Blastit

You are confusing the choices that a player makes with the choices that a designer should make. Of course a player of a challenge-based game makes choices based at least in part on what will make them more likely to complete the challenge. This is the nature of the game and most players engage in this behaviour to varying degrees. But these aren't the goals of a designer. They have to decide which behaviours should be rewarded, which degree of power differential is acceptable and all the other things that together make up the shape of the metagame. If Scrappers could tank everything well enough, why have Brutes and Tankers? If AE farms are the only things people ever do 1-50, why have the entire rest of the game? If one AT, strategy or activity obsoletes the existing dozen others then that devastates a previously diverse game.

"Unhealthy" isn't necessarily that subjective, though. Being able to farm two billion inf in a minute might be hilarious to do (I've played cookie clicker, I know that huge numbers are funny) but it would ruin the economy. A resistance-based character that also has softcapped defences as well as enough +tohit, +regen and +recovery to make anything but damage buffs unnecessary might be harmless in practice if there's only ever one or two people per server but would create a bad environment if it's an easy target for everyone to build towards. Crowd control and support ATs becoming effectively worse, by design, as you move along the game's progression path is not very fun for like a third of the ATs. If every melee character could achieve the same defensive stats regardless of which armour set they pick then that defeats the point of having different armour sets in the first place. For the developers, overpowered characters are an issue if you want to develop new content. Are we at that point? IO sets are easier to acquire than they ever were before, but are they so easy to acquire that the amount of bonuses they can give creates a major problem? I don't know! I would like it investigated and for the matter to be discussed with honesty. The thing I take issue with isn't people who like things the way they are, it's the refusal to consider that things legitimately could be otherwise.

If Hasten turns out to help create an unhealthy game environment, no. Players policing themselves on matters of power level are not a workable solution to game imbalance. Imagine taking the same attitude to Fire Tankers being able to herd entire maps by themselves.

Card games and MMOs are absolutely filled with examples of abilities, strategies, etc that were changed to be less powerful because they threatened the health of the game. These are, like, the actual worst game genres to explain to me in an attempt to convince me that things critically must not change. I'm sure that Flash was very fun for some MTG players but since it could win before your opponent even drew their first card while going first the card was banned. More specifically for CoH, the whole "enhancement diversification" deal happened because characters running around with perma-Hasten, six-slotted Stamina, attacks with six damage SOs and Focused Accuracy threw balance so far out of whack that scaling enemies up to threaten this new baseline would utterly demolish everyone who didn't build optimally. Sometimes it seems that people were so happy to adopt the terminology "nerfed" for any downwards adjustment, even sensible ones, that they appear to believe that anyone raising concerns over the centralisation of some pool powers and some kinds of IO sets is inherently arguing that those things must be made useless.

If every single character of a particular AT was one, single powerset combination then one should look into why. In this case, Fire/Kin is a popular corruptor combo because it's nearly the one thing they do better than defenders due to higher base damage and higher damage cap.

"That can't be true because if it is then the next thing you'll do is so-and-so" is a bad argument. Maybe it is poor design that everyone takes Tough and Weave, maybe the Leadership pool presents design problems, maybe the IO system itself is a design problem, maybe what power pools are meant to really do should be investigated. You're just assuming that the present system must be kept as it is. Every question of design is best approached with an open mind and an honest examination of your premises and goals. Never mind that humans can in fact just stop at some arbitrary point because they feel like it. The HC team could decide that they want Hasten to function as-is but be a final tier power to reward those who dedicate themselves to Super Speed, they could decide that the Leadership pool is a problem but they don't have a good solution and they could decide that the Fighting pool is fine as it is.

The yellow circle is, in fact, needed.

Is there really room left to optimise farming? With roleplaying and base building there is at least room for the expression of creativity and whim, which are ever-changing. The optimal way of farming the most lucrative AE mission seems like it should've been found now. A guide thread should suffice.

Then argue for making an electric APP. More APPs is always neat and there are certainly thematic holes to be patched there. The HC team is clearly capable of it so it's no pipe dream.

