Reiska

The question of whether balance matters in MMORPGs as a whole is a complex one, and I think is strongly correlated to how intense the difficulty of the "endgame" is intended to be and how onerous it is for a player to change classes/power sets/etc. In a game like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV or most MMOs in general, where you have very carefully tuned endgame content intended to be a punishing challenge for large groups of fully kitted out characters (i.e. "raiding"), I would say balance is very important, because there is a strong pattern in MMO social communities where a character class that underperforms by a measurable amount - even if that amount is small - finds itself effectively blacklisted from all of that content. Some examples I'm aware of just off the top of my head would be Retribution Paladins in WoW during vanilla and Burning Crusade; Dragoons in FFXIV during A Realm Reborn; and Paladins in FFXIV during Heavensward. Oftentimes, the stigma of that bad performance far outlives the actual bad performance (people *still* make jokes about FFXIV Dragoons floor-tanking, and they've been one of the better DPS classes for a while now). City of Heroes, even in the era of Incarnate Trials, has never been that game, though. Homogeny is also harder to measure meaningfully in CoH because, I think, the correlation between powerset performance and, as Luminara termed it, player-created homogeneity, while strong, is not absolute; for some of the power sets that happen to be the most powerful, it's probably impossible to figure out precisely how many picked those sets because of their power level versus how many picked those sets because they're broadly applicable to a wide range of character concepts. (For instance, I think the overrepresentation of Titan Weapons on melee ATs that get it can be chiefly blamed on its extreme outlier status; however, I think it's harder to make that argument for Fire Blast, which I think would be a very commonly chosen set even if were less outlying, just because "throwing fire" is such a mainstream concept.) On the whole, I don't think perfect balance is necessary or desirable for City of Heroes. I do think, however, that extreme outliers on both sides need to be addressed, just leaving the question of how extreme is too extreme. (For my part, I think the only extreme outlier set we have on the "too good" side of the equation is Titan Weapons.)

I believe the cottage rule has already been broken in a few instances.

I see no reason to change the original devs' paradigm that the game is balanced around the exclusive usage of SO enhancements and that the only content that is balanced around the use of incarnate powers is the content that requires incarnate powers. If you think heavy IO slotting makes the game too easy, don't do it. Run your characters with SOs only. If you think incarnate powers make the game too easy, unslot your incarnate powers when you're not running content that requires them.

Someone ought to measure to see if the total lengths of Steel Canyon, Atlas Park and Skyway City north-to-south, in-game, come close to matching up with the length of Independence Port. I wonder how close the scale actually is.

The entire original point of new!Dark Astoria as a zone was to give soloists a way to unlock and use Incarnate powers, albeit at a slower rate than players who were willing to do the incarnate trials. Obviously, on Homecoming this purpose has been obviated by the advent of veteran levels and incarnate drops being proliferated game-wide, thus exposing this issue. The best solution, IMO, would be an option amongst all the difficulty slider stuff allowing you to simply give all your enemies incarnate shifts too. For those worried about it not being lore-appropriate, you can either not use it, or make it only apply to DA, or something.

I actually do have the average activation time of all melee attack powers in Tankers handy. The mean raw activation time of all Tanker melee set attack powers is 1.76 seconds. The mean raw activation time of all Tanker melee set single-target attack powers is 1.51 seconds. The mean raw activation time of all Tanker melee set multi-target attack powers is 2.19 seconds. Note that this counts Titan Weapons powers at their base, un-Momentum-boosted activation times. I don't have blast set stuff handy, but this probably provides a decent starting point.

One of the big difficulties with truly evaluating the impact of Hasten (and/or recharge buffs in general) on the game is that unlike most of this game's buffs, Recharge works in a very granular fashion - while any amount of Recharge buff provides a nominal benefit, that benefit is only actually realized if it allows you to actually use a given power more often than you would otherwise. Hasten is such an essential part of the Defender/Controller/similar AT toolkit, in large part, because those ATs traffic in a lot of powers with very long recharges, so the efficacy of being able to use those powers more often will be easily felt. Conversely, on Sentinels or a melee AT, Hasten's primary efficacy will vary heavily based on the armor set chosen; Willpower characters, for example, won't benefit nearly as much from it as, say, Regen will. This isn't to say that melee ATs' primaries won't benefit from Hasten, but with melee primaries, you're generally working in an environment where Hasten is only subtracting fractions of seconds from your attacks' recharges after global recharge bonuses from your build, and so it's a very real open question whether or not that will actually improve your attack chain. An example I'm well familiar with: Dual Blades' "introductory" attack chain (Blinding Feint-Ablating Strike-Vengeful Slice-Sweeping Strike, AKA Blinding Feint-Attack Vitals combo) is gapless and repeatable with very low levels of global recharge - basic IO set slotting will do the job, in fact. Improving on this attack chain (the optimal one, AFAIK, is BF-AS-SS-AS) requires a whopping 315% recharge to be gapless, and around 275% to overtake the Attack Vitals chain in spite of having small gaps. But this means that until you can hit that 275-315% recharge range (which is probably going to require frankenslotting for ED cap recharge over defensive set bonuses, slotting other powers for global recharge set bonuses over defensive set bonuses, fitting in 5 LotG mules, running Hasten, probably running Spiritual Core Paragon instead of Musculature, and maybe even using Ageless in your Destiny slot), Hasten is doing absolutely nothing to improve your attack chain. And even then, you have to consider everything you gave up defensively for that. Is it worth it?

