Shin Magmus

This is like the South Park episode where it's The Man's fault for not putting the toilet seat down but it's The Woman's fault for not looking down before blindly plopping their butt onto the toilet with no seat down: every single character in either group always insists that it's 100% the responsibility of the other group.

Okay, I improved the set by focusing on the set and making Fortitude into a power that affects up to 255 targets instead of a single target. This new power will now be easier to apply to more targets than the current version of Fortitude, which will benefit some players more than others. I had already done exactly what you wanted, you just chose not to see it.

As for "data" regarding individual Empathy powers that underperform... I just looked at the power info and drew simple common sense conclusions based on basic math. Was I supposed to make a spreadsheet to prove that Regeneration Aura and Recovery Aura can't be perma'd? Do I need to show my work, provide links to the CoD page for Recovery Aura, and type this: "500s CD / 5 = 100s CD. 100s CD > 90s Duration, 100 - 90 = 10. At the unrealistic standard of the Recharge cap, a buff level not reasonably maintained, Recovery Aura still has a downtime of 10%." I thought that these basic points did not require a thesis or proof statement, as the math is simple one step arithmetic, it's barely even algebra. However, I can fill an entire post with basic algebra and then show the power stats of Pain Domination and Marine Affinity side-by-side for easy comparison to Empathy. Does this really add anything of value to the point?

In order to create a "data point" for Empathy random players who play the set extremely poorly, using a measurable metric such as: "can only keep Fortitude on between 0-2 teammates, and who never use Adrenaline Boost", I would need to cross some lines. @Player-1 I would need to begin logging other players' performance rather than performing simple solo testing on missions and empirically testing my own. I'd basically be recording these players against their will, just to write down a numerical metric proving a fact that most people already know. If you are suggesting that I should be recording footage of my teams and then reviewing the VODs to count the number of Fortitude / Adrenaline Boost icons and weight them by time, determining averaged buff uptime... I will do that. But somehow I feel like people here would call me mean if I were to do that.

It would seem that I fundamentally understand Empathy and the majority of its powers: nice! Well, CoH is a pretty old and reasonably "solved" game due to being a fairly simple MMO, so that makes sense. Several other people all independently reached the same conclusions as well, not to diminish any individual's understanding or contribution. Since the reactions were so positive to my proposed changes to Empathy, none of which remove the current functions of any of the powers, and since Healing Hands matches exactly what people want from Empathy in theory and do with Empathy in practice, I guess we just happily wait for the day when Empathy gets its due.

13 pages of people explaining to OP the concept of entitlement and how 2-way respect and communication work? Based. I 100% visit Null to disable being debuffed by Group Slow Fly on every one of my characters. It's annoying to have the onus continuously be put on everyone else but the Group Slow Fly user... the person creating the problem... but hey whatcha gonna do? It's not like this thread ever resulted in agreement or understanding between the 2 parties, and it never will. I wouldn't be surprised if the HC Powers Devs were looking at Group Fly with how often this comes up.

What if: instead of build diversity, we got Tar Patch but it has reduced everything beneficial, increased CD, and now it can miss and has to slot accuracy (even though every other version of Tar Patch can't miss and it's illogical that this version of the power isn't autohit). Doesn't that sound better? Why yes I have been offered a Powers Dev position, how did you know?

Obviously it would be a nebulous group of people from The City Council, or with direct personal connections to them: handled in a completely opaque way with no stated reasoning nor feedback... you silly billy. The invisible hand would pick the Gold Title winners, and any threads asking for more transparency would be trolled by the usual suspects and subsequently locked by GMs. You know how this works.

Thanks for all the feedback everyone. It's good to know that we all agree that Empathy powers being directly inferior to analogous Pain Domination powers is an issue. I'm glad to see players all root for the betterment of a powerset.

BOOM: Headshot!

I say we let the game stagnate and don't improve it. I like ToT Leagues and Banners!

I plowed through a ton of my backlog of single-player games and just in general had a great time experiencing things that I knew I'd probably like... but couldn't ever find time for. There's still so much more to do though.

I am depressed by the current state of affairs. I can't even remember the last time I was so dissapointed with the way a staff/admin group treated their community. Any change at all is probably a good change.

