DSorrow

Not a huge issue, but wouldn't mind seeing this. Catalyzing and boosting several enhancements in one go is pretty annoying currently, but fortunately it's something I only have to deal with once a month or so.

If TW is actually so good that it warrants nerfs, I'd go with something like this.

Yes please. Would like different Claws and Psy Blast color options for my Fortunata.

Yes please. I'd probably make my WS Human/Nova instead of Human/Dwarf if using the human form toggles wasn't so annoying to combine with shapeshifting.

I want to avoid the slippery slope kind of thinking when it comes to power creep. It definitely should be a concern, but is it really a game balance issue if instead of 7 buffed up players in a team we get 8? The bigger issue, in my opinion, would be the support characters vs. Sentinels view. Why play /SR Sentinel when you could just go for /FF Corruptor to get the same Defenses but with team buffs?

It's a red herring – a speaker attempts to distract an audience by deviating from the topic at hand by introducing a separate argument the speaker believes is easier to speak to. Citation

I'm slightly hesitant about this purely because of the power creep aspect, but having said that I'm not sure if this would be a huge balance concern considering existing sets such as Time and Nature. Also it would totally make sense. However, while it would make many support sets much more soloable it just might make Corrs/Defenders step into the territory of Sentinels.

All things can be improved, but you still haven't demonstrated: what improvement would mean for sets like SD in concrete terms the need for that improvement to justify the associated resource cost for implementing it the gravity of the need to justify these improvements taking precedence over something else It's been a while since I've left the field of management research, but I'd assume as an associate professor you would be familiar with the concepts of resource allocation and prioritization. And how is this different from prioritizing slots on any other important power? Should the base values of defensive powers be increased because I have to allocate slots on my attacks to improve their performance while foregoing improvement of my defenses? Resource allocation and prioritization. I'll call you out on this strawman. Nobody is saying things should never be changed. The game isn't a static environment, so right now I'm not convinced there's anything about SD that would warrant changes considering that it's currently a top performing set. After we get new content, balance changes to other sets and so on my stance might change. AD is slightly annoying at low levels, but there are ways to overcome that such as slotting 5 DOs and respeccing later, and when the whole 1-22 phase lasts a handful of hours max, it's hard to see why a likely large amount of development resources should be allocated to fix such a small issue. Before you go into the "no other powerset needs 4 slots in their mez protection" argument, let me remind you of the big picture: SD only has two powers that require the enhancement of one attribute (Defense in Battle Agility and Deflection) to achieve comparable levels of mitigation to most other sets. With the 4 in AD, you're looking at a very similar number of slots spent between sets. Resource allocation and prioritization.

7/9 defensive power sets are vulnerable to running out of Endurance when it comes to their mez protection while two of them are not. With active mitigation you keep an eye on its recharge to make sure it's on, with toggles you keep an eye on Endurance to make sure it doesn't drop. 7/9 defensive sets are also unable to stack their mez protection. This is probably the only part of your argument that I agree with, it is annoying at lower levels because it can't be made perma until SOs. The additional two slots aren't a problem, though, if you look at the big picture. To maximize your Defensive potential, /SD only needs to slot Deflection, Battle Agility and True Grit. Most people would also spend slots on Shield Charge, but it still leaves Phalanx Fighting, Grant Cover, Against All Odds, and OWTS that are all typically left with their base slot, leading to a much smaller total slot usage compared to many other defensive powersets even with the two slots in AD. AD has a base recharge of 200 seconds with a duration of 120 seconds. To make it perma you need (200/120) - 1 = 0.67 or 67% Recharge enhancement, which is less than most min/maxed builds get from set bonuses alone. If you want a decent 20 second threshold between activations, you need 100% Recharge enhancements or 47% global Rech on top of a single generic 50+5 Rech IO, which again, are petty numbers for any optimized build. Combine this with the overall smaller requirement for slotting in /SD and it's really hard to see why this is a problem for min/maxed builds. As has been demonstrated several times in this thread already, it's not a "glaring truth" or in anyway objective that toggled mez protections are better than clicky ones. Clicky mez protection comes with advantages such as: being able to stack the mez protection being able to be activated before a fight so they don't drain your Endurance during it being able to be stacked for secondary effects (especially notable for SD) less susceptible to End Drain effects than their toggled counterparts Mechanical differences != lack of parity. AD comes with the most CC coverage (Fear and Confuse on top of your regular menu), on top of which SD has Shield Charge, team buffs (Grant Cover) and self +DMG, so it could just as easily be argued that either those should be removed or added to every other set for "lack of parity". I hate to say it, but besides clicky mez protection being clunky in the levels up to 22 (which I don't think is a huge issue), your argument still boils down to "I don't like this mechanic".

