DSorrow

As many others have pointed out, there is no one solution that fits every situation. Generally I follow the practice of giving less outright influence and more information on how to generate it to people I don't know, and I feel like in the long run this has been pretty successful practice considering the number of in-game friends it has resulted in. Then again, I also have a childhood friend whom I routinely gift full-purple builds to because we have a lot of fun playing together but he has absolutely zero interest in planning builds or marketeering / farming for enhancements. From personal experience, as a new player I'd get the most out of a gift that boosts me up to the "premium family car" stage of gear. Good enough that every basic functionality is fulfilled to a good standard, but I'm also not completely overpowered in the content that's supposed to be a learning experience. At the same time, it still leaves the aspirational "sports car" and "super car" builds out there to be achieved later. In CoX I'd say some uniques (mostly Endurance related + Kismet) and ~20 million for some uncommon sets would be a good starting point.

And thank the deities the tedium is gone. If the main challenge in a game is calendar management to fit in enough grinding time or developing enough perseverance to endure an abysmal ratio of tedium to enjoyable stuff it's just bad entertainment design. I wouldn't mind actual difficulty that comes from designing a good build, game skill (i.e. reacting to enemy actions effectively) or such, but CoH isn't really a game like that at its core.

I think negative level shifts are the biggest handicap for MMs playing at higher difficulties. Just looking at how the purple patch affects damage output and ignoring the impact of level difference on hit chance completely: Going from two -1 T1s to three -2 T2s is a damage output downgrade at +3. Two pets at -1 [-4 vs enemies] deal 0.48 x base DPS each for 0.96 total while three pets at -2 [-5] deal 0.30 x base DPS each for 0.90 total. Essentially, being able to choose to only summon two of your T1 pets at -1 would yield a ~7% increase in damage output. Going from two -1 T1s to three -2 T2s is a significant downgrade at +4. Two pets at -1 [-5] deal 0.30 x base DPS each for 0.60 total while three pets at -2 [-6] deal 0.15 x base DPS each for 0.45 total. Being able to choose to only summon two of these at -1 would give them ~33% increased damage output. Obviously this simplifies things a bit because not all T1s summons contain three copies of the same henchman and it is ignoring the effects of having fewer henchies on bodyguard. Then again, at -6 your pets have a ridiculously low base hit chance of 0.2 which just compounds the issue of significantly reduced base damage, especially when your pets don't benefit from things such as Kismet +Acc or +Acc set bonuses.

Just to clarify this, the 5% vs 5% x 20 = 100% thing usually means the same thing, but from two different perspectives. Consider a group of 20 people in the raid and assume everyone does 100 DPS just for easy maths, if you apply a debuff that causes the enemy to take 5% more damage every individual raider now does 105 DPS. Your raid's total damage output is now 105 x 20 = 2100, which is exactly 5% more than the previous 100 x 20 = 2000. However, because you added 5% DPS to each individual raider, you get 5% x 20 = 100% of an individual raider's worth of extra damage. As you can see, the added 100 DPS is equivalent to an extra teammate's worth of damage. Similarly if you only had a team of 10 raiders, the 5% debuff would amount to 5% x 10 = 50% or half a raider's worth of added damage. Raid does 5% more damage or you get 5% x [number of raiders] equivalent of "extra teammates", same thing, different measure.

What are your goals for the build?

Shadow Shard TFs probably have to take the top spot for me. I've only ever done each of them once on retail CoH for the badges and never went back because they simply felt artificially prolonged to an extent where even the special enemies and locations couldn't make up for it. With more reasonable mission design they would probably be great because Shadow Shard and Rularuu are otherwise criminally underused for being such interesting lore wise. As for other TFs, Synapse and Citadel are both extremely boring because it feels like you do the exact same mission ~10 times, so you don't really get a feeling of progress during the TF. For Synapse specifically, Clockwork are also an extremely annoying enemy group at low levels given all the mez and endurance drain. The final TF on my list is Numina, purely because of the hunt at the end. It would be fine if you could progress all of the hunt steps at the same time, but you can't so it becomes an exercise in logistics if you want to finish it in a timely fashion. What's also annoying is that some enemy groups just spawn very scarcely in the zones you're supposed to hunt them.

