macskull

Neither target caps nor ED had anything to do with PvP, so I'm not sure why you brought those up in response to my statement. Also not sure why you keep bringing up Blaster damage in particular as if it was the only difference between PvE and PvP. For what it's worth, the percentage of Blaster damage that was unresisted did get tweaked for balance at least once.

PvP travel suppression is disabled in zones and off by default in the arena.

PvP does have a pretty steep learning curve. I don't think you can remove that without fundamentally changing how PvP works, and the last time that was tried it didn't go over well. At this point the biggest influencer of getting new players involved in PvP is the community as a whole, and I think the community has been doing a pretty good job of that. The population of players active in at least somewhat routine arena PvP has only grown over the last few months because of the efforts of a few key players. Turns out there's still a lot of interest in PvP if it's presented as an event that is specifically geared toward being friendly to new players. Yes, some of the players who show up to the events play a few matches and decide it's not for them, but that's okay.

You know there were arenas before PvP zones, right? Constant balance tweaks and changes are the nature of the beast in any PvP environment because they mix things up and respond to combinations/powers that are too good. Part of the problem is that PvEers will immediately jump into a PvP-related thread and blame PvP for nerfs or changes when in reality there's only been one power in the entire history of this game that's been nerfed solely for PvP reasons. I'd be willing to bet there's not more than one poster in this thread who knows what that power is. Objective-based PvP is something the PvP community has been asking for for a long time - and I think the Shivan temp power and Warburg nuke temp powers were the team's original attempt to make something like that happen. Like, you'd have a team going in to collect meteor samples, or escort scientists, and the other side's players would be trying to stop that so it would be up to your team to keep those players alive. As with pretty much everything else in this game the developers' vision ended up being nothing like what the players actually did. I disagree with your second paragraph though, because that is exactly the sort of situation the Issue 13 PvP changes tried to create. The implementation of those changes ended up seriously lowering the skill ceiling while making PvP more confusing to new players since nothing worked like they were used to, and it seriously lessened the effectiveness of many support powersets. XP and inf are extremely easy to come by on Homecoming with a bit of effort so it's not really a stretch to be able to afford a PvP build on a character if that's something you're really interested in.

The arena crowd has been pretty good about getting involvement going. There are 4 active "competitive" teams right now and 3-4 more "starter" teams full of players that are newer to PvP and want to learn. Attendance at the beginner-friendly PvP events has been pretty good. Zone, on the other hand... obviously the only zone with any regular activity is Recluse's Victory on Indomitable (and very rarely on other servers, usually when a team wanders in for badges). The arena community has been self-policing pretty heavily in terms of regulating or banning powers in the interest of balance and fun - for example the 8v8 "rules" right now are Alpha only, limit of 3 of any AT per team, one Poison per team, and most teams have agreed to not use 4-second-base-duration mezzes. This results in a more balanced and competitive environment than the "anything goes" environment of zone PvP. The unfortunate reality is that because this game is so easy and so casual-friendly it tends to attract the type of player who is not at all competitive and therefore is not at all interested in PvP. Sure, there are some who are interested in PvP, but here's how that plays out. Those players' first experience with PvP is probably going to be in a PvP zone where the sides aren't balanced to begin with and they're going to be going up against either a bunch of melee characters with T4 Barrier and the base TP macro or a bunch of Blasters with T4 Incandescence, a tray of T3 greens that heal for like 1500HP each, the base TP macro, and a team of support buffers sitting in their spawn waiting to recall them back to the base if they get so much as looked at funny. To top it all off, the players that tend to frequent the PvP zones while ignoring the other aspects of PvP tend to be some of the worst PvPers in the game, not only in skill level, but also in their ability to interact with people in general. So now these new players have all this going against them, and they're either going to decide within the first five minutes that PvP sucks and all PvPers are assholes without bothering to figure out why they're getting beat up, or they're going to to ask why, ask questions, and get better. That second type of player is pretty rare. EDIT: Realistically, to get more people interested in PvP, the mechanics need to make more sense and there need to be more tangible and meaningful rewards. PvP recipes dropping from NPCs kind of killed the rewards bit, but the mechanics bit might be fixable. It'd just take a lot of work.

This is because Vengeance does two things: Heals you and your allies Puts you and your allies into "vengeance" mode by granting a second power. It's that second power that provides the defense, tohit, damage, and mez resist/protection and makes Veng unable to be stacked - the Vengeance click power itself isn't what actually provides those buffs so that info doesn't show up in the power info window. Lots of weird stuff like that in this game.

No, I think they still have the base pathing requirements in place, but I'm not 100% sure. I tend to just barely keep up with what they're doing over there because a server with no XP in AE missions and questionable-at-best powers balancing doesn't at all appeal to me.

I think that's something Thunderspy was looking at doing. They re-enabled base raiding (lol) but IIRC they haven't fixed things like mez durations and other broken powers so it'd be a shitshow.

