Replacement

Absolutely! This is downright awful, and makes me feel bad that the only way to complete them is to run around sniping the already beleaguered and prone council member out of a pack of 5th column. Maybe it wouldn't be too hard to add "and 5th column" to the quest text and objectives? Nice.

I'm not sure why people are reporting such great results... I compared punch and kick to some scrapper primaries and, iirc, found they're basically tier 1s with heavier endurance costs. I can't imagine it would be better on ATs with a lower melee multiplier. But I wonder - am I the only person who would be a whole lot happier if they increased the cooldown of these (especially Kick) and upped damage to match? Basically, I feel like Punch should be there for people who need an attack that's always up, and Kick should target people who have only an occasional hole to fill in their attack chain.

Ship it.

Pardon the double post. I'm mobile and it's late. I believe there's also a click heal in Savage. Zepp, I would suggest editing your last post or creating another with a copy of your most recent take on the set, so people know "this is where commenting on this latest revision begins." Most of this first page is a bit befuddling to a newcomer, now.

To note, this is kind of a non-starter issue for any new Assault sets incorporating Whips, for a simple reason: There are only 4 whip-using animations, and one of them is a bit problematic (the Summon Hellfire animation) since it would be hard to extend it to medium range, and I'm not sure how it would work as a mob runs away around a corner. So any suggestion that takes out one of the few usable whip-based attack animations really is going against the whole idea of making a usable set that adds the Whip animations into the game as an option other than the personal attacks in Demons. In short: use all of the whip animations. You misunderstood (I don't know how to say that online without an implied negative tone -honest mistake, no negativity). I would certainly keep every usable whip animation. I was saying move it down and swap places with one of the later powers, such as the tier 7 or 8. Buuuut this is a miniscule detail not worth mulling at this point. That would be Justin work.

Seconding the idea of using flame sword (with touched up colors) visuals/animations but with some slightly altered stats to be more inline with MM's Hellfire stuff. This isn't even about power -- you want it have some mechanical distinction from Fiery Assault. I would suggest swapping Crack Whip with Rain of Fire, adjusting numbers as necessary. Reason: purely so you have a late-game lash to look forward to. But that's an obviously minor detail. Cauterizing Aura seems... like a dangerous precedent! I'm not entirely against it, but sustain in Assault sets is super rare. I wouldn't be surprised if Captain Powerhouse' upcoming Dominator buffs are mostly copying over Blaster Sustains. It doesn't feel off the table. But I want it stated for the record: THIS is where you're departing normal.

Sorry Tater I'm not looking forward to this change, unless they're giving us all a thumper blast with the damage snipe is now which ain't happening. Only /fire's snipe you can't get insta with any real regularity on your own, all other secondaries that have the snipe can adjust and maintain their tohit to frequently be above the threshold, so to me we're just catering to dinosaurs who can't make minor adaptations to have the best of what they can be as it is currently. Feel like they're opening a huge can of worms here. What of all the other deserving underperforming powersets across all the ATs? Or are we going to spend some more time nerfing far more unbalanced power sets? I'd much rather see new Control and Secondaries, new strike forces in the vein of Apex and Tin but harder and maybe fully level shifting you, more incarnate powers and trials to use those powers on. That's what I would be looking forward to had they mentioned getting the ball rolling on some of those things, but we gotta get those snipes nerfed. I do agree though I'm anticipating what the revamp is going to look like on all the secondaries. Just hope they don't break anything. -Forced power picks (leadership, a patron pool, even?!) -Required mastery of the IO system There is nothing here that is accessible game design. For a game that prides itself on infinite possibilities, the last thing you want to do is make some of them traps. I'm not saying the rest of the game is perfect, but this is a very glaring outlier of powers that no casual user would ever know "don't even attempt a snipe set unless you already know what you're going to do to make it work."

*Triple blink* This solves all the animation issues. We could just have a "Hellfire Assault" that includes all the whip attacks and a simple color-tweaked fire sword, for example (fun fact: Dominator Fire sets do not give them any sort of fire swords, so this would supply them that as well). Pretty sure you could get to 9 pretty quick like that.