They're patron pools, expressions of your affiliation with... your patron. If it doesn't make thematic sense for your character to work with Black Scorpion or Captain Mako then don't do that.

The problem with saying that we "already have blasters and tankers" is that this eliminates stalkers, brutes, scrappers, partially both EATs and dominators get the side eye.

Balancing them is not the hard part. They've got attacks and armours. We have four ATs that fit that description already, plus the EATs. Putting them somewhere along that axis in terms of performance should be well within the means of the HC team. The hard part is designing an inherent that gives them a playstyle of their own. Playstyle is why people are perfectly fine with scrappers, stalkers, tankers and brutes all existing together. To that end... I have no idea what kind of inherent I would give them. What are sentinels supposed to do? Or are their redesigned power sets meant to provide the style more than the inherent?

Because they already have ranged attacks for a primary.

In this particular environment I'm not sure how much it would matter. For minmaxers... Well, ok, you've now got one team dude with double support instead of the previous two team dudes with support/blast. Is that a major difference? Would seven support/support dudes and one brute be stronger than seven defenders and one brute? Minmaxers already are decked out enough in IO sets and incarnate powers that you don't exactly need a lot of buffs to cap most everything. For more casual players all you'd get is a defender that's infinitely worse at soloing than defenders were at release. Just dogshit-wet-punching a single minion for several minutes. If you've got a playgroup to level you or get farmed you're rewarded with, well, probably being a sufficiently impactful team member depending on how IO'd your buddies are. But you're kind of just a buffbot. Mainly I view this as a pure playstyle thing. And to that I say that, no matter how noble it is to want to provide a playstyle for as many people as possible, there just shouldn't be an AT that outright lacks any way of causing damage other than brawl and power pools. Even controllers had damage components in their holds and immobs from the start, before they got Containment. And people complained about them being way too slow to solo! Storm/storm would admittedly be funny but it feels like too much of a sandbox server sort of thing.

Would it actually make for a better forum environment?

Normalising pools is perfectly fair. It's not necessarily even a matter of multi-target immobs being great for a given AT but that a single-target immob is just not much of a power. Especially not if the set already has a single-target hold. Personally I think that tankers might benefit from having their APPs tweaked to include a few more support powers instead of control or w/e. They did get slightly boosted buff values with their other changes and it would further set them apart from brutes.

The point of the ancillary power pools is precisely to give your character things that the AT doesn't normally get, for the sake of rounding out your character's skill set. They weren't designed to just make your character more powerful. That doesn't mean that they couldn't do with some restructuring (putting all armours in the first tier is a perfectly fine idea, might as well y'know?) or that some couldn't do with some more fundamental rethinking but approaching it from the point of view of simply making them more powerful is the wrong way to go about it. Patron pools should obviously bear the mark of that patron. You proved yourself to them and were rewarded with their blessing and power. Also, melee attacks on defenders is super badass and that's my final word on it.

That scenario sounds like wishful thinking to prove that you love the game more than others and are therefore morally superior.

Getting rid of Hasten and looking over the recharge rates of various powers is fine with me, for the simple reason that it's mildly astonishing that a pool power has been allowed to have primary power set impact for so long. I don't use it anyway. Not like I try to make blasters with an uninterrupted attack chain of; Fireball. There are probably other things to prioritise, though.

If there's a point to adding more 7.5% global recharge IOs it's so that people won't have to scramble for +def powers to put them in. I'd say "well ok" to adding one for resistance and one for cost reduction ,or so, as long as they all use the same bonus slot so you can't use more than five.

That's not workable logic to maintain an MMO by, though. What about the people who get upset about new power sets, because they had already played all the power sets?

Using the market doesn't create inf, it just moves it around. Things that create inf other than running farming missions include task forces or doing storylines. You could have a go at those.

No, that's when you know you've crossed over into that part of the anime tournament where the weakest fighters can no longer even see the movements.

If farming is less fun for you now, why not look into the other ways of creating inf?

They do still have legs, tho.