Bill Z Bubba

Or we accept that resists have their own benefits and leave that issue well enough alone. Invul is awesome for the simple reason that it's a beautifully constructed hybrid set and mixing res, def and hp/regen is the way to make a tough build, after all. Edit: After all, there's a reason my SR tank survives shit that flatline my SR scrapper. All that extra HP and resist ain't there for nuthin.

We could but we both know that would just add more power creep.

I've plenty of female characters that need the leather straps with the nipple rings, and proper cigars as well. On the male side, we need fishnets and thigh-high boots.

So much heresy! I don't know about anyone else but here are some things I've seen with my own diabolical eyeballs: Respecing my claws/bio scrapper into a procmonster build granted him the same to worse times on pylons, drastically reduced his overall mitigation and made him horrifically end-inefficient, forcing me into Ageless. My SG ran our mains on a max diff kill what's in the way ITF with ALL incarnate powers unslotted and it only added about 10-15 minutes to our normal time to completion along with a normal range number of faceplants. I've always sung the benefits of defense uber alles for exactly the reasons you stated above. It's actually why I hate building resist based sets because I know I'm going to have to spend vastly more effort dealing with debuffs/slows/end drains/etc simply because so many more of them land. It's not any one thing that has cranked up the power creep in this game. It's a death from a thousand paper cuts. Tanks were ridiculously overbuffed. Procs are turning some ATs and powersets into something that they weren't designed to be. IOs grant far too much defense. (No, a hard cap of 40% is still dumb but so are softcapped blasters.) Far too much of everything, probably. Solo, the difference between no incarnates and a full loadout of T4s is quite drastic. It makes sense that they make less of an overall difference on a full team because all my characters are much better off with a full team of random buffs. Chronic inspiration chewing didn't exist at one time and I have to wonder how much more of an issue THAT has become than people want to talk about. I know what I'd like to see fixed but I also know that those things ain't happening. The ship done sailed. Last note: Yesterday I took my time/fire defender into a max diff ITF solo. She had 1 faceplant that was avoidable and another from when the seafood platter showed up and ate her ass. It also would have taken over an hour JUST to clear all the first mission. When I mentioned it to others, the very first reply was essentially "low DPS AT, proc it up." And I expect it to be true. Procmonstering a defender is probably going to be vastly more beneficial than procmonstering a blaster, scrapper or stalker. Maybe I'll retest with my sentinel.

RechargeTime = BaseRecharge/(1+%) Base of AM is 422 recharge as per Mids and lasts 120. 120 = 422/(1+x) 120 + 120x = 422 120x = 302 x = 252% total recharge needed Yea, it's doable.

I have both stone/bio and ma/elec brutes and I gotta say, I think stone/elec as well, for all the reasons already mentioned but one more I either missed or wasn't stated: /Elec's end drain coupled with the two AoEs from Mu Mastery provide another pretty decent layer of mitigation. I can't quantify it at all but I'm seeing it more and more on my ma/elec.

Noticed the other day that my Ring Mistress was applying my Degenerative debuff. Same mechanism going on with pets applying Opportunity?

I remember when balance existed. Brutes didn't mingle. they hung out with stalkers. Tanks didn't die and did a ton less damage than scrappers while scrappers faceplanted often but were the boss killers. I remember exactly how it was and quite frankly found it a far better game design than "screw it, it's tankmages for everyone!"

And tanks were fine and everybody lived them them, too, right? Blasters were fine for ages? Claws was fine before the animation overhaul? SR was just great after ED happened, we didn't need the scaling resists! KB is annoying. Repel is worse. Everyone talks about the skills needed to use it properly and yet I NEVER see it "used properly." Didn't before the snap, don't now. It's just chaos that slows a team down. Funny to watch from time to time? Sure. But having to always stick the KB->KD proc in shockwave means I'm missing out on something actually useful in its place. Avoiding my PB and Nrg Blast characters for the same but compounded issue is also annoying. I do not grok why anyone would actually be against leveling the playing field slotting-wise and allow for a Null the Gull option to turn all KB attacks into KD.

So now you can enjoy brutes and tanks because tanks were buffed into overperforming just as much as brutes and so it no longer frustrates you? I agree that actual balance is good but when everything gets "balanced" by perpetually escalating power creep, the game itself becomes so unbalanced as to become broken. Broken games aren't fun.

Blasters: This dirt tastes funny Tanks: Who cares, I ain't dyin.

Gremlins, sunspots and the ever encroaching chaos wave were always my go to responses for anything going awry.

Maybe 20 years ago I would have provided evidence. These days? Not so much.

I try to do my part by selling anything rare or higher for 111 inf a pop.

