OverkillEngine

Yeah I have deliberately picked Air Superiority on a melee AT before because I actually wanted it - its design made it actually useful from the word go for the situation I was picking it in. And this was post pre-req relaxation. So I wasn't forced into it specifically to get powers in the pool I wanted later. I didn't have to pick other powers to make it a still grossly sub-par choice. It stood on its own merits as a valid pick. It had an alternative power that did not have the same exact niche if I didn't need or want a melee attack. I consider it an example of how to set up the "prerequisite" powers in a pool correctly. A lot of them already have access to powers within their own sets that already satisfy that utility more flexibly or obviate it entirely by making the mob dead. They have little reason to burn a power pick on Air Sup.

Holy Frijoles is this one ever true. Joined an instanced MSR earlier today and didn't even have to tweak my settings, it was perfectly playable. I may actually show up to these on a regular basis now.

I'm aware. Still hot flaming garbage.

Part of the issue with Boxing and Kick is that both powers are clearly a sub-par pick no matter what AT you are. Even the ones that have the best modifiers for them. Especially for those AT's. To the point that they are meme tier picks. Which makes using them as a power tax extra offensive. Oh and they occupy the same exact niche, so it's also an illusion of choice between them. If I were allowed to sodomize the Cottage Rule for a day, I'd merge the two attacks into a melee power that has a chance to proc KD or Disorient or both with a kickboxing animation, and the "hole" filled with a more universally applicable but not particularly strong passive. Like maybe a passive that procs a self minor +absorb when you are hit, with some sort of cooldown. Grant it some sort of synergy with the rest of the pool just like before. Then an evaluation pass on the pool as a whole to see if some power needs shaved from elsewhere within it to compensate. Hand out a freespec and call it done.

Agreed. We already arguably have a problem with content balancing and just the IO system alone bleeding into it over time as an assumed baseline even though that wasn't supposed to happen. Granted, different Dev team now, but yeah. People ask for more power and then eventually ask that content requires that power, and then it gets set (consciously or intentionally or not) as the baseline assumption for content balancing and effectively punishes anyone new.

Same bug with Kheldian contact Sunstorm - screenshot below. Level 23 character at -1 notoriety, other enemies in mission were 22 as expected, Archon Swann was level 25. Mission was in Striga, did not have this issue with missions from same contact for same enemy group in Talos.

On that note, being able to customize those as well would be nice. Even if there were a limited subset of bodymeshes and skins to pick from (to reduce need for animation alterations) it would be a vast improvement in player agency over their character theme.

While I am not married to the meta of requiring an AoE Immob (I play Illusion on Controllers and Doms a lot), having the design of a powerset require another player or powerset to unlock its full potential while (more than likely from the behavior we've seen so far), still being dinged in the design budget for that potential even if those conditions aren't consistently fulfill-able by all players using that set, is inherently hostile design. Combo interactions while certainly neat, really need to be strictly internal to each set if possible unless there is an intent to rewrite every set in the game to have similar functions for parity and consistency. Otherwise for fairness you have to make them so weak and ignorable as to be a pointless investment of design budget and time.

Yeah that's why I made one of the suggestions that I did, and pointed out a precedent. A sleep is a crappier unreliable hold, and either needs to be heavily discounted in design budget for any powers using it, or altered to be on parity with hold or stun. (As to why it was never done before now, well, no set has forced the issue like Aresenal Control has either) Though more than a few powers it looks like the "compensation" for unreliability took the form of a fairly long duration....the issue with that approach is you will almost never have a use for that duration in group play since all other mezz options are superior in practice. I mean, FFS, sleep gets outperformed by a knockback/down proc when it comes to mitigation in team play. And KB spam is something that is divisive as hell within the playerbase.

Long term (and somewhat unfocused) feedback related to both Dominators and Controllers and the new Arsenal sets: I'm glad these have been added for natural/tech themed character concepts - and it would be nice if eventually an Epic/APP could be created for these AT's that is also on theme as well. Closest they have right now is the Mace Mastery Pool, but that is less "I CAST GUN!" and more "SPOOKY ARACHNOS POWERS GO!".

Jetpack and origin power changes were very nice to have when testing a new Arse/Traps Controller, made it less painful to level the character for a few levels the old school way by doing solo missions like a new person just starting out and learning the mechanics would/should do. Much appreciated.

Played a Arse/Traps controller for a bit yesterday after the reordering patch, and it does help in that we are not getting stuck with a Faustian choice of two sleeps anymore. And I was able to solo Ok'ish using Cryo and Tranq by chaining them and mostly ignoring the sleep on Tranq. And of course I avoided taking Sleep Grenade since now it's effectively meme tier. But this just somewhat avoids/papers over a fundamental game design problem with the sleep status effect in that it is generally not group friendly and the times where it helps in a group, nearly any other tool would do the the job better while still being group friendly across a far broader range of circumstances. And with other control sets that have multiple sleep powers, they are arranged in such a way so that sleeps can be avoided entirely on power picks, and/or the sleep is paired with another hard control on the same power and as such is not the main point of the power and not a focal point of its balancing (see: Mind/Illusion). But the current arrangement of powers forces the issue in a way that is avoided on other sets, so of course it is going to be inciting complaints. So here is a set of non-inclusive/exclusive suggestions: A) Take a real good look at Mind and Illusion and learn from how they dealt with/avoided the problem with sleeps and use them as a template for a solution. Will likely require a fundamental rework of the set or at least a few of the powers. Not the preferred solution but better than nothing. B) Globally rework Sleep to make it more group friendly or at least not actively antagonistic to the fast paced gameplay the majority of your playerbase prefers. Some of the older grognards here may remember how HORRIBLE Fear was during the early days of Live. It's going to be on that scale of rework. If you want Sleep to stay breakable, then maybe it needs to come with some sort of benefit for breaking it. My suggestion is slept targets grant the attacker, regardless of AT, an autocrit on them similar to a coup-de-grace in other game systems. That would allow it to be helpful in an AoE heavy composition while keeping it on theme as a breakable mezz. C) The Sleeps status if itself unchanged, needs to come paired with another effect that is still highly desired across a wide range of content if taking powers with them is unavoidable.

