Maelwys

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... 😛

A few patches ago Mids started wiping out parts of the Mids Hero Designer folder (including deleting the entire contents of its old default Builds subfolder) every time it takes an update. So if you store your saved build files within that subfolder, they'll get deleted each time Mids updates. It's happened on me at least five times now across three different devices. If you store your build files elsewhere (like within your My Documents folder) or back them up to a secondary location then they'll be OK. I take nightly backups which is the only reason why I didn't have steam coming out my ears when it started happening. And yes, the MR Devs are aware of if it as it was grumbled about on discord some months back. IIRC the official advice is to just not store your builds there. Meh.

FWIW, whenever I was combing through patch notes a few topics ago I did come across this: I always considered Punchvoke to be the name of a mechanic (whenever a taunt effect triggers on activating attacks) rather than tied to a specific AT's inherent. So IMO Tankers and Brutes and Kheldian Dwarfs all get it. I know the Wiki claims Brute's is called "Pokevoke" but I haven't heard anyone actually use that term seriously since circa issue 7.

It's even worse than that actually. That's from Ston's old Trapdoor results thread. Mission mobs scatter and Scrapper Willpower RTTC has a rubbish 1.25 base duration Taunt; so it's having to deal with runners. Stone even notes this in his disclaimer. That said; I agree with Tidge that "Asking for a an improved Brute %proc ATO, to either make them sturdier than Tankers or do more damage than Scrappers is crazy talk". IMO we should in fact be asking for TWO improved Brute ATOs... one of which noticeably boosts survivability (but not quite as much as a Tanker SMoT Proc) and one of which noticeably boosts damage output (but not quite as much as a Scrapper SCS Proc). The idea here being for Brutes to remain a bit behind Scrappers in damage output, and a bit behind Tankers in survivability. At present whenever ATOs are considered Brutes are almost OK in terms of survivability; but noticeably sub-par in terms of damage output. So it's either that or nerf the Scrapper and Stalker ATOs... 🧯🔥 🚒

Defender level buffs when applied to pets are pretty obviously going to beat Controller level ones. And being able to layer more -resistance and -tohit on enemies is only going to benefit pets. But Defenders only really get access to Patron Pool Pets (with the exception of stuff like Traps FFG, Marine's Barrier Reef and Fluffy from Dark Miasma IIRC). Controllers get more pets. So whenever there aren't any teammates around they have something to gain the benefit of all their allied buffs and perhaps even tank for them. Personal experience with running lots of tests with Masterminds and Crabbermind VEATs has shown me that pets are incredibly efficient whenever it comes to taking down a big single target; especially with lots of buffs and debuffs in play. That's a big part of why Crabberminds were top of the Pylon leaderboards for ages and why /Marine MMs can down a pylon in a mere 10 seconds. However whenever you subject those pets to a real-world mission environment with multiple targets and teammates they can "underperform". And it's not just because you need to expend more effort in keeping them alive - they're slow; they have buggy AI; they tend to get stuck a lot on Geometry; they obstruct teammate vision and movement; etc. etc. And that's on a MM that can issue their pets orders - something which until very recently Controllers were unable to do! I will say however that whilst my oldest most support-focused Defender (a Sonic/Elec that I've had since issue ~7) did really appreciate gaining access to patron pets back in the day; I've long since stripped them out of their build in favour of min-maxing the toon's own attack chain. And from the Controller side... whilst my two oldest most support-focused ones (an lllusion/Empath which on HC has since been remade as an Illusion/Time; and an Earth/Thermal) are/were both heavily reliant on their T9 pets; neither of them has ever taken a Patron Pet despite being perfectly capable of getting them "perma". So it depends on the pet. IMO the patron ones tend to be a bit underwhelming... in fact the only Controller I have which does take a Patron Pet is an Arsenal/Traps; and that was more because I had plenty of power picks left and already wanted Poisonous Ray.