The long-lasting mez protection clicks are basically on a soft banlist from becoming AoE (even Increase Density as it is now) because they allow all the squishy ATs to essentially not have any weakness (before lv50 and Clarion). All current sources of AoE mez protection are field effects, and you lose the buff if you step outside of it, almost instantly in fact. The Clear Mind clones all last 90s and that being AoE is just forever off the table.

Aw... thank you.

A foreword from the author... This is an update to my original thread on long-overdue Empathy buffs and reworks, but now with the added context of Marine Affinity being released officially. Hi there, I'm the Mr. Shin who likes Defenders and Corruptors. You may have noticed me mention that Empathy is the worst Support powerset in the game once or twice. Well... that's because it's true; Empathy is objectively the worst option right now and the situation keeps getting worse by comparison. The HC Powers Devs have buffed and/or reworked pretty much every Support powerset in the game by now, even adding nifty buffs to outlier powers (Liquify in Sonic Resonance); these changes are greatly appreciated. The Devs have also added 2 new very strong new Support options in Elec Affinity and Marine Affinity: with these sets being useful benchmarks for the maximum strength that the Devs believe Support ATs should have. An unfortunate side-effect is that these sets absolutely dumpster Empathy by comparison. Empathy hasn't been buffed once, ever, and it's genuinely incompetent sad that Empathy languishes like it does. This problem is exacerbated by the high popularity of Empathy but the puppies and kittens woof meow. For some history, my first lv50 on Live was an Empathy/Dark Defender. I am intricately familiar with playing the set both before and after power creep, and with playing its near identical analogues: first in Thermal and later when Pain Domination was added. I vividly recall when Pain Domination first came out on Live; We noticed very clearly the changes to the set to bring it more in line with playing more smoothly with MMs, pets in general, and League mechanics. I also noticed the overt detail that no fewer than 3 of Pain Domination's powers are simply upgrades from their Empathy companion powers: this will be discussed in detail. These 3 powers offer incentives to pick Pain Domination over Empathy in an extremely literal way. A bigger issue is that Empathy was partially outclassed even in the oldest versions of the game, because it has bizarre weaknesses like a +Recovery power that doesn't grant a single other benefit for when your teammates do not need assistance managing their Endurance. It's a stark contrast from buffs like Speed Boost and Accelerate Metabolism, which provide +Recharge and have retained their meta relevance for 20 years. All I want is for Empathy to be relevant again, instead of the bad joke that it currently is. ------------------------- Fixed Empathy 2.0 By: Shin_Rekkoha (Shin Magmus) (Numerical values listed below will be using Defender as the base AT. Reduce power values by known scalar ratios for Corrs / Controllers / MMs) T1 - Healing Aura / T2 - Heal Other While these powers are ruthlessly boring, they have direct parity with the heals in Pain and Thermal: which seems to be the intended baseline for such powers. I dislike the long animation time commitment using your PbAoE Heal in all 3 of these sets, but this is a bigger issue when bad players put their Healing Aura on auto-cast: because it prevents them from being able to reactively click other powers. No changes are warranted here, but a small animation time reduction to Healing Aura, Soothe, Warmth, and Radiant Aura would probably be good for the game. *No Changes -or- minor animation time reduction for Healing Aura + clones* *Inspired Healing Aura and Inspired Heal Other added...* T3 - Absorb Pain Here's our first directly inferior power. Absorb Pain debuffs the user in exchange for the massive heal, but it doesn't give them any real incentive to use this power over Heal Other most of the time. Pain got around this by making Absorb Pain buff the user's damage, which is a useful buff for focusing on your work. As Empathy is more defensively-themed, I think Absorb Pain giving Resistance is entirely on-brand. This buff not only makes the power more safe to use, incentivizing the player to go for it, but it diversifies what IOs can be slotted into the power. *Add Resistance on self after use / allow slotting Resist Damage sets* *+22.5% Damage Resistance (All) on self (unresistable) for 15s* *Inspired Absorb Pain added...