I think the issue with this is that for a lot of people the min/maxing specifically is a big part of the game experience. Asking to "not overenhance" is basically just saying "stop doing that thing you enjoy in order to make the game more enjoyable" which doesn't really make any sense. Another way of looking at that is telling someone who no longer feels challenged by a 5K run to stop training so much or run it in impractical equipment rather than encouraging them to find a nice 10K route. Well, it was already noted that the game does expect one to use enhancements to an extent already, and I think analogously to pretty much any other environment, you usually don't get increased rewards by achieving the same thing others do without using the tools provided to you, but by achieving something greater than default by using the same tools. At least I wouldn't expect to be lined up for a raise if I started showing up to work with an abacus instead of my PC, even if I could perform at my current PC-aided level. As far as I'm concerned, if tools are provided not using them is absurd, and conversely, expecting players to use tools that aren't readily available would also be absurd. The game does provide you with boat loads of generic and yellow IOs, and a good amount of oranges on top of those, so I think a common sense based semi random mix of those (i.e. damage powers slotted with damage sets, but no cohesive min/maxing of set bonuses) would be a good baseline for 50+ content.

Yes. I don't think there's any reason why any AT should not be able to progress generic content without the help of a team. I'm inclined to say yes. Why? The question does leave quite a bit open. +4/8 with a build specifically geared towards heightened solo performance? Can't say there's anything wrong with this, it's not like any AT or powerset combo is +4/8 capable by default (besides any Control sets with Confusion). +4/8 against which enemies? Council and Banished Pantheon are quite different enemy groups in terms of challenge. +4/8 with or without inspirations? With insps, anything can be done considering how powerful they are even at T1. +4/8 at what kind of speed? If speed isn't a concern, most builds using insps could just go back and forth with a contact and continuously stock up as they run out. I think if we limit this to a specialist build and easier enemy groups, then I don't see why some ATs should not be allowed to have +4/8 solo performance. There's still a wide variety of difficulty within +4/8. Yes and no. Some incarnate mobs are pretty gnarly and they all have increased ToHit, but at the same time we already have extremely difficult enemy groups that we barely get to fight (Vanguard) even below 50. However, at 50, purple sets, catalyzed IOs and especially incarnate level shifts account for a pretty hefty increase in character power so I think that Incarnate content is justified to be a bit more difficult because of the incarnate abilities wielded by player characters. I think a decent level of IO usage should be expected in end game content. Analogous to most other games, I think it would be completely reasonable that the most difficult content is tuned for characters that use gear beyond the basic items offered by the game. That said, I wouldn't want this taken to an extreme where every participant needs to be a build wizard, but rather that the expectation is set so that the players have a generic IO set's worth of enhancement value in their powers (~1.5 to 2 SOs per available slot). Essentially, a state you could achieve by slotting just whatever generic and set IO enhancements drop for you without caring for set bonuses, or slotting roughly half of your powers with full IO sets and having set bonuses take care of increasing the other half's enhancement values. But again, this would only apply for end-game content. I can only speak for myself, but I've never been bothered by capable teammates. This I can agree with. Judgment cycling is some of the most boring gameplay I can imagine. At 120 seconds cooldown, an 8 man team can use a Judgment ability every 15 seconds which is just too often in my opinion, especially when there's absolutely no trade-offs to acquire that power. You're not putting yourself at risk by using a ranged Judgment. You're not making a build decision by picking a Judgment power because it doesn't occupy a power slot that could be used by something that's not Judgment. It isn't a big gameplay decision to use Judgment because it comes back so quickly. None of my 50s have Judgment. While I do enjoy min/maxing, just getting a free "I win" button that's available every two minutes is just too much. Maybe make them 15 mins cooldown like Lore, at least outside of iTrials?

There was a point in time when +DMG/+Range HOs were the optimal slotting for most ally shields because the +33.3% Damage actually enhanced the Resistance the powers provided meaning you could hit the ED soft cap (~56%) with just two enhancements as opposed to three using standard +Res enhancements (+20% a piece). This has since been fixed, but given that it worked in the first place, it's pretty obvious how +DMG and +Res are tied. Anecdotally, the same was true for +Def vs. +DefDebuff and +ToHit vs +ToHitDebuff enhancement values given by HOs.

