Shin Magmus

The devs already believe that having -fly on most attacks, and the mechanic required being grounded, is unique enough. Also most of the attacks that do -fly also do -jump height, which is extremely unique by Ranged Attack set standards and forces targets hit to stay grounded with you. Whether the players feel the same way... probably will never matter to the devs. Love it or hate it, that's the set's identity. Lastly while minor -Def might be "dull", it's also literally top-tier because it adds 2x dmg procs and 1x -res proc option to an attack. Any set that has a random -Def debuff added to it jumps up in objective power when you're talking about minmaxed builds. That's exactly why Blaster Fire Sword suddenly being able to slot Achilles Heel -Res proc in the patch where they buffed Fire Melee, was the mandatory one-per-major-update stealthbuff to Fire/Fire Blasters.

That's fair, have a nice day.

A foreword from the author... Hi there, I'm the Mr. Shin whose unofficial main is now a Seismic/Fire Blaster. You may have seen this Magmoid creature of lava and hatred; I did put a lot of time into it. I currently use this character to play Seismic Blast because I strongly enjoy the aesthetics and core design of the powerset, especially with the Lava texture power customization. Unfortunately, the set has SEVERE ISSUES which prevent it from performing as well as it should. Blasters are pretty overpowered (citation needed), and Fire Manipulation is the most damaging powerset in the game thanks to combining 2 strong "Damage Auras", well known for being part of the Fire/Fire Blaster overwhelming dominance. I simply picked Fire Manipulation to carry the poor performance of Seismic Blast, allowing me to enjoy the character and still have decent overall performance. This strategy worked subjectively for me... but only on Blasters. How is Seismic Blast on Defenders, Corruptors, and Sentinels? Those ATs have to rely much more on the powerset by itself for their damage, and the results are not good. Seismic Blast is also one of the least popular sets in the game currently, and while we can all wager guesses at the reasons, I'd like to point out a few glaring issues with the set and suggest simple fixes to them. I'm not saying that these changes would immediately improve both the viability and popularity of Seismic Blast but... yes I am. Test Data Results This table showcases significantly worse performance and randomness in Seismic Blast vs Psychic Blast, sets chosen to compare due to their similar slotting options and the fact that Psychic Blast was recently buffed by the devs: making it a useful target metric for balance. Video Example Evidence Seismic Shockwaves KD is suppressed for 10s any time the target is knocked down by any source: Upthrust CD is never longer than 6s in the worst-case scenario on my endgame build, even with 0 Recharge slotted into the power and 5 procs slotted instead: Demonstration of the disruptive trolling potential of Meteor in general, but especially when enhanced with KB by a nasty player, "True Stuck" enemy in cave wall at 1:14: Comparison: Pain/Psychic Blast Defender (near identical build) test on GalaxyBrain's Office AE Map Time: 6:26 Comparison: Pain/Seismic Blast Defender (near identical build) test on GalaxyBrain's Office AE Map Time: 7:25 [More Video Evidence may be added here in the future] Fixed Seismic Blast By: Shin_Rekkoha (Shin Magmus) Rebalance Seismic Shockwaves No matter how you slice it, Seismic Blast is a builder/spender set. Both Stalagmite and to a lesser extent Rock Shards in their current form are powers that are not worth using without Seismic Shockwaves, hereafter referred to as "SS" or I will go insane. When a Seismic player gets SS, they immediately spend it on the chance to use either A: a single target attack slightly better than Blaze (Enhanced Stalagmite) or B: a decent secondary AoE that's still not as good as Upthrust (Enhanced Rock Shards). Immediately after spending SS, the player forfeits the chance to spend it on the choice they didn't pick. There is also a 3rd insanely bad choice to spend SS on your Aim and use it to reduce CDs (Enhanced Seismic Force), but you have no good attack powers to click so this is self-defeating and wastes the resource. Because of this spender mechanic having "opportunity cost" and 2 powers generally not being worth using without SS, many players commonly skip Rock Shards. They always spend SS on Enhanced Stalagmite instead... because it hits like a truck. If you can't use SS on both, one simply almost never gets used in practice: this leads to "dead picks" and the playerbase homogenizing builds. So with all that said, and the general understanding that players will be instantly spending SS in normal gameplay... what happens if you want to keep SS active? A player who wants to chill and sit on their SS, keeping it for the knockdown effect... should get some sort of useful reward right? Right? You're giving up a lot of damage by not instantly using SS on your Spenders, and you're also wasting all the enhancements you have slotted in those powers by not using them during the time you either don't have SS, or are sitting on SS to use it for the Knockdown. So what does SS give you in this case? It gives you a shitty Knockdown with a lockout period of 10s, that dynamically updates and re-locks-out any time the target is knocked down from any source. Seismic Shockwaves is HILARIOUSLY, EMBARASSINGLY, DISGUSTINGLY WEAK by any reasonable metric. It's mind-blowing to me that the effect even exists in the game as it does; common gameplay situations will often knock down a target so frequently that Seismic Shockwaves will literally do nothing. Enemies will never achieve the required condition for the full 10 seconds required to be allowed to be knocked down. Thank goodness most players will be spending SS instantly, so that they are spared the cursed knowledge of seeing how bad it really is. - Tick Rate: 0.2 (5 checks per second) - Current: 5% chance for KD / LOCK OUT: disabled IF: Target Sleeping, disabled IF: Target time-since-knocked less than or equal to 10s - New: 4% chance for KD / LOCK OUT: disabled IF: Target Sleeping, second condition deleted Rebalance Seismic Force Seismic Force consuming SS is detrimental in almost all cases and never actually helpful to the player. If I carelessly try to use my "Aim" power: Seismic Force, I will accidentally waste my SS and be robbed of the chance to use Enhanced Stalagmite. THIS FEELS TERRIBLE WHEN IT HAPPENS, and has led several players (including myself), to build the muscle memory to habitually jump every time we use Seismic Force. Being grounded is a requirement for Seismic Blast Enhanced effects, so leaving the ground temporarily disables the ability to consume SS and get those effects. This short "bunny hop" ensures that you can never accidentally waste SS, and the mechanic reactivates quickly after touching the ground again. Seismic