99% sure you're correct. What makes the fact that only scrapper primary attacks crit even more bizarre is that it isn't true. Pool power attacks also crit for scrappers but only at the 5% rate regardless of enemy rank. It would be nice if scrapper crits were normalized across all attacks available to them. Oh hell, even the above statement about pool power crits isn't true across the board. Body Mastery Energy Torrent has the 10% against LTs and higher rank flag. https://cod.uberguy.net./html/power.html?power=epic.body_mastery.energy_torrent&at=scrapper

Don't go runnin too hard with that. I'm apparently an "outlier" and an "opinionated curmudgeon."

@Bopper mentioned that internal testing was showing worse than arcanatime variance on actual cast time which gave me a big ol' sad (making me miss my attack chain spreadsheets slightly less given their obvious inaccuracies) and I still haven't gotten an answer on how/why this would be. Hopefully the devs will chime in one day with what an attack's *actual* cast time is given the current hardware/software environment CoH is running on. Although based on what you've stated and what I've read elsewhere, it seems that there is NO *actual* cast time.

Standard progression isn't an issue. Not even with SOs at lvl 1. Not even with all the teleporters. If you don't have double XP turned on, if you haven't purchased 8 hours of amplifiers, if you're not constantly stocking yourself with T3/T4 inspirations, there's absolutely nothing wrong with the ride from 1 to 50, solo or teamed. Course.... I don't do that anymore. I PL an alt to 50 in around 2.5 hours in AE, I spend another hour or so getting the initial build done in Mids, another 30 minutes unlocking PPP, then another hour slotting it out fully with its lvl 50 IO build. 4 hours of actual gameplay from 0 to a fully tricked out lvl 50 build. And thanks to all the emps/transcendents I have available, even T4ing said alt isn't that much of a hassle. Call it another 8 hours of farming Heather's arc if need be. This.. compared to the 4 months it took Bill Z Bubba to hit 50 the first time around, while I was between jobs and gaming 16-18 hours a day cuz I could. Standard leveling progression is fine. The problem is how few people choose to go that route because the other routes to get it done are soooo much faster.

Only because you've become accustomed to the ridiculousness of 3 minute tanker pylon times. Tanks used to have to pay for their extra mitigation through sucktacular damage output. This is no longer the case and completely disgusting. Nerf 'em. Hard and with extreme prejudice. Edit: And yes, if that means nerf the +damage from shield or bio, do it, across the board.

One thing I hope is being kept in mind by the dev team, as mentioned earlier, is that heightened difficulty and challenge *should* include heightened reward.

Only ATs I think need a buff are the poor Khels. Good gods below they suck so bad. Widows and Soldiers are rock solid team players. Scrappers are right where they should be. Weak enough on armor to die in the rough stuff but still dishing decent damage. Brutes: See scrappers except that their caps should be nerfed. Defenders: Meh, leave em be. Cors: See defs. Stalkers: Who cares? Stalker Claws suck butt with no spin. 🙂 In all seriousness, probably in a good place, too. There are other sets to choose from. Masterminds: I got nuthin. I hate 'em. I have one because I need one of every AT fully built and T4ed. Tanks: Nerf the shit out of 'em. Far as I'm concerned they are the pinnacle of absolute brokeness in CoH. Blasters: Meh. I guess they're fine and the problems they do have are due to SetIO bonuses and not really AT based.

I honestly hope that's NOT true. Bad changes *should* be rolled back. Tanks *WERE* overbuffed and should be nerfed. P2W garbage made sense on the SSPS with its minimal invite-only playerbase but have no place here and should be purged. Being able to run around with a near infinite amount of T3-T4 insps in email *should* be blocked. I'll continue to hope that sanity overrides the fear of player backlash.

I *would* like it kept in mind that increased difficulty *should* always be met with increased reward.

To your point, we both know that a ton of people out there are doing speed runs at +0 and I can absolutely see a correlation between that mindset and folks who join them thinking that everything is too easy. As I said in another thread, difficulty must be ok, because I'm a pretty decent player/builder and I have yet to be able to solo a +4 MLTF. I know others have done it but I don't know what cheat codes they used or how many T3/T4 insps they had sitting in email. For those reading this, if you've soloed an MLTF with no insps/temps/amps at +4, my hat's off to you and I'd love to hear what you did it with.

There's easier (stupid amplifiers and tanker buffs) and then there's "what's the point?" Honestly, if anyone needs a diff level lower than -1/x1 while they play... no, I don't care what the reason might be, there is NO reason possible in my mind that anyone would ever need a diff lower than that. I could get through that diff using 1 foot on my mouse. With a defender using flurry.