Shin Magmus

It's a Christmas Miracle. Happy Holidays everybody!

It has some uses on other ATs but we're on the Defender forum: the CD on Build Up is way too long. The powers were not balanced around available options in other Epics/Patrons, which is unfortunate because that's the comparison all players at all skill levels make when choosing their ONE Epic Pool. Nobody is going to give that Build Up a look compared to Spirit Drain, which both lasts longer and has a lower CD, or Soul Drain, which has a similarly very long CD but at least it grants a buff for 30s giving it some situational use cases. You'll sometimes see people on these forums defending objectively outclassed powers, but nobody serious is taking Ice for any reason other than aesthetics/theme. It's outclassed but workable if you're doing like Snow aura + Frost trail aura + MinFX Ice Armor to try and look a certain way... but even those thematic reasons are harder to justify when you could just buy the aesthetic armor effect you want for 250 Prismatic Aethers.

It took 2 seconds for someone to argue against your suggestion and say that they like the bad power or the bad way something currently is, and that improving it will hurt their build. Beanbag moment, beanbag thread.

Heal them with nanomachines by using a better support set than Empathy, such as... anything else in the game. Color Pain Domination green or something.

Maybe if I keep bringing it up someone will eventually care enough to make one of the Brute ATOs not be a literal waste of a slot, when Scrapper and Stalker ATOs are uniformly excellent and Best-In-Slot build-centralizing effects.

I agree that Brutes need some sort of help. Unfortunately, I also understand that this community will never agree on what those changes should be. In addition to legitimate issues with Brute performance relative to Scrappers and Tankers, Brutes have been numerically "wrong" since their inception. Factoring in Fury and the base damage scalars, Brutes should be getting the highest (significantly higher than they are currently) self +Damage modifier of all ATs in the game just to ensure parity with all other ATs. What I mean is that when a Brute clicks Build Up or Follow Up or Rage, they should get the same proportional benefit after clicking those powers that other ATs do. Unfortunately, Brute balance is super wonky because both the Live devs and the HC devs see no real issue with a Brute clicking BU and their effective damage output only increasing by ~20%... why even click the power... why even take the power? Additionally, this discussion about Brute balance mentions that their +Fury ATO is bugged: this bug is still unfixed. Here is a link to the proc itself on CoD. You can see that the proc is missing the purple icon and flag to "ignore level differences" i.e. ignoring the purple patch. This is causing the ATO proc to grant only 0.65* the listed amount of Fury when fighting +3 enemies. In the best-case scenario, the Brute ATO should grant a significant amount of Fury which is just +dmg. In the worst-case scenario (with a Kin on the team), the Brute ATO proc does literally nothing. That's a bad starting point, but to also have the +dmg be reduced to such a degree because of a bug is pretty sad. A change to the Brute ATOs to fix this bug and do something to make them more useful would go a long way towards fixing some (but not all) of the issues the AT faces.

The Tar Patch thing is because the player version of Tar Patch was also completely unresistable for many many years. It was uniquely powerful vs tankier enemy groups and MoG/Unstoppable-using enemies. Dark Miasma is a defensively focused powerset so this extreme boost to offense made the set just unrelentingly powerful... it makes sense that enemy Tar Patch worked the same way.

Congratulations, this is now the worst thing posted today!

There already are lady Trolls. They just look indistinguishable from the man Trolls. Did you stop to ask any of them how they identified or did you just arrest them without conversation?

Saying "lol" is also "perceived toxic" behavior. On this forum, it is verboten to say "lol". This comment will be deleted even though I'm only making it to agree with you and warn the rest of you guys. That's the reality of our community.

Toxic is also the most resisted damage type on average in the entire game. Since it didn't originally exist within the game, there are basically no enemies that are weak to Toxic. There's a misconception that enemies don't resist it either, but they actually do because many enemy powers had Toxic resistance added just like the player powers did. In descending order the 4 worst damage types in the game, on average, are: Toxic, Lethal, Smashing, Psy. Amusingly, the situation is inverted when you have 1 or more Spiders on your team because all versions of Venom Grenade inflict a self-stacking, no-cap debuff of -20% resistance to 7 types and -40% specifically only to Toxic.

Another bug for the pile; Great write-up. I'd love to see a patch that just bugfixes a bunch of enhancements, covering well-documented bugs like the minimum levels and the ATO procs which still incorrectly grant a variable effect instead of the static effect they say they should, entirely because they lack the ignores purple patch "unaffected by enemy level" flag (such as Brute +Fury ATO proc). Bugfix patch!

I have nothing to add because Snarky already stated it. This is one of the most Toxic Blast online spaces I've ever seen.

You guys scared OP away, just FYI.

Char and GFS are GOATed picks after the patch that rebalanced Epic powers. Not sure why someone deleted my comment about that for no reason, but yeah you'll have a strong character with Fire/Dark/Fire. Whether you actually enjoy the powersets is a question only you'll be able to answer though.

Cobalt is busy making every single cool thing in the game and being the absolute best Dev. He doesn't have time to fritter away with us here.

False hope is one of the least excellent things I can think of. As a concept, it is almost intrinsically guaranteed to do more harm than good, in basically any and all contexts. I agree with you, but I embrace the rigidity of logic and fact: free of wishy-washy non-answers. The nice thing about real objective answers is that they also preempt the creation of more threads which lead nowhere and end up locked... but now we're discussing a solution to prevent the same thread from re-appearing 2 months later... and again and again in a cycle of time-wasting despair.

You think transparency looks bad; I do not. We will have to agree to disagree... EXCELLENTLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What about a pinned post of "Never Gonna Happen" suggestions? You know, like a bulleted (and editable) quick reference list of things that were suggested but are confirmed shot down and never happening? Such a post would be easy enough to edit with links to the other threads (cite your sources). As the most helpful person here, it was easy for me to think up this excellent idea. I even have 2 nominations for the first things that should go onto the "Never Gonna Happen" list. 1 - Bugfixing the broken Brute +Fury ATO (it's clear that Brutes getting less Fury from hitting enemies higher level than them, and more Fury from hitting enemies lower level than them, is intelligent game design and WAI). 2 - The in-game memorial suggestions (just link to the closed threads and make it be totally clear).

What about a conference? I suggest they have a little meet-up and drink tea and eat cookies, but also become unified on policy in a manner of much excellence.

My best friend GM would never follow your account... but this comment will disappear when your comment disappears. I agree with you about agreeing, but I don't agree about that other thing. It's not being excellent.

The best I was able to find for you was a Heart of Fire. Hopefully it helps:

You don't need "heart" or "fire", you just need to agree. Become one with the excellence. Join us...

I agree with the GMs about everything.