep saying this, but I'm struggling to think of any examples of powersets or ATs that have been made "absolute trash" because of Homecoming's PvP-related changes that weren't already in that category. Before you say "Dominators:" no. Most teams were running a 2-Emp 3-Blaster 3-Dominator lineup for a good part of 2019. Dominators didn't suddenly become bad, people just realized Natures and Rads/Poisons were more valuable in a lineup because they made the entire team less squishy. I'm also going to assume you're talking about the Dark Control hold getting its hold duration reduced (as a reminder, its original 8-second duration was a bug), but I find it difficult to believe you actually think an 8-second-base hold was okay in a game where mez protection literally did not exist. Fast forward to today, where you can actually get mez protection in PvP again, and an 8-second hold might be more workable. I'm not going to pretend the current mez system is great - but I'm also not going to pretend the old one was either. There's a middle ground somewhere, and I'm sure there's a solution players can mostly agree on.

Amusing and topically relevant information I found just now while checking the server status page: (So, Indom's population is 35% higher than Torchbearer's - bets on when the "Torchbearer needs your help" thread pops up?) (P.S. This thread and others like it got me to tracking player numbers on a weekly basis, my signature has the current graph. It's currently way too few data points to actually provide any trend analysis but it'll be interesting to see what it looks like in a month or two.)

My response to that question is basically "it's not that simple." In 8v8 stuff, melee is not particularly useful because of the specific timing required to defeat a target (attacks are coordinated, all damage comes in within a 2-to-3-second window, etc.) and because having to get into melee range to execute attacks is a dead giveaway which will make the target phase or jaunt away and ruin the spike. In smaller-team (think 3v3-type stuff) melee can be just fine since the concerns I described for large-team stuff aren't really there. In duels most melee characters can at worst force a draw by simply playing intelligently, and many times can beat ranged characters. In zone PvP it's a free for all and none of that really matters, but melee ATs are popular because they can shrug off huge amounts of damage while getting some decent attacks in occasionally. It's a damage/survivability balance: melee ATs tend to be way more survivable when played well than any ranged AT, but dealing consistent damage with a melee AT is more difficult because of the game's pace. You can't really slow down that pace without slowing it down for everyone, and that takes away probably the most unique thing about CoH PvP.

It all depends on how any such changes are handled and implemented. The stated intention of the I13 changes was to make PvP more accessible to the casual player (via a combination of raising the skill floor, lowering the skill ceiling, and ostensibly making more builds viable) but we all know how that turned out. It seems unlikely that any sweeping changes can be made to accomplish this goal without having negative effects on what makes PvP in this game great. (Yes, post-I13 PvP is still leagues better than what you'll find in many other MMOs from a pacing standpoint, which is mostly what drew people to it in the first place.) The community can probably suggest tweaks on a power or powerset basis to improve variety, but in all honestly the perceived lack of variety isn't a thing aside from the more-competitive 8v8 scene, and even then you get at least some variation in what any given team is running. I know this is an example, but I think this is offering a solution in search of a problem. Melee doesn't have much place in high-end 8v8 matches, but you see melee characters show up more often in small-team stuff and even more in zone - it wasn't uncommon a couple years back for over half the population in RV to be Scrappers, Tankers, and Stalkers. It gets really tricky trying to balance things when you have a single character able to effectively hold their own against a team of 4-6 people without any outside help: should that character also get Blaster-level damage? I may catch some flak for this, but DR is a good thing. It's just very, very poorly implemented. DR means you can't buff someone's stats to astronomical numbers (anyone remember how hard it was for a character without Aim to hit a Blaster with two PB'd Fortitudes on them?) but for ranged ATs the curves for defense and resistance are so harsh support characters to provide them aren't needed. Pre-I13 you'd have a pair of Sonics on heroside teams (two Therms and a Sonic redside) but DR on resistance buffs means you can just drop those in favor of more damage. Adjusting the DR curves instead of getting rid of them entirely is the better option and could make running a Therm or Sonic worthwhile again, but remember ally buffs are now AoE instead of single-target so the job of a Therm/Sonic in the current PvP meta would be very different than it was 15 years ago. Getting rid of base resistances might help but it's a bandaid on the problem.

That's his old account, but there are a few other old players' accounts around still. The videos are getting harder to find these days though.

