DSorrow

Basically, yes. The pylon test is one metric among others, but it's extremely limited in the sense that it barely represents average gameplay. For example, Spines is a low-end outlier on the pylon test but I don't think anybody seriously thinks it's underpowered because it gets a whole lot of AoE potential to make up for the rather abysmal single target damage. TW (which sparked this whole thing) on the other hand appears to be extremely good on a pylon test and at the same time it gets a lot of AoE and soft control so it seems there isn't really any downside to the set. However, it might turn out that in a simulated average gameplay environment the momentum mechanic doesn't actually benefit TW nearly as much as it does in a sustained DPS race against a static target and we're just overestimating how good it actually is. In the interest of balance I think it's a very good idea to perform this test and then look at the outliers (if any are found) and then figure out what to do with them to reach parity with other sets. Perfect balance is obviously impossible because everyone will have different weights for different things, but I think with a bunch of good metrics and some brainstorming it's possible to achieve reasonable parity between sets after differences in AoE / ST / utility and active mechanics are accounted for.

+1 I don't know why he feels so suicidal, but I'd like my Phanty to get some help.

This isn't universally true. My TW/Elec has capped S/L/E/F/C Resistance and perma Hasten. Many sets can easily get soft capped Defense and perma Hasten. Why aren't Scrappers competitive with Brutes?

Well, you do lose out on some influence and half the drops if you bring a second player to tag along in your farm.

Here's a (most likely non-comprehensive) list of offensive sets with combo or other mechanics, so basically pretty much anything not in it: Street Justice Dual Blades Psi Melee Savage Melee Titan Weapons Water Blast Staff has stances, but I'm pretty sure most players just stick to one of them so it doesn't really count as a mechanic IMO. Then again, I haven't played the set myself so I could be wrong about this. Radiation Melee has the Contaminated mechanic, but it's very passive (similar to crits) so you don't need to pay attention to it. Katana/Broad Sword can leverage the Parry mechanic if you want to keep the buff up, but not using it doesn't gimp either of the sets. Basically you're left with several options to pair with WP and honestly I'd just go with whatever seems cool because none of the sets suck completely (except maybe Energy Melee).

Have to echo Willpower. Pick an offensive set that doesn't have any combo mechanics or such and you can just literally use whatever attack happens to be available and you'll be fine.

Very interested in seeing how these changes turn out. I haven't played a Sentinel yet mostly because the inherent seems pretty clunky and forces power picks. If these and the Tanker changes go through any time soon I'm going to have a hard time choosing between those two ATs for my next character.

"In order for your criticism to be valid you must not have a criticism of the thing you want to criticize." When you're done trying to frame anyone not sharing your stance as "hating the game", you're welcome to argue your position with actual arguments and evidence rather than spewing generally accusatory and derogatory nonsense. This kind of melodramatic misrepresentation of other people's arguments and intentions is not only 100% unconstructive, but serves nothing else except creating a toxic environment. I can't be bothered to list all the errors in your attempt at an argument, but once again it's built around an un-argument: traitorous critic, tries to polarize the discussion and attacks the arguers rather than the argument. F for f-fort. If you wanted to throw a tantrum rather than argue your position, then I guess you've succeeded in what you wanted to do.

Yes. Most end-game Illusion Control builds have perma PA. PA lasts 60 seconds and has a base recharge of 240 seconds so you need 240/60 - 1 = 300% recharge enhancement to make it perma. Just from enhancing PA you can get 95% of that, with Spiritual / Agility Alpha you can add another 25% and get Hasten for 70%. You'll still need 300% - 95% - 25% - 70% = 110% from set bonuses which is a lot, but not impossible. In your build you can fit in at least the following purple sets: Unbreakable Constraint (10%) Coercive Confusion (10%) Will of the Controller (10%) Apocalypse (10%) Additionally, you'll very likely have an ancillary AoE that can take Ragnarok (10%) and space for a few LoTG +Rech enhancements (+7.5% each) which combined should get you to at least 80% before any other IO sets. Illusion can also slot two 4/6 sets of Expedient Reinforcements for another 12.5% and there's a bunch of room for Doctored Wounds / Panacea / Preventative Medicine in Pain to get some more +Rech so it shouldn't be too hard to break 110%.

I'd like different kinds of challenges in CoX. Right now what we have is basically completely "is your number higher than their number" and that's a very binary sort of challenge. More stuff like Hamidon would be cool: higher numbers help you but strategy is more important than just nuking everything. In the post 50 game I find I have the most fun in pretty small teams (3-4 people) where we can still steamroll, but there's at least an illusion of being able to lose. That isn't to say 8 man teams aren't cool, but at 50 I just can't seem to enjoy them in long sessions because my individual contribution feels pretty meaningless and there's absolutely no challenge at all. Fortunately there's at least some control over being way too powerful. While I love the incarnate system, none of my characters have Judgment and I don't think that's going to change in a while.

This is a relevant concern, but I'd guess they look at the account's activity with the types of trades they do. I'd only be checking accounts that basically farm 24/7 and mostly trade out large sums of inf, like always 500M+. A large number of relatively small trades is more indicative of funding newbies, always trading inf to the same account signals that this is someone funding their main account.

