Bossk_Hogg

Counterpoint - little Alt-Reicht snowflakes have the biggest persecution complexes. They love to dish out bigotry and misogyny, but whine at the drop of a hat. Here's some info on your buddy. https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/11/magic-subreddit-on-lockdown-after-cosplayer-quit-due-to-alleged-harassment/ https://bentcorner.com/jeremy-hambly-christine-sprankle/ What a class act eh? Any friend of his is automatically questionable at best.

Blasts have secondary effects. Fire gets more damage. Dark gets -to hit. Sonic gets - resistance. All of them are universally good (or are supposed to be). KB is the secondary for Energy Blast. Should it take a slot to remove the to hit from dark? If KB is soooooo friggin good like you KB apologists want to pretend, why should someone have to pay to remove it? Or, if it is a penalty, why does EB not do more damage than other sets? Because it's pretty underwhelming at really everything except pissing your teammates off and slowing down missions by scattering crap everywhere.

If it's an actual perk, like all the KB apologists claim, then it should cost nothing to remove. The fear in burn and caltrops is a penalty to balance them (and was removed on certain AT's). So is KB a bonus or a penalty? Because the lackluster damage of energy blast and peacebringers doesnt seem to warrant such a penalty... If you want to raise the damage to compensate for the hassle of KB, I'd be fine with that. KB is an outdated and frankly too weak a form of control to bother putting up with. For comparison, Dark provides more safety with -tohit and has a perfectly cromulent KB if you want that.

It's too much of an investment to fix weak power design. Energy Blastr is already pretty mediocre in damage. Just make a null the gull setting and be done with it. That way people can swap on the fly for solo and teaming.

Web Grenade - Now officially worse than the Devices version (along with trip mine and time bomb). I think an AE slow around the target would be good. Up the recharge to compensate if need be. Triage Beacon - make it mobile and add + recovery. Stationary effects have low value on good teams, and this power heals a pitiful amount as is. FFG - agreed that it needs a boost to its speed. Otherwise it's an amazing power and IMO the main reason to take the set. Trip Mine and Time Bomb/Detonator need a complete overhaul. They only deal damage, which is kind of lame from a support set. They are slow animating and interruptable, making them ill-suited for the fast paced reality that COH teaming is. At minimum, they need the animation changes that Devices got. Trip Mine should become "Tactical Mines" or something. A 3-in-1 power similar to Swap Ammo. Leave Trip MIne itself as the incendiary damage option. Add in a Cryo Mine to deal ice damage and apply a recharge/run speed slow, and a Flash Mine or something that deals energy damage and lowers to-hit by 20%. Time Bomb/Detonator should become Doomsday Device, a variant of Omega Maneuver, that summons a taunting bomb that briefly confuses nearby enemies and blows up. Also lower the recharge of the MM version. 10 minutes is insane for what this does.

But only working when combined means it does nothing most of the time, on most teams. End drain is too binary. And I also get not wanting to "fight statues". Hence my suggestion to add a recharge boost or some other perk when you receive end back from draining an opponent.

Basically every set significantly re-uses assets or animations. There isn't a single one that I know of that uses all unique. Besides, if it bothers you, don't play it. It's not like you really pay that much attention to your teammates power animations anyways.

So there is a bit of a disparity between sets that have a level 18 temp pet (thugs, demons, and necro) and those that do not (bots, beast, mercs, and ninjas) in that the former have an easier time slotting the pet global bonus IO's by using their temp pet sets as a mule. Would it be possible to allow the pet sets to be slotted in the level 6 and 32 equip and upgrade powers? Currently they don't accept sets and there's no real point in slotting them with anything. note, the pet IO sets wouldnt really DO anything but provide global/set bonuses in these powers. It might help some of the lower performing sets.

How is that any different from 4 rad defenders giving huge - resist, - damage, - to hit and - defense? Or a couple of rad/psi/sonic/beam blasters just nuke stunning every spawn?

That legit needed to be done. As much as I love my blasters with 30 second AE holds, they shoudlnt be better than my controllers.

I'm all for improving Poison. The focus is the issue, being a mostly single target debuffer (the splash radius is pitifully small and weak in effect). COH is, for good or ill, an AE game, so being best single target debuffer doesnt really mean much. It's also a huge endurance pig. It's T9 for non-MM's also requires you to be in close range. Given the lack of self heals or buffs, this isnt a super spot to be in... Perhaps consider adding a HOT or Absorb?

Clearly the person asking you not to grief your own team is the real villain. They get to tell you to wrangle your mediocre powerset because it makes things more irritating/slow/dangerous for the other 7 members. And yes, you should be hovering and knocking stuff to the ground. That you fight even this shows how useless a teammate you are. But hey, surely everyone else is wrong about knockback but a few fetishists on the forum.

The chance to return drained endurance should either be upped, or when you get returned endurance you should get a short lasting recharge buff. That would effectively make electric blast's secondary "do something" even when the mob still has end left. Defenders and corrupters need higher endurance drain values as befits their AT. Its weird they don't drain more with their blasts similar to how they debuff more. I'd also say that blasters, defenders and corrupters need Tesla Cage given the damage boost that Sentinels got on their Tesla Cage.

