Maelwys

Also, just to address these ones: (i) Brutes currently win at Passive (AFK) farming. But for Active Farming (where you are present behind the wheel to combine inspirations and press buttons) speedwise they are not even in the top three... unless you're intentionally limiting yourself to the traditional four melee ATs only (and even there Scrappers still beat them into the ground) because survivability simply isn't a major issue when you can customise your enemy type and trigger inspirations and click buttons. (ii) Stalkers have two major advantages over Scrappers when it comes to survivability. Firstly, Hide - this not only allows them to get off a heavy opening hit without immediate retaliation, but it increases their Defense by a non negligible amount making it easier to reach the softcap. Secondly, Placate - since the rework in i27pg3 this has very much become worth taking for both offensive and defensive purposes. Now personally I think that Scrapper's higher base HP and HP cap probably make up for at least some of that. And you're correct in that those powers come with an opportunity cost since Stalkers lose access to some other abilities. But to my mind the biggest performance difference between Stalkers and Scrappers comes from the availability of Taunt Auras in the latter.

I am not, and it isn't. I am looking for a way to ensure that a Brute, a Tanker, a Scrapper and a Stalker can each provide something beneficial to the team that is sufficiently different that each of those ATs ends up filling a separate worthwhile niche and being attractive as a team member (albeit perhaps more attractive for specific content or team compositions). Brutes' current placing of being "slightly more survivable and dealing significantly less damage than a Scrapper" is unfortunately simply not a worthwhile niche. They therefore are not currently chosen for what the AT can mechanically bring to the team, but because of other factors (such as being friends with the person playing them, or there are no Tankers/Scrappers available, or the difficulty level of the content is so trivial that team composition simply doesn't matter). With the recent Tanker AoE damage nerfs, Brutes lot has improved slightly, but in most content they will still mechanically pale in performance compared to a Scrapper with a Taunt Aura (and Confront, for facing AVs) and for 4* content a Tanker's larger buff caps and MaxHP pool will win out - because the melee AT's native defensive powerset buffs are irrelevant since with alternating Barrier spam your toggles might as well be switched off. There is certainly a valid argument that teams nowadays steamroll through missions so quickly that the differences in Melee AT offensive and defensive performance become largely irrelevant. And if all you need is someone to take the Alpha and occasionally taunt AVs then you might as well just bring a /Devices Blaster or Illusion/ Controller or Arsenal/ Dominator or whatever. But I do firmly believe that getting each of the melee ATs to a point where they can each be seen as attractive to a team in different ways would be a good design goal. And the fact that a well built and intelligently piloted Scrapper can survive most content in the game is IMO not a bug... because the same applies for a well built and intelligently piloted Blaster (and often an unintelligently piloted and/or soundly inebriated one!!) especially when teammate buffs are applied - heck, even back before IOs and crashless nukes and sustains a single Empath plus a Blaster could tackle most things in the game...

Masterminds? They already have 'em.

A lot of the time the groupthink boils down to "Scrappers should be STRONGEST, Tankers should be PRETTIEST, Brutes should be both STRONG and PRETTY." Then at some point the thinker remembers about Stalkers and has to backpeddle a bit so that they can be the REAL strongest. (Just maybe not against groups. Unless they're Primary X and Secondary Y. Or if it's a Tuesday...) However in reality there aren't just two desirable and potentially opposing dimensions (personal survivability vs personal damage output) but lots of other things to consider. Aggro control and debuff/buff capability; at a bare minimum. I think it's fair to say that each of the four Melee ATs should be capable of soloing at a reasonable pace; and each of them also ought to be a valuable addition to a team. However YOU DO NOT NEED TO DEAL THE MOST DAMAGE OR BE THE MOST SURVIVABLE IN ORDER TO BE A VALUABLE ADDITION TO A TEAM. Defenders are a prime example of this. They do not personally deal the most damage or take the most hits - but they act as a force multiplier; allowing the team as a whole to deal far more damage and/or withstand far more hits. IMO each of the four melee ATs should simply have something unique which makes them a potentially desirable recruit for someone putting a team together. CoX is currently lacking a melee AT that acts as a force multiplier (other than very specific VEATs with double leadership auras...) so from what I can tell there is a bit of a gap in the market there (although I'm sure it's not the only one!) which is why I said this: Altering the dynamic in this manner would allow for different team compositions whilst maintaining similar levels of performance. As an example: On Four Star Content people tend to bring a Kinetic (for +Damage) and a Tanker (for Aggro Control) whilst spamming endless Barriers. But if Brutes were capable of inflicting a sizable amount of -res debuffs or granting a sizable amount of +damage buffs then a similar level of performance could potentially be achievable by taking that Brute instead of the Tanker and swapping the Kin for a different buff powerset (like Thermal or Marine). Team variety increases. More characters become "desirable". Merriment ensues.

