Bill Z Bubba

They deserve it.

I miss my 30 year old eyeballs.

What attack chain was this?!?!

Sound choices. SR and SD are also common picks for natural fighters but both come with click mez protection which some find annoying. Hell, I main SR and *I* find it annoying.

Truth.

Eva Destruction's Praetorian Invasion arc gives you a single map with all the Praet AVs. Even has a built in timer. Run it at, say, +3/x1 and you'd likely get some decent data after a few runs if you're bouncing between different incarnate powers.

See also Elude, Power Surge, Overload and Kuji-in Retsu.

I was one of those number crunchers. It wasn't true before AT IOs and it's certainly no longer true. Although, it was damn close before AT IOs. The reason BZB scrapper was turned into BZB brute back before the snap was, ironically, because the extra mitigation provided by being a brute exceeded the extra damage from being a scrapper. Funny, that, considering the current discussion.

A chance that can be easily calculated over time. If you're stating that "a brute can exceed a scrapper's damage when the scrapper gets a slew of unlucky crit rolls" then you should have said so. If you were trying to state a single attack with a capped damage buff for a brute can exceed the same attack from a scrapper at the cap only IF the scrapper doesn't crit, then you should have said so.

Again, false statement. No brute is going to surpass a scrapper's damage unless you're comparing a powerset like EM against Spines where you specifically stated we aren't allowed.

This. Wanna know where being melee is most useful? When soloing. Teams don't need any melee AT.

Ok. Neither are useless (or both are useless since we all can run all corruptor or all scrapper teams and slaughter everything) and there's just as much reason to build a brute as there is a tank. See? That's easy. And it has absolutely nothing to do with a discussion about balance.

I did. AT modifiers are actually proof that the devs initially felt that intra-AT balance, numerically, was very important. And then chaos occurred. You're not wrong. If we compare like to like, the tank's extra mitigation is vastly higher than the brute's extra damage output. Of course as so many have pointed out, "who should care, right? All that extra mitigation is wasted in 99% of the game? It doesn't matter!" It doesn't matter because of the colossal power creep this game has endured and adding to it is beyond insane. Apparently it doesn't make sense for far too many.

Ok. The worst, least fun TFs in the game just due to mind-numbing monotony? No thanks. This is why AT modifiers don't exist. Oh wait, yes they do.

To be honest, most of the posts I'm seeing in this thread point to the tank's extra mitigation as superfluous across the board and even the damage buff they received was meaningless, since brutes can survive anything and still dish out more damage. I mean hell, I do have to self-gimp with enemies buffed and player debuffed and no insps to make the ITF challenging at this point, so there must be something to it. It's almost like the tank buffs really were unnecessary and unwarranted and brutes should have been nerfed into the dirt.

I misread. It seemed you were saying just the opposite. By "building to individual strengths" one would think you ramped up damage on the brute and survivability on the tank.

That would explain the much larger disparity in your times.

Them too! But I'm confused, if that were true, where are all those Tsoo and Banished Pantheon coming from in DA? I've already murdered medium sized cities worth of them!

I stand by earlier statements. I kill everyone I defeat. It's not my fault that the medic porters keep bringing them back to life.

We are capable of agreement. I am capable of separating my ability to have fun from my views of balance. Which is why I have an em/shield brute and identically built shield/em tank on beta. It's why I have a claws/sr scrapper, brute and sr/claws tank. You're right when doing strict data crunching, that is the way to go. And what we've all agreed on with various amounts of testing is that for clearing maps the brute still beats the tank. Where the arguments all come from is that some of us think the time difference is far too close between the two while others don't. In the end, as you can see from the back and forth, it doesn't matter at all. Some of us just like arguing for one reason or another. I can type til I'm blue in the face but don't expect what I see as a problem to ever be corrected. But I'm stubborn to a fault.

What you provide is hardly evidence of anything. Do you honestly believe that a tank takes twice as many attacks using the exact same attack chain as the brute with the same animations but only takes 30 seconds more time to down a pylon? Do you really believe that's how math works? Because you'd be wrong. As usual. We get it.

Nope. Whole game is far too broken for that. At this point it's nothing but random thought experiments. I would love to see a CoH that was mathematically meaningful. Where archetype choice meant something. Where cast time was always taken into account for damage dealt. Where secondary affects of powers were universally utilized and balanced. Instead, we've got a game where the only reason end-game content (read itrial "raids") isn't soloed or duoed or trioed on the regular is because it won't allow you to start them with that few people. I love this game. Always have. But it does bum me out to see what it has become and appears to be going down a path of becoming worse because of it. I get that there are some players that are very happy that their pet AT has finally become the "god" of the game and any attempt to roll that back sends them flying off into drooling psychosis. But that has nothing to do with balance.

Lies. If it were true, then identically built tanks would be doing 50% less DPS against pylons. You know this is a false statement, why continue to make it?

Where "most content" equates to a max diff that I can solo with a defender now. 4.5 mins for a claws tank vs 4 for the claws brute. That's not me cherry picking, it's you ignoring reality. Brutes are NOT taking out bosses with 50% less hits than tanks. Side note: I would also nerf brute mitigation caps and buff their base values to be exactly 50% between tank and scrapper values.

Now you're grasping to avoid the problem. I know I can build em and shield on all 4 and I know exactly how it'll turn out, which will be exactly as the claws and sr tests turned out. It changes nothing. Tanks were overbuffed. Some people don't care. Some of us find it ridiculous. And I'll keep playing my ludicrously broken shield/em tank and continue doing ridiculous things with it that I certainly shouldn't be able to do. And I'll continue coming into these threads stating the same damn thing: they didn't need the buff, the didn't deserve the buff and the sure as hell shouldn't be in the same damage dealing league at all as their damage PRIMARY counterparts.