We never really got nearly as good of a look at Calvin Scott's story; it's fairly underdeveloped by comparison, I think. Most of what's there is in either out-of-game sources (with unreliable narration) like the official bios from the game's official website (still available via Paragon Wiki) or is given in short snippets. Some of Calvin Scott's actions seem irrational or don't really come off as making sense; one particular example that is only thinly justified is Scott's attempts to overrun the survivor compound in First Ward with Ghouls (which seems to be explained by personal animus at Demetrios Vasilikos over his not sticking around in the city with the Forlorn so that they could be used as shock troops). The biggest thing there is the reveal in the Minds of Mayhem trial (that Praetorian Aurora Pena was his nurse, not his wife, and that he's a schizophrenic who escaped from Tilman's asylum). Then, in the aftermath of the Magisterium trial (shown in Marchand's Primal Earth arcs)...

Sentinel's Psionic Mastery epic power pool appears to be misspelled in some areas of the game as "Psionic Masterty" - this is noticeable when you right click the powers for info, for instance, or link them in chat (typing [Psionic Mastery.Mind Probe] won't work).

Oh, I'm certain that is the case. That's not the thing being complained about, though - the thing being complained about is that unlike every other Story Arc in the game, the Praetorian arcs cut off hard if you outlevel them and don't let you finish the story. Which is kinda bad when the story is the whole point. This used to be a significant issue on Live when people tried to roll goldside characters during 2XP weekends.

Less than that even really. I ran a Sentinel through Warden last week, solo-only, never going off +0/x1 no bosses, and never using XP boosts. I had to do a single repeatable mission at the end of Nova Praetoria to be leveled enough for Imperial City, and then sailed all the way through to the end of the storyline; from there, I needed only 2 or 3 more repeatables to hit 20.

In the Homecoming era this jank is already pretty well lubricated by simply using the P2W vendor and collecting all the free temp power attacks you're allowed to have. Between your origin power, Nemesis Staff, Blackwand, and Sands of Mu, you usually can have something vaguely close to a gapless attack chain even as low as level 2 on many ATs. I don't have any actual objection to Hasten being made inherent, but other than that it shouldn't be messed with because, as has been documented in the many other threads on this issue, it would have deleterious effects on the support and control ATs that rely on long-recharge powers to perform their basic functions. That being said... Cipher hasn't posted statistics since August 2019, but at that time 88.79% of all level 50 characters had Hasten in their build. So it's pretty close to Stamina levels of ubiquitous. (I would probably argue that a substantial portion of those characters do not use it properly or actually benefit materially from it, though. Plenty of sets have near-optimal attack chains that can be achieved with only modest amounts of global recharge and no requirement for Hasten., and for them, the benefit of adding it is marginal and quite possibly less than adding some other kind of utility power.)

Have to fully agree that there is no conceptual reason why Ouro should not have a complete gallery of every story arc in the game. One assumes that the content missing from Ouro is only missing because of Paragon dev oversight at the time. Incidentally, Praetoria goldside story arcs in the 1-20 are a well known case in the current game of content that violates the "you can always finish the arc" "rule" that applies to most of this game's content.

Can add that the invisible katana issue also happens with the Shepherds minions in First Ward that use Katana powers - their katana appears in their hands long enough to swing it and then immediately disappears again.

