macskull

Yep, that'll be a bug then.

IIRC back on live a dev posted datamining info revealing about 80% of characters didn't use IOs at all.

I think that's the key part. Making the game more difficult as a whole should be an optional decision, not one forced onto the playerbase in some ham-fisted way. My two cents: if content is going to be made more difficult it should be optional and should come with increased rewards for the increased difficulty. As long as those rewards are meaningful it might convince more players to give it a shot.

While the first part is true, the second part shouldn't be. If an enemy-based buff is being modified by level differences it's a bug.

I have not played goldside at all but based on what I've read both here and on the forums back on live it seems goldside content is significantly harder and there's a good deal of complaining about it. I think DA is a different thing altogether as incarnate level shifts apply there and once you've got all 3 level shifts pretty much all content there is trivial. Like... yeah, you can make content that's more difficult for IO'd characters versus baseline content, but then that same content is that much more difficult for characters that aren't using IOs. Whether that's seen as a problem is a different story, however.

My question stands, whether you're talking 50+ or sub-50 content. The problem is once you begin to balance content around IOs the IO system is no longer optional for participation in that content and you're locking out players who would otherwise be interested in participating. At least with incarnate-based content you can grind that out and simply playing the game will eventually get you the resources you need to participate, but the same can't really be said for IOs. Besides, if you're making new content more difficult without increasing the rewards to compensate you're already ensuring that content won't be significantly utilized. Players will continue to gravitate toward the content that maximizes rewards for the time/effort which will continue to be existing content.

How do you take the IO system into account without making the game incredibly difficult for characters who aren't IOd? Even at that point, what do you balance against?

No on all accounts.

So the Rage thing ("nerf via bugfix") happened after shutdown but before Homecoming launched - back on live if you stacked Rage you avoided the defense debuff but that was apparently a bug and the defense debuff is no longer something you can avoid. As I understand it the live dev team was aware of the bug but chose not to fix it while they decided how they were going to rework the Rage crash. The Tar Patch/Twilight Grasp nerfs happened with the Page 5 update - all ATs previously used the same pseudopet for these powers so the -res value on Tar Patch and the heal value on Twilight Grasp were the same across all ATs. These powers now obey AT modifiers which is a nerf for any AT that isn't a Defender.

Even if you're doing it once every five minutes that's still 120 merits per hour which is okay but not particularly great. There's way more effective ways to earn merits.

I feel like Judgement is a much bigger offender in the "everything dies too fast" department than Destiny or Hybrid.

Oh hey, more wrong information in a thread full of wrong information!

MMs do get incarnate shifts as part of Supremacy to mitigate this, but what hurts them the most is the prevalence of high-damage AoE powers in iTrials because pets aren't subject to one-shot code so the T1 pets just spend their time inspecting the floor. At least in the case of Masterminds you bring (usually) decent damage and buff/debuff but it can be difficult to leverage. Won't argue about up-leveled content though, the purple patch really starts to screw over MMs like no other AT once you pass +2 or so.

I think just about the only "underperforming" AT right now is Sentinel. Pretty much every other AT still has a role to play in a team. Is that role different than it used to be? Maybe. Is that a bad thing? No, not really. The game has been constantly evolving and changing throughout its lifespan and at the very least it's helped keep things interesting.

There's not, though. If you eliminate Fiery Aura Brutes (for reasons that have been covered several times in this thread) there's a pretty reasonable curve in the "which ATs get played more" graph. If the game were only about DPS and not about support you'd see all the DPS ATs concentrated at the top - but you don't. Stalkers, which are arguably the highest-damage melee AT, are the least-played non-epic AT. Sentinels are only slightly above that. Controllers, which are probably the lowest-damage support AT, are the second-most popular AT at level 50. There's a pretty big difference between what people on the forums and the Discord server say are happening in the game and what is actually happening in the game.