I mean I can think up ideas that fix the issue with Boxing and Kick being suckass tax powers, And the original design of the Fighting Pool being based on assumptions that are not true in practice, but that requires being given free reign to violate the cottage rule that sometimes gets treated like a sacred cow past all common sense. Swapping the progression for Tough with either Boxing or Kick was just a cheap way of sidestepping both those. My preference would be to actually fix them. But again, that requires being given free reign to do things some grognards are going to be reflexively contrarian about for contrariness's sake.

Granted Air Superiority is more useful than Punch or Kick. I'd never take any of them for their damage, which leaves how reliable the secondary effect is as the determining factor of usefulness. But yeah, imagine if instead of Hover, we had something like Aerial Axe kick, with shit damage, and an unreliable secondary effect, and the only way to get Fly was to pick it or Air Superiority, even if both were effectively useless to your build. That would suck major ass.

Edit: At least this is the best I can think of offhand without also tossing out the cottage rule and doing something like turning one of Boxing or Kick into a passive or a click self buff, etc.

I mean hell, I could bring up how Concealment: Your entry powers are a choice of a self toggle or an ally buff; both within the same theme but different roles/target. Or Medicine, a choice of an ally heal or a foe/ally applied debuff/buff, so while you are partially restricted in choice of target they are still a different role within the theme. Similar for Presence, you get a choice of a taunt or a placate. Different functions, same theme. But I figured people could get the point without me being that exhaustive. Guess not. Out of all the non APP/Epic pools, Fighting and Leadership are the odd men out. And Leadership's entry powers are good enough for it to not be an issue, on top of it potentially providing something that a character has none of in their primary and secondary - team buffs. And at least they are different buffs, instead of just the same buff with a choice of sprinkles. Every build has access to attacks with a secondary effect (otherwise they'd not be able to level solo). Fighting's entry powers are indistinct in function from each other.

I do like the idea that as far as player characters go to change it to granting a temp version of default flight; then it is up to the recipient if they want to use it, and if they want it recharged they have to get back within the effect radius.

I absolutely can because they are still competing via the same opportunity cost mechanism.

Yeah that's the thing with Boxing and Kick, is that even if one disregards their purpose as a power tax, even with investment they are under most circumstances still inferior choices to take for even the majority of builds they have the most synergy with (AT's with decent melee damage modifiers). And they occupy the same damn role too. So you can pick a crappy attack....or a crappy attack. But if you take both and a 3rd crappy attack later on, they kind of might reach mediocre status! Oh Boy! 🙄 Flight Pool does it right: If I don't want or need the melee utility of Air Superiority, I can take Hover which occupies a different role in the same theme, or vice versa. Leaping Pool does it right: If I don't want or need the melee utility of Jump kick, I can take Combat Jumping which occupies a different role in the same theme, or vice versa. Sorcery Pool does it right: If I don't want or need the ranged utility of Arcane Bolt, I can take Spirit Ward which occupies a different role in the same theme, or vice versa. And on top of that, there are good reasons to take those powers even without them being power taxes.

Ima skip past the multiple pages of pointless bickering and chip my shillings into the pond on the Fighting Pool, and by extension, all the general pools: I don't mind the concept of prerequisites in the general pools. What I mind is the execution. To put it nicely, Boxing and Kick both suck outside of some very extenuating circumstances, even if you burn an additional power pick on Cross Punch. Sure they don't suck as bad as they used to, but they still suck (unless your idea of fun includes 6 slotting Brawl), and investment in them mainly just makes them suck less at the expense of slots that could be been far better spent elsewhere even on builds where melee attacks is at least within theme. Which is extra galling when if all you wanted to do was to pick up a bit more personal mitigation due to a lack of it in your primary and secondary, but it is being gatekept behind garbage. At least some of the other pools do it right and one of the two early picks performs adequately as a one slot wonder if one so desires, while still also being worth slotting. Makes me kind of wish the Fighting pool had been split into two pools instead, Close Quarters Combat and Defensive Training. But it's a bit late for that, so best compromise that I could see is maybe swapping the position of Kick and Tough. And then doing a review of how Tough and Weave might need rebalanced if not being forced to waste a power pick makes it too easy for melee AT's to become immortal.

Yeah I'd prefer if it at least followed a lot faster to save on recasts. The set feels clearly balanced around using this power with continuous uptime. Or if just *having* the power enabled a proc chance to summon it on your other powers as a way of forcefully relocating it.

Yeah I want Katars/punch daggers.

I'm positively ancient as far as modern gamers go, so I use a really archaic control scheme that predates WASD: Arrow keys with my left hand for movement, some camera and targeting controls bound to the home key block immediately above, CTRL to jump. I use the mouse in my right hand to manually target and/or click the powers in the tray. Combat in CoX is slow enough that I can get away with that, otherwise in games that require faster power execution I rebind the number row to the number pad in those games.

I'm down for at least considering any possible changes that would result in less disruptions to the flow of combat. Ideally, any changes would work similar to how Stalkers are able to utilize AS at need if it is off cool-down, but the system rewards the player doing it "correctly".