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I don't think the (what people call) disparity is due to procs; I think the whatever the disparity is... is due to Global Recharge. I'm not ignorant of the artificial inflation of %proc chances for (current, HC) Tankers that really ought to be addressed. With Blasters having crashless nukes and beaucoup recharge, I don't know why there is such intense focus of Scrapper/Tanker/Brute when those three have repeatedly been shown (currently, on the HC shards) to all be pretty close in performance. Scrappers without their Critical hits ATO wouldn't be outputting more damage than Brutes (in terms of clear times) as near as I can tell. Right now we've got a whole lotta ATs that are fun to play and can reap similar rewards in roughly similar amounts of time. I can't wrap my head around trying to knock one of four (or five, or six) ATs out of that rewards-per-unit-time group. The game is IMO far past the point where we need to have role-specific team construction to earn rewards (in similar amounts of time/effort).

I gotta write: Suggesting Trapdoor (and Pylons) as a means of balancing power sets and ATs seems like it is really muddying the waters when it comes to relative performance. Even the vaunted Ston analysis showed fractions of a minute in differences between three different melee ATs (at level 50).

I'm looking forward to Echo: Dark Astoria becoming a PvP zone.

It would be too much of a change to the perception and mechanics of Brutes, but this would be my suggestion: if Brutes debuffed enemies in PBAoE as they built Fury instead of self-buffing damage, that would be a somewhat unique mechanic that would allow the Brutes to "hit harder" and have a place on teams. Obviously this wouldn't appeal to anyone who thinks one-dimensionally along the lines of "Hulk get angrier and hits harder", but in terms of game mechanics it would be an alternative to "melee DPS".

Seems like Defender/Corruptor %damage in AoE might be a future target for this "clever" mechanic.

This is my head-canon: Dark Armor lack KB protection (as a feature) because of the ways that Dark Armor relies on nearby enemies to survive. The KB 'hole' was (in my mind) intended to add a blunt vulnerability... if the character is being knocked down/around they can't use their self-heal.

I'm a lil bit confused... mostly because I can't reconcile these concepts: Not getting past level 40+ Wanting to have a ton of characters at 22-25 Wanting most of the characters to have +3 enhancements (or better!) ... without having established a source of inf. I can imagine "pick any two, but not all three", it's just that the way the problem is constrained it is no surprise to me that there is some frustration. I can see why someone who isn't inclined to use the market would avoid it... yet... there has got to be a favorite character that is just itching to go through level 40-50 content... and once that character starts 45+ content... enough Inf will roll in to either kit that character or kit out the alts.... *IF* those alts even need to be kitted.

The reference to Black Country and Lenny Henry reminds me of the time when I was listening to an American news radio program (I think it was some NPR show) and Lenny Henry was introduced as "African-American British comedy icon Lenny Henry".

I feel like I lost perspective on what is actually desired to be addressed by the proposed Tanker changes. I mean, I am aware of "Ston data" but those results were, for lack of a better word, niche... and ultimately if there was a marginal over-performance of Tanker DPS, it was due to the PPM system. [setting aside personal feels and perceptions about how the game is possibly imbalanced by having three different melee ATs complete the same content in near-identical times] If there are a handful of over-performing powers in a few sets: address those. As we are seeing, the attempt to apply some scale-back to the entire AT isn't being discriminant. If it was the bonus AoE range gauntlet/whatever interplay with %procs... the modified ranges should have affected this (if the PPM formula accounts for them). Is this just 'too obvious'? The ties to the self-buffs/critter debuffs seem really odd to me... again, this feels like there are a small number of powers that were driving the concern. No disagreement... I'd like to know what the devs think the performance should be. Are non-proc Tankers over-performing by 33%? by 66%? It's not like the Tankers are going to start surviving 33% more content.

I'm not so sure.

