Bill Z Bubba

See last post.

That bit about the pylon was an amusing anecdote. Not a test. And I stated so. Doesn't change the fact that a damage secondary archetype is now pushing out nearly the same damage as a damage primary archetype while having superior mitigation thanks to it being an armor primary archetype. There's no cherry picking, there's no exaggeration. The changes did nothing but balance more than it was already broken. So let's take it to the logical conclusion. Bump defender and controller base damage mods up to tank level and we'll call it a day. Why not at this point? What's it matter?

Perhaps that would have been a better solution for tanks, too.

They were only too slow for all those people that demanded that tankers be the Superman of CoH. There's weren't too slow for anyone with enough sense to grasp that their heightened mitigation should mean their damage should suck. They are a damage secondary class after all. Just like defenders.

No they didn't. They did enough damage to get through a mission, just like a defender. They could solo normal content without issue. Their damage output was fine in comparison to their mitigation. The buff was unnecessary and unwarranted.

I would change that to say, "being inferior tanks with barely superior damage output." I just soloed an MA/Elec Brute to 33/34 then PLed her to 50. Now I'm staring at an empty Mids build and wondering why I'm bothering. I think I'm entering the phase where, thanks to all the ridiculous powercreep both before and after the snap, that I'm reminded of Syndrome... when everyone's super, no one is. All that extra damage that a stalker or scrapper can dish out doesn't mean much when they can't sit in the middle of Rom and his fluffies without faceplanting and tank damage is so close to brute damage while having greater build allowance thanks to higher base values, it's just gotten to the point where I wonder why I bother with anything but this ridiculous shield/em tank other than, "well, that other set looks cooler."

Point was, stating something has "enough" mitigation for whatever we decide is "normal" gameplay has nothing to do with powerset or archetype balance. Balance should come from math, not feeling.

My time/fire defender survives well enough and dishes out enough damage to clear the map.

I don't disagree. I don't agree that any tank should ever outdamage any scrapper in any case anywhere or anyhow. Just found it amusing. To put it another way, an Energy tank shouldn't even be able to get a better pylon time than a Spines scrapper since no scrapper can ever reach tank mitigation values. And, yes, I know, powerset balance within an AT was never this game's strong suit either.

A fun side note... found out my shield/em tank, with saturated AAO, has better single target damage than my claws/sr scrapper. Not by much, granted, bout 5 seconds faster than the scrapper's average, bet if I ran more tests they'd even out around 3 minutes on a pylon... but it amused me. A tank... taking down a pylon in the same time as a scrapper. With vastly more mitigation. BALANCE!

Master Brawler wins in my book and I wish it would get ported to all the other SR users. You're not actually forgoing mez protection if you take it. The protection gets moved to your first two toggles instead. The only benefit to PB at this point is that you can click it while mezzed as a breakfree but as long as your toggles are up if you take MB, getting mezzed in the first place becomes a non-issue.

I've only got a few claws. Claws/SR, Claws/SR, SR/Claws, Claws/FA, Claws/Bio, Bio/Claws.... think that's it actually.

Followup is fun. Doublestacking FU (or more in extreme cases) makes spin and shockwave into truly glorious creatures.

Yes, you can self-gimp by running at max diff at level 12 with SOs. That sounds awful.

There's quite a few sets that shine early and then fall behind. I've enjoyed running content on my new ma/elec brute. It has reminded me of how the old days felt. That ain't a bad thing. I've enjoyed the sudden faceplants from that vanguard group. That's the kind of content change to affect balance that I like seeing.

It's not self-gimping to have options. It's self-gimping to choose them, especially when there's no added reward to doing so other than "I did it." Just as not bothering with IOs at all is self-gimping. I self-gimped to run the Werner rules ITF just to see if I could. There was no reward from doing it other than adding my name to a list. Folks say this or that is "hard" but that's a lie. It's not hard. None of this is hard. It's a video game. Digging ditches in frozen tundra is hard. Making massive inf to afford IOs isn't hard. Anyone can do it with a fire farmer or a single tricked out character farmin DA repeatables. We can all, of course, choose not to. We can choose not to PL alts or farm for inf or run with nothing but SOs at +0/x1 from 1 to 50 and only get incarnate loot from running I-trials. But that, too, is self-gimping. It's all extremely easy to choose otherwise.

/claws tanks chuckle

Yes, but there's a huge difference between balancing a game and self-gimping in an attempt to correct for said lack of balance.

Does the AT IO proc that puts you back into hide function if you don't have the Hide power toggled on? If so, build to cover the non-hidden defense values lost and then just remove it from your tray and never bother with it again. I've been thinking about doing that just so I could have a stalker in my stable.

I've mentioned it in other threads... the loss of my old CoH drive, all those DPS/attack chain spreadsheets, all the .txt files full of random notes, mids builds, screenshots... that shit was painful to lose but I didn't know it was painful until I found out about the SSPS and HC.

The ones that click get T4ed, passive accolades an carefully plotted out in Mids for full purple/pvp/other IO sets. But I'm running a brute redside doing content right now and she just hit 29 all solo except for 1 lowbie TF. There is no end game for me. Hell, my 3 BZBs on Excel combined are at or over 1000 vet lvls. My "me" sentinel is sitting around 130 vet lvls. My new godmode shield/em tank is gonna hit 100 in no time if she hasn't already. My end game with CoH already occurred when the game was shut down. Then I got a second chance for some more CoH love. And, again, my end game will occur when this set of devs decide to close down the shop. Then again, the data to create my own instance is out there now and I've got the hardware to run a single player (or 2 or 5 player) instance here in my house. So maybe... just maybe, there never will be and end game for me.

This appears to me to be the correct course ahead. For any character that I've spent the time to fully T4 and IO out, the vast majority of the content has become trivial. To correct this, I can either self-gimp, or make no effort to improve, or IOs and incarnates can be nerfed, or more content can be added that utilizes the engine to add difficulty. The downside to this choice is that there WILL be, as we have seen in many a thread, those complaining that the new content is far too difficult to manage with SO only builds and thus goes against the age-old "game is balanced around SOs" mindset.

I know someone else mentioned it but that big rez from dark miasma, howling twilight, is glorious on the sound fx. Heard it last night and thought of this thread.

Rad melee suffers from painfully slow animations and crap single target damage and bio is an intensely clicky set with pretty bad mitigation for high end stuff even while granting amazing +damage. I've deleted a lot of both. But I'll keep my claws/bio scrapper cuz pretty pylon times, etc.

Did you mean shockwave? It absolutely needs the KB->KD but focus is already KD.