Bill Z Bubba

Yikes. This is gonna hurt. Going from tank to brute with identical builds (except for AT IOs) with shield and em, the brute loses 10% def across the board and about 20% damres. Don't even have melee softcapped. Edit: Oh, nevermind. These guys in your mish are pansies. 🙂

You know I'm happy to help. Point me at a target and I'll go killin. I have at least one of every AT except stalkers and masterminds. Stalkers cuz I hate not seeing my costume and stalker-claws ain't got no spin and masterminds cuz... dude, they just suck. They suck really bad for this crap I like gettin into. Gimme an AE mish to repeat ad nauseum to gather data and I'll hit it. It was never "lol why make a tank" for me. Instead, it was "i didn't have a reason to crank a tank until Werner said "try it this way" and I had to do so." And in doing so, I was forced to see just how wrong things really are on that front.

An effective solution wouldn't have involved tanks suddenly replacing brutes to the scrap pile for end game content.

While completely ignoring those poor EATs that actually need something done. I'll stick with "unwarranted and unnecessary" in regards to the tank changes that obviously occurred for no other reason than someone's personal whim and bias.

It's pretty sick and could probably be better since I don't do procmonster builds.

Shield?

I'd keep whichever character wasn't fully built/T4ed/etc. As soon as it was "done" it'd get deleted to make way for the next one. Edit: I'd also move to one of the other CoH groups because that'd be just plain awful.

So why waste time overbuffing an archetype that didn't need it rather than working on the archetypes that actually NEED help in that arena?

Fun is wonderfully subjective and can override logic at the drop of a hat. There's as many different opinions on what fun is as there are posts in any given thread. Even our own brains can find something fun one day and boring the next and then swap back. My personal struggle is that often times seeing an imbalance in the underlying structure of the game can become a detriment to my enjoyment of it and that prompts me to action.

Bettin you meant Tanks, Blasters and Defenders.... why, it's almost like someone feels that everyone should go back to holy trinity gameplay and damn anyone that disagrees... hmmmmmmm.

The cut of your jib is approved. Bring in @Lineato do an 801 overhaul of all enemy groups. The pitchforks and torches will no doubt follow but I'd love it.

I'm in this camp as well. Attack chain above all. Do I have the recharge to feed it and get any pauses covered or at least extremely minimized? Do I have the end to back it up for constant nonstop carnage from the moment I enter the fight until it's over? Does it look good while I'm doin it?

Brutes have tanker *caps.* Caps that aren't generally achieved while solo. Sure, that granite brute over there can hit 'em and fury negates the -damage from the set, so there's a case where it makes sense to ignore the extra HP the tank gets and just go brute. I suspect Invulnerable brutes can self-cap S/L damres, too. But for the majority of the time from 1 to 50, the brute has nothing above scrapper level mitigation except more HP. Back when the tank changes were in beta, I did ask for brutes' *base* mitigation values to be bumped to halfway between tank and scrapper values. It made sense. As damage output goes down, mitigation should go up. Now? Nah, I'm sick of the power creep. At this point, I just want to see the tank AoE buffs reverted. They were ridiculously unwarranted and unnecessary.

You'd think.... but I've seen the builds and seen them in action. There's a whole lotta players out there that don't consider end-sustainability as important because they mostly team and can just slow their roll to get end back. To the OP, there is only one proper way to design character builds. MY WAY! ALL OTHER WAYS ARE WRONG AND USELESS!!! Editor's Note: the above statement has no relation to reality and should be taken completely as the a joke it was intended.

But the game did get easier for everyone playing tankers.

If a tank is doing 90% the single target damage as a brute, but doing more aoe output with greater mitigation, there is no parity. Again, those tests were against standard enemies. As the difficulty goes up, the scrapper ceases to survive where the brute and tank keep on trucking. Edit: And as diff goes up further, the brute falls and the tank keeps going, again, doing almost as much damage. Before the tank buffs, there was parity amongst the three. Now, there is not. I might make the argument that there's some between the tank and scrapper, but not for the brute.

And that's a great reason. On the ride from 1-50, brutes are far more fun just thanks to fury alone.

Guess since I don't utilize proc monster builds, I don't go the cookie cutter route. End the end, there's a lot of us that do enjoy soloing AVs and know that even single target damage was buffed with the changes. Those thinking otherwise are mistaken. I've got claws and sr on a scrapper, a brute and a tank. Scrapper wins, of course, on kill speed, but the tank beats the brute. Not by much, granted, but it's there. Same attack chains for the brute and tank. Edit: And I'm talking about rerunning a clearall AE mish with standard opponents at max diff for testing purposes. And ya know, I don't have an em/shield brute identically built to the shield/em tank I used for that Werner rules ITF, but I suspect that due to the brute's lower mitigation, it ain't gettin through that alive.

Before it was a tradeoff, go brute for damage or tank for mitigation. Now, tank damage is so close to brute damage that there's little reason to go brute. Especially for those of us that solo a lot. The devs could have chosen to fix the design issue by lowering brute mitigation caps and left tank damage alone. Instead, I suspect at least, someone in the camp of "tanks should be superman" chose the damage route. So while it may take my tanks 30 seconds longer than my brutes to take down a pylon, the heightened size and enemy cap on aoes shoots them right on past brutes in overall performance. I'd be ok with archetype parity but it doesn't exist. In this case, they simply swapped which AT gets eclipsed.

You can go with ageless incarnate or whichever one grants the +end but I've not found I can live without conserve power and physical perfection for my claws/sr. Same goes for my claws and sr brute and tank.

Yea... I been around. 🙂

I can grok that. Sadly, since HC, I've joined the camp of "why bother leveling the old way when I can get a new alt to 50 in 2 hours?"

I've got 10 fully T4ed characters and another 20 in some state between T1 and T4. Did the runners of the super secret server overdo it a bit? Probably not for the population they had but for homecoming now? Yea, probably. Would I want it changed? Nope. I completely hated the forced to team/forced to itrial garbage that was on live for incarnate progress. Even the mediocre changes they made for soloists were complete garbage. But now we're in the zone of least effort to godhood. And yet buffs, (I'm looking at you tanker buffs,) are still incoming making the ridiculousness of easy mode slip right the hell into the absolutely absurd. But you're completely correct. Make any change, the playerbase will shift to the highest reward/least resistance mode because that's how humans are geared. We're a lazy and short-sighted species.

I rather fancy my earth/earth dom but she suffers from everything I mentioned earlier while still being a visceral joy due to all the smashy smashtastic goodness.

False. They provide threads like every other bit of content in the game when you're lvl 50. Threads are incarnate lvl rewards. You can, technically, T4 a lvl 50 by doing nothing but farming Council. Granted, that'd be an incredibly inefficient and downright stupid way to do it... but ya could.