Ah, a double whammy of argument from dismissal and psychogenetic fallacy. Even more funny, the latter is not only an un-argument but not even what I think so I'm hoping this is just benign ignorance and not a malicious attempt at misrepresenting my argument in order to poison the well. Just in case you're genuinely confused, my argument is based on the following: balance is important balance requires parity between the sets If a lack of parity can be demonstrated, then the current devs should take measures to restore balance. My argument is not "I'm jelly of TW's performance so nuke it like EM" (like I've stated several times and as it says on my signature, I play TW so it wouldn't even make sense to be jealous of my own character). Yet another argument from dismissal. And why do you think that is? It has good DPA even without Momentum. It gets 10-40% extra damage on literally every attack. It also happens to get extremely good soft control. It has virtually identical DPE with sets like War Mace, but with Momentum it gets the opportunity to turn Endurance into damage even faster than other sets, which is not a downside. It's a bit of a stretch to call it a huge downside you have to be a bit mindful of your endurance usage and I can agree that the Momentum system is "clunky", but if you space out your attacks you'll end up with similar EPS and DPS to most other sets. I'm not against TW getting something extra for clunkyness, but I think we have pretty strong indication it gets a bit too much. I'll happily wait for the test results to see if the opportunity to turn blue bar into damage numbers materializes in a significant way, but based on the numbers and my own experience with TW I have pretty good reason to believe it does. But just to reiterate, just because I think it might warrant some toning down I don't want TW getting the EM treatment. So to ask again, why do you think it is balanced within its limitations vs strengths? I'd appreciate it if you could argue this position without resorting to ad hominems or just straight up not addressing the points contrary to your stance. I hate to say it, but if your position is based on dismissing all counter-arguments and trying to discredit the arguer, then maybe your position isn't very strong. Third time's the charm? Nah. Besides, I enjoy playing TW and I have a hard time imagining a slight adjustment such as getting rid of the DoTs (if shown to be justified) would affect my enjoyment.

And I don't disagree with that, I just didn't think it needed repeating because I just literally wrote that in the post preceding the bumper sticker: What we currently have is some evidence that TW appears to be overperforming which indicates that it maybe should be toned down. We are gathering further evidence to determine whether this is also the case outside of some very clinical settings. If the new tests produce results that say TW is within a reasonable range of other sets, then that would be evidence that toning it down would probably be a bad idea, because tests in an environment that better represent the average game should have more weight than tests such as pylon times. If there's some other evidence, I'd definitely want to see that. However, stating that toning TW down is killing the game or sinking the ship without any evidence just skips a whole bunch of steps that should be taken to arrive to that conclusion. Not to mention that speculating about motives of the arguer rather than discussing the actual arguments is just poor form on its own. It's also extremely unconstructive to categorically shoot down any test settings because they aren't perfect rather than contribute to designing a test that is satisfactory. I don't take issue with either outcome if it is reached by sound arguments because I like TW in its current form, but because game balance is an important factor to me I'd be demonstrating cognitive dissonance to allow TW to continue existing like it is if it can be shown that it is overperforming. "It's ok that set X is an outlier" is mutually exclusive with "balance is important", after all. What I do take issue with is an argumentative style that is built on ad hominems, strawmen, red herrings, hyperbole and other rhetoric devices used to avoid directly addressing any points that are opposite to the arguer's stance.

I'm not going to hesitate to call out an un-argument when I see one. If you have actual evidence of why bringing TW in line with other sets would be bad or TW already being within a reasonable range of performance of other sets and toning it down would make it an underperformer, you're welcome to post that. Because it seems that I have to repeat myself, trying to create a toxic environment by posting speculation to other people's motives like this doesn't contribute to anything.

This is a really good list of IOs that have an extremely low risk of being useless in an end-game build so it makes sense to get them as early as possible (buy them attuned). In addition to getting those items early, my strategy is usually: buying rare sets as I go if I already have an end-game build planned (I usually do) buy cheap placeholder sets in place of purples and such or if I don't really know what I'm going to do with the build just go with level 25 generic IOs if I'm really lazy Option two is usually pretty good. Cheap uncommon sets come with much better enhancement values than generic IOs and you can often get them at a similar price level to level 50 generics, plus you'll get some set bonuses on top of it all.

I don't know how many times this has to be repeated in this thread, but nobody wants to make TW bad. These kinds of appeals to motive only serve to distract from the discussion anyway, so if you have any actual arguments for why TW isn't overpowered or you want to contribute to the testing where we're trying to provide data, please do that instead. If your argument is that every set besides TW is underperforming, collect and present evidence for that. Resorting to fallacious arguments and attacking the arguers instead of the argument if anything is a waste of everyone's time and serves absolutely no purpose other than creating a toxic environment. I can probably speak for everyone in the thread that it's fine that TW is a good set, but some of us also share the sentiment that no set should be its own tier of good (or bad for that matter). Out of all the games I've played, none have had a successful strategy of "just buff everything" because at some point you either end up with everything being so powerful it's impossible to make good content or you have to buff the enemies which is essentially a nerf to everything for the players. The most successful strategy I've seen is sensible adjustments (both buffs and nerfs) before things get out of whack. Drastic nerfs are what's bad, slightly adjusting the "best set by a significant margin" to only be "the best set" is just reasonable. For now, I'll wait and see what the test results show. If they show that TW is consistently 1-2 mins ahead of every set, then that's a pretty big gap considering the time scale, especially when clearing missions isn't the only thing TW is good at. If we're looking at 2 mins vs. the bottom of the barrel and less than a minute against the middle and top of the pack, then nothing needs to be done to TW and attention should be diverted to looking at what could be done to the bottom performers.

