macskull

Laziness, mostly. The Brute was cheaper to build and I could basically zone out for a couple hours and I'd have a new level 50. I've been sitting on a few Blaster builds the last couple months, just haven't got around to it.

That's not at all the same. My Brute exists to do one thing and now it is going to be objectively worse at doing that thing. I may end up biting the bullet and switching to a Blaster for farming.

Wondering how much the Brute changes on test are going to affect the numbers here.

Yeah, I'm more miffed that this is coming to pass especially considering as recently as a week ago Powerhouse said that the only way he'd further lower the Tanker cap (it had already been lowered from 600 to 550) was if he also lowered the Brute cap and that wasn't something he was considering, and less than a month ago he also said he was not going to nerf Brutes as part of the Tanker changes. Sure, I understand that this is less than a 10% damage reduction at the damage cap, and that it will have zero effect on most builds and situations, but a change that is essentially nonexistent for 95% of characters and is a reduction in performance for the other 5% is a nerf, plain and simple. In my case, that 5% was the entire reason I even have Brutes.

So much for "not nerfing Brutes" I guess.

A conversation in the Homecoming Discord a night or two ago got me thinking. Someone had said they wished Stone Mastery would get ported to Dominators, to which my initial response was "well, Doms already get 3 of the 5 powers in that pool in Earth Assault, and everything else that'd be thematic is already in Earth Control, so what's the point?" There are a few options, like Rooted, that could make sense but honestly would just be wasted power picks since I highly doubt many players would intentionally take Rooted if they had the choice. I took a look at the existing Dominator epic pool offerings and came up with something that shares a few powers from Stone Mastery but swaps the three duplicates out while keeping with a somewhat thematic pairing and uses existing animations and assets. Nature Mastery: You have mastery over the natural environment around you to blast your foes and add some much needed armor and defense. Level 35 - Corrosive Enzymes (ranged foe -res/-dmg): You spray a target with toxic, corrosive enzymes reducing the damage they deal as well as their damage resistance. Same attributes as the Nature Affinity version but with Dominator debuff values (11.25% -res, 11.25% -dmg) Level 35 - Overgrowth (PBAoE ally +dmg/+tohit/end discount): Becoming a conduit of nature itself, you greatly boost the damage, to hit, and endurance discount of nearby allies for a long period of time. Copy of the Nature Affinity version with Dominator buff values (7.5% +tohit, 49.5% +dmg, 74.5% end discount) and without Bloom applied. Recharge time of 300 seconds vice 255 seconds. Level 41 - Rock Armor (toggle smash/lethal +def): Your skin becomes stone while this power is active. Smashing and Lethal attacks are less likely to land and affect you. Copy of existing Controller version. No changes needed here! Level 41 - Earth's Embrace (self heal/+HP): You are so connected to the earth, you can draw upon its power to add to your own health. Activating this power increases your maximum hit points and grants you resistance to toxic damage. Copy of existing Controller version. Uses same attributes as Ice Mastery's Hoarfrost. Level 44 - Tornado (summon Tornado, minor smashing DoT, foe knockback/fear/disorient): Conjures up a funnel cloud at a targeted location. The tornado will chase down your foes, tossing them into the air and hurling them great distances. The victims are left disoriented and with reduced defense. The tornado is a menacing sight, and can even cause panic among your foes. Copy of version from Storm Summoning with adjustments to endurance cost (26 vice 20.8) and recharge time (120s vice 60s).

The original intention with the origin power pools was that each pool would only be available to a specific origin (only Magic origin characters could take Sorcery, for example) but since the game shut down and development stopped before any of them other than Sorcery were finished, they're being released as origin-agnostic pools that are exclusive to each other (so you can't take both Force of Will and Sorcery, for example). The other three pools are Utility Belt, Experimentation, and Gadgetry, and I wouldn't be surprised if they make an appearance at some point in the future.

I like this idea.

Not a bug, that mission takes place in an alternate future where presumably she is still alive.