The cottage rule was also only ever an ideal and a guideline, not a rule etched in stone - the Paragon devs were free to "break" it if was deemed necessary to do so for the health of the game, and indeed as pointed out earlier in this thread there's at least one instance where Paragon did (the change to Blaster Defiance in issue 11 was a pretty radical change that was quite controversial at the time) and one instance where Homecoming arguably did as well (replacing Tanker's Bruising with increased base damage). That's the point of the cottage rule, though - to attempt all other solutions first *before* you throw up your hands and radically change a powerset's core functionality. Assault Rifle and Regen, the two main sets mentioned in this thread, both can be fixed without violating the cottage rule; in AR's case, as others have mentioned you can upgrade Beanbag's damage into a tier 3 blast without removing the hold functionality. The lack of Aim is more difficult to deal with; more on this in a moment. In Regen's case, the solution that sticks out to me would be to cut the regen amount on Instant Healing by some factor, return it to being a toggle, and adding the Sentinel version's absorb-over-time to it. Or you could add it to Integration instead and leave Instant Healing as it currently is. Or you could even add an absorb burst to Reconstruction or Dull Pain. None of these ideas break the cottage rule. Now to come back to this. In fairness, the only other ranged damage set without Aim or a differently named power that has the same actual function is Dual Pistols, which is also widely regarded as a subpar set for the same reason. So it's pretty clear to me that lacking Aim is considered to be a pretty serious deficit for blast sets when 11/13 have it or something substantially similar. (10 of those sets have exactly it in function; Water Blast's Tidal Forces has half the usual +damage but the +tohit portion is intact; Psionic Blast and Sonic Attack have the effect under different names in Psychic Focus and Amplify, respectively.) It's not evidently clear where you could slot the effect into Assault Rifle without a cottage rule violation, though - maybe add a lesser tohit/damage buff to Sniper Rifle in the style of Claws/Follow Up?

As pointed out in the proposal, doorways in CoH don't actually have vertical collision.

Dual Pistols' Hail of Bullets has the same design (and the same issue on Sentinels).

In my experience, Defensive Opportunity is kind of a dud, so I'd probably skip Dual Wield and just take Pistols, maybe?

I'd like to add to this that a design which requires Blasters - by design one of the most selfish ATs in the game, at character creation they have a "Support" rating of 2/10 - to take a team support pool power, in which they have a measly 0.7 scalar, to make one of their primary powers function properly in combat is a bad design concept for the Blaster AT. It's a design that makes more sense for Defenders, absolutely. But not for Blasters.

I think an "insta-50 token" could be a good Big Influence Sink. I don't think I'd offer it for FREE, but price it at, like, 1 or 2 billion influence maybe...?

That's not what's being asked, though. Sentinels have all their T9 primary powers set to 90 second recharge across the board - this applies to both the blaster nukes with longer recharges and the aberrant powers like Full Auto and Rain of Arrows with shorter recharges. In AR's case, this is a mixed bag. Sentinel's Full Auto is significantly different all around, so it's hard to say it's actively worse: Blaster Full Auto: 60s recharge, 80 range, 20 degree arc, 17 ticks of 10.13 lethal, 10% chance of extra 62.56 lethal Sentinel Full Auto: 90s recharge, 40 range, 90 degree arc, 17 ticks of 7.03 lethal, possible additional up to 17 ticks of 2.91 lethal (16% chance) Sentinel AR also gets a smoother early attack chain with Disorienting Shot and some additional late single target punch with Incinerator replacing Sniper Rifle (and being not Lethal!). In Archery's case, it's pretty unambiguously bad for the set; the only benefit Sentinel gets is a slightly lower endurance cost for Rain of Arrows. Blaster Rain of Arrows: 60s recharge, 90 range, 25 radius, 3 ticks of 75.07 lethal Sentinel Rain of Arrows: 90s recharge, 40 range, 25 radius, 3 ticks of 37.58 lethal + 3 ticks of 15.48 lethal Like AR, though, Sentinel Archery gets an arguably stronger ST attack chain with the addition of meaningful damage on Stunning Shot and Perfect Shot being very strong. (On the other hand, Sentinel's Aimed Shot is weaker but faster-recharging.) Also worth noting: the numbers given in Pine's are lower than those reported by the server - Pine's reports a damage scale of 0.9 for sentinels, while the actual value on the server is 0.95.

The damage is Dominator level, actually, for what it's worth. 20% lower than Blaster on the regular blasts. The T9 powers are somewhat harder hit but also have shorter cooldowns relative to their blaster variants. Only slightly - Sentinel defensive values are 93.333% of scrapper/brute's. They do share the Blaster's hit point total, but the blaster's hit point total is actually the 4th highest in the game (tied with Stalker). By 25%, yeah. I dunno that I'd call it near-zero, but it's not all that much more impactful than, say, scrapper criticals (in fact it feels like scrapper criticals were the reference point balance-wise). I'm enjoying mine (Beam Rifle/Willpower). It's pretty much a blaster that trades blapping and extreme damage output for mez protection, yes.

By encouraging players to report farm arcs and routinely deleting them from the server, and periodically making changes to the base code for AE to thwart methods people used to farm. I know you don't like that answer, but that's what happened on live.

Erika Shimomura/Nagare Yuki/Lunar Lily/Ninth Winter checking in. Hi. :)

The main other AT I'd like to see at this point would be one that combines melee sets and support sets. Don't really care which one is primary and which one's secondary.