Shin Magmus

If Empathy simply gets some long overdue buffs/reworks, and especially if Fortitude is turned into an AoE (but with lower numbers) to be truly analogous to Farsight and World of Pain, then Power Boost goes from "pretty good" to "mandatory". The option to click PB then Fort everyone... including yourself, is the kind of thing that would rejuvenate Empathy and bring it up out of the dumpster tier.

These images are sending me. Fortunately, I play good powersets so I have Mitigation against Joke Damage.

This thread isn't supposed to be a basic English class about teaching definitions. Getting dragged into arguments with people (who are blatantly wrong) is the beginning of how all of these threads get locked. GM GooglyMoogly is here, unseen, in the shadows. You don't see him but he sees us all; he is watching, waiting for someone to slip up. Healing is not, and never has been, damage mitigation. If you have 600 Healers all lined up in a row, all ready to heal, but the enemy deals a big attack and oneshots everyone... you all die because you lacked sufficient damage mitigation: now you have 600 dead Healers. Now if the same scenario happens with 2 Healers but 598 Buffers, who boost the team's Defense and Resistance up massively: people survive. The same attack hits your party but the damage is reduced and it also outright misses some of you, which gives the 2 Healers time to heal everyone back up to full. The difference in these examples should be obvious. <> Resistance and Defense are damage mitigation, as are debuffs to enemy stats that reduce their Damage and Tohit. <> Max HP and Absorb are a damage buffer, they don't technically mitigate damage but they increase the amount of time you will survive, and therefore the time you have to react. Max HP also multiplies Regeneration. <> Healing and Regeneration are just health restoration and nothing more. Regeneration is often stronger because it is multiplied by Max HP increases, and you can build to push both these stats very high.

Healing isn't damage mitigation. It's literally not.

Imagine waking up and deciding that attacking the nicest people in the community is a good idea... Lauci you have the patience of a saint.

Every time we get a new powerset instead of revitalizing buffs to Empathy, with merged RAs and a new power, I cry inside. Non-terrible Empathy would be the best "new" powerset ever, and statistically it would benefit a huge % of the playerbase. Instead, we get FlerpDerp Control.

These points are both correct but the gentle wording belies the... "severity" of the issue in-game. Almost all (98%) of Empathy teammates will play in a way that may or may not inflict mental damage... on you. This is why I think proposed buffs to the set should also make it easier to play, more "set-and-forget" if you will.

Sonic Resonance is a pretty good set actually and feels fine to me.

Well yeah, as an experienced player you know that slotting like that at low levels actually makes the game harder. If you aren't going to use any attuned unique IOs like Panacea proc in Health (available at low levels), then your character has no sustain. Experienced players know that spending those slots on Acc/Dmg in attacks will end fights faster, meaning you spend less End on attacks and spend less Health because enemies didn't get to launch as many attacks. Especially on Melee ATs, optimizing damage is a significantly higher priority than bulk if you are soloing. Nobody else is there to deal damage for your, so you can't build like a 0 DPS Meatshield which would only be viable on teams. Whether or not Streakbreaker is actually an issue, Ultimo was the architect of his own demise with a bad build and poor insp management.

The two realistic options for AoE Fortitude are sidegrade of Farsight/World of Pain (which will come with dramatically reduced numbers, and obviously less +Def/+Tohit than Farsight in exchange for also providing +Dmg), or a toggle buff AoE anchored onto an ally. The toggle would be more annoying to use in practice and "feel" like Shifting Tides, Spirit Ward, Disruption Field, etc. so it would be able to have higher numbers than the click-and-forget buff (that maintains Power Boosted numbers for the full duration). Either of these solutions is fine, but Fortitude is long-past due for being an AoE with how this game works. That suggestion is very commonly requested, and also part of the rework in my signature.

SR Tankers and Shield Tankers (with doublestacked Active Defenses) both end up having hard-capped Defense Debuff Resistance, but they are also unhittable GodKing Tankers who end up with decent Resists underneath those Defenses because of both their AT scalars and their special ATO procs, with some free Absorb as well. Their extreme bulk being something that enemy groups cannot defeat with debuffs is part of why they are so incredibly strong. However, these powersets don't let you automatically win with a bad build and no effort.

I will now combat the misinformation above about Elec Affinity's heal: Rejuvenating Circuit. The heal/buff number is not "split" among the targets in range for chaining powers, instead it follows a predictable formula and only the primary target ever gets the full value, but the primary target always gets the full value regardless of Static Stacks or number of nearby targets. The powers are balanced around most people getting the weaker number but you having the flexibility to pump out a much stronger Heal (and Absorb), on the primary target. For reference on my level 50 Elec Affinity Corr, that would be a 368.6 Heal every 2.4 seconds and a 475.6 Absorb every 6.0 seconds. The amount that this is reduced per-jump in the chain is always the same %, and can be looked up on CoD. Here is a screenshot showing the values for the Heal specifically: As you can see, the Heal is reduced by 25%, then by 25% of the original value again (which is by 33% from the previous value: ouch), after which it stops decreasing. This means the floor is 50% of the primary target's strength and listed numbers on the power. The important takeaway here is that your targeting matters: you need to select the primary Tank who is taking the most incoming damage and direct the huge numbers at them, while unfortunately the rest of the team will only get literally half of that. But the power keeps hitting more targets in range so it keeps tacking on more and more 184.29 Heals in this example build. Elec Affinity's sustained output on a single chosen ally, both with reactive Healing and proactive Absorb, is incredibly high.

Empathy is the weakest available Support powerset among all choices. It used to be possible to argue in favor of other sets, which have all been buffed or reworked since that point and the game has evolved to better "support" those Support sets. A good example is old Force Field, which only provided Defense in a game where 45% was enough. Now the powerset both provides other benefits, including -Res debuffs, but also the endgame has evolved to include challenges where enemies have hundreds of points higher chance tohit you so the need for Defense-stacking way beyond 45% is now a thing. During the entire lifespan of the game, Empathy has never received a buff. It's long overdue at this point, and I conveniently keep a link in my signature to my proposed Empathy buffs which hinge heavily on balancing it against Marine Affinity as a benchmark: the Homecoming Team's newest set. This seems like a perfectly acceptable target to me.

Ultimo, your threads are always a real treat but this game is clearly just too difficult for you. If your character didn't have mez protection yet, and you were soloing content against an enemy group with mezzes, then you needed to carry some break frees. This applies to any character in that situation. By being a bad enough player to not carry break frees, you invited defeat. So take Practiced Brawler at its first available level like a good player, and/or carry break frees until you get to that power.

+1 for changing Phantasm's KB to KD by default. The fact is, even disregarding the other issues with this pet, Phantasm is actively detrimental to you and your teammates until you waste a slot and convert its KB. This is a weak pet that asks you to waste a slot for no reason, which is terrible when directly compared to other pets. Lots of Illusion Doms just skip Phantasm cus it's not worth it. Illusion Controllers are more incentivized to take Phantasm and try to keep him alive but that is a tall order most of the time.