Replacement

Quotes in full if you're going to try to sensationalize me, please. It was said in jest for this context but, take that entire quote and drop it into literally any situation in real life, and yes, I will back it 100%.

I know it would be ridiculous and it's... not likely, but I've wondered before about a teleportation toggle. Where running towards a target always cues a savage leap-esque teleport to target if they're inside a distance range (not too close, where it'd be better to just step, and with a short max range). It would need some annoying logic. Something like... While enemy targeted While forward button is held Listen for enemy distance If distance is lower than it was half a second ago AND If current Distance is between 10 and 35 feet Teleport to enemy location Sounds inefficient. As for simply cleaning up standard teleport, I would like that approach, too. A suggestion I've made before is making the Descend key (default X) instantly disable the Hover effect. That way you could keep the hover for folks who need it, but have an instant-out for others.

You have no reason to be opposed to changes that do not affect you but do improve other people's lives. Unless, you know, you're a monster.

Either this wasn't in pre-edit, or I skipped right past it. Thank you for tempering your post, here. About "the data". The thing is, you don't even need to play CoH to see this. This reminds me of the "added damage to Favored Enemy" problem in Dungeons & Dragons™: If your class is balanced around the damage you deal to Favored Enemies, you are underperforming against unfavored enemies. If you are balanced around how you perform against other enemies, you are overperforming against your favored enemies. I see your latest post that came in while I was typing this. I do not see a reason to continue our back and forth on your individual points. Much like Vanden earlier, I feel like you're reacting to specific things I said instead of the overall purpose of this thread. So.... ----------------------------------------------- Hello! This is the Feedback & Suggestions forum! In the same way that we all know a Scrapper punches harder than a Defender, we can all say it's mathematically true that a Dominator is outperformed by a Perma-Dominator! My suggestion is that we should make an effort to reduce the gap between these two builds! In the same way that if Stalkers had a .7 melee multiplier, we would all come to the Feedback & Suggestions forum to talk about how weak they are compared to Scrappers, I have made this thread to bring to light the objective, mathematical difference in power between Dominators and Perma-dominators, compared to the gradual, linear power curve experienced by other ATs in their journey to IO perfection! Thank you for your consideration!

@Outrider_01 I hope you had fun with that. Simple question for you: Is it a good design decision that if you are 1 second short of permadom, you are at least half as strong as a Dominator with permadom? I do not give a shit about how much you are trying to cast me as unlikeable and flawed. Tell me how that is a good design decision. Tell me how it makes it an appealing AT for casual players who have no idea what they're in for. EDIT: @Yomo Kimyata I would like to have your vote, but it's not much of a nerf. My "easiest" suggestion would be an invisible nerf to current high-end builds (it would nerf them during travel time and party downtime and that's really it), while buffing builds that fall short of perma.

That's fine. I'm liking your opinion a lot, here. But before I sign off on the "agree to disagree" I want to make sure I'm clear on my position because I'm not sold you do disagree with it entirely: A blaster who isn't soft-capped is still damn fun. Still very effective, feels like they are doing their job. A blaster at 44% Ranged defense is not half as strong at survival and output as a blaster at 45% defense. A dominator is an imitation of a perma-dominator. A dominator 1 second short of perma-domination is half as effective as a perma-dominator. Because of the rest of their kit, this includes offense and defense. We are free to disagree on the details, but this is the crux of my entire argument. This is a bad binary.

All good. About this particularly, I'm a bit confused on the wording in your first paragraph but I think my response is: there will always be a benefit to building certain 'meta' ways, but no other AT must suffer as big a gap in performance as Dominator. And that's not fair to Dominator. As for game health... I literally am incapable of seeing a downside to adjusting Domination outside of player pride. Much like the Fast-snipe changes - we got rid of a mechanic that was opaque and exclusionary. The only people sad were the people who enjoyed it because they liked the reward of flexing their game knowledge. I actually do think Controllers could receive some love, btw. But Support is powerful, and a lot of Domination's power is really just "overcoming my lack of Support" with stuff like mez protection. They do not have this crazy grand canyon of performance they need to cross over.

Misunderstanding: I am not asking if Permadom is too powerful in its own right. I am saying: do you think it's fine and healthy that some players can be permadom, and others are not? Do you think it's fine for the AT to have most of its strength locked to such a degree? It is obvious I do not think this is good. It is horrible, in fact. Either a) You think Permadom is overpowered. You should support my proposal to remove the binary. OR b) you think Permadom is just fine. This means non-permadom is an abyss of poor performance. You should thus support my proposal to remove the binary so we can begin to bridge the gap. Anyone who thinks there exists an option between this, like "Dominators are fine regardless" is just not looking at the data. They are not seeing the vast difference that no other AT must suffer through. ("You" is not necessarily MTeague, to be clear.)

