PoptartsNinja

Currently, very few; but that's down to enemy design. Most of the game's current mobs are built with bosses primarily being ranged or mixed attackers, with lieutenants and minions who are mostly melee to play meat shield for them--but then the minions die instantly and the bosses die a half-second later because they're unsupported. It makes sense for the Family because yeah, the Mooks die for their leadership, but not for every enemy group. If you build mobs like a D&D party (Bosses built exclusively as tanky melee bruisers, LTs built as mixed melee or ranged/support, and minions built exclusively as ranged attackers) the dynamic changes significantly--it's one of the things I like to do to make my AE missions more difficult without giving everything Super Reflexes. Freakshow actually sort-of function this way already, and people usually enjoy them! It's just that their ranged minions are armed with completely ignorable shotguns. If the Freaks snuck in some new ranged minions with 3-5 beam rifle powers then they'd be a more protracted but still enjoyable fight.

That's a good thought, and could maybe be emulated by giving bosses hold resistance instead of (or in addition to reduced values for) their current hold protection; letting them reduce the duration of hold, sleep, stun, or other CC mags but not protecting them directly. Or making mez protection short-duration high end cost (or no cost but high end requirement) click powers that last 30 seconds or so, which would add value to end drain if the bosses can't pop their mez resist under 50% endurance or whatever.

Partly a buff, partly a nerf. With damage and AoE being what it is these days, control has somewhat slipped by the wayside; and the mobs just can't really keep up, especially in the endgame. Rather than giving mobs more HP, or more static resistances, I've got an alternate proposal: Split current mob resistances into passive and active resistances; increase the value of active resistances and then make active resistances suppressable with CC. I think this would be doable without any major engine changes. To emulate mobs getting player-style toggle powers, they could be given auto powers with the "Cancel on [Held/Sleep/Stun]" suppression flags that player toggles currently have. Mobs (or entire enemy groups) could be given some satisfying damage type weaknesses (the same way Minotaurs/Cyclopses are vulnerable to Psi, it's really satisfying smashing an invulnerable Cyclops or Minotaur with a Future Pain), and then some degree of resistance to everything else. So, as a quick example, if we look at the Freakshow Tank Smasher: Tank Smashers have 25% resistance to Smashing and Lethal, and no resistance to other damage types. Under the proposed change, Tank Smashers would keep 12.5% passive resistance to Smashing/Lethal, then gain 25% active resistance to Smashing/Lethal, and say 20% resistance to negative, toxic, fire, and cold (because they're mostly robots), but leaving them vulnerable to energy and psi (since there's still a human brain in there--and not usually a particularly smart one at that). This would give Tank Smashers 37.5% resistance to smashing and lethal, 20% resistance to negative, toxic, fire, and cold, while still giving them a common, exploitable weakness (energy damage), and the bulk of their resistance would go away if the Freak Tank got held, slept, or stunned. But, there's more, which is why I consider this a buff and a nerf: Because suppression would need to linger for a few seconds, that opens the door for something fun: additional sources of suppression. Tank Smashers are highly resistant to smashing and lethal, but only because they can point armor plates at the enemy. Knockdown and Knockback could be made to suppress their smashing/lethal resistance for a few seconds, because the knockdown exposes vulnerable areas that would normally be protected by their junkyard armor. As an alternate example: Master Illusionists have 20% lethal and psi resistance, and 20% psi defense. Under the proposed change, they'd keep 10% lethal and 10% psi resist; and 10% psi defense, and gain 20% lethal and psi resistance and 20% psi defense as active autos. They could also pretty comfortably be given 15% smashing, energy, and negative resistance by using telekinesis to block those effects, but remain vulnerable to fire, cold, and toxic damage. That would give them 30% lethal and psi resistance, and 15% to smashing, energy, and negative; but the bulk of their resistance would go away on being held, slept, or stunned. Additionally, their active psi resistance and defence could be suppressed on successful confusion, because they're no longer focused on protecting themselves mentally. The end result would be slightly increased TTK on teams that focus on damage to the exclusion of all other factors (while at the same time not significantly harming their effectiveness; all damage teams would still be strong enough to manage this); but give teams with diversified capabilities a bit of a leg-up. And if the expanded suppression works, it could eventually, potentially be made to take damage types into account for boss or AV encounters. As a hypothetical example: a Devouring Earth plant/rock AV that's resistant to fire and lethal unless you hit it with a smashing damage attack, after which it becomes vulnerable to both for a few seconds. Edit: Or for the introduction of mobs with more positional defense, whose defense gets shut down if they're immobilized.