I get the testing methodology and I agree that measuring each build across ~30 data points (any less than that and the statistical confidence plummets) will provide some useful points for comparison. My issue is more one of... how to best put this? "false advertising"? "sensationist overstatement"? "clickbait headlines"? "unrealistic expectations?" I'm not sure where this and the original Defcon thread fall in/amongst all those terms - because some of them imply an intention to misdirect for the sake of views; and I'm not sure that's what's going on here and I definitely don't want to disparage or belittle the obvious effort that went into it. However I am more than a little bit concerned that someone might glance at these thread titles, then immediately look at the results and draw sweeping conclusions from them that are beyond the scope of what was tested. I have seen plenty of cases (on these forums, in game, on discord, on reddit, etc etc) where someone has spouted misinformation based on test results that they've taken completely out-of-context. Ston's old Melee Comparison and Tier Listing is a good example of this - if you don't look too closely at the context (e.g. the attack chains and slotting utilised; and what was actually being attacked) you might be forgiven for thinking that it is a straightforward test of what level of damage the powers contained within each offensive melee powerset can deal; with each powerset's performance then ranked to show how they perform in relation to each other. But instead it's a test of specific builds and attack chains; many of which rely heavily on pool and epic powers. That doesn't mean it's not useful data; but it's often misused as ammunition in arguments for just how much set X performs in relation to set Y in a vacuum; typically to help the quoter justify powerset buffs or nerfs. So allowing your audience to easily understanding the scope of what is being tested is important. The original Defcon thread claims to be attempting to answer the question "who brings more to the team — Defenders or Controllers?" by making "an honest-to-goodness comparison of these two ATs". However in reality what it is actually measuring and recording are multiple data points for a very limited number of specific builds. Therefore the most that this approach will be capable of showing a reasonable level of statistical confidence in is how THOSE SPECIFIC CHOSEN BUILDS are likely to perform in a team. Whilst you can certainly compare those builds with each other and draw conclusions from it, the number and variety of builds being tested is far too limited to be meaningfully representative of "Defenders" and "Controllers" as a whole - there are simply so many possible build variations that you cannot directly extrapolate from such a limited subset of them to produce a meaningful outcome; at least not whilst maintaining a reasonable level of accuracy and statistical confidence. So whilst these threads are certainly entertaining (I enjoy the artwork and bios in particular) unfortunately as far as I can tell it's falling well short of its stated goals - because the testing methodology being employed is far too limited to measure "Defenders vs Controllers" with a reasonable level of statistical confidence. Again, I agree with the first section here - with 25 data points you are indeed very likely going to start to see meaningful trends emerge. But those trends are only meaningful for each character being tested. There seems to be a very big assumption going on here that the results for these 10 characters can be extrapolated to provide an accurate indication of how the Defender and Controller ATs will perform in relation to each other; rather than merely an accurate indication of how this particular subset of characters will perform in relation to each other. And that's what I'm taking issue with here - you've looked at 10 out of the possible 459 primary/secondary powerset combinations tested (let alone the potential variation in power selection, enhancement slotting, power pools, epic pools, incarnate choices, etc) which is at best only covering 2.18% of the possible builds. Therefore I do not believe that this experiment allows you to state with any level of confidence that "Controllers outperformed Defenders, and reliably so"... just that "these Controllers outperformed these Defenders, and reliably so". And lets be clear; I'm not demanding in the slightest that you test all 204 (Controller) and 255 (Defender) powerset combos here. Because (i) that's sheer madness and (ii) doubtless even after that someone else would object because (for example) "your Time Manipulation Controller should have been using both Power Boost and Radial Clarion to boost the effectiveness of Far Sight like a real character would have done..." 🙄. The sheer enormity of build customisations available in CoX simply doesn't lend itself to trying to model things based on random sampling; at least not without unfeasibly large sample sizes; and different people have very different notions about building characters and pushing min-maxed numbers. One person might go deep into DPS; and another into maximum mitigation; and another might try for both whilst making minimal build concessions - so one person's Controller (or even Mastermind) could easily beat another person's Defender in pure buffing potential. Squeezing maximum performance out of each of my characters is something I personally rather enjoy making a game out of; but lots of other people simply don't care in the slightest - so there are myriad unknown and/or uncontrollable variables that can muddy the waters. However it's still an entertaining thread with lots of good and useful data, and the results seem perfectly valid for what is actually being tested. So thumbs up 👍