/bind KEY "petcom_all aggressive follow" Summon Pet. Press KEY. Done. No clicking of pet trays or any other horribly difficult UI interactions required. And if you are the sort of person that doesn't need the kids to set up your streaming box (that's the modern equivalent of "program your VCR", right?) you could even append the petcom command onto the end of the same button you press to summon the controller pet in the first place.

I used to love Sappers. And Shadow Cysts! They were barely a threat if you had one whit of sense (my human form PB used to solo the little terror-inducing purple fluffballs for shiggles) but it always seemed to stop the half-asleep steamrolling PUG team dead in its tracks. Heaven forbid you actually have to target something... 🙄

I "save" most of them for later; and chug the rest. Typically Column #1 is a Red, a Yellow, an Ultimate and a Wakey. Column #2 is Purples. Column #3 is a mixture of Greens and Blues (typically only 1-2 blues). Column #4 is Breakfrees. Although on a melee toon I only tend to keep one emergency Breakfree; and use this for extra Reds/Oranges. Column #5 is left empty, so it's where my free-use skittles drop. I basically have my movement and targeting keys bound to "inspexec_slot 5"; so that as more skittles drop I immediately chug them. If I'm fighting an GM etc I'll just start manually combining them and/or open the AH or my global email to fill half my tray up with Reds.

Vigilance is a pretty rubbish inherent, but at least it boosts their damage output when soloing/duoing. I find their ATOs rather decent personally - the Heal proc is particularly useful on Sonic/FF/Cold/etc, and the Absorb Proc is useful for everyone. (Although if they weren't AoE then it'd be another story...) FWIW, with the ATO2 proc in Headsplitter you should get 4.25-(2.508-1.32)=3.062 active buff time remaining afterwards. That's more than enough leeway to trigger both Hack (Arcanatime=1.584) and either Whirling Sword (ATBE=1.2 sec) or Disembowel (ATBE=0.733 sec).

AFAIK the only AT that Elec/Shield is currently decent on is a Stalker. Whilst the pseudopet Teleportation AoEs do benefit from caster boosts like Fury, they have poor base damage on Brutes and don't inherit their larger damage caps and also don't Proc well (aside from the Tanker version of Lightning Rod which is coded as a power effect redirect instead of as an entity creation). If you want an AoE focused Brute I'd lean into either Fiery Aura, Stone Armor (non Granite) or Radiation Armor rather than Shield Defense. Primary will be Super Strength, Battle Axe, Titan Weapons or Martial Arts. Savage Melee is also a contender for AoE but is terribad at ST.

