Bill Z Bubba

Then your prior statement was a lie.

Fantastic. Then you as well shouldn't care at all about balance conversations or nerfs/buffs. Great. Balance does NOT mean homogenization.

@MTeagueWhile I do see your logic, I think it downplays heavily the survivability a sent has over the other three archetypes. As they sit now, I consider sents to be the broken tankmage that MMOs are supposed to avoid.

That's fair. I completely disagree, obviously. No, I'm suggesting that reward over time is the only metric to be concerned about.

And I am in no ways stating that you should care. I also play a bunch of characters that I find fun regardless of the multitude of balance issues. The two things are not and should not be related. If you find energy blast fun, and fun is all you care about, why would it suddenly become less fun if it was buffed to be more in line with the other blast sets? If you find titan weapons fun, and fun is all you care about, why would it suddenly become less fun if it was nerfed to be more in line with the other melee sets?

Sentinels *should* be at the bottom in overall performance of their blast sets. The order should be blasters > corruptors > defenders > sentinels. Why? Because Sents are vastly more survivable than the other three. They even come with built in mez protection very early in their careers.

And I'd be fine with that IF a powerset with awesome AoE over a wide range of time was comparable on reward intake with a set that prioritized ST damage. Now I'm biased all to hell and back but I consider claws to be one of the most balanced sets for melee in the game between ST and AoE output. It's not the best or worst at either. If I build a */invul scrapper, where * equals whatever attack set, and run 100 or 200 or 300 DA repeatable missions at x8 and after a given time parity is reached, or at least some semblance of it, then the sets are balanced. If one set lags behind all the others, it needs a buff. If it exceeds all the others, it needs a nerf. And the same *should* be true between archetypes. Run 300 missions with 8 defenders and another 300 with 8 scrappers. Then do the same with 1 defender and 1 scrapper. If defenders can drastically pull ahead of scrappers with 8 of them as a single defender is behind a single scrapper, then there's probably parity. But that's not what we're seeing in game.

For me, the easiest and most impactful thing we could do with incarnate powers is dump the levels shifts. Completely. They make a mockery of incarnate content. Be set at +4, get rewards for +4, fight +1s. Kind of a joke. Yea, even the +1 in everything from alpha. Nuke it.

If a single powerset combination is outperforming through kill efficiency in 90% of call standard (not AE farming) content, then that gross overefficiency is also overpowered. Flavor is one thing, balance is another. And I was comparing a defender to a scrapper but it might as well have been a defender and a corruptor or a blaster and a sentinel, all ATs that share blast sets that *should* be balanced internally so that we can better judge the balance between archetypes. Flavor should not affect overall reward rates as they so painfully do now. This is not a balanced system.

Efficiency in farming shouldn't be used as a metric for game balance. Why should differing roles have such a huge impact on reward gains? Or perhaps a better point should be that soloability should never be used as a metric for game balance except that this is exactly how we balance powersets within archetypes. It's why EM was nerfed and is about to get buffed. It's why claws was buffed and may be getting nerfed. It's why spines should be buffed and it's why TW should get nerfed.

And is the bad one on the left?

Therein lay the rub. Many of us do NOT consider the game "balanced enough." I often make the statement that it's barely balanced at all. The binary nature of mez, the very fact that so many DO gravitate to a few specific sets simply due to their OPness, the vast chasm of difference between reward gains for a solo emp/nrg def and a tw/bio scrapper, and the list goes on and on. It should not be this way and any movement toward balance, toward a sane and logical mathematical foundation is welcome by a great many of us. If that means outliers get nerfed, so be it.

As do I. I see no reason for a game, arguably an art form, to lack balanced beauty within the underlying math. If this means a poorly designed set needs to be nerfed or buffed, it should be done, purely for balance's own sake regardless of player feelings.

Yea, and we should love them and have fun with them like "normal" humans. Where normal = we don't know what the fuck that is.

A perfect response from a PvPer. All trolling and lacking any kind of human decency. Well done. 🙂

Often.

As a man married to a bipolar human... wut? That bitch be crazy but I do love her so much.

You've offered me nothing.

Asshattery. Also expected.

I like your drugs.

And some of them don't. I get enough RL PvP with politics and my RL family. I don't need that shit in my escape from reality. Side note, I love me some FPS games, still hate online PvP.

No, it's not. If I'm paying top dollar for an experience, the whole damn thing better be exquisite. If I'm not paying top dollar, then sure, some crap can slide. With CoH, I'm currently paying nothing and can easily avoid bad waiters, so I avoid them.

I honestly can't make a judgement call on procs because I have refused to go down that path so far. I like set bonuses, especially that 10% +recharge from 5 purples which lets me have two procs in all my purpled attacks. The math-head in my brain sees the benefit in going proc-monster, the purist rails against it. Heard rumors that procs may be "adjusted" again. Didn't like the PPM changes so I rather doubt I'll be all that hip on the next alteration but whatever. Long as I can take down pylons in less than 3 mins, I'm a happy camper.

Agreed. It's 100% absurd.

Considering F for follow doesn't actually get you into melee range while hovering I would have to consider those people insane. To the topic, I've burned respecs on testing theories. I should go to the test server for that and honestly I have no clue why I don't do so. My current fire/bio sent is running midnight grasp instead of inferno for Satan's sake... yea, I've screwed up a lot. Happily, respecs are so easy to come by these days, in the long run, it just don't matter. Some time spent, some in spent, some things learned, whatever.