ForeverLaxx

Not to run this even further off-topic, but the concept of "squishies don't exist anymore" is just patently absurd. When you're running basic IOs only with maybe your only procs being a Performance Shifter, Stealth IO, KB IO, or Panacea and you're running that on a Dom, Blaster, Defender (really anything without personal armors), you're going to feel very squishy when things don't go your way. I certainly know I do. There's times when I've had to use Rest multiple times in a single mission just because I get caught by a patrol while fighting another spawn. Being able to patch a set's inherent flimsiness with temp powers doesn't make that set any less flimsy on its own. Justifying nerfs simply because you personally aren't impacted by them is extremely selfish, short-sighted, and frankly a privileged way of thought. If I have to buy a bunch of gadgets just so my character can function, then that's a problem. No amount of claiming otherwise will change my mind. To the topic at hand, I can say I'm not a fan of nerfing the duration of Rune of Protection either. City of Heroes has historically been all over the place regarding Pool Power balance, with a trend downwards in usefulness. The few gems that exist tend to warp builds around them, but the answer isn't to push those diamonds back into lumps of coal -- a real effort should be made to boost the Pool Powers that aren't interesting or useful so that real choices can be made. For instance, why does Boxing and Kick have to hit so weakly and what harm would it do to allow these two powers to be functional replacements of main-set equivalents? Why does Arcane Bolt have to take so long to animate that it's only good for dealing damage during Containment windows? I understand not wanting to give "squishy" ATs higher defense/resist values from pool powers, but why do the ATs that already have defensive armors get better numbers from these by default when the squishies can't stack them with anything but an Epic armor? There's just so much that can be done with the various Pool Powers to turn them into real powers that are just as much a part of a character's identity as their Primary/Secondary. The fact that HC is currently trending on Primary/Secondary set adjustments/redesigns to make skipping powers in a Primary or Secondary next to impossible only exacerbates the problem of Pool Powers being so lacklustre except for the small handful that gets picked in nearly every build. Fix the weak powers. Don't nerf the only decent ones.

Sounds like a personal hangup to me. I don't like how Stone Armor is designed, so I used Dark Armor instead and colored the particles to look like sand floating around. I don't care that the set itself is designed to be good against Dark and Psy damage and not Smash/Lethal (with a side of Psy) like Stone because it's the power animations and colors that fill the concept. Requiring that your "dark magic" must also debuff ToHit is a very stringent requirement, even for me, someone who only builds concept characters. You're just restricting yourself unnecessarily to the point of stubbornness.

It's very simple. Beta Decay is a toggle that affects enemies. All toggles that affect enemies, be that with damage, debuffs, or anything else, will shut off when you're overcome by a mez effect. Toggles that are only buffs for you/allies will not shut down, such as Tactics, Maneuvers, Tough, or Weave. The reason Beta Decay is the only one that shuts off when you're mezzed is because it's your only "offensive" toggle active.

I much prefer PC over WH on my Scrapper solely because it does more damage against a single target and doesn't have the inflated animation time that WH does thanks to that full half second of standing around at the end doing nothing. The reduced cap compared to it is meaningless for me since my job as EM is to nuke the bosses and not the spawns anyway.

Nothing quite says "me me me" more than complaining about a power someone else takes that "gets in the way" of how you think the game should be played.

Considering the concept of "chain your inspirations or you're not playing right" came from you first, and you've been repeating it over and over, I'd say the burden is yours. Personally, I don't like relying on random luck of the draw to shore up my character's holes. If you get around this by filling your email with large inspirations or buying them from the AH to store for later, that's something I don't want to do either. When I build characters, I build them around things I can control. I can't control what inspiration I get or how big that inspiration is if it's even the correct one.

It really seems like people have missed the point behind a push for what can "fix" Regen. I don't think anyone is advocating that the set become less active since that's pretty much core to its identity. The problem people have is that even when you take the time to understand all the levers and when to apply them, you're still reliant on your attack set to provide additional breathing room that other powersets essentially never have to consider and leverage. On top of that, while you're busy juggling which Attack to use or which Heal Button you need since they get in the way of each other, other sets just push through spamming their attacks and nothing else, clearing spawns with comparative ease. Regen just doesn't really reward being good at situational awareness beyond bringing you just to the same performance of a set that is far less demanding of your attention. That's the real problem, from my perspective.