Solo, I get it can be a needed form of mitigation, but knockback isn't remotely needed on your average team. Knockback powers aren't doing more damage than other options (energy blast is pretty low on all forms of damage actually) to compensate for the extra effort they require to not directly slow down combat by scattering mobs. Basically, on a team, there is never a time I'm GLAD to see knockback, merely less annoyed. It's basically a hindrance to be overcome and chill teams put up with. Why should the melee have to "do their part" to overcome your powerset's weak design? Or anyone? I don't have to worry if inferno is going to knock stuff out of a targeted rain of arrows or have to worry if an electric blaster is going to scatter a group out of the ae debuffs that were laid down. What makes you so special that others have to deal with your irritating power design? At minimum, a null the gull option is sorely needed for peacebringers and energy blast sets, with the IO's offering granularity. The other thing needed is for mobs to take extra damage from KB, to make it worth dealing with the hassle.

I don't understad this. The powers are simply unwieldy in a team environment due to taking too long to set up/trigger, and that is universal. There is essentially no amount of debuffs inflicted to make Traps time bomb worth waiting around for. This isn't to say that I wouldn't like them to be more debuff oriented. I had originally posted a suggestion for Trip Mine to have 3 types of mines to set out (similar to dual pistols swap ammo power), with an incendiary mine being the current implementation, a cryo mine for slows, and a toxic mine for debuffing enemy damage and to-hit. Turning Time bomb into Omega Maneuvers (and improving Omega Maneuvers) would help this as well. But the core issues of traps not meshing well with how modern COH actually plays on a team needs to be looked at.

Agreed. The beast ones at least build stacks of pack mentality. I would be nice if all the attacks got something meaningful, aside from chance to knock down...

I'm sorry, I guess I misunderstood you. I thought you were opposed to just giving Sentinels assault sets, and instead were wanting a new AT, with assault and weaker shields than sentinels but that also somehow tanks better than a sentinel. The latter seems much harder to balance than the former, as it would require a new inherent, new epic pools, etc. Not to mention cause even further issues with the tank/brute conundrum. Sentinels with assault would be great, and would fully realize many concepts from a low level instead of having to wait until epic levels.

If you want a damaging character with shields, why not use the AT's that already exist? Scrappers and Sentinels are quite solo friendly. I don't get the point of trying to make a third damage/shield AT that can sort of tank. There simply isnt enough design space.

So why not play a sentinel with provoke? Tanks are already having an identity crisis with brutes. Either a ranged/soft control tank will overshadow tankers, or they'll just be a worse version of an already marginal AT. This is designing the game for issue 3 in an issue 25+ world. It may as well double sleep durations too. A new playstyle alone (which again, overly fiddly for the same payoff) isnt a good reason to create a whole new AT, particularly one in a niche that is already problematically crowded. Imagine if there was a DPS character that gained damage bonuses for attacking the healthiest enemy, and required a crap ton of tab swapping to equal blaster damage. Or killed things in alphabetical order. New playstyle, but why?

TBH, that sounds mostly pretty terrible. For example, slows are pretty useless on a decent team. They only matter after a target has exhausted all their attacks, and by then the mob is locked down or dead. BLASTERS get AE holds on a 90 second recharge. Sentinels with Rad, Psi etc are throwing their Nukes every 30 seconds which also function as an AE hold. Soft control is dead on PVE teams. Outside of them turning slows into holds, I don't see any real utility. Improving HOTS? Given how people feel that healing is more or less useless, I don't see a point . In incarnate stuff you're basically full health or dead. KB is already mitigated by AE immob, KB to KD enhancers, or just not being a dumbass and scattering stuff everywhere. Any AT that needs to jump back and forth from melee to range is going to lose out on damage while moving. You seem to have created a half-ass tank, with a needlessly busywork playstyle, that would just be eclipsed by a brute for less effort... Being good on bad teams isnt a niche worth developing IMO.

I'm wondering if the best solution wouldn't be to have new pools with various melee attack options (and some ranged). Throw the T1 and 2 of various sets, a weaker AE like Combustion, a hard hitter, and a utility like a ST immob. Set it to be mutually exclusive if you already have the powers or something. If a defender wants to punch stuff, let em.

Does it really? It deals less damage than Ripper, which is a faster recharge, animation, and a cone that hits more targets. The animation time coupled with melee knockback (ugh) is a huge drawback. Thunderstrike is a DPS loss, and an artifact of the original devs poor design. Lower its damage like 20%, turn the KB into KD and make it a true PBAE and it would see use. That would put it on par with something like Atom Smasher.

I'm surprised there were no changes to Elec Assault. Havoc Punch is at the lower end of the melee attack's DPA, and Thunderstrike is uniformly garbage in all sets. Is the formula for Thunderstrike accurately reflecting that only a small portion of the damage is AE? If the everyone was hit for the full amount it would actually be relatively balanced.

I'm really hoping the Devices changes proliferate to Traps. If not, can you explain the rationale? Is anything else in store for this? While the set can do some crazy stuff solo, its team performance is at the low end for a support set IMO.

I just wanna say THANK YOU for reinstating the Malaise pattern. I had it on my dark defender on live, and incorporated his tutelage under Malaise in his backstory. It was irritating when they took it from us, and I'm glad to have access to it once more!