Whoah whoah whoah whoah. I just saw this! Captaaaaaaaain! Could you please come back? Could you elaborate on this? I see two interpretations: [*]From a tech standpoint, it requires a lot of messy work, such as onerous duplicated effort or technical challenges [*]We have the same definition of Implementation, and you're talking about all the changes you'd need to make I implore you, please consider a "less is more" approach, here. I'm talking changes that not only keep more of what players enjoy with these sets in-tact, but also less work for you! Consider: Sustain powers are fun. No need to remove all melee powers from the Manipulation sets -- just the ones that duplicate across to Assaults. Completely write off Mental Manipulation right now. It's a complete loss and there are enough sets to make a functioning AT. We're super done with more armor ATs. Excluding some Build Up overlap which would need swapped out for Aim or similar... expect to replace an average of 2 melee attack/repeat moves with defensive skills (and I would actually suggest low-recast Clicks like Scrapper > Soul Mastery > Shadow Meld). I threw together an ugly spreadsheet using City Of Data, (surprisingly, the Wayback machine has a listing with most i24 data) to see just how much overlap there is. Let me know if you want it. Easiest to port (2 powers must go): Darkness, Fire Arguably easiest to port (1 power must go, but you'll probably need to axe a 2nd to keep them in line with the other sets) Devices, Ice, Martial Some work to port (3 powers must go, and that's assuming swapping out Build Up is non-controversial) Energy, Electricity No data on the i25+ sets that aren't listed on the City of Data Wayback machine. If there's interest, I'll add that data and compare it. EDIT (if this is ever seen..): I understand the direction they were headed with the Inherent but it's too heavy-handed. It's too rigid. Don't feel beholden to this following example - I like it, but the thing I want to call attention to is how it provides the player a unique gameplay loop without beating them over the head with it. Take the tack of "positional advantage". Calculate a value based on the Defiance formulas for each power. If the attack is melee, it gives a defense buff. If it's ranged, it provides a recharge buff. This creates two dynamics, and incentives to switch it up. And you accomplish it without an inelegant "inherent toggle" which I seem to see in every AT thread.

So.... I have something to get off my chest. The 97% Insta-Snipe never left beta. People keep acting like it's this holy grail that shouldn't be violated, but we're really not sure Paragon Studios ever would've been happy with their implementation either. I really hope Homecoming moves forward with these changes, and soon. I can't wait to actually get to use Moonbeam in parties.

This is interesting. Paragon Studios always said "New pet sets are hard." I'm curious to know if that really meant "a new pet set that is distinct from what we already have is hard." I wouldn't even know where to start with the code to really figure that out, but I feel like most of us would be very happy with some mostly-copy/pastes of the current sets. E.g. Create a copy of all Thugs elements and rename them Skuls, change out the loaded character models to Skulls and poof, a Skuls power set.

This is where I'm at! Focus on making a few good sets that are diverse but can be ported; extrapolate and find identity from there. The stumbling block is that a melee/support needs some way to buff themselves, but simply meshing in armor powers is too "I can do everything." Tweaks to their powers to make buffs pbaoe is the simplest path forward. It also makes them feel distinct from the other Support-capable ATs. Disclosure: I do not care about building a Paladin. That's maybe 30th on my list of things I'd want a melee/support AT for.

Glad to see this is still going! The suggestions that everyone agrees on are the ones that sink to the bottom and have low visibility, so I appreciate seeing people +1ing this. I also want to mention the flip side of this: Ninja characters who feel compelled to disable Ninja Run in combat, which is super lame when you're, say, a /ninjutsu blaster who does a lot of combat repositioning. I'm literally playing my titan/ninjutsu scrapper on my other monitor right now (Ghost-faced killer, basically), and he needs all of his end for that giant sword, and nothing left over for his aesthetic.