"Only these buffs/debuffs are useful" is a different argument than "buffs and debuffs aren't useful." Besides, not everyone is playing the game at the IO/incarnate level and I'd wager there's a wider spectrum of buff/debuff that's useful in that scenario. EDIT: Regarding the "only -res/-regen/+dam is useful at max difficulty content" I think that's assuming everyone on the team is running fully IOd builds which is not always going to happen, and even if you're assuming everyone is IOd to the gills you're not going to be able to significantly vary the buffs or debuffs that are useful without making either the NPCs more difficult or the players weaker, and you will piss off everyone no matter what you do there.

A certain few posters have been claiming that over the last several pages of this thread and it still boggles me.

I'm not sure what the ask here is, outside of iTrials/special events there is no minimum team size anymore.

Just have it shoot Blaze on every tick, DoTs on DoTs

I don't think this thread has a "goal." OP wasn't even soliciting input, it was just stating some of the stuff the dev team may be looking at (but I feel like the caveat in yellow at the first post is silly since it basically invalidates the entirely of the rest of the post). Like, "hey here is some stuff we are looking at but none of this might actually happen or it might be completely different than we are looking at right now" is kinda weird.

As long as the IO system is optional you can't balance the existing game around it. You can make adjustments to individual powers or interactions between powers while taking IOs into consideration, but balancing the game as a whole for IOs opens a whole new can of worms that is going to involve constantly chasing some semblance of balance because it'll basically be targeted nerf -> IO meta changes -> targeted nerf -> IO meta changes -> rinse and repeat.

You're not the person I was replying to and based on the context of their posts I'd say your answer isn't the one they would give, but I'll bite. Yes, IOs and incarnates are more available on Homecoming than they were on live. I think that's a huge chunk of the appeal. If that stuff went away the playerbase would be (understandably) extremely unhappy. You're implying that these heavily-IOd characters are the norm where in reality that is probably not the case. Like I said earlier in this thread we don't have any hard numbers so all we have to go on is anecdotal evidence, but while we're on anecdotal evidence I can simply cite the number of people in help or general chat insisting that Sentinels are good, or Empathy is a great support set, or that Assault Rifle has the best AoEs in the game as evidence that not everyone is even playing the same game at this point.

Meanwhile you've got people complaining about playing City of Statues and how going up against a bunch of CC'd mobs who can't fight back is boring. So now we're at a weird point here: You are claiming Controllers are just DPS with minor support and CC is irrelevant But Controllers don't have the highest buff/debuff modifiers on their support sets and they certainly don't out-DPS the other support ATs Yet somehow Controllers are the most-played support AT So maybe players actually do still value CC.

(Emphasis mine) If we're being honest, most characters can't do that, at least not at a reasonable pace. Sure, in theory something like an Emp/AR Defender could solo +4x8 but it'd be devastatingly slow and I think these forums and the Discord seriously overestimate the number of players who even care about being able to do that in the first place, let alone make characters with that in mind. I am curious which time frame you're referring to when you say the game used to have a lot less DPS and survivability because it really shifts the frame of reference. If you're talking post-ED through pre-IO (issues 6-8 basically) then sure, but that was only a year and a half of the game's original 8-and-a-half-year run which makes it more the exception than the norm. I didn't play the game then, but a game where everyone was essentially slotted exactly the same way would not have held my attention very long.

I assume based on the rest of your post you meant kill speed needs to go up but if you raise time-to-kill you're just going to further bias the meta in favor of DPS (things will take longer to kill or things will do less damage, therefore I will need more damage dealers to accomplish the same thing) which means you'll have even fewer support characters making appearances. I also don't understand where the "support isn't valuable" argument comes from, especially because support still acts as a force multiplier for the entire team to the point where it's usually more beneficial to bring a support character than another DPS character. If you look at, for example, the Task Force Olympics stuff (speed task force races, basically) most teams consist of Blasters and Corruptors/Defenders with the occasional Scrapper thrown in. It's very rare to find a "speed" team without any form of support. I mean, hell, if I see a random TF forming in LFG or general or a global channel and I ask the team lead what they want the answer is usually "support or DPS." The role of support is far from marginalized in this game. There may be support sets that have been marginalized (Empathy and Force Fields come to mind) but support as a whole is still extremely valuable.