The Auction House probably has common IOs, crafted, available for far less than the cost of buying the recipe and crafting it yourself. I'd just put some bids in on level 30s. Common IOs don't expire, 30s will be better than trying to stick with SOs. SOs are and old, mostly out-dated concept that only has relevance for low-level characters without access to Influense, Merits or already crafted recipes. There are useful crafting badges for level 25s, 30s, 45s, and 50s, so there are often A LOT of those on the market. Some advice for 'stubborn' players who think old school(*1): If you are REALLY starved for Influence at level 41: Run Ouroboros content at lower levels without using the XP boosters... sell your drops. If you run content in the level range 20-30 you should get useful common recipe drops as well. (*1) This is not meant as an insult. The Homecoming setup with the Market and the Merit conversions makes it really easy and inexpensive to kit out characters... but it is not "page 1" thinking. If the game was the same as the early days of Live, we'd all be (re)living what @Ultimo is living.

Spring-boarding from this comment: Writing only for myself: when I initially realized that I could get 'perma-Hasten' from IO set bonuses (Purples, LotG, etc.) I pretty much realized I could skip Hasten altogether and just get significant Global recharge from the set bonuses. In my case, I never was doing "farming" so when the choice of attack IO sets comes down to Purples v. Winters it was pretty much a no-brainer for me(*1), I'll always use a purple set first, and then maybe use 2-pieces from Winters' (for Slow Resistance) in an off-beat attack... and sometimes if a character has hella many attacks one of those will get a Winter set after I've used ATO and Very Rares. (*1) Because of typical Recover/Accuracy/Global Recharge bonuses from the Very Rare/Purples instead of Res/Def from Winters.

Those prices are pretty small potatoes; I'm guessing this is for things like common/uncommon salvage or common IO recipes below a certain level. I predict that eventually you'll either be listing those things for 1 inf or simply selling them at vendors.

I see what you did there. The reduction in self-buffs isn't 100% overlapped with the changes to cones or the overcap reductions... but it does seem (to this guy, *points to self*) that there is probably one-too-many ideas being thrown into the pot of tanker-scale-back. It isn't as if the self-buffs somehow are negating the effects of the overcap or cone changes, are they?

I'm not testing in Beta. I've got one Scrapper that has Cloak of Fear for theme, and a Tanker that has it as an extra enemy-affecting aura effect for teams. I've tended to delay the choice of Cloak of Fear until later levels... for all the reasons everyone knows and a few reasons that most people can figure out after playing with it. I generally have it 2-slotted, one 53 HO Accurracy/Mezz and one boosted 50+5 Acc/Endurance Reduction. I don't think I'm going to start recommending this power based on the proposed i28p2 changes, even if it is an improvement Each of my Dark Armor characters ends up with+14 KB (passive) protection from set bonuses that scale down below level 10 (PVP sets, etc.), and I see no reason to (early-build) swap into a toggle that relies on enemies in PBAoE to get a little bit of KB protection from each enemy. This effect will be appreciated when facing the FREEM-tossing Council, because I'm typically facing at least 6 of those guys. The only thing in my current builds that looks like a "compromise" to achieve the +14 KB is using a Karma where otherwise I might use a LotG global recharge... so I suppose that other players that want to make different choices (using three pieces of Gladiator's Armor and Fury of the Gladiator in Dark armor is a sort of no-brainer for me) might make use of the toggle. The big change I'm facing is "how to fit in Soul Transfer"?

Has the decrease in Tanker self-buffs extended to Inspirations as well?

Changes to cones is another head-scratcher for me... maybe I need to be deloused? The enemy AI and the physical restrictions of which enemies could be hit by a cone, plus the level at which Tankers tend to get cone attacks <- these contributed to me finally feeling good about Tanker cones (with wide arcs). I find it hard to believe that the cones have to be made narrower... just given the way the critters behave.

