Bill Z Bubba

Sound or visuals? If it's the sounds (I have the same problem with many of the loop noises) silence those farkers! It's easy. I currently have 20 different game sounds permanently gone thanks to this thread and its sister from back before the snap.

I'd absolutely love the scaler to go higher. +5/x10 sound fun. Another option is to get rid of the 2nd and 3rd level shift entirely. Yank them completely from the game and be done with it.

All three of mine do have the same slotting at least on the attack side. Followup uses a full set of AT IO, scrapper with the +crit chance, brute with the +fury set and the tank with the +damres set. Focus is 5 +5 Apocalypse (no dam/rec) and Glad Jav chance for toxic. Slash is 5 +5 Hecatomb (no dam/rec) and the Achiles' chance for -resist. I suspect that for AA's claws, followup is more heavily proced because it needs far less recharge in it for the fu-focus-slash-crosspunch chain and it gets another -res slotted in CP. But I don't have the power picks to spare to pick up kick and CP and even a cursory glance shows what I would have to lose should I try. Then again, I don't build for insp spamming either.

The interview for that was dreadful.

No, I'm suggesting at no time should any power X AT has access to should use something other than the base AT modifier for range or melee. If I have 1 as my melee modifier, every melee attack I have access to should have a mod of 1. If I have .75 as my ranged modifier, every ranged attack I have access to should be at .75.

A lot closer. And with a much smaller margin of difference in overall damage output. Thus the OP.

I'm only stating that all AT modifiers should be applied to all powers used by said AT. Nothing more, nothing less.

Good question to ask, as long as you also ask how long the 45% defense toon with 2000 hp lasts versus the 90% resist toon with 2000 hp.

No, it isn't unless you have a brute that can hard cap resistance to all damage types 100% of the time while solo. Which, of course, you can't.

No. Also, no. Don't care. Each AT should do its value of damage regardless of the power chosen. Full stop. My knowledge of pain far exceeds anything even remotely related to gaming or computers or philosophy, thanks much.

Ugh. Please by the dark and elder gods get this fixed. It offends my OCD to psychotic levels when a power isn't using the right AT modifier. Set them in stone and fix everything for Satan's sake. For the rest, I have zero issues using insps that drop. Go for it. They're there for a reason. (The hoarding of T4 insps in email are a topic that disgusts me on every level.) But doing so while solo still means I'm at neither cap unless I work REALLY farkin hard at it with insp combining macros. Something I don't have on anything but my farmer. Cuz when farming.. fark it, bring all the cheat codes. The "gap" you're talking about is where my focus exists. There is a gap where the brute is better than the tank on damage output. That's 100% true across the board and there's no discussion there. But the same gap between the tank's ability to survive and the brute's is a much larger gap for the vast majority of the game. If the scrapper's extra damage output compared to the brute's compared to the tank's was equitable across the board to the tank's mitigation versus the brute's mitigation to the scrapper's mitigation, I'd have nothing to discuss other than how much persistent mez protection favors those that have it versus those that don't. But it's NOT equitable. The brute does NOT sit between the scrapper and the tank. It's sits far too close to the scrapper on mitigation and the tank on damage output... at least for the post 50 game.

Maybe. But only because I've been informed that I'm always wrong because I'm an outlier. Whatever the bleeding fark that means.

Doesn't this line of thinking completely ignore solo gameplay on the mitigation front? If I'm not at the caps on damage, I'm not gonna be there on mitigation either and so there will come a point when the tank's damage output exceeds the brute's cuz the brute is busy sniffing dirt and thus doing 0 DPS. This said, I fully grok that with the game as it is, the probability of the brute (or even the scrapper) eating dirt starts to reach nil making the whole argument hilarious unless one actively chooses to force added difficulty.

MMO has always meant you CAN play with other people. Not that you have to or should.

Something rare for brutes unless teamed with buffers. I don't live at the caps. The vast majority of the time I'm never at them unless I just fired off barrier or I'm hitting the damage cap combining insps on my farmer.

hey, @Bopper ... can you do a similar graph for mitigation?

