macskull

As long as you know what zones to access the PvP zones from (Bloody Bay: Skyway/Cap au Diable, Siren's Call: Steel Canyon/Sharkhead, Warburg: Kings Row/St. Martial, Recluse's Victory: Atlas Park/Grandville) you can use the dot on the map to find the entrance.

The problem with slotting the proc in TD is it'll proc randomly and there's no guarantee it'll go off when you're actually in combat. Probably better to slot it into Aim if you have a primary with Aim, otherwise Tactics is likely a better option (especially if you team often).

Or Membranes in Mind Link to cap out on def/tohit/rech with only 3 slots

On the contrary, -res and -regen help melt him before he can really use any of his extra click powers. There's a reason speedrun teams always have a couple buff/debuff characters instead of 8 straight DPS characters.

Reconstruction and Dull Pain are both unresistible so the set already completely ignores heal debuffs. Regen debuff resistance though... yeah, it needs way more of that (and should probably have higher passive regen and resistance since the only time Regen is really "regen" is when IH is up).

What exactly are you seeing? You can post combat attribute screenshots at least.

Recharge slows are mechanically unchanged from the pre-I13 system, except Defender debuffs are no longer unresisted. What has changed is that slow resist is more common (all melee armor sets get it for free if they don't already have it, and there are more sets now that have slow resist in set bonuses) and diminishing returns reduces the actual value of -rech that is applied before resistances. For example, Defender Infrigidate is -87.5% which would DR down to about -75% and then be checked against slow resist. Movement slows, specifically -runspeed, are different because the -maxrunspeed flag was removed from the PvP attributes. It is still possible to slow run speed but not nearly to the extent it was pre-I13. Fun fact, slow resist DRs at the same rate as recharge. You'd need about 125% slow resist to actually be immune to slows post-DR.

Stalkers at CoV launch were one-trick ponies that people didn't like having on teams because they did zero things a Brute couldn't do. Once you blew hide on AS or another power, you were just a mediocre low-HP Scrapper that did less damage and couldn't crit. Sometime around Issue 11 or 12 they added the "scaling crit chance based on team size when not hidden" mechanic which helped but your biggest attack was still a one-and-done thing. Issue 22 is when the current Assassin's Focus mechanic was introduced, as well as a buff in max HP, but those changes went live about six months before the shutdown was announced so many people just didn't know about them. Combine all that with the two ATO procs and Stalkers are pretty insane now.

A competent player can be successful with most powersets and combinations. There are absolutely some that are better than others but that’s because not all powersets are the same. If I’m building a character to mess around in PvP zones I can make most things work. Hell, I’ve got a PvE-built Psi/SR Stalker that is relatively successful when I want to dig it out. Competitive team arena matches are a little less diverse but even then you can still field a pretty wide variety of things and do well. Yet instead of listening to that feedback they spent even more time and effort on sweeping changes that completely alienated most of the existing PvP playerbase while bringing in almost no new players. That’s bad game design 101.

Jousting and kiting work perfectly well against almost any NPC because even the ones with plenty of ranged attacks are still controlled by this game's (pretty dumb) AI. As long as I'm moving around a target at range that target will keep trying to run to where I was instead of where I am, meaning even with movement suppression it's trivial to stay at range. Additionally you can still abuse jousting by doing things like creatively timing the activation of powers so you're around geometry or out of range by the time the enemy actually responds. That being said, this discussion doesn't actually matter since movement suppression doesn't exist in PvP. Don't believe me? Hop into a PvP zone and try it out for yourself.

From the beginning, there were a few PvP-specific differences to assist in AT balance (things like unresisted Defender debuffs and a portion of Blaster damage being unresisted, as examples). It isn't possible to build a PvP system in an MMO where every single powerset and AT performs exactly the same, because at that point you might as well just give everyone the exact same powers and then the actual character you're playing becomes irrelevant. The argument that every single powerset and every single build combination on every AT should be equally viable at one specific part of the game is laughable. If I want to build a character that is good at soloing AVs and monsters, I'm not going to build an FF/AR Defender to do it. The Issue 13 changes were a well-intentioned but poorly-conceived and poorly-implemented effort at trying to make PvP more accessible for those who didn't participate in it, while simultaneously ignoring the inputs and suggestions of the players who did. The PvP community had a rather long list of fixes that would have helped PvP balance but that list was largely ignored.