Force's benefit when it wastes SS is also insultingly bad: being nothing but a one-time instant reduction in the CDs of all actively recharging powers. My slowest recharging power is Upthrust, which has a maximum CD in worst-case scenarios of only 6s (see video above for evidence). In theory, the CD reduction effect of Seismic Force could be used to increase the frequency of a Meteor, but that's its only real benefit and Meteor sucks. My main live character is a Seismic/Fire Blaster who skipped Meteor, so Seismic Force using up my SS is only detrimental. Hopefully you can see the problem with Seismic Force based on the picture I've painted. - Current: Seismic Force consumes SS to reduce the CDs of all actively recharging Seismic Blast powers - New: Seismic Force instantly grants SS, allowing the player to use 2 Enhanced powers back-to-back by using Seismic Force in between them Rebalance Meteor There's only one way I can honestly write this section: Meteor is a failure of common sense when it comes to game design and balance. Most Nukes in the game have a secondary effect that is purely beneficial, varying by individual powerset. Inferno in Fire Blast has no secondary effect (such as a debuff or mez) so it deals more damage in exchange. These are established, comparative, logical rules between the powersets. I will call the majority of Nukes "Standard Nukes": powers which do the same damage as each other but less than Inferno. Standard Nukes are very good! Atomic Blast is a reliable Hold and accepts Hold procs. Dreadful Wail is a reliable Stun that also inflicts -Res. Blackstar eviscerates enemy Tohit chances for a whopping 30s. The weakest of the bunch is Nova, but Energy Blast has its own list of Issues and Nova isn't out of place in the set. All of these powers deal the same damage as Meteor. So what does Meteor do? - Meteor is cast on a huge delay, landing roughly 5s after being cast. All other Standard Nukes deal their damage instantly (at the end of their cast animation). - Meteor deals Smashing/Fire damage, but only 25% of it is Fire damage. This means Meteor deals 75% of its damage as one of the most resisted damage types in the game: worse than all other Standard Nukes. - Meteor does not have any beneficial secondary effect, unlike all other Standard Nukes. - Meteor causes massive Mag Knockback as a detrimental secondary effect, but upward using a "new knock vector system" added by the devs. This causes Meteor to throw enemies higher and farther, over short walls that would normally stop Knockback and up into the ceilings and out of bounds on cave maps. In exchange for these weaknesses, someone decided that Meteor should only deal the same damage as all other Standard Nukes; This doesn't make any sense at all. Of all the things in Seismic Blast that need addressing, Meteor sits at the very top of the list. We can never know how or why such a bafflingly bad power is the capstone of Seismic Blast, sitting unmatched in a tier that can only be described as: "Nova, but the Knockback is even worse, and it deals worse damage types, and it has a huge delay before it even hits which can cause you to waste the power." Meteor is simply the worst nuke in the game. - Current: Meteor is REALLY BAD - New: Meteor is now affected by SS, separated into Meteor and Enhanced Meteor: both versions of the power deal increased damage relative to current version. When used without SS, Meteor will instantly grant the user 6 stacks of Seismic Pressure (3x the rate of regular attacks) and only deals Knockdown. When used with SS, Enhanced Meteor will consume the effect but deal increased damage and have the Knockdown replaced with the current massive Knockback. This allows beanbags players who enjoy the current version of Meteor to retain access to the KB, enabling player choice and hurting no one. The powers are broken down below: New Meteor Damage ratio changed from 75%/25% to 50%/50% Smashing and Fire Damage increased by 20% (1.20x current Meteor damage) Knockback changed to Knockdown (100% chance) Grants the user 6 stacks of Seismic Pressure (granted on cast, not on Meteor landing) Enhanced New Meteor Damage ratio changed from 75%/25% to 50%/50% Smashing and Fire Damage increase by 25% over non-Enhanced version (1.50x current Meteor damage) Inflicts massive vectored Knockback, unchanged from current (can still slot KBtoKD IOs) Consumes SS and ends the Shockwaves Major DPA buff to Entomb Even outside of the more important and impactful fixes above, the DPA of Seismic Blast powers as a whole is undertuned. The Powers Team very clearly used "The Formula" to calculate Encase (T1) and Shatter (T2) DPA, to make both of these powers operate at the mathematical baseline standard of "pathetic and weak" alongside T1 and T2 attacks in Energy Blast, Rad Blast, etc. A skilled player will view these powers as not to be used at lv50 except as filler: only when you have nothing else available to use. This design philosophy is consistent with some other powersets, even if it isn't much fun for the player. However, Entomb (T4 power, "T3 Blast") deals significantly less damage than it should and actually has lower DPA than Shatter. Entomb should have its DPA buffed by 65% via a combination of damage buffs and animation time reduction, bringing its performance up closer to the level of powers such as Freeze Ray, Bitter Ice Blast, Telekinetic Blast, and Blaze. After this buff, Entomb would have 79% of the DPA of Bitter Ice Blast as an example. This change would cause Seismic Blast to actually have 2 good always-available single target attacks: Entomb and Tombstone (The QuickSnipe). Remember, Seismic Blast characters cannot use Enhanced Stalagmite very often: often only getting SS once every 4-5 attacks. Seismic Blast is a Builder/Spender set, and you have to use Builders to be able to get to the Spenders; if too many of the Builder powers suck, then the entire set falls apart both in performance and in fun factor. The set currently only has one good single target attack to use outside of Enhanced Stalagmite, and with this suggested buff it would have 2. This buff might seem extreme from an outside perspective, but it also accurately portrays just how weak Seismic Blast currently is. Conclusion That's it, that's my suggested list of changes to fix Seismic Blast. In summary, these changes were: rebalance Seismic Shockwaves, rebalance Seismic Force (remove SS interaction), rebalance Meteor (add SS interaction), and rebalance Encase by massively increasing its damage (all other powers in the set are unchanged). I've reasoned that these changes make the set simultaneously perform better and feel better to play: both factors that would increase its popularity. A huge part of my motivation for this post is my time playing Seismic Blast for myself, and dealing with its issues in my own gameplay experience. As always, I appreciate your opinions and feedback on these posts. Look forward to the set I cover next month!