I'd love to see that sort of testing too, although as @SomeGuy points out Trapdoor isn't really a great example of an average mission these days, so something like Galaxy Brain's Mission Simulator map might work better. I'm not sure about the premise that Brutes "should" be squarely between Tankers and Scrappers. A lot of players feel that Brutes, Scrappers and Stalkers should be dealing very similar levels of damage output. Personally I subscribe to the notion that the less survivable you are the more damage you should be dealing, but since non-Resistance focused Brutes are very close to Scrappers there it's rather difficult to put a firm number on it. For Pylon times I think it's fair to say that Stalkers ought to reign supreme but Tankers come dead last, but for AoE heavy content (like active AE farming) and for mixed "regular mission content" things get a bit murkier since most Stalkers have poor AoE capability and Tankers are supposedly meant to be AoE specialists. Really depends on just where the Devs feel it ought to sit. There are any amount of Pylon time threads out there, and even in Ston's original threads (which lean heavy into Cross Punch and "old" pre-recharge-time-nerf Epic Snipes, and don't quite make the best use of Scrapper ATO2) you can clearly see Scrappers drastically outpace Brutes in those metrics. By about 30-35%. My own far more limited testing using Galaxy Brain's Mission Sim has Scrappers being about 130% faster than Brutes, 140% faster than Tankers and also comfortably beating Stalkers (although by how much drastically depends on the Stalker powersets, as something like an Elec/Shield will be a lot closer than a NinjaBlade/SR or EnergyMelee/EA). Unfortunately my free time is largely still being taken up by toddlers so I'm currently not in a position to put together an exhaustive comparison. My gut feeling is that Tanker performance should be a smidge better (roughly where Brutes currently are) and Brutes should be a lot better (still beaten by a Scrapper, but only by 10-15% tops!) 🤓 📋

I think as long as one single character can't reliably damage more than 16 enemies with a single attack (Judgement Nukes and Rain Powers notwithstanding!) then we're probably OK. The HC Devs seem to keep gutting stuff that has the potential for runaway exponential damage stacking (like Fiery Aura Burn, Assault Bot Incendiary Swarm Missiles, Plant Control Vines, etc). I know part of that is in response to AE Farming, but it could just as easily apply to "mega corner pulling/dumpster diving" shenanigans. It's already pretty easy to drag nearly two mobs worth of foes directly on top of another two mobs worth of foes. So clumping things up isn't an issue, but keeping things clumped absolutely is, since you really need a long-duration AoE mez for the first 10-16 plus a Taunt for the next 17. And whilst it's currently possible to juggle that sort of thing on a Tanker or Brute; it isn't pretty or particularly safe for your teammates... 😇

To be perfectly honest I think Aggro caps should scale a bit depending on the AT... say Regular ATs including Scrappers ~17, Brutes and Kheldians ~22-25, and Tankers ~27-32. The target limit on most wide AoE abilities caps out at 16, so I can understand why 17 is the default aggro limit. But I personally would prefer it if a Tanker's larger target limits actually allowed them to reliably hold the attention of a few extra enemies (so having a Tanker on the team makes that team safer, especially whenever Blasters are nuking every other spawn, rather than simply faster) instead of having the HC Devs continually fixate on getting four melee ATs' damage output balanced just right. That said, if the Devs hadn't decided that Tankers were apparently supposed to be the melee "AoE specialists" then I'd be perfectly game to stampede off in an entirely different direction... (for the benefit of anyone who didn't read the i28p2 design notes, the relevant snippet is: "Tankers will... ...be AoE specialists among the Melee AT's. We believe that this is a more balanced take for their intended role compared to more damage-focused counterparts." however currently a Tanker hitting 16 targets with an AoE will deal roughly 1% to 11% less damage than a Brute hitting 10 targets with that same AoE... so if they're demonstrably not AoE specialists whenever it comes to damage output, surely that just leaves aggro control?)

The VEAT global Toxic damage Proc tends to contribute quite a lot to their performance. In Soldiers (which can apply considerable additional -res to Toxic damage via Venom Grenade) it can be particularly good, but replicating its baseline effects would still certainly constitute a buff to Brute performance over their current "chance for Fury" ATO. However it'd not help Brutes carve out a different niche for themselves, so best case they'd just draw a bit closer to Scrapper/Stalker levels of damage output. Also, having a Proc's effect vary depending upon the damage type(s) within the triggering attack is to the best of my knowledge currently impossible (at least without including an additional "Fiery Embrace" style conditional element within each and every potentially affected attack power!)... but if the intention is just to inflict a different damage type depending on the owner's selected primary powerset then that might be more doable. It'd still be considerably more straightforward to just pick a single damage type though. Like Smashing. Brute SMASH. <INSERT CLICHÉD TABLE FLIP ASCII ART HERE>

The one about merging Tankers and Brutes together then forcing them both to act mechanically identical to Brutes prior to reaching level 24? I already replied to your PM about it 4 hours ago, but since you're asking again here... I think if the Devs actually did that then the playerbase would be extremely incensed. Really the only thing the proposed change would result in would be the removal of all Tankers below level ~24. Whilst it's true that Brutes don't have much of a niche, somehow I suspect that taking things away from Tankers again is not the way to go about fixing that. My preference would still be to make Brute ATO effects (i) more powerful and (ii) provide a reasonable benefit to their teammates.