I usually agree with Barrier on PvP-related issues but this is one of those times where I think it's not going to be a big deal in the end. The change does disproportionately make Cold Domination weaker than, say, Poison because (I think) those are the only sets with -special ability in the game and Benumb's recharge time is 120 seconds versus Weaken's 16 seconds (both debuffs last 30 seconds), but both sets are already fairly powerful without being able to boost their -special and PB will continue to make them more effective at what they already do. If you're looking at an Ice/Poison Corruptor, most builds go with Psi mastery or Leviathan mastery for the hold and you only really see builds with Power Boost if they're built around dueling or very small team stuff. Storm may still be a workable set, and a few teams ran storm teams post-I13 with some success (here is a playlist with some of dUmb's 8v8 matches, most of which are with storm teams) and Cold is definitely useful in a team situation and I'm pretty sure I saw a few Cold/Dark Defenders in duels post-I13.

@Dan Petro @Captain Powerhouse Ingame testing confirms that mez procs are 4 seconds on Controllers and Dominators and 2 seconds for everything else. I have not been able to 100% confirm they're obeying mez suppression but it looks like they are from what I've been able to test.

PPM works the same way in PvE and PvP. For PvP IO damage procs the amount of damage the proc does is different between players and NPCs though. Defender Paralytic Poison looks like it's been fixed. EDIT: It also looks like all the mez procs have been fixed.

Yeah, that was my thread. I posted it, it didn't get any replies the first day or two, and then I came back after a weekend away to see it had exploded into a "blame PvPers" thread. Another example is the PvP accolades thread where I spent page after page trying to reason with people who either couldn't be or didn't want to be reasoned with.

You are aware of the popup that literally says "You are now entering a PvP area and can be attacked by other players" whenever you enter a PvP zone, right? No one going into PvP zone is ignorant of that unless they can't read.

This is tangential to the thread's topic. The entire enterbasefrompasscode fiasco exploded because there are some very vocal people on here who insist it is now getting removed for PvP reasons when this isn't the case. The very vocal group of posters who keep blaming PvP and PvPers for taking away their toys are getting kind of old.

What if I told you that there is no travel suppression in PvP? Go on, look for yourself, it doesn't exist.

You can claim all you'd like that PvP was the sole reason for any of those changes but you're wrong. The only PvE nerf that happened solely for PvP reasons, in the entire history of this game, is a change to the way the repel ticks in Hurricane function. But hey, I'll bite. Intangibility powers - does anyone actually take these in PvE? If yes, obviously being able to completely remove a targeted enemy or enemies from the playing field for as long as you want without any downtime via an autohit toggle is broken (but nevermind that even after they got changed to click powers you could still perma-cage things). Toggle dropping - toggle dropping was a PvP-only mechanic and didn't exist in PvE. Why even bring that up? ED - lack of ED meant builds were shoehorned into certain slotting combinations pretty much without exception. ED was necessary to pave the way for the IO system. Neither of those are PvP-only concerns. GDN - defense-based sets were too good relative to resistance-based ones. Not an exclusive-to-PvP concern. Defense has almost never been in a good place in PvP because of the amount of tohit you can put out. Travel suppression - being able to kite NPCs with zero risk to yourself because you're out of range of their attacks by the time they aggro on you is obviously not a balanced mechanic. Nevermind that you can completely get around travel suppression by having a Kin on your team. Like... the idea that travel suppression was put in because of PvP is laughable. Regen nerfs - toggle IH was obviously way too good in any situation, PvP or PvE, and trying to argue otherwise is disingenuous. Enterbasefrompasscode - is Leandro saying that people can use it as a cheese mechanic to avoid deaths during "Master of" runs going to be something that you conveniently ignore? PvPers don't need to "own up" to any changes because with one exception they haven't been the sole cause of any of them. You can argue all you want about why PvP is bad and the dirty PvPers took your toys, but you're wrong, plain and simple. ...You are aware that PvP powers and mechanics are vastly different because of an ill-advised and misguided effort to rebalance PvP by a developer who did not PvP, which no one asked for, and were pushed through despite the PvP community already having presented their ideas for how to improve PvP? Let's not be disingenuous and say that PvP was "added much later." This game existed on live for eight and a half years and PvP was part of that game for seven and a half of those. I know you have your opinions about how the game should work, about game mechanics, about the effectiveness of powers and powersets, and you can defend those until you're blue in the face because they're your opinions, but in this case they're objectively wrong.

My point was that people are quick to blame PvP for things getting nerfed when in reality there were PvE reasons - to use your Regeneration example, old-style toggle IH meant that a Regen Scrapper was literally unkillable if they survived an alpha strike. Saying things like that got nerfed for PvP is disingenuous at best and downright wrong at worst. To your Total Focus example, there was no functional difference between a mag 3 stun and mag 4 stun in PvP, but there was a huge functional difference in PvE because it allowed you to stun bosses in one application.

