DSorrow

Heh, weekly gated RNG loot is the primary reason I've quit playing several MMOs. The last one I left had me running a raid ~60 times without getting any of the 3 drops I would've liked. Instead of feeling excitement over maybe getting the cool thing I wanted, I just started feeling resentment over the lack of player agency and basically cut my game time down to just doing the raid every week and finally when I started expecting disappointment it didn't take long to stop playing the game entirely. Sadly the game was mechanically very satisfying to play, but the loot mechanics were absolutely crap once you got past the point of having great but not perfect gear.

This. For a first character, I'd definitely pick Super Reflexes as your primary powerset. It can be made very tough with extremely low investment and completely bonkers when you can finance a top tier build. Primary is mostly up to you, but Claws, for example, is a great pairing with good single target and AoE damage.

I don't think those are two separate issues. ATs can be at parity only if we know what the baseline performance of players vs. the world is. If you change one without thinking about the other, you'll probably run into issues. For example, I think a lot of the current AT vs AT parity issues come from the fact that players vs. the world balance is out of whack in incarnate content. Most notably, I think the enemies just aren't powerful enough which leads to a handful of balance problems: defensive buffs are relatively unimportant because a lot of good builds can tank / absorb alpha on their own enemies have so few hit points that it's more effective to spam AoE damage rather than debuff because the AoEs demolish groups so effectively, AoE controls and debuffs (other than -Res) have very little value Effectively this leads to the current version of end-game where (AoE) damage is king, and very little beyond that matters. ATs such as Sentinels don't really have a place because their extra survivability is of very little use in those teams, but they really don't compare to Blaster damage. Many buff/debuff sets don't bring much to teams because they can survive just fine without the added help. In my opinion, because the issues come from the players vs. the world balance, it can't be solved by looking at ATs vs ATs. Making buff modifiers more powerful doesn't matter if a majority of buffs aren't valuable in the first place. Same deal with mezzes, they don't really do much when all the enemies they'd affect are demolished in two seconds anyway. Without changes to players vs the world, the only way to make all ATs equally viable, they'd either have to do high damage or be tanks. This is why I think we first need to decide where the players should be relative to the content before we can ensure that all the ATs are comfortably close to that place while preserving the flavor of each AT. So, basically we need more powerful enemies to make buffs and controls a viable alternative to nuking, and I think we'd be off to a good start with a blanket increase to enemy damage and HP in incarnate content. But again, this is for the 50+ content. I think the 1-50 journey is just fine as it is.

I am quite literally discussing end game balance (50+, incarnate level content), something I tried to emphasize and highlight several times in the post you quoted.

It'd be much more useful to provide something to the discussion though. For example, I'd like to know how why end-game content should be balanced for people who refuse to make minimal use of the tools given to them, and how you'd propose to balance it in a way that it's justifiably end-game content, i.e. appropriate content for people with late-game characters, while also being balanced for SO only builds. I don't think the latter is possible, which leads to my opinion that the end-game difficulty should be raised. The side effect of this would be, of course, that people who don't want to use the tools available to them will face a spike of difficulty in end-game, but in order to face appropriate difficulty at that point in the game, I think it's a completely fair ask to have to use something beyond the most basic gear.

Which is why I'd balance things around using whatever drops, no knowledge necessary beyond "maybe slot powers for their main effect, e.g. attacks for damage". To be completely honest, this is not something that any game should be balanced around. If a player chooses not to use the equipment available to them, then it's their own fault if the game is more difficult than necessary. Note that all of the balance changes I'm talking about are for the 50+ end game because I think "wanting to play end-game" and "don't want to use anything beyond basic gear (=SOs)" have to be mutually exclusive so that the end-game can be interesting. I'm much in the same boat because the 50+ teamplay just isn't all that interesting to me, and I'm also not that interested in playing solo or doing some insane challenges.