When page 4 was on the test server I ran a few arcs with a Rad/Fire Brute and Fire/Rad Tanker with essentially identical builds and my results showed that even with the radius and target cap buffs for the Tanker, the Brute was still faster, though not by as much as previously. The higher Brute damage cap still outweighs the increased radius/target cap. The earlier versions of the page 4 changes (double radius, 600% cap) had the Tanker pulling ahead but those got reined in (1.5x radius, 500% cap) before it went live.

Gauntlet radius/arc buffs do not apply to all powers - as a general rule the buffs do not affect armor set or pool powers and even in melee sets there are powers which specifically ignore the mechanic (Spine Burst and Footstomp are two I can think of off the top of my head). The fact that leadership toggles are getting the buff is probably a bug.

Gauntlet is a 1.5x multiplier, which would make 60ft Leadership toggles into 90ft. That being said, I don't think anything other than Gauntlet currently affects radius and arc. Range bonuses only buff range, not radius or arc (though you can make the argument that the longer range on cones makes their effective area larger, it's still the same arc).

If it is getting buffed from Gauntlet it wouldn't show in the power attributes for individual powers since Gauntlet's bonus is a global "proc" that is applied after the fact (this also helps out Tankers because proc calculations continue to use the non-boosted radius).

Seems like it's because the +range is flagged to not affect the caster: If not (target.entref == source.entref) Where the "not" should not be there. It's supposed to be a 15% range bonus which works out to an extra 9 feet. Also it seems like that effect is flagged as PvE-only which seems weird and incorrect.

This game is extremely easy/casual-friendly and as such attracts the type of player who is just not interested in PvP.

I think the issue with this is that open-world PvP would further dilute the PvP population which is already only really managing to keep one zone on one server active (granted, this is aside from the very active arena community). Additionally because of the PvE/PvP powers separation implementing this would take a lot of work because at least some of the PvP-specific differences are triggered by the map the character is on.

The simple fact that purple patch exists means at least your tier 1 pets are pretty squishy when you start going into higher-level content. I'm not even arguing incarnate-level content here, just anything that's +2 or higher. Fighting at +2 means your t1 pets are effectively fighting against +4s which means even if you're able to buff them to the point of being more survivable, fully half your normal damage output is significantly less effective than it should be (to the tune of 0.48 multipliers for all their effects). Again, this is something that no other AT has to deal with. That being said, it's a careful balancing act - raising pet survivability without directly raising their damage output seems to be the best way to approach the problem and OP's suggestions mostly do that. Yes, I'm aware that in the right circumstances, with the right powersets a Mastermind can put out pretty good single-target damage but that is not representative of the AT as a whole.

AT-specific defense caps do exist, they're just so high they're functionally irrelevant. That being said... #implementPvPdiminishingreturnsinPvE >.>

Surely you're not serious in suggesting that a power with at-reasonable-best 50% uptime and which after its duration completely drains your endurance and eliminates your ability to recover it is the solution to a character's endurance problems?

I assume you're trying to slot a DO or SO (dual- or single-origin) enhancement, which can only be slotted by characters that match the origin(s) of the enhancement. Verify the enhancement you're trying to slot is compatible with your origin.

FWIW almost every armor set's heal is unresistible which oddly enough makes a Fire tanker with enough +HP, +rech, and KB protection an ideal Hami tanker with minimal outside support. Healing Flames will be available for a 900ish HP heal every 10-12 seconds, way more than enough if you're chewing EoEs as needed.

To be fair, the developers said the game was going to have PvP well before it was released.

Masterminds benefit far less from IOs than any other AT simply because the pets are unaffected by any of the bonuses (oh, and because pets can't have their recharge modified but that's a different story). Even if you're going to argue that, the only other ATs that see huge performance changes with ATO procs are Scrappers and Stalkers, and those ATO procs can be slotted at will without any real sacrifice anywhere else in the build. If you're a Mastermind and aren't Thugs or Necro you absolutely give up something to fit the 6 pet survivability procs in. Additionally, unlike Scrappers and Stalkers the MM pet survivability procs don't actually boost your damage, they just bring pet survivability up from "awful" to "okay."

You know the existing villain accolades have badges in PvP zones too, right? Most PvP zones are so unpopulated that you'd have to be incredibly unlucky to run across another player who isn't there for the same badge.

You can unslot and re-slot incarnate abilities at will.

This is not a bug - this is PvP diminishing returns at work. The ingame combat attributes window does not accurately show the effects of diminishing returns for some attributes, recharge included. Your 235% global recharge is actually closer to 156% in PvP and therefore PA - which would recharge in about 58 seconds in PvE - will recharge in 84 seconds. You'd need to have about 500% global recharge before factoring in diminishing returns in order to keep perma PA.