I'm not going to address these individually because other people have already done so, but... in the entire history of the game there has only ever been one power or mechanic nerfed in PvE specifically for PvP reasons and it's probably something 99% of players don't know about. However, there are multiple cases of powers getting buffed for PvP reasons that then had those buffs carried over into PvE. Do you like the -75% range on Taunt? That's a PvP change. Melee attack range going from 5 to 7 feet? PvP change.

IIRC there aren't any autohit damage attacks in PvP but PvP diminishing returns makes building for resistance or defense on most ATs worthless.

Name one of these things you enjoyed that have been nerfed or completely removed due to PvP. I'll wait. (Also, did you miss the spot in this thread where Leandro said it was also abusable in PvE as a get-out-of-jail-free card for Master TF runs?)

I'm not sure where you're getting that from but in my hypothetical scenarios if you were at the HP cap you would not have died in either scenario. If you were at base HP with no bonuses (1017) you would have died on the resistance-based character and survived with over half your HP left on the defense-based one. Even if your resistance-based character had the extra 20% HP from the passive accolade bonuses they still would've died. Regarding hitting the HP cap, it is very much possible but not at all necessary for PvE builds. My scenario was designed to be an easy-to-understand demonstration of the math behind resistance and defense and why defense is almost always the better option until you reach the breakpoint of 45%. It doesn't matter if there are five enemies, or seventeen, or any other number attacking me, and it doesn't matter if they're doing 50 damage, or 100 damage, or 500 damage, the point was that the resistance-based character will always take more damage than the defense-based one when you look at it over a given period of time. It is true that defense is left up a bit to luck and the streakbreaker, but 1) the number of times you'll get insta-killed because two heavy hitters land quickly is very small and 2) you're probably killing things so fast that streakbreaker will never matter. Given a long enough time frame, yes, you would die on either character if you just stood there and did nothing. You'd probably die faster on the resistance-based one though. The beauty of this game is you can build it however you want, and you're not wrong for focusing on recharge (hell, most of my builds back on live were the same way). However, at the end of the day if you've got a build with permahasten and some resistance and a build with permahasten, some resistance, and softcapped smash/lethal defense, the second build is going to be more survivable especially in more aggressive playstyles. It's also worth pointing out that defense is much easier to obtain in meaningful amounts from pool powers and set bonuses when compared to resistance. EDIT: Another thing you haven't even considered with resistance vs defense is debuffs and mez. With defense, you can sort of shrug most of them off because they won't hit you. That's not the case with resistance.

Let's look at two scenarios, one where a Controller is at the defense softcap (45%), and another where the same Controller has no defense but is at the resistance hard cap (75%). Scenario 1: An even-con minion has a 50% chance to hit. With 45% defense, that even-con minion now has a 5% chance to hit, which is the lowest possible chance anything can have to hit, ever. Let's assume that this Controller is surrounded by 100 minions who all attack at the same time with attacks that deal 100 damage. In this scenario, you will get hit 5 times for a total of 500 damage. Scenario 2: An even-con minion has a 50% chance to hit, which is not reduced at all because in this scenario our Controller has no defense. If the same minions fire off the same 100-damage attack 100 times, they'll hit you 50 times. Ignoring resistance that is 5000 damage. However, with 75% resistance, our Controller will actually take 25% of that damage, or 1250 damage. In other words, the defense-based character takes 40% of the damage the resistance-based character took over the course of those 100 attacks (and the amount of damage the resistance-based character took is above a level 50 Controller's base HP which means in the absense of any +hp that Controller is dead). While it is true that each of the 5 hits on the defense-based character hit harder, the likelihood of a series of hard-hitting attacks landing within a small enough window to kill that character outright before the player has a chance to react (get healed, use their own heal, pop greens, whatever) is pretty small. EDIT: Basically the only time defense and resistance provide equal survivability at their respective hard/soft caps is if you're on an AT with a 90% resistance cap (so... Tankers and Brutes).

FWIW Stealth hasn't had a -speed component since the September 10 patch.

Let's remove badges, IOs, accolades, travel powers, and supergroup bases too, while we're talking out of our asses here.