Annnnnnd my suggestion wouldn't impact you at all, while improving the game for many others so... you wouldn't have any reason to shoot it down.

@Vanden Do you believe Permadom as it stands is perfect and healthy? (clarity edit: I mean that it exists and is unachievable without severe IOing, see below) Do you think it is fine that one AT has such a huge binary in its performance, totally cut off from all but people who have mastered the system? Do you think it is fine that in addition to the soft-cap struggles everyone else has, Dominators must also give up all their power and IO choices in pursuit of Global Recharge?

You will notice that if such a change happened, we would actually be able to have discussions about adjusting the rate at which Domination fills. With the current status quo, I don't think that's even on the table. I had actually considered that it might require something similar to the "Villain" power to refill the bar in dire situations for other alignments, but I really think adjustments to the fill rate (probably including a modifier for team size) is the better place to start. The thing about comparing Dom:Permadom to SO:IO is simply one of vastness. Brutes go from Scrapper survival to full Tanker levels, and that is nothing compared to Dom->Permadom. Even Kheldians require less work - and they're intentionally designed for "Veteran" players! So what about more radical changes, like Domination As A Toggle? Would that make you walk away from your Dominators? Build more? Thank you, that's a really good way to put it. I think this does a better job of describing my "basic enhancing" issue that @Vanden took issue with.

Your responses... confuse me. If Permadom outperforms *any* character, you are still agreeing with me on everything but where the benchmark should be. You should still want this stark binary eliminated. The Jekyll/Hyde thing is about maintaining current playstyle expectations. The suggested change** would allow those players to still have that while reducing the pressure on players who do not. Defense softcap affects everyone. Honestly, I am really struggling with you, here. Anyway, that's basically this: By "Click" I meant literally every power you click - you seem to think I'm talking about Duration clicks. I mean Cinders and Smite and Ice Slick and Mental Blast, etc. Literally, "all the buttons I have to keep clicking on." Seriously. None of this is relevant to the fact that Domination is a binary needs destroyed. **My suggestion was also just a suggestion. It should be clear it was not the point of my OP. I'll go ahead and edit in some verbiage here, but I want people to focus on the Subject line of this thread.

Pre-emptive Responses: "Other ATs have to sacrifice flavor for power too!" Yes, but the difference isn't anywhere this significant. A Scrapper can pick up Boggle or Touch of Fear, maybe waste a couple of pool picks on flavor, and still be extremely strong. Contrast: Dominators basically have most of their power pools spoken for. In turn, their hyper-low recharges on "normal" powers reduces them to only needing (or in the min/max world: WANTING) a tiny handful of their primary/secondary powers in their actual rotation. "Oh yeah? What about Petless Mastermind?" ...Is actively going against the class design. In the pursuit of player expression, a player should still choose the Archetype that most closely adheres to their vision. I don't like your use of words like "Optimized" or telling me what's required to be "Good" Cool, just don't project your opinions on me. This thread is about objectively bad game design. And that affects people with open hostility towards optimization more. You, theoretical poster, are the person who benefits most from addressing these issues. My goal is for players who are even worse than me (a low bar, indeed) to not feel like an entire AT is locked to them for not having the ability or interest in system mastery. My goal is for players to be able to choose the powers they like without the AT punishing them for it.