Whatever the resolution between different categories of gamer is, I think we can all agree that Getting to level 50 is pretty trivial We have permanently available double XP, and using that you can get to 50 pretty easily in 20-30 hours which is extremely quick compared to pretty much any other MMO out there. Even without double XP, if you actually direct your effort toward XP gaining activities, you'll still get there in much less than 100 hours (which is still low, relatively). Getting a great build is also quite easy Just source a build without purples or winters from the forums and odds are you can get enough inf to get said build in less than 20 hours just by doing level 50 activities with a team. Getting incarnates is also trivial Just play the game. By the time you have amassed the money for your great build, you'll probably have T3s across the board. Why is this important? Because it enables any reasonably dedicated player to get a build that can solo most conventional content at least at +2/x8. You don't have to be a "power gamer" to achieve this as the only hurdles one must pass are finding a build and then spending a comparatively low time to afford the build. No need to spend 2 hours per day, 5-7 days a week. No need to learn how to build characters because you can easily find an extremely strong build for free. No need to camp rare spawns, farm for loot or any such thing because that stuff rains on you just for playing. So, you just keep playing for a pretty reasonable time and eventually you're mostly guaranteed to get there. The thing is, CoH is mostly a rock/scissors/paper style of game where you can choose to play an industrial crusher machine if you just utilize whatever drops for you. Because there isn't any special skill required to get there and even the time requirements are low, it's inevitable that a big part of the player base will end up much stronger than what the game is balanced against. Sure, some people will refuse to utilize in-game systems such as IOs or incarnates, but I don't think it makes any sense to balance a game (or end-game, especially) specifically for the type of player who won't use important available assets. I mean, just imagine any generic MMO whose end-game was balanced for white gear (or whatever is SO equivalent). Now, I don't think the 1-50 game needs any changes because IOs and incarnates are definitely more in the 50+ range, but at 50+ we really do need a hard look at the difficulty/reward balance. Incarnate level bumps specifically need to be looked at (why is it ok to fight +1s in DA for +4 rewards?), as well as what incarnate powers are usable outside of iTrials (I'd be fine with just having the passive incarnate effects). As far as IO balance goes, personally I think the enemies in any 50+ content should be balanced against players who have full IO sets excluding set bonuses and an alpha slot (i.e. ~1.5-2x total enhancement value vs SOs). Consider your standard SO slotting for an attack which gives you ~33% enhancement value per slot, with a set of Crushing Impact (excluding set bonuses), you'll get ~50% per slot and with an optimized frankenslotting scheme you can get to ~66%. Add in an alpha slot and you're probably around 330%, essentially gaining an additional ~4-6 slots worth of enhancement value in your attack before set bonuses. I'm purposefully ignoring set bonuses because just going for the enhancement values is basically players using whatever improvements to their gear they receive as drops, which is, let's say a given, in any other MMO I've played. At least to me it's pretty clear that even without any build planning it's extremely easy and quite quick to become significantly more powerful than an SO'ed character. Once you start optimizing your frankenslotting / IOing and using boosters it gets even more ridiculous, so for any content to be justifiably called end-game, the enemies need a baseline bump in power.

A Dominator, Plants/something most likely. Never played the AT or Plant Control to 50 so it would be a double whammy. A Tanker, don't have one at 50 on HC yet, but I can't pick between all the possible powerset combos - probably Rad/* or SR/*, but it'll depend on the primary and what kind of concept I come up with. Third one is a tough call between a Stalker (Sav/EA most likely, never got either set to 50) or a Storm/Energy chaos offender.

We've seen all sorts of crazy accomplishments in past pinnacle activities: solo GMs, solo STF, solo LRSF, solo Mo*TFs (even at +4x8), etc. I think it's pretty arbitrary to decide that 8-man Hami is where we've crossed a border when the reality is that the only point in the game's history where we had "sensible" limits to character power was the gap between ED and IOs. Besides that period, it's always just been a matter of time until someone comes up with a build and/or strategy to accomplish something previously unthinkable. Just to echo other people, so long as this kind of crazy stuff is only doable to the most dedicated and skilled power gamers, I don't think there's an issue. Once the average player starts soloing STFs it might be a time to look at bigger balance changes.

I generally think +Regen isn't all that valuable. Stacking any significant number +Def or +Res bonuses will often give you better survivability than stacking +Regen bonuses because Defense and Resistance effectively multiply your Regen (and HP) whereas Regen just works additively and at some point the linear returns can't measure up.

15% +DMG is, to be honest, not nearly enough. After enhancements, Alphas, averaged in BU and set bonuses (let's say, ~175% total enhancement for someone using Musculature), that 15% increase to base damage is only a ~5% net effective increase from that point. This is an issue for several reasons: Most of Regen's powers would actively reduce this damage buff making it difficult to maintain Regen doesn't have much mitigation so staying at low HP is incredibly risky, not worth it for a 5% net increase in DPS It's also a counter-intuitive mechanic for a set whose whole gimmick is to keep your HP close to the max I honestly don't have any good ideas how to fix the offense drawback in Regen in a way that would fit thematically and not completely rehaul the set. Mechanically, I think some kind of +Dmg or +Rech tied to the use of clickies would be fair because they're what causes the issue, but I'm not sure that really fits. And we'd still be left with the issue of attack animations killing you. However, if the game engine supports it, I'd be cool with allowing at least Reconstruction/Dull Pain to be used while an attack is animating, which should fix most of the animation related issues.