I would also really like it if Storm Blast was better. The ideas in the set are fine, and it matches the mechanical theme of Storm Summoning, which is that it ramps up and gets better in longer fights, vs enemies with tons of HP that facilitate the long setup. My issue is that both of these sets have the weakness of powers being disproportionately bad vs weak enemies and on fast teams. Lightning Storm and Category 5: both powers that theoretically can inflict great dmg... do very little in a fight that ends in 10 seconds. On top of general buffs to Storm Blast, I think the baseline of what the set *should* be capable of doing needs to be adjusted. In the ideal conditions and long fights where Storm Blast users get to fight an Advanced Mode AV or Reichsman with hundreds of thousands of HP... I honestly believe that Storm Blast should outDPS every other set (including Fire Blast). This is only fair from a game design perspective, since 60%... 70%... sometimes even 80% of the potential damage of your Storm pets is lost on common encounters. It doesn't make game design sense or balance sense for a set with extreme weaknesses vs common scenarios, to not have proportionate strengths vs uncommon scenarios. The Bad in Storm Blast far outweighs the Good and that's really just not fun for anyone involved.

K, they already gave you an actual challenge with tankier enemies: go play Advanced Mode. I know you don't, just by the way you phrased all of your comments. Go play 4* ITF and tell me how well running in and nuking on your Blaster worked. Oh you... you don't actually engage with the hard content, but still cry for nerfs? Yeah no.

Agreed with The Goddess of all Kheldians, having a pretty and customized personal testing range, that fulfills the exact same criteria as the 3 testing Pylons in RWZ, would just be a buff to the game.

+1, the Widow "hold arm / wrist-mounted dart shoot" animation is one of the best animations in the game. So many powers should have this as an alternate animation or even just the default one: pschoof.

Coming to a CoH near you: varying weather! 5% chance of the skybox changing to Fire Base Zulu / Cascade Archipelago: demonic hellstorm.