I figure now is the time to post this, now that I'm on my last shred of willingness to fight with people who just "nope" anything that will improve this game. I made this topic because I truly believe Dominators should be accessible to all player types. If you like current Domination because it requires you to be "this tall to ride" in regards to knowing IOs well enough to Permadom, your opinion is not welcome here. The goal is to see Domination become accessible without impacting the performance of people who already enjoy their Dominators. Primary issue: The more optimized your Dominator build, the more homogeneous it is. If you love your Dominator just the way it is, you're probably building it the same way as every other good Dominator build: Permadom. How many powers are you using to make sure you have enough LotG mules? How many set bonuses are you only caring about Global Recharge? Just how much of your build is really your own? Sub-issue: too many clicks, forcing you to give up "cool" for "power" The AT that cares most about global recharge also happens to already have the most Clicks. This means if you want your Dominator to be good (with its ever-increasing global recharge), you will always prefer to optimize your routine to just a few clicks, with all other powers being largely-situational (and mostly just IO mules) where they aren't passive/toggles like that Maneuvers you grabbed just for the 7.5% extra Global Recharge. In-line TL;DR: In case I'm not clear. Dominator has to make powergame choices if it wants to compete at a level that many other ATs simply get to by Enhancing (Even crafted IOs). Next issue: Unbalanceable Permadom is head-and-shoulders above "1 second shy of Permadom." This is a nightmare. If you balance the class around the assumption of Permadom, anything shy of that is vastly underpowered. If you balance towards no permadom, how can pemadom possibly be balanced? So it becomes difficult to say with a straight face that it's safe to raise/lower rate of Domination bar filling, for example, since you have to perfectly capture how both "versions" of the AT perform. Solutions Lots! There are many ways to fix this and I would support many of them. Please be aware that I care more about recognition that this is a problem that needs fixed than any of the solutions I list below. But here is the simplest: Dump Domination bar on ability activation instead of buff expiry. CON: current permadominators will need to ensure they are refilling their bar again before their bar is up (SEE BELOW**) PRO: Losing Domination will no longer completely remove your momentum. PRO: Jekyll and Hyde feeling is maintained. PRO: Build requirements to be "good" are eased significantly. PRO: Power develops on a curve instead of a sudden spike at the end. This doesn't fix all issues. Optimal builds will still be optimal, so this isn't a huge sea change. It does, however, bridge the gap between these two types of players. ** This change also makes the class far easier to balance. If this change were implemented, Development would also be able to tweak Domination bar fill-rate without severe repercussions. Other solutions? I think there are other solutions, and probably better ones, but most of them start to incur "cottage" costs. An example would be turning Domination into a toggle that costs Domination per second instead of Stamina. It'd be great to get to go nuts and make "tool for everything" builds with all of my clicks, but it would have a much higher impact on current builds. Appendix: Mechanics. In case the reader isn't aware, the clutch detail of Domination is the bar emptying out when the buff expires. If Domination is off of cooldown to be used again before that point, you simply Click it to push out how long until the bar wears off another 2 minutes. This means if you are even 1 second short of permadom, you will need to work to fill your bar again, and thus be locked out of Domination for all the time required to refill.

Even if it was shifted into the base? By which I mean: decrease recharge of all powers by 20% but reduce Hasten benefits by a similar amount. Even reducing it by 30% would result in Hasten providing a larger relative benefit, but with objectively less impact (and thus necessity) to a build. This is just me being curious. I'm not really on board with nerfing Hasten today -- I'd rather focus on a Dominator revamp and a minor ding to PPM, as those are the left and right fangs of Hasten anyway.

Someone call the developers, we finally agree on something! The issue is, there are people who like the current implemention (check out the last Focused Feedback: Experimentation thread for examples). I think the consensus is that Teleportation needs some of its powers combined and condensed to make room for a combat teleport. Based on context clues of what Captain Powerhouse has said in the past -- I think the intent is to get all 5 origin pools out there door and then revisit the original travel pools.

Tiny level ranges for arcs is the issue. I would choose 4x XP and +5-10 level range for contact access any day. Disclaimer: Part of my altism is choosing arcs for my characters. My opinions are fundamentally incompatible with players who need to have "completionist" toons that run all arcs on the same character. My ideal is to have a character that begins an arc at level 1, run 15 different story arcs, and be level 50.

I would actually suggest Dominator or one of the VEATs. Reason: good base multipliers. You will still need to make an actual pick for level 2, and you will need to grab at least one other power from primary/secondary/epic. But It gets a bit better if you at least let yourself take all of your Epics. Presence + Experimentation = a surprising amount of utility and control.

You sure? I'm only seeing -perception (detection range, as opposed to attack range). Or were you saying that's where you would add it?

This is... I find myself in a weird position. I want to argue and tell you why you're wrong but I don't have to - you were overruled a decade ago. Still, here it is: it is more important for someone to be able to build an elec*3 tank than it is to deal with patron immersion.

Luckily, the devs disagreed and there are options without the mark for sure on blastermind Soul Mastery. So the precedent is set and any armors missing this option should definitely gain it. And damn am I glad for that precedent. It's bad enough how many characters have to rationalize a double-cross just for the powers that make sense to their character. Being forced to bear a mark that makes no thematic sense as well? Hard pass.

Brave.

I think it was mentioned that some of the Upgrade costs or behavior aren't quite right, but I wanted to give some data in case it helps. Testing Data: +tier enhancements are charging full price to upgrade. Level 13 character Slotted with a level 15 Damage Enhancement Combined another 15 with it to gain a 15+ enhancement Using Upgrade button attempts to convert this to a level 16 enhancement (despite there being no reason to do so) Still charges me a full price of 19k influence to do so

Feedback: DOs and SOs are now both online at the same level (5), and that makes it very hard to notice that SOs are a thing that exists, since they're below DOs. If these are organized by some sort of hidden ID, can this ID be lowered so SOs float to the top of merchant lists? It may honestly be better to limit SOs to level 10 and up (player level 7) entirely to introduce to players that "something has changed" to cue investigation from a novice player.

It also happens to be fantastic for testing.