Besides the obvious New Content™, I'd like to see some old content made more relevant and/or less repetitive, such as: some old TFs get the Positron treatment more ways to obtain the passive accolades, right now I feel forced to run a lot of repetitive content on all of my alts (TF Commander, Maria Jenkins arc) improving some less used power pools (most notably Presence) improving some of the less used primary/secondary powers that are showing their age (e.g. Ice Armor)

I'd definitely like this for the convenience factor, but it's not something I'd prioritize if it would require a lot of work.

Stryker, with all due respect, you would probably have a better discussion about your suggestion if it didn't appear that it's a thing you personally dislike poorly reframed as a balance concern. Some of your arguments such as the ones Vanden pointed out are contradictory and objectively false. You only acknowledge comments that agree with you while collectively dismissing any that disagree: Additionally, you don't discuss any of the pros of having AD as a clicky, nor any of the offensive bonuses Shield and SR provide to make up for the few seconds worth of DPS interruption every 1-2mins. Finally, you appear somewhat confrontational and unwilling to change your stance when people validly criticize your arguments, so it's not a huge stretch of imagination to come up with the idea that you're looking for a conflict. While personally I don't agree with the people calling you a troll, the rest of the discussion is not a "sad testament about the community", it's just people easily criticizing the inconsistencies and false claims in your rather weak argument.

A DPS definitely should have to worry about its defensive set to keep up. Besides, SD and SR are very light in terms of clickyness compared to something like Bio, Rad or Regen. Fortunately, if you don't want to pay attention to your Defensive set, several very passive alternatives such as WP exist already. I'd buy some of this if you were talking about Regen which is a seriously clicky set with no offensive upside, but when it comes to Shield that once every 60-120 seconds pause in DPS is severely offset by Against All Odds and Shield Charge, and SR gets Quickness. I think most people just think you don't have a very strong argument for why this change should happen. From how your comments read, you want all of your 50s to play the same (Destiny on auto cast) and anything that can't do it should be changed to fit that playstyle. I don't want to sound snarky, but if putting Destiny on auto at the expense of Active Defense puts you at a significant risk, maybe consider checking your autocast priorities? I'm saying this as someone who plays a Shield character. Would it be convenient to have a toggle mez protect? Yeah, sure, that would allow me to put Hasten or Destiny on autocast. Would I take it at the cost of no longer being able to stack the DDR from AD? Hell no, that's a big part of my survivability.

You get 1 base slot per power and 67 to distribute freely so 24+67 = 91 total slots excluding inherent powers.

Slot 3 level 25 generic IOs in it at level 25 and it's perma. Kind of bothersome, yes, but the same is true for at least Practiced Brawler, Wet Ice and Entropy Shield which are all comparable powers. Why? Active Defense already gives you KB protection. In the end, I'd prefer it to stay the way it is. Double stacking AD with Ageless allows you to get very respectable DDR with Shield Defense, something you wouldn't be able to get with it as a toggle.

