Shin Magmus

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!

Yes, quite literally anything long enough. If Brutes are X% slower on 3 minute content, then they're still X% slower on 3 hour content. Now that we've cleared this up, back to the topic of how to improve Brutes.

I disagree with everything about this point. The absolute time in question is irrelevant to comparative analysis, and the way you phrase it makes it seem like you have a problem with people who can go fast or who have good builds; everyone plays the game differently. However, the proportional time difference between those ATs all doing [example] in [sub 3 minutes] matters a lot, if one of the ATs in the comparison uses the exact same powers as the others... but is weaker in offense and defense, and repeatedly clocks in 20-25% slower than the other ATs. That proportional difference would be the same even if they were measured doing something that takes 2 hours, but now the bad AT (Brutes) is lagging behind by 24 minutes or more. Do you see how this makes sense?

The data shows that there are specific defects with the AT. The people making rational arguments, that include performance on Advanced Mode team comps at end-game and comparative analysis with Scrappers and Tankers, already know that Brutes have no niche amongst them and no identity of their own anymore. Yes, people do "just want the Brute AT to be better". Brutes deserve it.

Giving Brutes something to do with Fury, that also debuffs enemies, is going full circle. I'm not saying that it would be bad, but it's LITERALLY just swapping Brutes to the position Tankers were in with Bruising. The compensation for doing less damage than the other AT, is to be a shitty support and partially increase the team's damage. Going this way also brings Brutes into "stepping on Sentinels' toes" territory, not that Sents are a good idea in any way. Sents are an answer in search of a problem, but they're also currently the damage dealer / armor AT that has a -25% Resistance debuff as their inherent. That debuff is single target BTW. So you'd need to be really careful about giving an AoE -Resistance debuff to Brutes. I think most of these suggestions are overdesigned in principle: the solution always lies with Fury and only with Fury: no new active powers necessary. Making Fury do more things or build in different ways is all that needs to be done.

Everlasting's favorite Task Force's are: "LF AE Farm plz I'm lazy" "Kill Most ITF" (Imperious Task Force), but not Advanced Mode even though it's more profitable MSR (Mothership Raid) TinPex / ApeMage TFs

You're the Wind Demon here, you fix the Winds!

What about the other Epic Armor which is both Def and Res: Frozen Armor - https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=epic.defender_ice_mastery.frozen_armor It appears to have the same flag. Maybe this should be looked at in a batch, good find Macskool.

Yeah this was mentioned off-handedly by someone before, but I guess nobody ever made the actual bug report. This should be pressed to correct in a Hotfix patch, preferably at the same time they bugfix the purple-patch-affected ATO procs like Brute's Fury.