When you can balance powers separately for PvE and PvP it's not that much more difficult, especially if you actually solicit feedback from the players.

[citation needed]

Generally speaking, yes. The more complicated answer: there are certain sets and combinations that are better on a Corruptor than on a Defender, and vice versa. If you're looking at Cold, the only way a Defender wins that is if they're Cold/Sonic. The slightly weaker debuffs are usually pretty insignificant compared to the stronger damage, so a Corruptor is dealing more damage while debuffing/buffing almost as much, and against hard targets like AVs the Corruptor will outdamage even a Blaster once Scourge kicks in.

This is the second time I've seen this argument in this thread and I've gotta admit I'm a bit confused. How do you "seamlessly" introduce something into the game? One day it's not there, the next day it is. Minus the story-driven content that started popping up near the end of the game's retail run, most things were just dropped into the existing game.

It's not wasted time if it makes that part of the game more enjoyable for those who do participate in it, even if that number is small. Okay, where do I start here? I guess I'll make a list. Just because something was not in the game at launch does not mean it was not a feature the game was intended to have. See also: supergroup bases. Did you know that if you didn't purchase City of Villains you couldn't use SG bases at all until CoH and CoV were merged - more than four years after the game launched? In the entirety of this game's history there has only been one power - one - that has been nerfed in PvE solely for PvP reasons. Do you know what that power is? Probably not, that's how obscure a nerf it was. Every other nerf that the playerbase has blamed on PvPers has had just as much a foundation in PvE, if not more. PvP was always going to be opt-in. The way it was handled could have been better but having the arenas and later PvP zones worked fine. Players weren't forced to engage in PvP if they didn't want to (granted, initially there were liason contacts inside PvP zones that blocked progress from the rest of your contacts until you talked to them, but that got changed pretty quickly). I'm not sure what your second paragraph is - or your third, for that matter - except a bunch of roleplay justification for why you think PvP is bad. That being said, Warburg has always been a free-for-all zone where anyone from any faction can attack anyone not on their team. If you want to fight someone of the same faction Warburg is an option, or simply join an arena match. There's no requirement for hero vs villain, except in Bloody Bay/Siren's Call/Recluse's Victory. At no point did I ever say PvP was a core design element of the game, or that it was ever going to be. What I did say was that PvP was always an intended game mode for this game. Source? An early alpha gameplay demonstration where the demonstrator discussed the three planned game modes, which were missions, hazard zones, and the arena. Check around the 8:00 mark in the linked video if you're curious.

The wiki is usually pretty good with answering this question. That being said, there is a rule of thumb for these sorts of things - if they show up in your set bonus list they act as set bonuses (though you do have to either slot the IO or find someone who has in order to confirm this).

Basically... I'm not really in favor of any changes that further dilute the game's PvP population. Open-world on-demand PvP a la Champions Online might be cool but outside of the arena it's difficult to find consistent PvP anywhere that isn't RV on Indomitable and making more zones PvP-accessible would either mean the small existing population would spread out, or the new PvP functionality would simply go unused.

I don't know to what extent PvP was planned for in this game but I'm pretty certain open-world PvP was never on the table. At any rate it wouldn't be possible today with the way the game handles PvE/PvP powers differences.

I'm not sure how you got that from my post but that was 100% not what I said. I was addressing the (incorrect) statement that this game's PvP was "shoehorned" in.

How can you shoehorn something into a system that was designed with that thing in mind from the very beginning? I am curious to hear your logic here.

This is due to a difference in how some attributes are expressed on a per-power and overall basis. In the case of Sprint, right-clicking on the power in your buff bar will give you the run speed value for base plus Sprint (14.32 base + 14.32 unenhanced Sprint = 28.64). The combat attributes window breaks that down for all sources individually (14.32 base + 5.01 unehanced Swift + 14.32 unenhanced Sprint = 33.65). Same thing goes for some other base attributes such as regeneration and recovery - in the case of Up to the Challenge the power info in the buff bar is again showing you the base plus UttC value.

The MM pet aura IOs function as set bonuses, not global procs, and as such they follow set bonus rules.

I think T9 powers are the weekly discussion topic this week. I think the newer armor set T9s are in a good spot - they don't provide overkill level of bonus, they don't have a harsh crash, they provide some extra benefit the set might not already offer, and they're available more often. Think Rad, Shield, Willpower, and Ice (Stalker/Scrapper version).

The devs would know.