Its sad that fire dark and electric should be relegated to super bouncy balls because some ppl lack the ability to question if the Nerf to acro was a simple oversight. It would seem to me that it's pretty evident that it wasn't an oversight, but rather very intentional. There's maybe 1 enemy attack in the whole game that would knock you at 90 point KB prot, but not at 100, so I'd honestly question a power adjustment with no functional change as an oversight rather than the other way around. As for the problem at hand, high mag KB is extremely rare. Some sets can't handle it as well as others, but the same could be said for many exotic CCs, -rech, end drain, toxic damage, psionic damage and so on. Should these holes be patched in other armor sets too? Besides, I don't think it's out of place that a juiced up incarnate end game boss can toss some heroes around. Even Hulk gets thrown around at times. EDIT: Just so we can finally put this "Acrobatics oversight" thing to rest, see the patch notes for yourself: https://cityofheroes.fandom.com/wiki/Patch_Notes/2008-05-20

What makes CoH great in general is the combination of fun mechanics and the lack of many common anti-fun mechanics. I get to design and play my own Avengers level hero. I can pretty easily have several kitted out alts to embrace different roles. Basically anything works, the gameplay doesn't require sweating. Every session gives you progress towards something at least in the form of inf / XP. It's a very relaxed game so depending on my mood I can play something quite involved like a Warshade or something incredibly simple like a /WP Scrapper. Very little time spent acquiring resources. Compared to other games, the ratio of fun gameplay to resource grinding is extremely high. The game is essentially teammate agnostic, when in other games 30min content can be stretched to 2 hours or even be literally impossible because your teammates don't know mechanics / lack decent gear / don't know rotations, in CoH you're usually looking at an extra 15mins, or in other words, not meaningfully longer. Lack of salt inducing gameplay elements. Most notably, nothing is gated behind an endless RNG grind and it's essentially impossible to fail content because of teammates unless they're actively griefing. The community is great. Most of the time any annoyance / conflict can be dealt with in PMs and there's rarely any drama. Yeah, it's a combination of many elements I find fun and a lack of elements I've grown to dislike. Even things I find annoying require so specific circumstances that it's extremely rare to run into them.

Well, the distinction just seems awfully arbitrary to me if the result is irrelevant. If it is irrelevant, it just seems to me that the argument for leeching is bad "because it is bad" shares some of the irrationality of the "all KB is bad" sentiment. Is participation an automatic free pass even if it's a net negative to your team (e.g. hindering your team's ability to stay alive / defeat the enemies)? Leeching may have been a bit of a tangent, but I only brought it up because it's one of the things most players agree on being bad and disruptive. If we consider why it is disruptive (other teammates have to do more), it should be, in my opinion, pretty analogous to any other type of build / power use that results in the same thing. I don't really understand where you're getting at here. Pointing out inconsistencies in arguments isn't a personal attack on anyone. Kicking or ignoring people isn't looking for conflict either, sometimes you just run into a person you don't want to run into again and maybe my threshold for ignoring someone is lower than yours. But like I said, generally I don't care what my teammates are doing, but I will respectfully tell them their build is disruptive, discuss how they could avoid being so and use kick as the final measure. Having said that, I don't think I have anything more to add to this discussion.

Well it's not self evident to me why it should be treated any different if the result is the same: slowing the team down and making your teammates do more work.

True, but for the same number of drops an 8 man team would generate 250 million inf so at the very least farming (or soloing in general) causes less inflation than playing in 8 man teams, even if farmers can't get us into the deflation zone.

Why? Because it's more socially acceptable to call out a lack of participation that slows a team down as opposed to active participation with the same result? Like I said, I'm not a person who looks for conflict and most of the time whatever my teammates are doing doesn't bother me. However, if a teammate is doing something that is anti-fun for me, I'll leave unless it's my team in which case I'll replace them with someone who doesn't diminish my fun. The change yourself instead of trying to change others should also apply to people whose actions are disruptive, even more so if they're disrupting a full team: why should 7 other players be expected to adapt to one player and not the other way around? Fortunately, this is mostly a theoretical discussion for me at least because I pretty much never run into actually disruptive or annoying people in-game. In 4 months I've had to kick one player from a team and my ignore list has accumulated a total of 3 people of which two weren't even in my team but just spamming childish nonsense on one of the global channels.

I mostly agree but I can't avoid wondering how the huge rate of recipes the farmers print out relate to this. Considering that the drop rates (per mob) are the same for a farmer and a whole 8 man team while the 8 man team makes 2.5x the inf (total), the farmer generates 3.2x the drops per inf relative to an 8 man team. If I'm not crazy, this should have a pretty deflationary effect as the number of units of transaction (inf) increases slower than the amount of goods for trade. In a sense, they're printing money and gold reserves at the same time.