Most (all?) -Res (and +DMG) effects are tagged to be unenhanceable, and as far as I know, no currently existing -Res (or +DMG) effects are supposed to be enhanceable, so even if it did work it's bound to be fixed at some point. As a sidenote, because of the way Damage and Resistance work, at some point in time it was possible to use Centrioles (Dmg/Range) in some +Res buffs to get +33% Resistance enhancement from a single slot which was much more efficient than the +20% from actual Resistance enhancements at the time.

Interesting idea, but I think it would have to be handled a bit more delicately, otherwise an unsuspecting player might just handicap their build by throwing in one IO. Also I totally wouldn't run an SO only SR/SS tank with incarnate soft caps along with capped damage.

Seems to me you forgot to toggle on the AoE Def shield after stealthing to the cyst... Looks doable with that build, though.

I actually like sets that require player skill, but I just think it's a bummer that especially in the case of Regen the skill requirements don't translate to higher performance potential. For me the biggest issue about this whole thing is that even an optimally played Regen is probably about as good as a decently played any other defensive set with a similar level of build investment, so because there is no mechanical upside, I just fail to see how it is not a drawback.

It might be that Arcanatime with the exact 0.132s tick interval isn't relevant, but I'd guess the underlying mechanism would still exist in a similar fashion even with a new server. It wouldn't make too much of a difference if the interval was actually 0.1s considering that the max difference between the written activation time and actual time consumed is 2*interval, even a significantly faster server with 0.05s intervals would differ from the Arcanatime estimate by ~0.16s (=2*0.132 - 2*0.05) maximum, and likely around 0.1s on average depending on how written activation times are distributed. Given lag and inconsistency in my own inputs, I doubt I'd be able to notice my attacks needing 0.1s worth of additional recharge to be completely seamless. EDIT: Just adding that attack chains based on ArcanaTime seem to work just fine for me.

Heh, I guess I'm an optimist in this regard and usually I hope that people would be happy to update their world view when presented with new information. However, if they're petty or hostile and just looking to argue, I might entertain myself for a short while before putting them on ignore. Thankfully I've only had to resort to ignore with just a handful of people on HC.

They are short, yes, but constantly activating even short activation powers eats up the time you could be using for offense. Let's say you use a combination of Reconstruction / DP three times a minute, which I don't think is an outrageous assumption, 5% of your overall animation time is being eaten up by trying to stay alive. Once you add in Instant Healing, MoG, Shadow Meld, Hasten and so on, you're suddenly using in excess of 10% of your overall animation time for mediocre survivability when most sets get the same results in <5% total animation time. Maybe 10-15% isn't much to you, but numerically it makes Regen offensively worse than probably all the other sets besides Granite Stone builds out there with not much to show for it on the survival side. Of course, you can choose to avoid using the active abilities, but then you're choosing between sub-par survivability or offense. Then there's the other side of the coin: being locked into animations from your offensive set that completely prevent you from using your survivability tools for what might be too long... I'm still convinced animations are a big source of issues for Regen.

My biggest issue with Regeneration is being locked into quite a bit of animation time in order to stay alive. This wouldn't be a problem if Regen actually offered above-par survivability or offense, but it doesn't do either so a Regen character ends up having to choose between sub-par offense or defense. Another huge issue with Regen is that it's extremely weak against debuffs, especially -Regen, -Heal and -Rech out of which the last one is very common. Also given the lack of innate Defense, most of those debuffs are likely to land. Finally, we get to its main weakness: spike damage, which is prevalent everywhere in the game unless you play at very low difficulty settings. No Defense means that at +3 (+4, but let's assume basically everyone playing +4 has Alpha) enemies have 65-85% chance to hit depending on their rank, so jumping in to a full spawn means you'll get hit by a majority of them. This extremely short reaction time brings me to the clickies, their effects should kick in instantly, as in, when you click the power, not when the animation ends. Thematically the set is cool, but every time I play it the performance just makes me wish I was playing something else instead. Bopper's list of changes looks pretty good, though.

