Bill Z Bubba

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.

Meh. Possibly meh? I've got a couple doms. One is permadom without hasten. One is permadom with hasten. Another one hit 50 but hasn't really been played since. I think I also suffer from the "too many damn powers to choose from while in combat" feeling. Having to add to the clutter with macros for all the targeted clicks just to make them single click attacks doesn't help. Do they need a buff? Probably not. Do I like the way domination functions? No, not really. I'd far rather they have a passive inherent. Adjust all the control mags to 50% between dom and not dom values and call it a day.

True. Unfortunately, the difference between overall mitigation is far greater than the difference in damage output. At this point, the only reason I'd roll another brute would be if I planned to lvl cap them at 40 or so.

It really is. My shield/em tank honestly feels like cheating with godmode turned on. Kinda fun sometimes but overall leaves me just shaking my head that it was allowed to happen.

Heh, I'll put it this way... my SR/Claws tank can continue tanking even with Rom's autohit fluffy beating on him. Even with the game cheating like mad to try to kill me it can't!

I blame Castle, BAB and Arcanaville.

I main SR. I've got three B... Z Bubbas, tank, brute and scrapper. Got a couple SR Sents. A few other SR meleers. SR is freakishly awesome 95% of the time. After you softcap it. And the rest is Rularuu eyeballs and anything autohit. DAMN YOU, Romulus Autohit Fluffy!!! And leveling up. No fear protection, before softcap you get hit, get hit hard and you feel it. It's definitely an end game set. Shield is far more forgiving and based on my experiences so far with my shield/em tank, it's just plain numerically a superior mitigation set. But it ain't and never will be as sexy. And, yea, you're right, the lack of a damage aura or any kind of damage buff other than quickness's +20% recharge is off-putting.

SR is easy to softcap for all archetypes that use it so you can have room for adding on damres and health. With its scaling resists kicking in as health goes down it can rapidly become a full tilt beast that will survive when you don't expect it.

I wondered the same but slash, which is now the two slash animation, has both entries in the 1st section.

Confused about something. What is that 0% chance of 18.7685 damage? It's not tagged with anything like fiery embrace. Side note, and I know this isn't your job, but dang, devs, swipe hasn't had the two quick swipe animation for a looooooong time.

As I said in another thread, yes please to a new assault/debuff(and/or buff) archetype where the debuffs are pbaoe-centric and act as armor. Yes, the AT will need some kind of functional mez protection.

Doom. The rabbit hole has returned! Awesome work.

I still want to be able to store inf in account-wide base bank. One with no cap.

How is this not true for buildup? It is. Therefore it's not a flawed example at all. It's true for every powerset. I don't believe this to be the case. Otherwise, brutes would clear missions faster. Or I misread your post. Either way, in actual play is the important part.

Mixed bag. While my claws/sr brute would seem to be more efficient thanks to holding aggro which decreases the chance of runners, in the end, the claws/sr scrapper still kills so much faster that when comparing 100% clear all DA repeatables at max diff, the scrapper still gets it done quite a bit faster. Sadly, thanks to the way tanks were buffed here on Homecoming, even the sr/claws tank is faster at clearing missions than the claws/sr brute just due to the increased power of their AoEs. Edit: the brute still wins against single hard targets like AVs and pylons, of course. Tanks were overbuffed, regardless. They should NEVER beat brutes on damage output, aoe or st.

To be fair, that still leaves me with one tactic: kill 'em all. Difference being they come to me to die rather than me going to them.