Bill Z Bubba

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.

Now all that would show is what's stated in the OP: that the difference between tank and brute damage is far smaller than the difference between their damage mitigation. But again, if all that extra mitigation the tank has is meaningless, no one should bat an eye about nerfing it into line.

Looks right but you'll need to factor in crits for the scrapper and come at it with the understanding that any other damage buffs that come into play will end up benefiting the tank more than the brute.

AS and no spin means I'll never know what a good pylon time is for a claws/sr stalker.

It does. 1 pt fury = 2% dam buff.

Yea, seriously. When you're down to "well, they rock in AE" but might as well go with one of the other two for everything else, there's a problem that needs fixin. There need be no nerf to tanks if brutes get the buffs requested.

That chart (which I've always thought to be misleading) puts tanks at 10/7 for survivability and melee damage. Brutes at 8/9 and scrappers at 7/10. Those values are not accurate to how the game currently sits. It'd be closer to tanks 10/7, brutes 8/8 and scrappers 7/10. If we go with just the chart, which we shouldn't, brutes should be at 8.5/8.5.

The game won't let me start iTrials solo, so I don't know. But when teamed, I've never found anything in this game a struggle, possibly because I've always avoided cheaty playstyles. Edit: Except Aeon in MLTF. That punk...

I can't assume any of that because I never spam insps nor do I run with the P2W buffs. Except when I remember that I can buy mez protection for my squishies. For the rest of it, I don't want to assume. I want the devs to datamine the facts and share them with us.

I hope to the dark elder gods that I'm not in this group. All I've ever wanted for this game was to have a situation where I could pick any powerset for any archetype and feel that I was on a similar plane of performance. I really don't think, that with obvious intelligence of the people brought to this type of game, that such a desire would be impossible or even unlikely.

That's not true. As mentioned in the OP, standard clear all times favor the scrapper heavily in a wide variety of the test missions being built in AE as well as standard experience with the AT regardless of the incredible nuisance of runners.

I know it's all in play but I'm pretty sure, due to her never correcting me when I called her a her but that proves nothing, the greatest math-minded player to ever grace these forums was a woman. We even have a mechanism named for her in arcanatime. Edit: No, really, I have absolutely NO farkin clue how she figured that out.

I'd be ok with that.

I have three Bill Z Bubbas. Well, technically speaking I have Bill Z Bubba the scrapper, Beel Z Bubba the brute and Bael Z Bubba the tank. All three use Claws and Super Reflexes. While solo, the scrapper kicks the crap out of the brute and the tank on standard +4 clear alls. While solo, the tank kicks the crap out of the brute and scrapper on being able to survive Werner rules level content. (Enemies buffed, players debuffed, no insps, no faceplants, no temps.) The scrapper takes down a pylon in 3 mins. The brute, 4 mins. The tank 4.5 mins. While the brute may be the most suited to teaming with its tank mitigation caps and huge damage buff cap, solo it has no reason to exist. And I *still* solo a lot even though the percentage is drastically reduced from how I was before the snap. Suggestion: Raise Brute base damage modifier to be exactly between tanks and scrappers. Increase mitigation base modifiers to be exactly between tanks and scrappers. Lower caps to be exactly between tanks and scrappers. Thank you for your time.