tidge

I second the suggestion for checking City of Data. Writing only for myself: knowing what the actual numbers are helps me decide what, if any, attributes of a power are worth investing (certain types) of enhancements in.

I'm not seeing this in my own play experience. I change my MM tactics for different content ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . Reading between the lines of the OPs posts about the MM experience, my takeaway was that difficulty (certainly spawn size, it is unclear about +level) was being turned up at somewhat low levels (earlier than 45). There simply aren't enough complicated nuCouncil appearing in a 0x1 setting to worry most MMs, at any level... unless of course there is something really poor about the henchmen slotting and/or tactics. IMO, any time the team size is set above x1, we aren't talking "solo" play anymore. It is true that even a relatively modestly crafted character(*1) can often, and is expected to, in some content, solo more than one spawn at once (unintentional aggro, wanderers passing by)... and in the "good market" era of HC we can all make characters much better than "modestly crafted"... but it strikes me as a disingenuous argument to both want to turn up difficulty settings and then want to complain that the enemies are too difficult when doing exactly that. (*1) As a practical matter, I'm about 50-50 on if I turn up the difficulty for my characters. Specifically on MMs, I find that it is relatively easy to turn up the spawn size after the second upgrade is available... but that doesn't mean the game is "easy mode" forever after level 26. As the enemies become more complicated after level 30, the MM has to adjust playstyles. I experience a similar sort of thing with Kheldians... the progress immediately after getting Nova form is pretty easy, because the enemies aren't able to deal with a character that has that many ranged attacks, at that level. After ~level 12, the enemies are better equipped to handle that sort of thing, and the game rebalances. It's not that enemies above level 16 are too "highly tuned" for Kheldians, it is that the game now requires a different strategy from a solo player.

As I wrote: I think chasing enhancements for enemy debuffs, especially those below 10% isn't worth trying to enhance them for enemies that are not likely to be sticking around long. Also because it's a "no more than 2" stack on the Fear portion, I concluded that once I had the base accuracy above 110% (because the two other Fears are about 150% base accuracy) that was all I needed to invest in a rather meh power (that I don't even need to keep toggled on). I had originally 6-slotted it for set bonuses, but I had to pick either Fear or -ToHit, and invest a rather large number of slots that could be used elsewhere. For example, adding a Kismet +ToHit to a toggle... which I did on the Tanker but not the Scrapper, so the Tanker has an even better ToHit chance with the toggle. Frankly, I find the practical effects of each of the non-damage auras by themselves to be insignificant enough that I wouldn't fault someone giving up both of them and just go with a %-Resistance piece in the Damage aura. The %proc rates will be horrible, but in terms of how it would improve performance... I don't know that we could tell a difference. between all these middling choices.

Now that it is more evident that the the OP wants to be able to face-tank AVs with a Defender... below level 40... and has doubled-down on this attitude... sympathy has evaporated. As @Luminara wrote: relying on +Defense and -ToHit is eventually going to lead to disappointment. AVs are not just like the mooks "but at +N" from the rest of the mission. AVs require some strategy and coordination. On TFs like Manticore, it may not look that way if a team has been steamrolling/stealthing, and there are a bunch of experienced players with a wide variety of tricks (including controls, debuffs, team buffs/heals) to call on for the AV fights

On my /Dark Scrapper and Dark/ Tanker Death Shroud Fury of the Gladiator Dam/End/Rech (50+5) Fury of the Gladiator Acc/Dam/Rech (50+5) Fury of the Gladiator Acc/Dam/End/Rech (50+5) Cloak of Fear Hami-O Endoplasm Acc/Mezz (53) Nightmare Acc/End (50+5) Skipped Oppressive Gloom I usually take Cloak of Fear as my final choice from Primary/Secondary, and only if the build has Global Accuracy (or ToHit) in it, because of the terrible inherent Accuracy. My Stalker has multiple other Fear powers, otherwise I'd skip Cloak of Fear. My characters do not have other Stun powers/effects, so I skipped Oppressive Gloom on both. I'm simply not a fan of PBAoE status/effect toggles. I can almost feel good about them on Tankers/Brutes because of "aggro", but I generally don't like having to worry about their Accuracy against +N and Endurance costs. I slot for +Mezz because the base fear effect is something like 7 seconds, so if trying to stack the effect longer is better. The base -ToHit is IIRC -5%, so boosting that is marginal without an investment in slots. YMMV but I never trust PBAoE debuff toggles. Death Shroud is a power that I usually only work into a build early after respecs when I have Global Accuracy/ToHit bonuses. My level 50 Scrapper has it as a "first choice", my level 50 Tanker didn't bother with it until level 18... my general opinion is that for content below a certain level it isn't doing that much. It becomes more important for soloing a increased spawn sizes or when teams are facing enemy spawns that can't be defeated in a couple of attacks.... so something like a +2 Synapse TF. I opted for the 3x Fury of the Gladiator because of the lack of Knockback protection in Dark Armor. Dark Armor allows for 3xGladiator's Armor as well, so using that along with two of the 4-point KB protection pieces gets 14 points of KB... and it is important for Dark Armor types to not get knocked around or knocked down to be able to spam Dark Regeneration.

