macskull

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.

Spines/Fire Scrappers were the FotM non-AE farmers pretty much the entire time from when Scrappers got Fiery Aura in I16 to when GR let you roll any AT on any side in I18.

I mean, apparently there was data back on live that suggested something like 80% of characters had no IOs slotted. We don't have the metrics to make any truly informed decisions here but it would be really nice if we did. cough cough nudge nudge devs are you listening That being said I think it's still very likely that most players don't get into the IO system that much.

Ha-ha, quoted! Common IOs don't level with you but they do not change in effectiveness as you level. With schedule A numbers a level 25 generic IO provides 32.0% enhancement whereas an even-level SO provides 33.3%. If you're constantly running around with +3 SOs (so you upgrade every level) you're looking at 38.33% enhancement which gets matched by generic IOs at level 40. The big appeal of generic IOs was once you hit 22 or 27 you'd slot level 25 or 30 generic IOs as you could afford them and then you'd never have to upgrade that slot again. The funny thing is, spines is sorely in need of a buff but it's unlikely to get one because of its popularity as a farm set (even though it's mostly Quills that makes it popular).

I think adding content balanced around IOs is a bad idea because it means that the IO system is no longer optional for at least part of the game. Besides, how do you balance it around IOs? There are so many different potential ways to build characters that it'd be impossible to decide what to balance against. Also, yeah, what @Coyotedancer said. I'm not about making things more difficult when most players are running around on SOs thinking Empathy is the best support set because it puts green numbers above peoples' heads. And if a build can solo a GM or AV without incarnate powers... who cares? It's a slow process that doesn't offer any extra reward other than bragging rights. I'd hardly call that unbalanced.

The point being made isn't "haha no one knows what that power is," it's the change was so obscure no one noticed it happened. The entire point is to act as a direct counter for the myriad posters who jump into a thread at the mere mention of PvP and blame PvP and PvPers for everything that's wrong with the game.

Power Boost has a couple issues: 1) there are several important buffs/debuffs it doesn't affect at all, which means 2) it's mostly only useful for long-duration click buffs, most notably defense. In most cases aside from that boosting buffs or debuffs with PB is simply overkill.

I think the best thing to do with IH is to reduce its recharge so it's up more often. You'd probably have to reduce its regen bonus as well but combined with the other proposed changes it seems solid. Maybe give Resilience a bit more resistance as well.

My post was more directed at the person asking "how fast can you do it in normal content?" It seems a bit weird to be asking how quickly you can get to 50 and then put artificial limitations/qualifiers on that statement. I'm pretty much the opposite of you. If I have friends playing the game I'll occasionally level a character the "old fashioned" way just to play with them but that's pretty rare these days. I've played through the game so many times that I'm totally over the low-level slog of not having enough powers, slots, or enhancements for the game to not feel like a total drag. Most of my gameplay happens at or near 50 so levels 1-49 are just a hurdle I want to get over.

Okay, now I know you're trolling me. That or you're being intentionally obtuse. I think I'm done here.

So at face value +dam is more useful than -res because the purple patch exists. You'd think that all things being equal a 30% damage buff would be just as good as a 30% resistance debuff, right? Well... not exactly. Damage buffs only boost your base damage while -res effectively boosts your enhanced and buffed damage. If I had a power that did 100 base damage and I had it fully slotted for damage (call it 100% for easy math) with another 30% damage boost I'd be dealing 230 damage. If I had a 30% resistance debuff on a target and I was using that same attack with the same slotting, I'd do 260 damage. In this case -res is more valuable than equivalent +dam until the purple patch causes a break-even around +4 (where my debuff is reduced to 48% of its normal value).

I mean, have you been on a team full of debuffers? AVs absolutely melt. Yes, after factoring in the purple patch and AV resistance buffs are better than debuffs but the debuffs are still useful and some of the best support sets are the ones that offer a mix of both. There are both explicit and practical limits to buffing after which more buffing doesn't matter and the only way to increase team effectiveness is with debuffs. Empathy's schtick at endgame (since we're talking about that apparently) is "cool, I can keep a small damage bonus on 3-4 teammates at a time." A Kin can effectively damage cap an entire team with one or two clicks and solve the endurance and recharge problems. Oh, and that Kin can also bring -regen, -rech, -spd, -dam, and -end to the fight.

Other than "just to be different," why would I want to do that? If my goal is to get to 50 as fast as possible or with as little effort as possible normal content doesn't meet either of those.