I prefer "just playing" and a vast majority of the time I get just that in CoX, but sometimes there's a teammate who prevents that, and a vast majority of the time that happens via unmitigated KB. If they're knocking spawns constantly out of the reach of my AoEs / melee attacks, I might as well not use half my powers, at which point I might as well be doing something else completely because having half my powers rendered very ineffective is not fun. I'm not a player who seeks conflict so I usually ask them if it's possible to at least direct the KB in a less disruptive way, and if that's impossible I'll kick them or leave the team depending on if it's my team or someone else's. CoX supports a very wide range of gameplay from crawling through missions to being a nuclear powered steamroller and while I don't require my teams to be at the latter extreme, I much prefer the latter end of the spectrum, especially because its not mutually exclusive with fun. When it comes to KB specifically, most of the time it's not a problem, but in my opinion it just happens to be the CC with the most disruption potential. Personally, I find KB fun and Screech with a full set of Stupefy (very close to 90% proc chance for KB) is one of my favorite powers on my /Sonic Defender. At the same time, I have Shockwave slotted with the Sudden Acceleration KB->KD because I realize scattering mobs is often counterproductive and especially in open maps it's difficult to position yourself to avoid being disruptive. Same deal with my WS, the single target blasts can cause KB because one enemy flying off every now and then is funny and means nothing in terms of efficiency, but I have my Dark Nova Detonation slotted with Sudden Acceleration to avoid scattering whole spawns. Honestly, I don't think there's anything inherently bad about telling someone how to play. The context and how you say it is what matters. Nobody would blink an eye if a leecher was told to participate because sitting at the door is disruptive and slows the team down. Why should bad use of a character's abilities with the same result be treated differently? I think the thread can be summed pretty effectively as: don't be an ass. If someone's playstyle is bothering you, it's usually more productive to have a polite discussion about it rather than attack them. Conversely, if your playstyle has been bothering someone, it's also better to politely discuss what could be done so that both of you could have fun.

If I'm not all wrong, KB works according to the following formula: KB_Prot - (1 - KB_Res) * KB_Mag If the value becomes negative, you'll be knocked down or back depending on how far into the negatives you go. With 99% KB Resistance, basically any attempt to KB you is negated with negligible protection needed as the KB_Mag of incoming attacks is barely higher than 0. Note that the number displayed in Combat Attributes is not Knockback Resistance, but Knockback distance (= 100% - Knockback Resistance), . In the specific case of Lord Recluse and Suppression (KB_Mag = 40, it seems), substitute the following values into the formula: KB_Prot = 19.6 KB_Res = 0 KB_Mag = 40 And you get your KB value 19.6 - (1 - 0) * 40 = -20.4, enough to send you bouncing around like a basket ball. For an Invulnerability Tanker with the same KB_Prot, you'd be looking at 19.6 - (1 - 0.99) * 40 = 19.2 or nowhere near the negatives.

Resistance debuff resistance exists, it's conveniently baked into Resistance. So, Resistance resists Resistance Debuffs. Slightly confusing, but what this means is if you have 50% S/L Res, 25% E/NE Res and 0% others and an enemy hits you with -20% Res (All), you'll end up with the following Resistance changes: (1 - 0.5) * (-20%) = -10% S/L Res -> net S/L Resistance after debuff = 50% - 10% = 40% (1 - 0.25) * (-20%) = -15% E/NE Res -> net E/NE Res after debuff = 25% - 15% = 10% (1 - 0) * (-20%) = -20% other Res -> net other Res after debuff = 0 - 20% = -20% All of this is just a pretty confusing way of making a -20% Res debuff mean that overall, you'll just take 20% more damage across the board regardless of your Resistance starting point. For example, in the S/L case a 100 point attack previously hit you for 50 damage and now it hits you for 60 and in a similar E/NE case, a 100 point attack did 75 damage and now it does 90, for an increase of 20% in both. Furthermore, Resistance also gives you -DMG Resistance. 50% S/L Resistance halves the effect of -DMG for your S/L attacks.