Like a lot of things in tech or science that gets marketed for consumers, it's aimed at people who take them for their word and based on unverified, flawed, or purposefully vague studies. In short, they're marketing companies chasing the latest trend.

I'll do this on my Dark Armor/Stone Melee tank sometimes if the group moves fast enough. At that point, I'm just there to take the alpha away from the Fire Blaster and taunt everything. Maybe I'll throw in a Fault or something now and again if I get bored or I see things dying slower than usual.

Oh, perfect. I've been using the link/unlink workaround and glad to know this option exists instead. I doubt this works for the Tech Knight belt with the waist cape attachment but hopefully it will do the same there.

Any enemy that deals "special" or otherwise untyped damage makes Regen uniquely suited to handling. This is because, I'm sure you know, Regen doesn't have any particular resistances worth noting so all damage is functionally the same to it. The set is designed around this, giving it the tools it needs in order to survive where other armor sets, like Invuln or Willpower might fail. Those tools, of course, are the click heals. Unfortunately, you don't really see this much in-game. The best example is Hamidon and you don't even really "need" a Regen character to clear it despite being the best at handling it on paper. As an aside, it's still a strong melee armor set for PvP unless something drastic has changed. Melee isn't great in zone PvP, but the nature of how combat works there in a 1v1 scenario (mostly jousting) plays directly into how Regen wants a fight to go.

An actually good T9 that gives the armor set it's part of something completely different than what the rest of the set does by itself. Invuln doesn't really need Unstoppable, SR doesn't really need Elude, etc. MoG granting boosts to things Regen doesn't have natively is a huge boon when you need it.

The green dot should only be for powers that are click buffs with a duration or toggles. The yellow dot is for a proc, such as Force Feedback, which will be where the green dot is on any power that isn't a click buff/toggle, or adjacent to the green dot for those that are.

I'm a big fan of my Dark Armor/Stone Melee tank. Essentially a very beefy PBAoE stun machine that can also permaStun bosses for fun. Recolored the Dark Armor to appear like sand to better match Stone Melee's aesthetics.

Yes, it should. But then again, they advertise these boxes as elevators when they're clearly Wonkavators.

Because I think Air Superiority's interpretation of that effect is unique. All the other "knock up" powers seem to just be knockback with a vertical vector, when you consider how the targets of those powers ragdoll like a normal knockback effect would achieve. AirS, however, forces the mob affected to do a flip in place with an entirely separate animation. I'm not sure if this was the reason it was excluded, since it's technically not knockback, but it's something to consider.

This only really holds true for single slot, and somewhat for a second slot. ED pretty much nullifies any useful boost at the 3rd slot, effectively normalizing the SO and Generic IO values to which the powers are already balanced against. Shifting the "balance stick" to Generic IOs won't be moving it very far. Even if you get a player using Boosters in order to make 2 slots of Generic IOs pull the same weight as 3 SOs, ED once again shows up to severely limit any additional increases after that second slot, making the "Booster Player" only stronger in the sense that they have more floater slots that they can put in powers they otherwise couldn't afford to slot more than the base slot. As much as Generic IOs are the "new" SO, their impact on player builds doesn't push them outside of expected parameters of the old SO-only builds. Not really sure how your suggestion would change anything.

For what it's worth, I'm not against avenues of optional increased difficulty in order to let people really challenge their expensive "+4/x8 is now babymode" builds. But what people advocate for is rarely this, and it rarely shows itself in that manner down the line. What many people fight for, and what usually ends up happening, is that the entire game gets pushed into the "we need to challenge min/maxers" direction, leaving players who don't want to, or don't care to, indulge in reaching defensive and offensive softcaps in the dust. It's the classic case of balancing for the hardcore at the expense of the casual, and CoH at its core is a casual game. I say all this, again, as a min/max player in nearly every other game I can do it in (and when I eventually get to 50, I'll do that on my characters too, to whatever their concept dictates). My primary character in Dark Souls 3 uses a whip and "crappy" Pyromancies and I beat the hardest optional boss in the game (Midir) with just those tools. I'm not against challenge -- I'm against enforced build dictations by developers. CoH was billed as the "build your way" MMO and it set itself apart by being a mostly casual, jump in for an hour and feel like you accomplished something experience with characters you designed yourself. For the most part, it succeeded in that vision and many people, including myself, play it simply for that reason alone. Many tentative changes never happened because they would run counter to that initial draw, or in another way, would have turned CoH into every other generic fantasy MMO on the market at the time. I'm still here now, today, because the game is still very much a "jump in and have fun" casual beatdown with cool powers. It's not a numbers game unless you want it to be, and I love it for that. Comments like these: completely miss the point and seek to paint those who like the game the way it is as some kind of regressive, anti-challenge crowd and do nothing but perpetuate the overall impression that people wanting "moar challenge" are seeking to make the way I and others play no longer possible. I'm no longer engaging with these people because it's clear to me that the health of the game and its playerbase aren't their concern; they just want to have a captive audience to flex on.