This sounds like me and my life choices! As I wrote above, my perfectly excellent gaming laptop was my travel choice... and might still be if I didn't have to bring two laptops through TSA... Aside from the extra weight I found unpacking all the laptops to be a real mood killer at airport security, especially when the gaming one has a larger footprint. KTN makes this easier, but then I've still got a somewhat beefy carry-on for plane travel. I sometimes feel like I'm pushing the limits for carry-on as is! I typically don't have enough downtime while traveling for gaming, but had I been able to get a smaller profile laptop with better graphics for similar (cheap) pricing I probably would have done it. The only thing I feel like I'm missing from the budget traveler besides reliable CoX is related... it's much less efficient at doing video and audio processes than my other systems

That was my guess, but I know there was a lot of discussion earlier in the HC life about how to 'gobble reds', so I wasn't sure if some combination Inps+SelfBuff+Incarnates of solo builds were doing it. Any guesses as to why the cap was dropped? This feels (to me) like something that might have been included to make "Hard Mode" types of content (where a couple of Kins and large spawns might appear) moar hard.

The best reason IMO for slotting Coercive Confusion in an AoE control was, IMO that with a reliable %proc chance, it became practically unobservable to 'miss' hitting every critter in the spawn because of 5% RNG... the followup rolls of the proc always (per my observation) hit the enemies. I think I did see times when teh magnitude of a Confuse wasn't enough for Bosses, etc. but otherwise every critter in a spawn would get the Confuse effect, even if some of them only had the short duration version. Having written that, %damage in a Confuse AoE wasn't a bad thing, as any %damage got you on the list for potential reward drops, even if the critters defeat each other.

Thanks! This is basically what I did (years ago) to try to understand 'nerfs to Brutes'. The biggest one I see is the top value for Damage Buff... I'll leave it for others who routinely and consistently crossed from 700% towards 775% to say how they were affected. I remember many people being upset about 'massive nerfs', and maybe those players favored Brutes? The items in that category are (from memory): 1) Defense (& attack) typing changes which meant players chasing single resistances (for example S/L or F/C) became vulnerable to content that they had not been vulnerable to previously. 2) Fire melee set changes (that came to include Defense Debuffs), which was most noticeable for fire farmers 3) Changes to the in-game rewards, like scaling rewards of Empyrians, lvl 49 XP->Inf going away, conversion rates of Vanguard merits, etc... many of these were targeted at AE (and some non-AE) farm-ish activities for the economy of the game and nothing to do with performance. It's not a secret that in the early days of Homecoming, 'Farming with Brutes' was typically the default advice (for those who wanted to farm). I'm wondering the 'nerfs to farming' have gotten confused with 'nerfs to Brutes'. None of the three changes I listed were targeted at Brutes, although #1 had a larger impact (from my memory) on ATs that were capable of exceeding a very high resistance cap.

Just some personal comments, based on a few recent posts: I used to feel the same, and how I mitigated this feeling of drudgery (on solo) was: At low levels, I use START attacks. They still have terrible damage scales, but they are damage. At medium+ levels, I add %damage. The damage procs are pretty much the only thing that keeps Controllers having solo times within an order of magnitude as other ATs. For teams... usually it is the case that a couple of powers offer the same type of control (e.g. Holds) as a ST and AOE. I usually try to make sure I can stack those (on single targets) I try to stay with the players that aren't rushing off... and if everyone else is, I tend to stay with the 'slowest'. Controllers have to be careful, because in my experience they can accidentally grab 'too much' aggro and are far more subject to controls and damage than something like a Blaster.

I want to toss this out here as a potential Live v. Beta test: The Penny Yin TF is one I use (Live only) to test performance differences for different ATs (to speed it). Tankers, Scrappers and Stalkers do best, with times typically just over 10 minutes. The times can vary because of the many different enemies that can self-rez, but I find it to be a good measure of a full-kit performance.

I don't think the current beta Tanker rollbacks are unwarranted, or even qualify as nerfs... so no panic on my part. As I've often written, I like the game best when there isn't an order of magnitude difference in mission completion times for different ATs run by the same solo player. I'm thinking about mid-levels 30-45 content when we start getting a lot of 'defeat all' missions with enemies that have a significant number of extra tricks. Historically (old history), one of the ways I found for solo Tankers to speed this up has been to pull as many enemies along as possible. For small spawn sizes these changes shouldn't really affect Tanker times.