The difficulty settings do address this, and it was pointed out multiple times in this thread. (*1) I'll repeat something I wrote earlier: The only time (so far) nuCouncil made one of my characters feel like "wow that is really hard!" was in the following circumstance: I was solo on a Warshade somewhere in the "Brickstown" level range, so mid-30s, but below 40. (read as "leveling up, and not tricked out and exemplared down") doing the Warshade arcs (read as "rather pitiful damage, no controls") The "final" map EB (spawned +1 to me) went nuclear, transformed, and I didn't have enough nearby enemies left to do my usual Warshade tricks. I was tempted to reset the mission, but using a lot of Inspirations (a trick learned back in the very early days of Live) was enough to beat it. Obviously, I could have also asked for help. Otherwise: The NuCouncil hasn't forced me to change anything about my play style or build choices, for any of my characters, except that if I think of it... and think knockback will be an issue... I will craft a SG base buff for knockback protection. NuCouncil spawns are slower to defeat, but they were ridiculously easy to defeat en masse prior to the update. (*1) It isn't clear to me that this round of complaints is due to anything other than setting large spawn sizes and playing solo. My experience has been that the dominant effect of larger spawn sizes is that more enemies will eventually hit... and now that the Council has more "annoying tricks" (including soft controls like FREEM!) players you used to just shrug off the relatively few hits of S/L damage are now finding that this enemy group requires slightly more mental bandwidth. This is almost certainly why some players write that "this was a swing of the nerf bat against resistance-based characters", as they tend to take more hits than defense-based ones. Folks that aren't immediately frustrated by those effects/controls are annoyed that several nuCouncil enemies have higher resistances, which is slowing down defeat times, but my experience is that those critters aren't any worse than certain other enemy types at the same level. On teams? I haven't seen any issues with clear nuCouncil times, even when it was my character being tossed around like a ragdoll.

I can get behind this thinking, but I tend to go beyond just thinking about the armor, but can I make the "generally recognized as bad" parts of the armor work? For example: we have recently had rather long discussions about the Dark toggles. I feel like on my /Dark scrapper, I actually have Cloak of Fear working for me, but I have some other crazy Fear stuff happening in the build, plus a metric ####-ton of Accuracy and ToHit to cover for it's horrible waeknesses. Even I wasn't crazy enough to try to also make Oppressive Gloom work. Otherwise, I suspect that each of the "Armors" (for all ATs) has been more-or-less "solved" by lots of players. My personal challenge is pairing an Armor with the other set (primary or secondary) and perhaps leaning into one pool (could be epic or patron, but those come so late!) to make the character sing with a unique voice.

They remain punchable.

IIRC, the various emotes can be made to work while holding shields... it is just that there is a specific emote that needs to be done immediately before. I can't recall what it is!

The nuCouncil is effectively demonstrating that they can now leverage certain "player tricks", at an appropriate mission level... whereas before, pretty much the only "player annoying" tricks were Warwolves running away, and Ascendants being untouchable. The Council was grossly under-powered considering the level range of content they appear in. I continue to suspect that it is only because the Council had been seen as punching bags that they are specifically being singled out. The CoT has been briefly mentioned, but somehow their updates, like Crey before them, are not drawing attention.

Do either of the follow matter? The powers and abilities demonstrated by the NuCouncil appear in the lore well before level 50. With the exception of the random FREEM!, those nuPowers are not radically different from powers exhibited by other factions bosses.

I am not saying true feedback doesn't appear, I'm saying that I witness a very large chaff-to-wheat imbalance. One potential sign that a suggestion/feedback is started in good faith, with specific merits that can be evaluated is IMO that it doesn't degenerate into arguments about logical fallacies, or about how the forum moderators did somebody wrong. See also... 1) I don't know why "questioning other people" even comes up in the suggestions game forum, unless this is a specific comment along the lines of "I have a question only a dev can answer". 2) I think you underestimate how infrequently /jranger is used, especially compared with the first several years of Homecoming. Frankly, often when /jranger is used, someone else almost immediately comes along and explains why the suggestion probably merited a /jranger. See "Bring back Prestige"

More related to the question posed: I really wish we could get a revisit of several of the Armor T9 powers. I find it embarrassing that often a handful of Inspirations can do what a set's capstone power can do, with less investment and fewer negative consequences.