* T4 - Resurrect Here's our second directly inferior power. With the same 3 minute CD as Conduit of Pain but no buffs or secondary effects to the target or to yourself: Resurrect is the absolute worst "Rez" in the game. An incredibly simple fix is simply for this power to buff the target, using templates from other "Rez" powers. Conduit of Pain, Mutation, and Elixer of Life all give a very strong buff for a duration, followed by a weaker debuff for half that duration. This double-edged buff/debuff theme does fit those powers, but for an Empath's kind heart I don't think debuffing our teammates is thematic. Instead, I propose the buff granted be weaker as balance for not having a "crash" or debuff. Resurrect should give the target +12.5% Defense (All but Psy) and 15% Res (All) for 60s. *Add Defense and Resistance on revived target after use / allow slotting Defense and Resist Damage sets* *+12.5% Def (All but Psy), +15% Damage Resistance (All) on resurrected target (unresistable) for 60s* T5 - Clear Mind Here's our third directly inferior power. I am aware that people dislike most single target Mez protection clicks and wish they were AoEs, but that's never going to happen. Clear Mind is identical to Clarity, but both are weaker than Pain's Enforced Morale which gives a minor +Recharge as well. The bigger issue is how much worse these powers are than Antidote and Thaw, which provide Damage Resistance on top of valuable debuff resistance (to slows) in exchange for not granting +Perception. I've always thought there was a middle ground here, and that ground was giving both Clear Mind and Clarion minor Resistance to Psy damage; It makes complete sense thematically, matches the power names, and it partially patches a current damage type hole in both Empathy and Sonic Resonance. Additionally, Clear Mind, Enforced Morale, and Clarity are regarded as Dead Powers in your build because they can slot nothing useful for the effect of the powers nor mule unique IO's for your build; Most people simply throw in a Recharge IO which barely makes any difference. Allowing the player to mule an incredibly useful Resist Damage Unique IO in these powers is simply giving them parity with Poison and Thermal Radiation. *Add Resistance on target after use / allow slotting Resist Damage sets* *+10% Damage Resistance (Psy) on target (unresistable) for 90s, effect does not stack with multiple applications like Mez Protection* T6 - Fortitude The issue with Fortitude is that it is balanced around players being intelligent and very active. Fortitude lasts 120s but does not stack with itself from the same caster, so you are meant to move through the list of teammates and cast it on different people. With just SO enhancements, Fortitude is perma on 4 other players: objective fact, non-debatable. With sufficient Recharge bonuses (and no small amount of effort) it is possible to have Fortitude on all 7 other players on your team. The numbers on this power fall apart when the Empathy player is puppies and kittens woof meow. Not only is Fortitude shackled by this weakness via player skill, but even the best player in the world won't be able to reasonably extend Fortitude's benefits to the legion of extra entities from MMs, Controllers, Lore Pets, etc. The Live Devs and the HC Powers Devs both implicitly understood that AoE buffs mesh better with teamplay and leagueplay in the way that CoH has evolved, demonstrated through the AoE buffs (or chain buffs in Elec) that all post-Empathy Support powersets include. I don't think it's controversial to say it's long past due for Fortitude to be made an AoE. Changing the way that this power works will buff it more at the low end of of player performance than at the high end, but it will be a large buff regardless. There are 2 viable ways to rework Fortitude: AoE click buff or AoE ally-anchored toggle. If Fortitude becomes an AoE click buff, it will have to get numbers reductions across the board to have parity with World of Pain and Foresight, especially because a long duration AoE click buff will benefit massively from full-duration interaction with Power Boost. Alternatively, if it becomes an AoE ally-anchored toggle it can retain its current numbers and work like an inverse version of Disruption Field, which will only receive brief windows of increased strength from Power Boost. Marine Affinity has shown that the Devs are okay with strong buffing ally-anchored toggles and set the precedent for this change. *Change power to an PbAoE, either a click buff or an ally-anchored toggle* *Click Version: 25 ft Radius (affects user), 255 targets, 15.60 End Cost, 120s duration, 240s CD, +25.00% Dmg, +12.50% To Hit, +10.00% Def* *Toggle Version: requires ally to cast (pets okay), 25ft Radius (can affect user), 255 targets, 0.52 End/Sec, 8s CD, +31.25% Dmg, +18.75% To Hit, +15.00% Def* T7 - Revitalizing Aura (Recovery Aura + Regeneration Aura) It's best to lead with this: a pure Recovery buff is worthless on many teammates whose builds do not require help managing endurance. All good Recovery buffs in this game have useful secondary effects, usually +Recharge, to provide any benefit at all in these situations. Recovery Aura and Regeneration Aura also dubiously cannot be made permanent in a game where support sets have completely defined themselves by achieving "perma" buffs such as Overgrowth and Chrono Shift. So what we've got here is a power that is situationally useless... with the audacity to also have forced downtime. The current power Recovery Aura is a joke power, while Regeneration Aura is simply a decent power. This is completely sound justification to merge Recovery Aura and Regeneration Aura as part of the Empathy rework: it's just good game design. The new power needs a name and I think "Revitalizing Aura" fits the bill nicely, we're not done yet though... Increasing the duration is interesting but Overgrowth lasts for only 60s and Chrono Shift for 90s, and Revitalizing Aura is very similar in scope to those powers. Leaving it at 90s duration "feels