This. Last time I back-of-the-enveloped it, I came up with one Global ATO that lets their attacks apply a non-stacking -res debuff that scales with Fury (roughly 1 point of -res for every 4 points of Fury, so capping out at roughly 20-22%) and one Proc ATO that grants 5% MaxHP, 5% Resistance and 2.5% Defense in a 60ft AoE Aura that is stackable up to twice (or possibly scaling with Fury once again up to a similar maximum value rather than utilizing PPM). I've never found the existing +Fury ATO useful, best case it's bringing me from ~90 to ~93 Fury whenever I'm in full hulk mode. The +Regeneration/Recovery one occasionally helps take some of the passive regeneration threshold pressure off in AFK AE farming runs, but in regular gameplay is utterly ignorable.

I assume that's a Pylon time rather than a Trapdoor or mission simulator run? My own recent testing (as of open beta i28pg2) put Scrappers roughly 30% faster than Brutes, and 60% faster than the originally proposed Tanker changes on Brainstorm on a Mission Simulator map at +4x8. Post patch (with the base damage changes reverted) I'm observing Tankers only getting beaten by about 40%. In any case my point was that whenever ATOs are being considered then an optimized Scrapper will beat an optimized Brute into the dirt, rather than it being anything like a close race. So that 30% figure was meant to be a rough indicative ballpark rather than a hard rule. IME whilst there are individual powers and/or powerset combos that play more to a Brute's strengths than to a Scrapper's (like Stone Armor's Brimstone Procs and Fiery Aura's Burn patches) it's still typically not enough to make up the difference whenever ATOs are a consideration... and given the non-superior versions can be slotted from low levels? Nah. And whilst I can certainly understand the reason behind Tankers not getting any ATOs that notably directly buff their damage output, the same is very much not true for Brutes. I do however think (and have suggested previously) that in order to give Brutes a decent niche it might be a good idea to have their ATOs grant a noteworthy beneficial effect which extends (at least in part) as an AoE to nearby allies... let Tankers be lower-damage aggro magnets (just increase their aggro limit!), and Stalkers and Scrappers be the high-damage damage dealers (stealthy Single-Target and non stealthy All-Purpose), and Brutes can be the middle-men who aren't quite the best at anything but can still hold their own whilst buffing their teammates' damage and survivability a bit.

The list of everything across the whole game? Heck no. The list of ATOs though? I'd say so, since Brutes are one of only two ATs that have utterly garbage tier globals/procs in BOTH their ATO sets... and unlike Sentinels they have two rather close sister ATs (Stalkers and Scrappers) which don't have such a handicap and so outperform them in almost every conceivable scenario (ignoring passive "AFK" AE Farming).

Because if the assumption is that a Scrapper with ATOs just about outperforms a Brute with ATOs then the only way that assumption holds any water is if it is a very mediocre Scrapper build. A min-maxed Scrapper will deal an additional ~30% or more average damage compared to a min-maxed Brute, with ATOs. Without ATOs the Brute will be roughly on par with the Scrapper - Scrappers will be miles better at spike damage hit and runs but Brutes will typically edge them out in prolonged combat (providing that neither is getting an obscenely high amount of constant damage buffs, like endless red insps or fulcrum shift). The only other thing that can potentially vastly skew the numbers in favour of the Brute is if the Scrapper doesn't happen to possess a decent duration Taunt Aura (eg anything other than Willpower) and they're doing a Kill All at x8. And regarding Fiery Orb/Energy Font... most PPM effects are going to be very hard to balance without nuking Proc mechanics from orbit, but the aforementioned two ATOs solved that issue by summoning an incredibly fragile uncontrollable pet with short duration and crap AI in entirely the wrong place for it to do any good. IIRC best case it adds less than half the damage of a regular 3.5PPM damage Proc. Hard pass.