Tell me more about this power "Unstoppable"... it sounds like it may the fix for all of Invulnerability's problems! /s

I observe many more instances of what @Ruin Mage describes (i.e. "roll it back, I hate it" *1) in suggestions than anything else except threads started by players (who often appear to be new-ish, at least to HC) making suggestions that appear to be a stray thought that crossed their mind about something that simply happened to peeve them. I don't consider it brigading when multiple people point out the triviality of suggestions or the (often) many ways too avoid being peeved. I also don't think it is brigading to defend HC dev decisions that have empirically been good for the game... e.g. most assets are fungible, with a limited number of Influence sinks that mostly don't affect in-game performance. Actual feedback on Beta is a mixed bag... I deeply appreciate the beta testers because for a while I wasn't able to Beta due to my own laziness about not changing launchers. I have occasionally chimed in on a Beta thread, but for the most part I'll just read them because I can almost never offer constructive feedback without having tried the Beta content. Full Disclosure: I want to say the last time I had a shared opinion on Beta content without playing it was the GM revamps... The GMs did become slightly harder, but not by the means I would have chosen. Frankly, if the devs had implemented my suggestion (or at even tested it) there probably would have been a louder player revolt than whatever is bothering people about the recent Council and CoT updates. (*1) Something new to HC players should keep in mind: Homecoming has had several "The sky is falling"/"Things have changed" moments in the years before a 2024 player joined. Based on some of the comments made by new players, I can easily imagine them making similar posts about how the game is ruined because they can't get to Echo Dark Astoria from a SG Base, or how they can't instantly pop into a SG base, or how the Crey Confuses are ruining their play experience, how their Fire Farms are ruined, how the economy is ruined because of Vanguard/Empyrian merit conversions, how they lost a billion inf because of level 53 Hami-O's, whatever.

The KB resistance must be checked first; I noticed a SR character with no extra KB protection aside from Practiced Brawler was not affected by FREEM! at all.

Invulnerability on HC doesn't have the Psi hole it did on Live. Energy Aura has more of an issue with Psi, IIRC.

I've written a lot of RNG jibber-jabber, the dominant effect is that the RNG is certainly pseudo-random, in that it it will (try to) flatly populate numbers over the entire range (as observed), so not rolling a "natural 20" on one roll makes it more likely that the next roll will be a "natural 20". This is not the way real randomness works! perhaps the biggest mystery for me is: It's not clear to me if RNG "throws away" a "roll" when applying streakbreaker, or not. I believe there is a discarded roll, with high confidence but low power...there are so many RNG rolls in the game but AFAIK only Streakbreaker only applies to the ToHit rolls of attacks. The dimension that confuses me the most about implementing streakbreaker: If the RNG is a flat-fill of number space, there should be no reason to implement streakbreaker. Writing another way: If streakbreaker was implemented only because of (player) perception bias, then any remaining (player) complaints about a streakbreaker implemented on top of RNG can't be dismissed casually by saying "well, that is just perception bias".

Players may have feels about preferring the hero side over the villain side, but I disagree that it is the writing of the arcs red side. The best blue-side writing is IMO the original, slow reveals of the relationships of the different factions... but as much as I like this, it is really confusing (Lorewise, at least to me) why some contacts are forcing "investigations" on PCs about enemy types when there really can't be any mystery about what is going on, given how certain enemy groups appear (especially if Tips are used). There really is no agency blue side, except 2XP I suppose. "Who will die?" is pretty bad for player agency blue side, it offers IMO slightly more red side. I will give a thumbs-up to the revamped Faultline arcs blue side. The red-side arcs are a mix of contacts trying to take advantage of the PCs, as well as more mercenary type of missions, until the PCs ultimately best whatever the contacts have. Playing red-side makes it possible to defeat almost all the named blue-side heroes/trainers, as well as all the villain patrons and lackeys, simply by doing arcs. You can even get your revenge on multiple different contacts that may have treated you "wrong". You want to face a CoV Patron blue side? You are generally limited to hoping they decide to rob a bank, or go to Recluse's Victory.

This might work for some NPCs, but I feel like there would be more unintended consequences for others. For example, the Mayhem Hostages might easier "freeze" upon seeing a critter, and Fusionette doesn't need to have more of a reason for her behavior.

^What they wrote. This is almost certainly your issue. There is an occasional display bug for invention badge progress that won't show the bar increase, or what the actual count/progress is at for inventions, but this is a flaky UI issue that isn't particularly common. I usually encounter that problem in the SG base, but that is where I tend to be doing the mass-creation of inventions... I haven't been able to duplicate (or resolve) that issue by opening/closing the sorts of UI things that cause other issues in SG bases (storage racks, costume, vault, recipes, etc.)

Maybe it wasn't 5%?

That sounds like all kinds of nightmare. I feel like I can easily adapt whenever a PUGorganizer advertises speed/non-speed, but the one common advertisement that always confuses me is "Kill Most". I've been on many "KM TF" that we didn't even fight half the critters on any given map. I'd like to point to the spot on the TF doll where the leader threatened to kick me for drawing more aggro that we were otherwise ignoring.