In my brain, I feel such an AT should be called Interceptor. It fits their position (running in to intercept bad guys) and also informs what debuffing and buffing does for your party. I know you guys want your /Empathy Paladins but honestly, Empathy would be one of the harder sets to proliferate. Test bed sets These are what I would suggest starting with to actually test out the AT's viability and get a feeling for what needs patched up. Primary sets - You'll note I intentionally avoid sets that can cause Redraw. Dark Melee Fiery Melee Martial Arts Secondary sets - I selected these because they're reasonably "easy" sets, but are also so different from each other that they highlight some of the design challenges. Cold Domination Dark Miasma Radiation Emission Inherent/Special mechanical considerations: Instead of including Armors in these sets, I'd rather see an approach to get a more reliable amount of benefit from their own buffs. So to put Cold Domination on a similar footing with Dark Miasma, for example, you'll need to get at least a portion of your own buffs. Approach #1: Simply change all the "aoe buff allies" powers to pbaoe, let them affect self. Cool, but down the road we'll get to stuff like Temporal Selection and we'll need to know how to deal with those ST buffs that are OP to give everyone. Which doesn't bode well for Empathy. Approach #1.b: One interesting thing you could feasibly do is make all their buffs even weaker than MMs but AOE. Allies gain 2 stacks but you gain 1. Approach #2: Some sort of unique self-target method. Something as simple as "targeting through enemies who are targeting you" seems... dubious to pull off in-engine, but could maybe be workable. It means you would buff yourself less the more tanks you have. Approach #3: your inherent is a Click that creates some sort of pet that you buff, and its buffs reflect to you. Also, +1 for replacing Taunt/Confront with Power Build Up. That would be fun.

I've been playing around on Titan Icon with the -n parameter (NPC) to see what's in there. The Roman dresses (Solaris is what's pictured in OP, but there's also a Sybil entry which Serene wears) are both entirely missing the abdomen portions, meaning they only work with the Sybil belt piece equipped. Also, they're both chest pieces in there but there's lots of odd stuff like that (Mynx's "M" icon on her belt is a chest piece, for example). That said, there are a lot of good-looking pieces in Icon's NPC stuff. Particularly the Belt category, has lots of stuff that looks like it would require little/no artistic touch-up to import... At least, that's what I'd say if I weren't aware of how hard I'm dunning-kruger'ing. Anyway, I'm too lazy to upload/link the picture, but I've made a pretty good-looking (fidelity-wise. NOT a strong fashion choice) NPC outfit starring: -Selene's hair -Silver Mantis torso/legs -Diabolique chest detail and boots -Penelope Yin's shoulders -Some clawed Talon hands -Lamashtu belt

-cov in the launch parameters works, too. Don't think there's a shortcut like that for Going Rogue... or I haven't found one. -Whenever you log out of a character and return to the select screen, it uses the alignment of the character you logged out of. -I don't know anything about Freedom.

And the flicker is obnoxious.

I definitely feel the priority should be filling out missing themes, like psi for scrappers, etc. But I'd also like to see some light/luminous pools enter the fray. In a fantasy of unlimited dev bandwidth, could even tie it to a blue "patron" arc involving the peacebringers you're gonna copy powers from. It's weird to me that the only "canon" (such as it is) light-based warriors are alien squids.

So the only valid answers are supportive of the proposition? If you interpret it that way, I don't think you're cut out to be providing feedback. EDIT: I can't stand being this blunt and mean, but there is nothing respectful about a community that knee-jerks with "nope." The whole /jranger thing comes off 100% douche., Every time. Come on guys, this was the game with the good community. If you want to say "Fulcrum Shift is so good that it requires giving up set benefits to keep it in line" then Goddamn say that. None of this "lol have a meme" crap that helps no one.

Just a heads-up to anyone (like me) who wasn't around in the i20s back on Live: Night Ward has ghost citizens and other fun mysteries going on. Pretty fun aesthetic. No crazy fog though.