This here is my number one concern with TW. It doesn't really break anything right now, but when there's a distinct lack of parity between powersets planning an appropriate difficulty level for new content is going to be a nightmare. As a slightly less urgent concern I think we have to think about how important game balance is in general, if it's not very important (i.e. massive outliers are fine if they don't break anything) then it's pretty hard to argue that any underperformers need to be fixed either so long as they aren't completely useless. Here it's mostly a false dichotomy of only having two options: do nothing or do the EM. It's an easy un-argument when nobody has asked for the latter but something closer to nerf the "massive" out of the outlier so it's still going to be top tier but no longer its own tier. For now I'll wait for some test results on TW. If they show that the set's performance is within a reasonable range of other sets in normal gameplay like situations, I'll happily retreat back to my original position of "TW is fine as it is" and let it have great solo performance as its niche.

I think Regen is decent on paper, but I just personally dislike how it plays. I don't think it gets quite enough survivability for the DPS cost of all the clickies.

I agree with this assessment.

I think there's quite a bit of daily volatility when it comes to the stable earners. Some days Unbreakable Guard goes for ~3+ mil a piece, other times it's barely breaking 2mil. Currently I'm operating on a weekly sales cycle where I dump ~150 items into the AH every weekend and collect the next week, so I'm rarely affected by it.

This here. Right now I'm bidding 500-600k on rare salvage most of the time, but if I really want a piece right now and none are available at 600k, I'll just jump straight to 1mil because overpaying a few hundred thousand inf is pretty meaningless when your net worth is in the billions.

This is why I always use a sequence of numbers instead of zeroes. For example, if I'm going to bid 10 million on something, the actual bid is going to be something like 10,123,456 so that I'm less likely to put an extra number in there.

This sums things up very well. Looking at the raw data and how my own TW/Elec performs, I have a strong suspicion that a slight toning down is justified, but if a battery of tests shows that TW is pretty much in line with the other sets in circumstances that represent normal gameplay, then absolutely nothing needs to be done. However, if those tests also indicates that it is too good, then it should be brought down slightly. It should still be top tier because going from "the best" to "kind of decent" would be the epitome of stupidity and cause a massive and justified uproar. Going from "the best" to "still the best, but with less of a gap to the runner up" sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

Yes, because it doesn't get great soft control and even more extra damage on top of the DoT. Yes, because it pays for that with a basically complete lack of AoE. What is TW's niche? Being exceptionally good at both ST and AoE, having soft control, extra damage on top of extra damage? All for the cost of being "clunky" and endurance intensive? I couldn't say with a straight face that what TW gets is appropriate for the cost. It deserves something, but I can't come up with any justification for it getting as much as it gets now. I'm completely open to having my mind changed. I've already done it once, my starting position was that nothing needs to be done to TW. After reviewing the evidence posted, I think nothing needs to be done to it right now, but it wouldn't be unjustified to bring it down a notch and that it would probably be a good thing in the long run, assuming we're getting new high-end content. Hand waving evidence, on the other hand, seems very much like the epitome of "not open to changing one's mind". If anything, venomizing the discussion like that is polarizing the issue. This isn't camp "TW is fine" vs "nuke TW from orbit" and it doesn't help the discussion to try and frame it that way.

I did 4 or 5 at the same time on my Kat/Inv back in the day. They were hand picked, of course, to mostly do S/L damage so that I could survive it. That said, I don't think soloing several AVs at once is a similar issue to TW because that feat isn't powerset specific. I'd be convinced of a problem if there was a powerset that was significantly more survivable than others, or an offensive set that was capable of doing it significantly faster than others, especially if the latter was also great in the non-niche parts of the game. It's a big part of the powerset design that many of them have niches where they are particularly good at, but usually they come with much heftier costs than what TW gets. Fire Blast doesn't have any actual secondary effects, Dark Melee has great single target damage and survivability, but its AoE is crap. Spines gets great AoE at the expense of ST damage. TW definitely needs to get something for the clunkiness and endurance cost, but what it gets now just appears to be too much. Besides, nobody is suggesting that everything should perform exactly the same according to a magical formula, but that that performance should be reasonably close together after you account for secondary effects and stuff like combos / clunkiness. So Titan Weapons getting extra damage on top of the damage formula on literally every attack, extra damage over times on top of that plus great soft control, decent DPA without Momentum and Defensive Sweep doesn't point to the direction that it's maybe slightly too good? Hand waving all that evidence is basically the same as saying that EM is fine because it isn't completely useless.