Some buffs are less buffs and more sidegrades. Reductions in single-target power in exchange for AoE power, making AoE more spammable (but less impactful per use) so you have something to do in this fast-paced "AoE all the things" meta so you don't feel like dead weight, etc. It's not really a direction I like, but one I'm living with.

Declarations of fact that suit my argument but not yours are not "confirmation bias". Confirmation Bias is taking the natural progression of buffs/nerfs and the utilization of an entirely optional system to argue that the game is now easier by default and design. Which is what you're doing. But please, continue to project. I won't entertain you further anyhow. Shout into that void.

Which has already been addressed previously. Barring the travel changes, everything else is standard fair for underperforming sets. Some sets even got weaker overall, like Titan Weapons. Disabling bosses in solo play was always possible if you had enough control powers to stack. If you're talking optional build avenues that aren't required to progress and aren't taken into account when designing content, powersets, or power numbers, you don't really have a case or a point.

And nerfs, by the same token, make things harder. I'll give you the changes to Travel, though. So? Even a team of only SO people made the game "easier" because that's the nature of teaming with people who can click buttons every so often. The values that powersets are created under haven't changed. The values of SOs haven't changed. The base difficulty of the game hasn't changed. It doesn't really matter if you accept or believe it when we're not given any data to know one way or the other. What I do know, though, is that I don't want pre-50 content to be adjusted to account for this "obvious majority" of people covered in set bonuses. As soon as I'm forced to utilize the IO system in a manner that dictates every choice for me, I'll be quitting.

Which doesn't change the actual balancing factor of the numbers themselves, what they're balanced against, and what the game expects of you as a player. You are aware that "those people" existed on Live before it was shut down, yeah? The game's balance is the same now as it was on Live. The game systems haven't changed to make anything easier under the hood. Potential player access to better, optional, slotting has improved but that isn't the same thing as the game being easier on a design level as was indicated.

Explain how the numbers of enemies, the numbers of player powers, and the numbers of SO/Generic IO slotting haven't changed, but somehow it's still easier. The numbers in the system don't agree with your perception.

Easier due to experience. I run generic 25 IOs, which are inconsequentially weaker than SOs and the game is just as "difficult" now for my characters as it was after ED was introduced into the system. That is to say, still not difficult by standard measures as CoH was never really hard to start with, but to pretend the game is magically easier now than before with zero slotting system updates is absurd. The top-end power level is definitely more accessible than it was on live, to be sure, but the game didn't adjust itself downward just because everyone else had an easier time pushing themselves upward than before. The game's balance didn't change at all, but the costly barrier to access Set IOs was reduced, causing more people to be "tricked out" than before and skewing the perception that game is now easier when in fact, nothing really changed under the hood. It'd be like saying Dark Souls is easier because you knew the trick to get the Drake Sword early on, or Dark Souls 3 is easier because you knew to use a Raw modification on the Astora Straight Sword you find early in the game. This is why I'd want new content for Incarnates rather than a rebalance of old content. People who aren't using Set IOs shouldn't be expected to use them simply because they're "better", especially since the entire system is still 100% optional -- no contact even directs you to a University for the purpose of learning the crafting system. I'm not going to get into the muddied nature of the creation of new powersets as I feel too many of them these days require too many powers picked from the set to even function (I much prefer sets with minimal "must haves" with additional cool flavor/role powers to fill out choices for character diversity), but only Dominators really seem to have been built with permaDom status in mind. Even in the Dominator's case though, the damage that was granted during Domination was rolled into the base AT itself and Domination really only provides increased mez duration and magnitude, on top of an endurance refill and a nominal ToHit boost -- hardly anything worth being concerned about for standard content.