Blastit

Controllers would be very unlike what you usually play, yes. You get to use control powers and support. Illusion/Radiation should have you pretty set for soloing, too.

On the other hand, you get to be Captain Cube.

Stone Melee Stalker.

It's a set that really needs to be redone from the ground up. You could do something fresh and cool with it but you'd need to take a step back and really evaluate how the set is supposed to play and feel. You could tweak numbers to just make it a regular decent set and ignore that either Granite obviates the other toggles or the toggles and much easier IO bonuses render Granite superflous like all the other T9s, but I don't think that sounds very satisfying. Easier work, though.

I thought that ATs all had the same aggro cap because there wasn't a feasible way to program it differently. Like, aggro caps applied to everyon equally due to being baked in and needing a whole lot of rewriting to make it work differently.

It's worth talking about because you can discuss what kind of play experience different levels of aggro cap lead to, if those are better, worse or just different and if any of those play experiences are a better fit for what this server team is trying to accomplish. Other servers don't dictate what is done here but they can inspire analysis and discussion.

⛈️ ⚠️ ⁉️ Obviously we have to massively nerf IO sets and incarnates in order to have any design space left at all.

If you do make a melee support AT, you don't actually have to port every single support set to it anyway.

Absolute agreement on this. A full set of elemental APPs would be a wonderful quality of life improvement.

How would increasing difficulty by further increasing enemy level work? What does that do to debuffs, crowd control, defences and to-hit tresholds?

What kind of person would slot out a build after five hours of powerlevelling and instantly realise the sets sucked ass but not do so at any point during seventy or a hundred and five hours of active playing? Five hours every day, no less. If we're talking how different characters can be before and after getting maximally IO'd out, then... no relevant amount of players would know that much about endgame builds and goof it so hard on their choice of what to fundamentally play. And anyway, if some sets are trash then the devs should probably do something about that. That's kind of a bigger-picture concern.

My contention is with the idea that powerlevelling is only a matter of personal preference. It's more complicated than that. I don't even advocate its eradication, I've only said that developers "have to keep an eye on it". Hardly controversial. Additionally, of course I know that some people love having an instant level 50 and that they can want that for multiple different reasons. There are people who like and dislike everything.

There is also what widespread powerlevelling does to the game environment. If nearly everyone goes on AE farms to get to at least 40+ then that leaves the rest of the world empty and further pressures players into powerlevelling. So developers do have to keep an eye on it because otherwise only a small part of their efforts stay relevant.

Only if it's a set of custom-made City of Heroes emoticons. Otherwise you can just stick to the text- and character-based classics.

Skimming this thread, multiple different people have multiple different ideas for how to tackle any overpowered aspects of system. So what is it that they all have in common that effectively kills the system?

That doesn't mean "destroyed", though. Something can be reduced from overpowered to decently balanced.

If incarnate powers are changed so that you can no longer steamroll 45-50 at +4, just play on a lower difficulty setting.

You're not the one who sets the terms of the discussion, so no. "This is poorly balanced" is a fairly common opinion in MMO stuff, anyway, so if you can't deal with it then discussion threads aren't a good fit for you.

So okay, since EATs are all built around representing a specific thing that happened in the CoH universe... what would be Praetorian Earth's specific thing? What unique event would result in the archetype? Anti-Hamidon tech? A specific kind of Praetorian super-soldier? An accident during a lab raid? You could consider a new breed of superhero-soldiers created by researching Devouring Earth weaponry, with a big plant and bio-armour theme, under the leadership of a brilliant but eccentric scientist who finally got their time to shine but had the whole project come crashing down because the anti-mind-control tech was too strong so they couldn't be brainwashed and instead all went their own way. We've got an alien energy EAT, a tech/psychic EAT and a plant-ish EAT wouldn't overlap even though they do overlap with the whole laboratory manipulation schtick. But that's just something that comes very naturally to Praetorian Earth so maybe it's okay. Not sure what they would do mechanically other than maybe be some kind of scrapper-dominator hybrid sort of thing. A dash of duplication, maybe? Unless there's some magic-themed thing you could do? A spell that goes awry, a pact that is made and has unforeseen consequences for everyone involved, something like that. The devil and the dealer both tricking each other. A possessed archetype could be interesting too. Whatever happened to the Praetorian Circle of Thorns? If they're gone, maybe some unwise digging around brought remnants back in an unorganised way that didn't obliterate the free will of the possessed.

Having gone and looked at what was actually written in the beta forum, they are referring to changes to various movement powers. Specifically, that the changes they were investigating have been reverted in the latest patch because of how they interact with any plans for proliferating the Ninjitsu power set. Nothing has been changed for Ninjitsu and nothing was mentioned about needing to change Ninjitsu. I understand that these are difficult times but that's why you should double check that you read correctly and not let your anxiety get the better of you.

Repel is a design choice that wasn't implemented perfectly but that shouldn't be essentially removed so you can have another godmode aura. If you want to use Hurricane to debuff large groups without scattering them everywhere then you're just going to have to get good at using Hurricane. Let's have some possible skill in the game so that it's not just about copying the best IO build.

Electric Blast doesn't necessarily have a simple fix, either. Do you just buff some damage numbers? Do you fundamentally rework how endurance works for enemies? Do you re-examine whether the endurance drain aspect is even worth the work to keep? What do the volunteer developers have time and interest in doing? etc etc

If someone uses their super powers to put a force field around you in order to protect you from harm, as is the function and theme of the entire powerset that the forcefielder chose, then yes you are going to look like you have a force field around you. It's for the satisfaction of the buffer and for your and their practical use so you can see when the buff fades and then reapply it. Additionally there is the stylistic integrity of a set named, for example, Ice Armor providing you with armour that deflects attacks. That's not to say that effects can't get very busy when you have, say, eight players throwing fourteen distinct buffs around or that it's a bad idea to come up with a good system that allows players to adjust the level of visual information on their screen to their liking. This is just a silly way to suggest it.

SR on tankers gets something absurd like 90 or 95% DDR, I think?, so even if WP gets it bumped up to 40% I'm not sure if that really changes the sets' relative value.

You forgot a summoned pet bubble that bounces around semi-randomly and knocks enemies back in a radius around it.