Bill Z Bubba

Ok, so do faceplants matter? When the brute at lvl 30 on SOs fails to complete a mission at +4/x8 where the tank succeeds, and the time to complete goes to the tank, does it matter?

Which is?

Been asking for that data dump for a while now. Find it very interesting that it hasn't been forthcoming.

Tankers are much more played and enjoyed because they've become the OP melee AT that so many that don't give a shit about balance hoped for. It's just a shame that so many care more about being OPAF than they do AT balance.

LOL. Ok, that was a pretty good analogy.

Course not. You are in the camp that enjoys the benefits. Why would you want to spend effort showing those benefits are ill-gotten and wrong?

No thanks. I don't accept bad decisions. Doesn't mean I have a snowball's chance in hell of fixing them, but it doesn't mean I should just lay back and enjoy the offense. I'd rather bring the problem to light in the hopes of change.

Ok. When can the shield/nrg/soul tank push diff to +4/x8 with zero chance of death vs the brute pushing to the same level when both are using nothing but SOs? Which one levels faster from 1 to 50? And if the tank wins, why does it suddenly not matter? Or, rather, why does it not matter at all?

Why can't I be allowed the same fun with my emp/nrg defender? You can have both. Any game in history could probably tell you that.

Everything is absolutely just fine when you don't give a shit about numerical balance.

I have based on Claws and SR but was told my testing was invalid because of the way followup functions and it wasn't relevant to every attack set that didn't have a constant damage buff.

Maybe we all should. Maybe the devs should. Maybe that's the point of everything I've been spewing on about for the last 2 years.

That's awfully myopic.

Easy to test. But again, I need exact parameters to test with. SOs only? Total time from 1 to 50? Insps on or off? Binds for combining insps allowed? Or just a fa/rad tank vs a rad/fa brute in a fire farm? What's the criteria?

They run out. Tanks can spam reds and combine to make more just like the brute and benefit more from them due to their higher base damage mod. Edit: while never needing them for survivability.

That's just false.

If that's the case. I'm arguing that it's not. based on the game as it is right now, tanks will level faster solo to 50 than brutes simply due to the extra XP that comes from being able to punch the diff higher sooner. It shouldn't be this way. It's broken and unbalanced. All the melee ATs should level at exactly the same rate. As mitigation goes up, damage output should go down.

Yea, that's the point. Tanks get to push diff higher at lower levels and thus level faster. Why isn't this a problem? (And meleers get to do the same across the board compared to squishies, why isn't THAT a problem?)

I'm asking all these questions because without solid answers I have absolutely no way to provide useful information from testing.

Again, if xp/time while soloing isn't relevant, what exactly is? If I run a tank from 1 to 50 solo faster than the same combo brute and scrapper because I can push the diff higher and sooner, why isn't that a balance issue?

I don't have an answer. I'm trying to find it. If we base balance on a teaming experience, what team do we datamine from? A brute and 7 corruptors or 8 kheldians?

And that's precisely where I think most everyone has gone wrong including the OG devs. How a character solos from 1 to 50, in my mind, should be the ONLY metric BECAUSE: Except when it does. When the SG I ran with did a slew of all AT X ITF runs, corruptors came out on top with the fastest time and least number of faceplants but no one thinks a corruptor soloing from 1 to 50 is going to be faster than any of the melee crowd because they can't so it seems that XP/time leveling speed isn't relevant in balance discussions and I'd like to know why.

It's true. My heresy runs strong. I have two bolters mounted in my ceiling ready to drop down at any moment. The subject of what we're balancing for was brought up in another thread and I know there's still no consensus and probably never will be but it'd be nice. If the game truly was balanced around SOs, then it's a completely unbalanced mess right now with IOs. And, yes, again, I'm in the camp that sees that imbalance, wish I never had, and knows I'd have more fun playing if I didn't. I find claims of brutes dishing out WAY more damage than tanks misleading when I view it as barely more damage. The three Bills have pylon times of 2.75mins vs 4.5 mins vs 5 mins. Granted, part of that is because damage buffs are better for tanks than brutes when solo. Scrapper Bill pulls even farther ahead on AoE because he can cycle followup, spin, shockwave where the brute and tank have to do followup, focus, spin, shockwave but again, thanks to double stacked followup, the larger AoE size and the greater number of targets, the tank is barely behind the brute while maintaining a massive advantage over mitigation with all that extra health AND the MotT proc cranking his mitigation into orbit. Then there's that whole proc business where tank procs aren't being punished for the increased AoE size of the attack. Then there's the whole red herring of, yea, well, "that's ONLY at the very high end of performance cuz the game is balanced around SOs and at lower diff all three ATs survive just fine." In the end, I'm left pondering a quote from @SomeGuy where they stated, "They wanted to make Brutes irrelevant. This isn't going to go back." Now, I won't agree that the devs wanted to do this, but I will agree that the end outcome is the same. Where do brutes really win? On fire farms in the AE and only when you have binds for combining insps to reds and you're built for capped fire resistance and defense. EDIT: Or if you're on a team with mates that buff exactly what your build is missing and a kin for fulcrum shift and heals to make up for the lower HP.

I have one with permadom w/o hasten but the build still has hasten. Dom is on auto and I click hasten when I see that it's ready. You need 123% global recharge [ ((200-90)/90))*100 and rounded up ] for it to work. 5 purples gives 50%, 5 LotGs gives 37.5%, so that's still another 35.5% you have to get from other set bonuses, temp buffs, day job powers, etc. Doable, yes. Nice to set up as soon as you log on and never have to worry about again? Yes, of course. But plenty of powers want even MORE recharge and that's where hasten comes in. I think I have 1 50 without hasten and it's a pure concept build not geared for performance.

As mentioned earlier, I farmed DA repeatables to get my main to 666 vet lvls for the screenshot. Getting +4 rewards while effectively fighting +1s made it worthwhile and the SL farms in AE that would have sped things up some, I found annoying to play. At best (with experienced charges also in play,) I was getting 3 vet lvls/hour. One might be able to convert that to inf/min from other posts in this thread.