Rooks

I've never been much of a kheld player so sorry if this has already been implemented or is otherwise useless, but as a stop gap while other things are pursued what if all the human form kheld toggles where set to a 0.00 second activation time? So when you go human you can just set up a toggleon bind or macro and just mash it till all your stuff is up? It'll still probably take up to a second because of server ticks or whatever but if it's not already been done it'd probably be better than nothing.

I didn't realise fury generation was a problem for so many brutes. Even on teams I rarely drop below 70% (ish, just by eye) and even that is usually because of some big travel gap between mobs, e.g. going back through a tunnel in a cave map to go down the other tunnel a fair ways. My free tip if you find you aren't getting enough agro for fury to just shoot up by itself is: on the first or second mob, just hop ahead into the next mob (pop a few purples if it's the kind of content it's tough to do consistently on), then take their alpha. You'll get a big shot in the arm of anger juice that will keep you going for the rest of the mission, pretty much just from attacking. The trick is to not stop attacking. You're a brute, that's literally your whole deal. So yeah any brute I'm playing will be much smashier than correspondent tanks. I just want the game in a place where I can make a new tank without feeling I'm doing a disservice to any potential teammates by not picking a brute. These changes would completely fix that. I might even have a near equal number of brutes and tanks!

Sorry yeah I meant on the actual damage of the power, not adding a debuff to enemies. I haven't kept up with this thread in a while but I assume since it's still going there are still some issues with what's being proposed despite page upon page of discussion. The issue for some seems to be a fear that tankers will be both a top end aoe dmg dealer (even if only in extreme scenarios) because of increased target caps as well as the hardest AT to kill in the game. I think the increased target caps are a nice differentiation from other melee ATs and so think it's worth keeping. Just having increased aoe size on big teams would be kind of redundant asked imo most will be fully saturated at the old caps anyway. If the debuff is kept low enough it would still be a net gain in raw damage per target hit over live anyway, and might lower edge cases of tanks doing better damage than dps ATs or at least put people off trying to use tankers as a dps AT But if it's a case of "no compromise is good enough, because tankers are never meant to actually deal damage in any way under any circumstance" then just ignore me and keep arguing lol. Just remove the secondaries and give us 9 taunts lol. For the record I love the changes as they are, or at least as they were last iterated on that I saw (which is probably closer to the beginning of October lol) and I'd love to see them or an iteration of them go live at some point, because I think it deals appropriately with a lot of the issues I've noticed running tankers, particularly at high levels and in large groups

Has anyone brought up the possibility of the aoe increasing inherent doing a little bit of base -dmg on affected powers to make up for an increased target cap, say 5/10%? To try to put off would-be farmers and aoe minmaxers from switching to tankers just for damage?

I've found putting a taunt enhancement in usually does the trick for most auras. I dunno if that's just a placebo lol, but I never seemed to have problems keeping agro back in the day

I assume that would be the easiest way for these changes to not be a pseudo-nerf to everything past the threshold

Keeping up 500% external damage boost is just as hard as boosting a brute up to survivability caps (or buffing them enough to cross the threshold into 'won't die', seeing as survivability is much more of a binary thing than damage dealing; either you survive or you don't*). And if the brute deals more damage than tanks no matter how much dmg buff they are at, how are they worse? In what universe does more = less? Also if you are capped out defensively (or even just survivable enough to stay up) you can just jump ahead to keep fury high. That's what I do on my brutes in large teams. Its antisocial but it's the most efficient thing to do. And most teams just wanna run through content as fast as possible. Brutes are really really good at that. *in fact with IOs you could argue this survivability threshold is much easier to hit with buffs on brutes than 500% damage boost is on tanks.

IOs and a thermal and or Cold can get you pretty far. FS is good at damage capping and Frostwork is also good at HP capping

I think it was that back on live. But if that's higher than brutes then my b.

Making brutes have such a high resist/hp cap will just make people take brutes over tanks. In high end content everyone is running around at resist caps etc, so why take a tank that does less damage over a brute that can A: Kill faster. B: Survive just the same and need less damage buffing to be as effective. I dont get why it's ok for brutes to have identical survivability caps to tanks but tanks getting a damage cap increase to try to bridge that gap somewhat is so abhorrent, when the brute cap is still higher and takes less effort to get to. Brutes will STILL deal more damage under every scenario.

To me the cap change just makes Fulcrum Shift less of a waste on a tank. Like, "oh, look at all that extra damage you could be doing :(" instead you'll be doing it! Or at least some more of it. I fail to see why this is unfair when brute survivability scales to tanker levels with buffs. And their effective damage cap is still higher.