right", so that leaves lowering the CD. A reduction from 500s to 360s is reasonable for uptime that is nearly permanent, and with outside sources of +Recharge could be permanent. Now all that's left is strength adjustment. Recovery +200% -> +100%, Regen +500% -> +250%, now grants debuff resistance complementing the buffs: 64.88% resistance to -Regen/-Recovery/-End at lv50. This new power still provides incredibly potent buffs, but now it also insulates the team against debuffs making it more consistent overall at countering enemy groups such as Freakshow and Praetorian Clockwork. *Regeneration Aura and Recovery Aura combined / Power renamed to Revitalizing Aura / buff effects decreased, cooldown decreased, added debuff resistance to -Regen and -Recovery* *PbAoE buff (affects user), 25 ft Radius, 255 targets, 26.00 End Cost, 90s duration, 360s CD, +100% Recovery (unresistable), +250% Regeneration (unresistable),+64.88% Resistance to -Regeneration, -Recovery, and -Endurance (ignores buffs and enhancements, unresistable, scales with player level)* T8 - Healing Hands (Empathy gets a NEW POWER) There's no getting around the obvious answer here: Empathy needs a new power and this power needs to increase damage in a way beyond the easily cap-able +Damage buff stat; The 2 options are -Damage Resistance debuffs and +Damage procs (additional instances of damage). We also have the precedent set by Marine Affinity's Shifting Tides, so the Devs are fine with Support powersets being able to add damage procs. This is the only way for the powerset to remain relevant on teams at all when the players aren't struggling, by providing offensive merit for when teams don't need Empathy for its defensive merit. The theme of Empathy is that it has 0 powers which directly affect enemies, and that gave me an idea. I've combined aspects of several powers to come up with a genius solution to this problem, creating a brand-new idea for a power that every Empathy player will love: Healing Hands!!! This power is a buff you cast on yourself that has 2 effects. First, it increases your Healing strength allowing you to puke out larger green numbers. Second, it changes the effects of Healing Aura, Heal Other, and Absorb Pain, via the redirect ability to call different versions of those powers in the same way that Titan Weapons works; You can think of this mechanically as "Momentum but for Empathy". The absolute brilliance of this implementation means that it rewards Empathy players (and their teammates) for the Empath hitting everyone on the team with Healing Aura: but it is a long enough duration affect that it also doesn't further reward or encourage needless Heal spamming, allowing plenty of time to use attacks and other powers. *Added new power "Healing Hands", self buff, +strength to Healing, redirect to "Inspired" Healing powers, grant affected targets +Psy Dmg procs* *Description: "You focus your heart and mind, strengthening all of your Healing powers to restore additional Hit Points. These powers inspire you and your allies to defeat your foes, causing all damaging powers to inflict additional Psionic damage. The bonus damage effect lasts for a brief time, but can be extended by Healing targets again." *Primary Effect: Self Buff, 90s duration, 360s CD, +25% Strength to Healing (unresistable), redirect Healing powers to "Inspired" versions of Healing powers. *Child Effect: Healing Aura, Heal Other, and Absorb Pain now buff all affected targets for 30s (Healing Aura also buffs the user), 100% chance of dealing bonus Psy Dmg procs on all attacks, does not stack from same caster (Healing again will refresh the duration of the buff, allowing it to last up to 30s after Healing Hands wears off), damage expression is similar to Brimstone Armor (check City of Data for details) but understandably much lower for balance reasons* T9 - Adrenaline Boost This power is pretty cracked for what it does honestly, just like Painbringer. When enhanced for Heal(Regen), this buff can make a decent build completely un-killable and put them into a hands-off safety state for 90s. I appreciate that it contains massive resistance to Slow/-Recharge as well, as that fits the theme and helps shield your chosen ally from dangerous debuffs. I see no reason to change this. However, if I was going to add anything, it would be that Painbringer and Adrenaline Boost should be the only powers in the game that give the target a small amount of "Bloom" like Nature does, enabling everyone to heal the targets more during the effect and partially counteracting -Heal debuffs. *Add -20% Resistance to Healing on target for 90s* ------------------------- That's that, the Definitive, much-needed, and well-reasoned list of changes for a long overdue Empathy buff and rework. Thanks to the HC Powers Devs for finishing up Marine Affinity and officially releasing it; Now we have a template against which we can measure Empathy's performance and dial in how much it needs to be buffed. My suggested changes to Empathy will result in a significantly improved experience for Empaths and their teammates, at both low skill level and high skill level minmaxed builds. Bopper and Captain Powerhouse, you can feel free to use my Healing Hands idea: it would make me as happy as a puppy playing with a kitten. I'm very interested in any and all feedback.