True statement. I lost track a decade ago on the number of arguments that occurred between myself and those that thought there should be no solo path to incarnate-hood.

Sounds like problem caused to me. But I get the point, don't like X play Y and move on. But if I like 10 things about X and only have 1 thing I don't like, what's wrong with trying to get that 1 thing dealt with? I'd kinda agree but that's not what's being discussed here by most of us. Edit: How can brutes be obsolete when I'm using one to PL another right now?

AVs do. And I fight a ton of them regularly. Guess what? The performance I see against a pylon on the overall is mirrored fighting AVs. Imagine that.

To be fair, many of us have veered of into "well, crap, is ANYTHING around here balanced" land as we often do in these threads. I have, I admit, a pretty damn rigid view of game balance when archetypes are involved. But that was born from when this game was, to me, "I'm the scrapper and my brother's the tank." This is how we roll. I'm fine with him being a ton tougher cuz he can't even come close to the damage I dish out. Then the IO system was thrown in and the sudden power leap (no creep here, it was immediate and insane) it provided shook things up. And then Going Rogue came along and the insane turned into full tilt, gassed up WTF land. I actually moved my main and beloved BZB Scrap to another server and rebuilt him as a brute because the brute was far tougher and its damage output was so close to the scrapper that the brute had to win. Had nothing to do with playstyle difference or feel... it was just the facts, man. How was that fixed? Scrappers got 2 AT IOs that buffed their crit rate. More power creep. They could have fixed brutes and dropped their damage level putting them closer to the halfway mark between scrappers and tanks. And then tanks get buffed. More powercreep. They get buffed to the point that leaves me in identical position that the previous bad decisions left me in. Sure, my tank is slower than my brute but he gets to survive things that the brute can not. And the difference between those two states are not equitable. Yea, this is a problem for me and it doesn't look like it's a problem only for me. Yea, ok, I know that claws is a ... unique set due to just how far away from the standard powerset equations it sits, but between the brute/scrap/tank versions, it is in no way dramatically different. The ST chain is still Followup->Focus->Slash->repeat and needs the same amount of recharge in FU to pull it off. The AoE chain is one attack different, FU->Spin->Shockwave->repeat on the scrapper, FU->Focus->Spin->Shockwave->repeat on the brute and tank. (Yes, I know, better attack chains exist due to either loading up with damage procs, and on a scrapper, putting eviscerate into the mix due to its higher than normal crit rate, but they ain't as sexy.) It IS apples to apples but it is also a study of Granny Smith, Fuji or Red Delicious apples. And that study still applies to every other combo shared by the three archetypes. Is my view myopic on archetype balance? I would actually say yes if it weren't for the 10+ other full IOed/T4/etc characters I run. Across all ATs. I'm not coming into this blind of the capabilities of other powersets. You can call me many things and probably be right, but I ain't no n00b.

Truth. Just like sentinels, brutes are superior on the way up to the top, and just like sents, once there, become surpassed by their cousins completely because of IOs.

@Eva Destruction Praetorian Invasion mission in AE? Slaughter a bunch of AVs and notate time? Get the devs to build a DPS tracker into a punching dummy that we can put in our base? I'm sure we'd figure something out.

It matters in any content where the brute will fall while the tank survives. Yes, brutes were clearing faster than tanks across the board. Again, not by nearly as much a spread as the mitigation difference between the two. And maybe the most important part of the discussion that's come out is that the game itself may have been broken across the board with IOs. I'd say incarnates but the SG I run with and I did a zero incarnates max diff ITF without any issues and it wasn't longer in any meaningful way to completion than normal. Given that we ARE forced to seek out content difficult enough to give us a run for our money by buffing enemies, debuffing ourselves, choosing not to use incarnates or inspirations or whatever. Maybe what the game needs IS another great global nerf to get us all back in line with the content since we've so ridiculously surpassed it. (And no, a 40% defense hard cap is not the way to go.) I sure as hell don't want even MORE powercreep but so far that's all we've gotten and it started long before the snap.

Apparently crosspunch is amazing. I'm guessing there's another damres debuff slotted in there.

Agreed. I don't think it's meaningless at all.