MrQuizzles

So during the hayday of the City of Heroes official forums, there existed a subcommunity of us defenders who argued online for the better sake of our archetypes. I was the Dark Miasma personality, even though I played a Dark/Rad defender, a combination that we have no evidence for having been played by anybody but me. I was and am MrQuizzles, AKA Dark Azsmo, the Dark/Rad defender on Infinity. The one who soloed Babbage in Issue 4. The one who was soloing +4 groups of Rikti back in issue 5. I was part of the birth Fruit Salad Defenders, of the birth of the philosophy of RO, god rest their souls. Barely any of you remember RO at this point, do you? You don't remember Fruit Salad. You don't remember how we rebelled against "good heals" and typical MMO party structure. I'm 37 now. I was in high school when I was part of this community before. The people who founded this community were in their 20s and 30s at that same time. They're probably long gone, aren't they?

Certainly not before the fear rework (they used to run away instead of cower in place) and before the -Resistance was added to Tar Patch. There were a few other buffs it got here and there throughout the original game's run, but before those two major ones, Dark Miasma used to basically always get you auto-kicked from teams trying to do harder content. The biggest problem with it was mostly the double-dip penalties against higher level enemies. Not only would their base accuracy and damage be higher, but they'd resist your accuracy and damage debuffs by like 45% on top of that. And remember the -res wasn't there yet, so it was really quite painful. The underperforming part of that interaction getting fixed was that Trick Arrow and Dark Miasma were exactly useless in Hamidon raids otherwise. Dark Miasma, especially, could do essentially nothing useful during the encounter.

No, that actually happened 18 years ago, and neither Trick Arrow nor Dark Miasma were very good at the time.

When the Devs sit in on a Hamidon raid and hear people calling for "slick twilight", they see people teleporting downed heroes into a pile, and then a Trick Arrow defender launches Oil Slick Arrow, and a Dark defender uses Howling Twilight on the oil slick to res the whole group at once. When a developer witnesses that, and the first thing they do is nerf it because neither Trick Arrow nor Dark Miasma were ever meant to be viable or usable in anything resembling end-game content, that's what underperforming means.