Ice Control powers have always had -runspeed, and Shiver had -maxrunspeed, which would totally destroy a target's move speed unless they had slow resistance (most characters didn't at the time). The -maxrunspeed was removed from the PvP version of the power in I13, but before that you could absolutely slow a target to a crawl. Here's an example (around the 3:30 mark, specifically): Tanks, on the other hand... Ice/EM was popular in the early days because of the slow resistance and phase/Hibernate stacking before the nophase changes and EM nerfs, but most Controllers and Defenders could make easy work of them if they were played intelligently.

...and then fast-forward to the post-shutdown AMAs where the devs admitted they hadn't had any further plans for looking at PvP after I13.

What are you talking about, the behavior you're describing literally existed from the day PvP was added to the game until the day I13 went live.

I'll address these parts of the post since the rest is too long to respond to: Sure does. This game's devs historically had a very bad track record of actually listening to PvPers to make improvements to the game. Hell, before I13 there was a pretty long list from the PvP community of desired fixes and suggestions, and they were almost universally ignored in favor of the I13 changes. The Homecoming team has been better about this, and I27 had some pretty hefty PvP improvements which were driven by player feedback but then much of that goodwill evaporated when the rooting/animation canceling changes happened. What do you mean "in an extreme way?" It's not built for PvE any more than any other MMO is. Damage type is largely irrelevant in PvP. Your point might have been kind of true prior to I13, but it hasn't been that way in 14 years. The first part of your statement here isn't really true - the game was always going to have PvP, it just wasn't in at launch. I'll dig up the source for this when I've got more time, if you want. As for the second part, the I13 changes alienated a lot of people because the game just didn't play the same between PvE and PvP. Finally, I want to address a separate comment I've heard over and over and over again: "more stuff needs to be viable" or "only a few builds are good in PvP" or anything along those lines. In a game with literally thousands of powerset combinations, you cannot make everything or even most things viable. You could potentially do something like LoL where there's significant rebalancing every so often to shake up the meta and keep things fresh, but that requires a ton of dev attention which won't happen here. What you find in CoH is the sets/ATs that are "good" vary by the type of PvP you're engaging in - different stuff is good in large team settings, small team settings, and anything-goes zone settings. For the most part, PvP favors sets which provide high single-target burst damage, so naturally the sets which are useful are going to be limited. It's the same reason I wouldn't bring an FF/AR Defender as a fire farmer - sure, I could make it work but it isn't going to be good at it.

Nah. There are people who don't want to lose their villain alignment power so switching sides is a non-starter.

Do Defenders get better buff/debuff values? Yes. Do their higher support modifiers give them stronger epic/patron shields? Also yes. The rub is for Corruptors those lower buff/debuff values are almost always enough already, and if you can make your character survivable enough, then those advantages are small. Higher Corruptor base HP means any +HP bonuses you might get are worth more, and on the offensive side of things you just can't build a Defender to do more damage than a Corruptor once you start factoring in Scourge. Yeah, we know Scourge isn't always reliable but it's far and away better than a straight damage bonus. Higher base damage, higher damage caps, and Scourge combine to make a Corruptor the clear choice for me. Obviously not everyone feels this way, and the fact there's so much debate about which AT is "better" tells me they're both in okay spots. This isn't like the Sentinel vs Blaster conversation where there's a clear preference one way or the other.

Meanwhile I'm over here wondering why anyone would pick a Defender over a Corruptor except in a few specific cases.

As I've previously pointed out, the population designations for specific servers did not happen until several days after more servers were added. If Indomitable actually did start out at a lower population (which we cannot know for sure without the actual population data from April 2019) it could not have possibly been due to its designation as "the PvP server" since that designation did not exist when the server was brought up. It's not that strange to me. City of Heroes has always had one of the most bizarrely toxic anti-PvP playerbases of any game I've ever played. This was true back on live, and it's true here. Excuses for these attitudes range from "PvP was added later as an afterthought" (it's on record from before launch that PvP was going to be in the game) to "PvP gets everything nerfed" (but none of these nerfs ever got rolled back once PvP power functions were split out) to "a PvPer killed me while I was badging" (strange that you, a player, are getting attacked by another player in a zone which you had to intentionally enter and that has a popup warning which explicitly tells you you can be attacked by other players). Lot of this game's players don't care either way but hoooooooo boy are the ones who do loud. I wouldn't say there's "a lot" of PvP on Excelsior. I can't just drop into Recluse's Victory and find other players to fight against. This is not entirely surprising, considering HC's population is only a fraction of what the live servers had even at peak hours.