Midnight for me as well. If it makes you feel any better, 99% of people who enter a CC will lose, so you're not missing out on much.

Where are the options to take Ancillary Beanbag, the best power in the game? This is an outrage to Beanbag fans everywhere!

Wake me up when they add Beanbag Mastery.

Insanity. This would just result in melees being more reliant on external buffs like Speed Boost/AM/Schmeletrical Schmircuit/Ageless Destiny, but they'd still run all their toggles. I am not sure you understand how badly this wouldn't work, but it would make melees Tankier and thus be a series of massive buffs to them, rather than nerfs.

Fascinating. My argument against Tar Patch being able to miss, is that it's fucking stupid. Tar Patch doesn't logically make sense as a power that can miss, and other versions of Tar Patch can't miss. Epic/Ancillary pools also need to be correctly balanced against each-other, since that's the decision that all players make when they select one pool over another. Dominator Sleet doesn't need any Accuracy enhanced to work, but Dominator Tar Patch does.

In what world should Dominators need to slot Accuracy into their Tar Patch when nobody else does, and when Tar Patch competes with (and loses to) Sleet in another epic on Doms: which doesn't need any Accuracy slotting at all? It's insane how bad Tar Patch is on them. 80% of players are just going to keep taking Sleet.

Bump cus I tested this too, and it results in the game lying to the player about what their Alpha slot is doing. You'd need to be very observant while testing to know that you aren't getting the Range from the Alpha, and I bet this bug is currently tricking/affecting several players builds.

There's a 2nd part to this bug, even if it's a text error. Irradiated Ground is DETOGGLED when you get mezzed instead of simply getting suppressed. This is inconsistent with 99.997% of toggles in the game currently after HC did a consistency patch on everything, and it does come up as soon as you do something like that Mapserver Event that just happened. IG constantly needing to be manually toggled back on is incredibly annoying.

But we can get a bugfix for the almost totally useless Brute's Fury ATO proc "soon" hopefully... right devs? I mean, surely fixing the bug related to flags on the proc can't be that hard and isn't too much to ask?

This is beating a dead horse at this point and should move to its own topic. I'm going to reiterate that how CoH/CoV used to work is no longer relevant at all, and won't be going forward.

But that history doesn't matter anymore. All that matters is fixing the problems now, and the way the game works now. New players to the game literally don't care about anything you just said as it has no effect on them and they can't go back to the game pre-Going Rogue. That's why we're pitching solutions to the problem.

A fixed ATO, slightly improved bulk (the scalar thing for Brutes is past due and still needs to be looked at: midway between Scrapper and Tanker just makes sense), and any one of the secondary stat buffs being pitched (Recharge rate, debuff resistance, mez resistance) will be sufficient to at least make a Brute build have some innate appeal over a Scrapper or Tanker build with the same powersets. Bonus Recharge and debuff resistance would be especially helpful for Regen Brutes as a specific example. There's good ideas being suggested, we just need some of the devs on the Powers Team to actually listen. If they can just let go of their vendetta against AE farming and realize that Brutes are struggling in the rest of the game, we might see a better game for all players.

People don't want to spend time and energy switching and making new farmers, regardless of how much or how little work it is. Also, most players don't care about being optimal (read this thread for direct evidence of that) and therefore, may not even know that there's something better than their Brute.

I'll toss my hand in to help too. Here's my Necro/Sonic MM build for reference. The 1st priority in power order for me was getting the 3 bonus pets out, and so for Bots something equivalent would probably be Repair Drones (and the Plasma Burn attacks if you take em). Once I had that, I took my full 3 Leadership auras as quickly as was reasonable without sacrificing key powers from my secondary. Most of the build is just optimal proccing in attacks/pets, and having to squeeze those damned Aura IO's in (the 2x Def and 2x Res auras that have been discussed). Totals are pretty bad, but MM build totals are always bad because MMs slot so many things that only benefit their pets (which detract from your personal set bonuses, and thus your totals). Hopefully this additional data point helps you.

Sure, that's how it should be. I agree with you that Brutes should be faster at content they can survive than Tankers. I mean since Brutes are squishier than Tankers, they more or less have to be able to clear content faster from higher DPS... otherwise they sit (where they are right now) behind in both offense AND defense. Sadly, that's where we are right now.

I like your positivity CrusaderDroid. I agree, this isn't the thread to teach people how proportions work and other basic math. We should stay on the topic of buffing Brutes and giving them an identity again.

But wait, there's more. Chance for Beanbag on every attack. When you land 3 Beanbags in quick succession, you entered BEANED UP state. This increases the chance to Gadgetize on all attacks by 5%. Whoooo Traps Arsenal Melee goooo!