I agree, let's ban all PvP.

So since it's been almost 6 months, can we get the devs to maybe now finally address the bugged (and even if it wasn't bugged, still almost completely worthless) Brute ATO now? Is buffing Brutes allowed yet, maybe for the next patch, or is it still off the table because Brutes are stilled used by some people to AE farm so the devs think that any improvements to Brutes is illegal. Here's the link to the even older thread where I revealed the bug, this link is also available in the OP of this thread. Why would this still not be addressed?

I'd fully support several animation time reductions on Traps, as the set is forced to play more slowly than other sets. The great new power Temporal Bomb leaves a stationary buff/debuff so it has to be cast in every fight, unlike similar buffs in other powersets which are applied to players. Temporal Bomb alone takes 3x longer than it should to cast and detonate. This doesn't mean that Traps is weak: it's still the best AV/GM-soloing set in the game, but Traps is hindered by everything taking way too long. Here's a list of powers that should all cast at least a full second faster: Triage Beacon Acid Mortar Temporal Bomb Trip Mine (needs other tweaks as well)

The funny thing is that this is a sociological problem that stems from the same root cause as the lv50 AE farmed noobs you mentioned: most people want the greatest reward with the least effort. Spending any effort at all to form or lead anything is already "a bridge too far" for a lot of CoH players, and you can't fix it with a small carrot on a stick. The reward would need to be disproportionately, unfairly good to make some of these people actually become interested in leading TFs/SFs. Too small and it won't have any effect at all. However, the immediate result of that would be people fighting over who gets to lead the TF/SF now that there's a good enough reward, and a sociological inevitability of this would be a team splitting in half because 2 people both demanded the "leader reward". These 2 teams would then be competing for the same player pool and poaching players from each other. I can literally see 5 moves ahead and see exactly where this leads. That's why the pendulum would swing back the other way (because of people crying on the forums about it) and the "leader reward" would get changed to a worthless one-time badge like what happened with the Diversity Bonus. At that point, nobody would care about the feature and it would quickly be forgotten... sound familiar? Predicting collective human behavior is a science.

Nobody cares.

We're just fighting obesity and improving the lifestyles of Heroes and Villains.

It's a knife idea, I like the cut of your jib.

It truly was the end of an era when Veracor quit. It's like he said with that one key word: "consistency". Having people in the community who will consistently perform, even if it's not specifically by leading content... just someone you can consistently rely on when you need to is so huge. It's a bit of a shame that the main reason he quit is that the HC development consistently bothered him, but I guess that's just what we're stuck with.