So Switchfade's interpretation is probably the correct one - that PvP tipped the scales in their decision of introducing travel suppression. But it was being discussed before then. Did anyone else ever read Jack's blog/dev posts back in the early days, before the game was actually built? I've been thinking about them a lot recently. It's where I first learned the term "tankmage." Anyway, I'm pretty sure he mentioned their apprehension towards "jousting" in one of those. That said, they waited a long time to pull the trigger on it... So if the boot fits... But as to Solarverse' actual question: you're safe. As someone else mentioned, all of your beefs were about pre-i13 decisions. i13 was them righting the ship, taking their licks, and moving on.

You know, I absolutely remember there being a handful of top-tier builds in PoE when I played. Specifically one with some kind of like, thrown axe spamming spell build, or something. But that was a while ago, so I went to look it up and find that not only did they move towards a more class-based system by limiting certain skills to certain Ascendancies, but there even isn't that much diversity in which classes end up at top tier. I think PoE behaves exactly as predicted. And while I know next to nothing about the Pathfinder or Occultist, I'm willing to bet that Grinding Gear improves diversity by restricting or trivializing over-performing combinations. It's absolutely true that ongoing development has helped the devs "stay ahead" of too strong a meta taking root, and there have always been FotM builds, but nothing any different from any class-based game. In fact, let's just be clear and frank about this: you cannot equate "has some known/favored builds" with "classless always results in a tiny number of repeated builds.". I'm not sure that's what you're arguing and I respect your opinion so I'm trying not to put words in your mouth, but that's the general tone I'm gathering from posts in this thread. When the truth is, it is no more flawed than classed systems where people get kicked from WoW parties if they aren't specced correctly. But more on topic, this is the sort of stuff where I say, ATs are enough of CoH's identity that I wouldn't eliminate them entirely in a sequel. I would, however, prefer to see them as starting points and play style suggestions, providing a clear path to great characters for players who don't get into optimization. ...ok, one more note on the classless concepts. I find classless systems don't typically fail in build diversity: their failure is in noob traps. PoE is again a great example of this. While I found all the player choice I could ever ask for, it came laden with ways to brick your character.

- Consolidation of some of the more boring powers. Example: 3 powers for 3 different sword attacks? How about 1 power purchase that throughout your career gets cd reset and effect mechanics. Maybe you can attack 3 times before it goes on cooldown, with each of the 3 hits having different animations and effects ....tl;dr on the above. Buy 1 attack power that is actually a combo. Remove boring "attack chain filler." - More and stronger power pools. It's so year-2000 to have to take Kick just to get to the power I will actually use. Power pools should be nearly/as good as AT powers, and create the true way to "ascend" your AT. -A little more contentious but uhhhh... I kind of hate AT modifiers. Why can't my scrapper be a good leader? Before you say "that would break the game," understand the game was built with them in mind and underwent a decade of balance adjustments under that premise. If we're talking CoH2, I say ditch the AT modifiers from the get-go and tune accordingly. *** People saying "classless doesn't work because CO.". STOP THROWING THE BABY OUT WITH THE BATH WATER. Lots of fun tabletops use a similar approach and manage to not fall into the same pitfalls that people in this thread take as inevitable. That said, I suggest you guys take a look at Path of Exile's method: 7 classes that are better described as 7 "career starting points." In fact, CoH has Spines/Fire and PoE has no equivalent build. That is the epitome of "everyone will end up with one of these" because it's criminally useful. And that's why I suggest smaller but better primaries/secondaries and a much larger emphasis on power pools. 8)

...You should definitely build this on Justin. I am quite sure you actually manage to have more melee attacks than time enough to use them all. Particularly with cross-punch in the mix (which I actually just tested on Justin, incidentally -- cone attack that would give this build 10% recharge bonus per struck target).

I'm not sure I quite understand what's separating this from Energy Aura -- it looks like you even borrowed a few powers from that set. What's the niche this hits which that doesn't? I would personally like it to be more unique than what I posted but I'm not sure how willing the team is to actually develop things so that was a set built from preexisting things. Also aesthetically energy aura is not force fields. Err that's exactly what I thought EA's aesthetic was. If it's not a force field, what it supposed to be?