This describes my position quite well. Of course, I've got nostalgia for the classic CoH experience, but a big part of that nostalgia would really be experiencing a game like CoH for the first time while also being 15 years younger, neither of which I can have. I've had similar nostalgia with so many games (Dark Souls, Halo: CE, DA:O, etc.) that still hold up years after, but the experience just isn't the same even if I do get my fix of nostalgia. Instead, I opt being realistic about what's possible given my current situation in life (why does one have to do this as an adult..?) and I just have to admit that I can't play for hours at a time. I sure as hell can't play every day. The QoL changes in HC are a prerequisite for me to be able to enjoy the actual gameplay part like I want to because I simply don't have the time to grind for 2 billion Glad Armor uniques like I could back in the day. Some of the QoL items I'd never go back on: inherent Fitness and travel power prerequisites, I already dislike the 1-22 part of the game the most and having to spend four (often bland) power picks just to be functional at 22 didn't add any value IOs. With or without ED, builds were far too simple without those and you had basically every player, character and build use the same slotting for everything because 5x DMG / 1x ACC or 3x DMG / 1x ACC / 1x END / 1x RECH was basically always the best slotting. With IOs there's so much more depth. The rest is so interrelated that it's impossible for me to say which individual items I wouldn't mind being gone, but frankly I'd like to keep most of them.

I don't think it would be outrageous to balance end game content so that the expectation is IO level of enhancement value. Just slotting any appropriate IO sets into powers and disregarding set bonuses completely still gives a character probably ~1.5x the enhancement value per slot an SO only character would get. Participating in content set to this level of balance wouldn't require a degree in setbonusology, but just utilizing whatever drops for you, which I think is a pretty reasonable expectation for player behavior in any game. I'd be willing to be this is significantly lower on HC. Back in retail CoX much more than half of my characters never got IOs because they were either long retired by the time IOs were even available, or if I still played them, didn't seem worthy of IOing in contrast to some other characters thanks to the quite prohibitive cost of good IO builds: I had two characters with ~10 billion builds each, which combined is more than I've spent on all of my characters on HC, there's a reason many of my retail characters never got funding... Here all of my characters start getting IOs as soon as possible thanks to catalyzed sets and all my 50s are IO'd to the gills with purples, winter IOs or whatever is the best set given the build's goals, not the best value for inf as cost is much less of a concern. Obviously, this is completely anecdotal, but I'd still be surprised if the no-IOs at all population was anywhere near 80%.

I think the issue is that the subset of gamers who actually want challenge just for the sake of challenge is really quite small. Having done stuff like solo LRSF, I'm all for more challenge without the reward sometimes, but I honestly don't think CoH is a game that can support this kind of playstyle for long because so many other games do it so much better. So, in my opinion extra rewards for extra difficulty are necessary, but the implementation has to be smart and probably requires data collection from actual gameplay. Personally, I'd like to avoid a situation where some optional difficulty settings become mandatory for reward efficiency while potentially shutting out less optimized characters and teams. As a rule of thumb, I guess it would be fair if a difficulty setting that increases average completion time by X%, the rewards increase by half that, e.g. buffed enemies on average extends a TF by 20% so now the participants are entitled to 10% extra XP/inf and merits. On average, reward efficiency decreases so there's no point in forcing these modifiers for a random team, but a highly optimized team could maybe achieve a similar reward/time ratio with or without the modifiers, but they'd get to play more challenging content should they want to do so. Something like this could work for close-knit power gamer groups without disturbing the core of CoX experience: casual teaming.

Give me Mind Control with Mass Confusion at 60 seconds cooldown (same as Seeds of Confusion) and I'll go roll a new Mind Controller right now.

It's impossible to give a definitive answer without seeing your build as we're missing quite a few variables without it. However, if all your powers have one level 50 IO worth of Endurance Reduction in them, getting Cardiac Alpha will roughly double your EndRed enhancement value from 0.42 (=70% base Endurance cost) to 0.85 (=54% base Endurance cost) for a difference of 16% base Endurance cost. Without knowing your Recovery, attack chain and other similar information about Endurance gain, it's impossible to say whether or not the difference in Endurance expenses will make you break even. As an additional note, in my experience attacks and other active abilities usually account for ~2/3 of overall Endurance expenditure, so looking at toggles (or the number of them) often answers just the smaller part of the overall issue.

I'd say on average my characters hit 50 in ~25 hours of gameplay, mostly doing TFs with DXP on. Fastest on HC was probably just a hair under 20 hours.