In my head I'm imagining some sort of "Fire Slash" or "Fire Swipe" where it's like some kind of bare handed swipe. Like your hand becomes a plasma cutter and you Qui Gon vs Door on your enemy

Tank base hp and def/res modifiers are higher, but the caps are all identical to brutes. It's just easier for a tank to get to theirs. Stuff like Frostwork can bridge the HP gap no problem tho

Tanks getting their own, larger agro cap would be awesome, if it were possible. I dont know how viable that is in terms of coding though

I think the point was that brutes can be buffed easily into having tank or better defensive numbers because defense and resistance buffs are easy to come by, and brutes share tank hp and resistance hard caps. So a buffed up brute is automatically better than a tank because, everything being capped (including damage), a brute is just as hard to kill as a tank but does more damage. All increasing the tank damage cap increase does is lessen this theoretical advantage. Now tanks are less wasted in buff heavy teams

I did quite like the bruising mechanic though, it was a fun addition to the overall tank playstyle imo. As a team centric AT, it's nice to have a two-fold reason to spam T1s about the place. Making stuff hit you instead of squishier teammates is one kind of value, incentivising teammates into attacking mobs that are already agrod to you in the form of extra damage from the -res made it even more valuable. I liked the depth it added over other melee characters whose primary job it is to spam as many DPAs into whatever enemy looks like it most needs dying at any given time

I like the damage cap idea, them scaling offense with teams helps to avoid the issue of brutes scaling better in teams overall due to their survivability going way up with buffs (to catch tankers) and effective damage cap being higher too. It makes tanks slightly less suboptimal in team scenarios. You can buff up a brute's survivability to make him into a tank that does damage, and now you can buff up a tank's damage to make him in to a tank that does damage as well.

It would be amazing if some of the old live team could liase with the current team about what overarching plans for moving forward incarnate content would have been, with a view to trying to implement it someday (or an iteration upon 'it')

I love what you guys have done with this second iteration of MAs kicks. If you gave me the option of nerfing the overall power of the set as a whole if it meant keeping more value in the kicks (considering it's pretty much agreed in that the context of domis, MA is at least somewhat OP), then I absolutely would have taken it. Also as someone who had a thorns domi back on live who I'll eventually get around to relevelling I appreciate the love you guys have pointed at thorny barrage. It's a power that's always felt good even if its mechanical value wasn't really there. So as a guy who really likes to kick and shoot a billion thorns in one go, thank you for making me more valuable to any potential teammates.

So do Martial Assault users have to wait for permadom IO builds to match functionality with other Dominator Assault sets? Especially considering other sets get Build Ups too. Honestly my focus is more on the Spinning Kick nerf anyway, it feels heavy handed when you consider its use as both a cone and the 2nd chainable melee attack in a set with only two melee attacks, notwithstanding the pbaoe which every domi assault set seems to get on fairly even ground. A role Spinning Kick shares with Ripper. Now, obviously Ripper should be way stronger, it's a later tier power, it has a longer activation. But its base damage is practically double even before the DoTs which take it way over that threshold. That the difference is that large for two powers which share such similar functions seems a bit wrong from my perspective. In my mind a Martial Assault set should have more of a focus on melee power than it does in this iteration, I guess is my primary point. Because of its use in a melee attack chain I feel like its comp should be closer to something like Sweeping Cross than Flashing Steel. Weaker cones are balanced in melee damage sets because you switch to using it over other options when you want to aoe. But Martial Assault Domis use Spinning Kick when in melee in general because they have no other options after using Thunder Kick. In my mind, if any of the Domi assault sets should have a melee attack chain that's worth bothering with, it would make sense to be the one borne conceptually from an existing melee set. But if the math says Martial Assault is still as good or better than everything else even despite the 33%ish dmg nerf to one of its only 2 melee powers (while the other is also being nerfed) then I guess I need to sit down lol

That said, if its old DPA was so busted why is the new contaminated strike essentially being turned in to the old thunder kick, but with a superior activation time? Doesn't that make contaminated strike more OP than thunder kick ever was? This is kind of what I mean by double pronged nerf/buffs going a bit far imo

Just went on to test and the Spinning Kick nerf seems a little harsh, going from 95 to 65. It was quite obviously overbalanced before but this seems like a heavy nerf to melee damage for what is essentially (or at least I assumed thematically) a melee set, especially when it seems like every other dominator assault set's overall melee power is getting a buff. I wonder if going at the idea of martial assault being OP this hard from both angles at once only just reverses the issue rather than solving it. I love the buffs to the other sets but when you compare DPAs across sets now if feels like Martial Assault lags behind noticeably now. FWIW the Thunder Kick nerf seems fair enough to me. Maybe the set is in good balance and I'm just upset that it seems so much more shuriken focused than kick focused (I love my kicks quite a lot). But yeah. Even if the recharge times "make up" for the reduced damage, most domis that are trying to be competitive have an eff load of recharge bonuses anyway which kind of makes faster recharging, lower damage sets inherently less useful for dominators unless their dpa keeps up with the heavier hitters, in my opinion.