But isn't the same true for all survivability bonuses? Scrappers get the exact same +Def and +Res bonuses as Tankers despite their lower defensive modifiers, and thanks to their better offensive base values, they can catch up with the Tanker defensively if they don't go for an offense focused build. Basically, I don't really see a huge issue if one AT that is strong offensively and weaker defensively invests a lot to shore up defense ends up closing the gap to another AT that is weak offensively and strong defensively but invests in improving their weaker offense. Exactly this, but I'm not sure if I'd allow them to completely ignore it. Like you point out, support ATs do get a lot of mileage out of procs because many of them are capable of reducing enemy Resistances by quite a bit. As for the highly resistant enemies, I don't mean that those need to be present for the benefit to be obtained, but rather that completely unresistible procs might just be a way for all ATs to bypass mechanics that are designed to make enemies tougher (e.g. Unstoppable). Then again, those enemies are quite rare and procs typically don't amount to insane damage on their own, but in some edge cases they might, and these edge cases are why I'd make them partially unresistible: lower the maximum potential when -Res is available but not make them a strict counter against high resistance enemies. As far as procs following damage mods go, I like the principle but the one AT where I think it wouldn't work is Brutes. Their damage scalars are designed around Fury, and as long as +DMG wouldn't affect procs, they'd get the short end of the stick.

I'd have to disagree with this. Looking back at the introduction of IOs, the only things that were readily available and useful to a wide variety of characters were +Rech and to a lesser extent +Def (positional). Unless you had positional Def to stack with bonuses, everyone built for +Recharge because there were no competitive alternatives. The way I see it, the first iteration of IOs was boring. Everyone, regardless of AT or powersets, built for the same thing because only one category of exceptionally useful bonus (+Rech) was easily available. After that, we got typed Defenses sorted out, no longer coming in just Fire or Smashing, but paired to S+L, N+E and F+C, and a bit later the mirroring of typed and positional Defenses. Many more characters were now able to leverage the IO system beyond just stacking +Recharge because any type of +Def could be stacked. At this point, the IO system was already much more interesting because there were alternative ways to build characters which leads to trade offs, but the system strongly favored characters with high base damage and Defense based survivability tools, or Scrappers with certain secondaries, basically. Finally, +Res bonuses were made much more common so that Resistance based characters could also better utilize the bonuses in concert with their powersets. Up until that point the only things that you could actually do with IO sets were global +Rech and survivability through Def or Res. This system obviously favors ATs with high built-in offense, because there was no way to significantly increase the damage of your individual attacks beyond what the scalars said and you could just shore up weaknesses in +Def, while characters that did not need that much patching in the survivability department, couldn't really get any boosts in their offense. With the introduction of PPM procs this was finally changed. Damage procs allow ATs with high built-in survivability to shore up weaknesses in offense. Or they allow ATs with high built-in offense to go all in on that. But most importantly, they introduce trade offs in builds: if you want to slot more than one damage proc in a power, you're giving up a potential set bonus for it, and because the highly desirable bonuses (+Rech and +Def) typically come in at 5 or 6 pieces, it's actually quite difficult to get a lot of both. So instead of aiming for maximum survivability and +Rech by default (because there were no competitive options), now you actually have to decide whether you want to maximize +Rech, survivability or offense, and what the balance between them is. Options are great and damage procs give that. Are they too powerful? I guess that's a matter of taste, but personally I think they're in the "ok" range. Nerfing them significantly just brings the system back to the "set bonuses can give you +Rech and survivability" stage, at which point anyone who already has a lot of survivability just can't get that much out of IOs. If I had to change something about damage procs, I'd probably consider making them partially unresistible in PvE to reduce the impact of -Res on procs. However, this might make procs quite powerful in niche cases against highly damage resistant enemies, but I guess that's not a too bad trade for somewhat more balanced proc damage between characters that have access to -Res and those who don't in all situations.

I'd probably keep my Illusion/Cold Controller. It's the closest thing to a do-it-all character I've ever played, capable of soloing just about anything but also providing a lot of utility to fast or slow moving teams. The character is also themed around being a mage/sorcerer which happens to be my favorite class in most MMOs.

