Bill Z Bubba

This is, sadly, the way to go. I've been abusing it on all my squishies. (Where squishy = character without built in mez protection.)

Simply put, on the day we could create/migrate brutes blueside, they should have had their mitigation caps reduced. It didn't matter when the sides were locked away from each other. But you just described yet another in a long list of imbalances amongst the ATs.

I don't see that getting nerfed. If anything the way the current devs are rolling, I suspect that ALL attacks a scrapper can use will be fixed so that they crit.

TW has a ton more secondary effects than more damage. Fiery melee should be the #1 damage melee set but it's not. That's broken and should be corrected.

I still remember being told how much I sucked at this game back in Issue 1. I had never played an MMO before, had zero clue about the tank/healer/damage trinity, nor how to play within it with this non-tank/healer/blaster claws/sr scrapper I had built. I remember it taking me months to hit 50 the 1st time. Now it takes hours. Skill and knowledge levels change for EVERYONE the longer they play.

Exactly. And an empathy freaking defender. 🙂

Wrong. This is what happens when balance changes are incorrectly applied. Change is not the problem.

A little pain for a much more stable "world" seems a small price to pay.

Oh horseshit. It's not a case of X being able to solo Y. It's a case of X being able to solo Y at the max diff, with no inspirations, with enemies buffed with +50% acc and damage and ZERO deaths. It's a prime example of the ridiculous power creep that this game suffered from for years BEFORE the shutdown.

Not even a little bit.

And tanks clearly didn't need a damage buff.

Sounds to me like a lot more work than just removing the shifts completely.

But it is if you keep the current situation in place. Remove the level shifts. Keep the +13% tohit buff and whatever other buffs they get for being incarnate baddies, choose +4 and they are +4 and that's that.

I'm interested in balance.

No. I want nothing short (and apologies to my SG for this who have stated plainly that they disagree) of the complete removal of all level shifts for players and enemies from the game. +4 should be +4, full stop.

I'm not saying it's a cakewalk. Even standard Carnies can fark me up at +3 (+4 with 1 lvl shift.) And yea, when you get a bad combo of Incarnate BP bosses they can put a world of hurt on ya. Because they SHOULD be able to. They're incarnate level nasties. And if I decide to face them at +4, they should BE +4.

Wish I didn't find it to be true but I do. Removing level shifts completely from the game should be the first step toward an overhaul toward balance. Yes, that includes all the enemies that get lvl shifts while you fight them like Praetor Sinclair in Belladonna's arc. Edit: And, yes, I did solo him at +4 (+7 by the end of it) on a freaking sentinel that was +3ed.

All true. And also points to why level shifts are garbage. I get max diff rewards while only fighting +1s in DA. I get that they were designed to be tougher than normal spawns, but they're not tougher *enough* because the level shift is far greater than the buffs they have as enemies... but only when the level shifts are present. Fight those same spawns without levels shifts and yes, they are noticeably tougher than PI spawns.

I just find it sad that so many think logic is the enemy of chaos. Change is neither good nor bad. Our species, in general, reacts poorly to change but it took change to get us out of the oceans and more change to get us down from the trees and a whole ton of change for us to set foot on another piece of our solar system. Being resistant to change is often far more negative than the change itself.

He carried the terra sky to the groove after toasting it.

If we're all just edge cases then what we can do doesn't matter does it? Might as well spend some cycles bringing about balance within and between archetypes and powersets. It'll bring up the bad performers, bring down the over the top performers and then Joe Average will have an even better time because he'll have to think about even less while playing.

Why *almost* no one? Why hedge your statement? Either we can or we can't. If we can, why can we is the question. If we can't, why can't we is the question. If we shouldn't ... I don't care about that word. Lots of things in the universe *should* be one way or the other and aren't. The only way to get to what you have stated here is a complete and global nerf.

And yet I consider +4/x8 to be the standard difficulty level for maxed out characters while being one of the people calling for a more balanced game. It's almost as if blanket statements about other players are often false.

Fix the tense, fix the flow. The blacksmith, in the back of the mocha, race(d) to the dawn, toast(ed) the terra sky and carried it to the groove. The back of the fire passed on, and you got to it, always proudly winding the word that the wolf's blood was flowing. You knew who to keep and they kept us together while we were in trouble.

How's that ITF goin? 🙂