Being perfectly honest, I don't know... ...but I very much suspect that it's a case of other things taking priority. HC has a dedicated but small and voluntary group of developers; and an even smaller proportion of them are on the powers team. So the amount of manhours available to do any work on powers stuff is comparatively tiny. I've personally logged multiple bugs in powers that to me would appear to be a very easy and straightforward fix (we're talking five minutes tops to remove an incorrectly set flag, such as a regeneration buff that has "affected by enemy level" set) and yet they're still present years later because they're just not a priority for the powers team. That said, there are many things that irk me when it comes to powers in CoX, and Brute (and Sentinel) ATO underperformance is just one of them. Lore pets - most of these are utter rubbish, and the Radial BP pets should not be doing damage whilst invulnerable. Kinetic Melee - by far the worst performing melee powerset. Kheldians and their attack animation time cancelling exploit bug. PPM Proc mechanics (more local recharge aspect being bad for you is completely insane). And many more. So frankly I'm not holding my breath for any one particular change. I am however glad that they've just spent a big chunk of effort attempting to address Tanker AoEs (even if it's not quite fully there just yet!!)

It was time to change the ATOs years ago. Baseline Scrappers, Stalkers and Brutes are fine balancewise. Tankers were very much an outlier (at least whenever you were engaging a sufficiently high quantity of enemies to keep your attacks saturated!) and the recent changes have addressed that... however they are now lagging a little behind and so frankly could do with the Overcap damage reduction being lessened a bit (e.g. to at most a ~50% flat reduction instead of the current -67% flat reduction) and/or their aggro cap being raised by ~50% or so. The ATOs are to blame for the very large performance disparity between a min-maxed Scrapper or Stalker (with their utterly fantastic ATOs) and a min-maxed Brute (with their utterly dogturd ATOs). And whilst the Tanker ATOs don't directly increase damage, they do directly increase survivability (via a constant 13.4%-20.1% damage resistance plus a decent chunk of Absorb) which can allow a min-maxed Tanker to forego slotting for any additional survivability via set bonuses and instead concentrate on slotting for global recharge and damage procs. AFAIK the only reason that some players aren't observing a major performance disparity between those ATs in game is that fully leveraging the Scrapper ATOs requires a very detailed knowledge of your attack timings (ideally you want to place the ATO2 proc itself in an attack with high Animation Time Before Effect and high PPM activation chance, then follow that attack up with a few low Arcanatime but high damage attacks, plus a final attack with a sufficiently low ATBE that it can just sneak in before the very end of the ATO2 proc's actual buff duration window). Getting the most out of the Stalker ATOs is much more straightforward, since all it really requires is sticking a Gaussian proc in Build Up and having a big heavy crit-from-hidden wallop that isn't Assassin's Strike... but Stalkers don't get any taunt auras and tend to be rather lacking in the AoE dept, which means they end up with considerably more ground to make up on team/+Nx8 content.

Traps is fine, although the MM version still gets Detonator rather than the more useful Temporal Bomb. Really the only thing I'd poke at would be reducing the interruptible period of Trip Mine (or even eliminating it entirely like the Devices version!) It's definitely slow moving, but it excels at point defense and crippling AV/GMs. 3+ Acid Mortars for -res plus a Poison Trap to floor their regeneration, and 2x Triage Beacons (with Panacea proc) and an FFG for sustain... Caltrops, Web Grenade and Tripmine toebombing is just gravy.

FWIW my Bot/Traps was comfortably soloing AVs even pre IOs... it's all about positioning and getting the debuffs layered on properly. That said, IMO that combo has long since been surpassed as the "do everything" MM build by Bots/Marine. That setup is just so solid it finds it really difficult to lose...

Why not just visit a START vendor and pick up the "Only Affect Self" toggle power...?

Depends if you're working Rise of the Phoenix into your attack chain or not... 😛