One of my favorite things about CoH is that unlike in most MMOs, pretty much everyone runs around with their own build instead of a copy pasted cookie cutter. Anything made with some common sense is (i.e. slot attacks for damage, low frequency game changers for recharge, etc.) is viable, and with full IO sets you're going to be more powerful than the game is designed for even if your build wasn't designed by a Mids' PhD. Having said that, there are a couple of generic bonuses I usually look for when making builds: Recharge: most builds will have some big powers that normally can't be used that often, but going for +Recharge changes that. This might be a case of an AoE control with 90 seconds base cooldown you'd like to use every spawn or just a regular attack with 20 seconds cooldown you'd like to use more frequently as a part of your attack chain. Basically any build benefits from global recharge, and many IO sets can give it to you, so it's very easy to get in moderate amounts regardless of what other bonuses you're going for. Defense / Resistance: For melee ATs, these are typically quite important, for squishies they're especially useful if you like to play solo or in smaller teams at high difficulties. Rule of the thumb: on melee ATs stack whatever your build already has for best returns (+Res bonuses for Resistance based sets), on squishies go for Defense. As far as typings go, everyone likes S/L/E as they are the most common damage types dealt by NPCs in the game, but a squishy might get more mileage out of Ranged Def (or no Def at all) if your playstyle keeps you out of harm's way. Damage procs: quite simply, doing more damage is always useful. Then there are all sorts of incidental set bonuses like +maxHP, +Accuracy and +Recovery that are useful to all builds, but you'll usually get an appreciable amount of all of these if you slot 5/6 or 6/6 IO sets, which is typical for anyone chasing +Rech. How to pick what you want to focus on? There isn't any one-size-fits-all solution for this, but usually I find it helpful to start with what I want my character to be able to do. If I want to run a specific attack chain or have a long recharge buff effect perma, it's pretty simple to figure out how much +Recharge I need. If I want to solo AVs or do something else that requires significant survivability, then I'll need to look for sets that provide me with +Res or +Def that add up to some neat milestone. If I want to do max damage, then I'll have to look how many damage procs I can cram into my attacks while still having them slotted for enough +Acc and +Rech that I actually hit things and can run an attack chain. And the list continues as far as you can imagine different flavors. Once you've picked all the flavors you want, then it's just a matter of finding the right balance as you can only fit so many scoops of ice cream in your bowl. The good thing is, though, whatever you pick, it's still ice cream so it's going to be good.

Completely agree. If it were up to me, I'd give all melee ATs the 90% Res cap (Stalkers, Scrappers, Brutes, Tankers), let EATs have their special 85% and keep the squishies at 75%. Why? The squishies have essentially zero access to DDR, so their Defense is easily taken away from them while Res comes with built-in stops against that. For these classes, it's a question of taking the more risky Defense with higher maximum mitigation (inherent volatility due to the binary nature of hit/not hit combined with low HP, as well as the likelihood of losing all of it) or the constant Resistance with lesser maximum mitigation, but much more predictable performance. For the melee ATs, the lack of DDR doesn't hold for any powersets with appreciable amounts of +Def to stack with power pools and bonuses, so to me it would make sense that capped Res and Def should have equal maximum mitigation. Tankers would still have a large advantage at getting to the cap outside of buffs thanks to their better modifiers for +Res/+Def powers, and the ATO proc for Res specifically. EATs are pretty special here, and I don't have any well thought out reasoning for changes to their Res caps, so I'd keep them as they are.

Oh dear. I'm not trying to support my case, I'm undermining yours, not by cherry picking numbers, but by following a standard practice of showing a proposition ["hard capping defense at 40% is a minor nerf"] false: counter examples. Besides being wrong twice in one sentence, the attempt at a gotcha is especially amusing when you avoid addressing any of the individual points presented and go into a long winded number rush to change the topic into "Def Scrappers vs Res Scrappers". To a diligent reader it might even seem you're using a lot of rhetoric masked as an argument supporting to your case, when you've actually changed your argument. Of course it wouldn't have any effect on people who are not at the soft cap because you're altering the cap. The issue is, you're still nerfing the solo ability of all maxed non-tankers in normal content by four whole difficulty levels which is not in the same universe as a minor change. In incarnate content the change would be so "minor" you'd have to nerf the base hit chance of all Incarnate mobs to counteract the majority of it. Your idea to achieve balance this way is, simply put, bad. It's a huge change that affects gameplay for a lot of people (difficulty changes thanks to reduced survivability), requires who knows how many build re-dos (new IO setups thanks to new Def hard caps) and moves the game closer to the holy trinity (Tankers basically required for difficult content). I can't even begin to imagine the player reactions. Seems pretty evident to me that an overhaul of this impact still needs a lot more work than "maybe thinking it through a little bit". Then again, maybe I should've taken this at face value on the first go. You think minor is good and you think your idea is minor, so it has to be a good idea regardless of whatever anyone else thinks. Beyond the entertainment value, there doesn't seem to be anything to gain by addressing your bad idea in detail if you keep on moving the goal posts and even changing the game every time someone's stuff and things gets inconveniently in your way.