Honestly, if mobs had stronger damage resistance toggles that got suppressed by CC instead of just auto-resistances to certain damage types like they do now? That would make control powers a lot more desireable without making them so absolutely vital that teams couldn't function without a controller/dominator. "AT makes team better" is preferable to "Team can't function without AT" I forgot all about that! You just brought back so many traumatic memories. I also want to make it clear that, while I do think a lot of Jack's decisions would have been harmful if they were implemented; I have no issues at all with gabrilend's desire to see the game improved. As a result of this thread, I've become convinced that giving mobs suppressable resistance toggles is the right way to make CCs useful. Even if sleep only suppresses a toggle for 2-3 seconds, that still makes even a half-second sleep valuable.

Controllers/dominators would also be more relevent if it was possible to defeat enemies through stacking control magnitudes. Like, eventually, if you freeze someone into an ice block long enough they'll still be frozen when the police come to collect them or you finish your bank robbery before they can possibly thaw out. Unfortunately, that only works if the CCs scale in a way the CCs in CoH don't. Which is to say: if stun or immobilize above a certain magnitude could turn into hold, and then hold above a certain magnitude turned into a perma-hold, defeating the mob. Or if sleep turned into confuse, and confuse above a certain magnitude turned the mob neutral because they're mind controlled (defeating them). The game's not really designed or balanced around that, though. There're some really good and fun CC powersets in CoH, but because DPS wasn't really a design consideration when the game was first developed (DPS didn't become a design consideration in MMOs until WoW, and CoH predates WoW) the game was designed around a Tank/Support/Mezzer trinity (with Scrappers being off-tanks and Blasters being off-mezzers). We're very lucky that we accidentally got DPS classes in the first place and, unfortunately, because Statesman viewed mezzing as the more powerful option he accidentally under-powered it. That's partly why all the CoV ATs were DPS ATs. We got the Stalker, a melee-ranged Blaster. The Dominator, a control/DPS. The corruptor, a DPS/support. The Mastermind, a DPS/pet controller. And we got the Brute, a DPS/tank. Which is also why the Brute is so weird in modern CoH, because the Stalker has a built-in identity but the Brute? In those early days of CoV, the Brute was a breath of fresh air (at least for me). It broke the OG CoH gameplay loop at the time by being an AT that encouraged you not to stop and rest after every spawn, but to throw yourself recklessly into the next battle because your fury was high. In early CoV, Brutes often had to pray your team had your back with holds/supports because if they didn’t you’d probably “brute lock” and die when you inevitably ran out of end and your toggles dropped. It was the fun melee AT, because if you didn’t want the brute lock style gameplay you’d play a different AT. But over time, a lot of "Jack-isms" like: - Forced travel time, with most missions forcing you to leave the zone you took the mission in. - Contacts not giving you their cellphone until you’d completed half of their content. - Founders Falls not being on the tram line. - No inherent stamina management, encouraging players to spend time using the Rest power instead of fighting. - Balancing around the belief that one player should be equivalent to three even-con minions. - The idea that defense classes would run at most one or two toggles at a time, picking and choosing their resistances as the situation warranted and not stacking them to their resist caps. They got winnowed out of the game, or had their severity reduced... and now the "fight then rest after every spawn" playstyle is pretty well dead, and the Brute is no longer the reckless AT it once was because most every melee AT now plays like the Brute did back at CoV’s launch. And I'd argue that that's not a bad thing but it is where the game's age (and the development pause caused by sunset) really shows, because tweaking controls to make them more valuable would require some hefty fundamental changes to the game's systems; and Mezzes (and the Mez ATs) would be much more difficult to modernize than the Brute would be. And I don't think modernizing Brutes would be easy by any means. I've got a lot of thoughts on rebalancing Brutes, but I'm not sure where I'd even start with Controllers that didn't include the words "so let's fundamentally change the way control powers work" 😁 Which isn't to say that Controllers and Dominators are bad, either. I think the two are very well balanced against each other. I've never once looked at a team comp and said "Man, it sure does suck that we have a controller/dominator, I sure wish we had something else instead." It's just that control powers in general are a safety net in a game where safety nets aren't really necessary. My favorite Brute back on live (pre IO sets) was a Stone Melee / Electric Armor (without Tough), who was very reliant on Fault (Stone Melee's safety net power) for damage mitigation because he barely pushed 50% smashing/lethal resistance. These days, Fault is pretty skippable because the same combo can trivially hit the hard resistance cap to six damage types Actually, I can think of one thing that could make controllers/dominators more attractive without fundamental changes: a new, very rare enemy spawn def that contained say, 3x the normal number of mobs but could only appear on an actual team (i.e. not while soloing at X8, only if the team has 3+ or 4+ people). If say, 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 spawns was an "Overwhelming" spawn that a single Tanker couldn't fully agro manage, it would make controls (and off-tanks) more useful because the portions of the spawn that were uncontrolled would either need to be off-tanked or locked down with CC. At the same time, I could see players hating that and needing an extra difficulty option to turn Overwhelming spawns off the way AVs can be downgraded to EBs or bosses can be downgraded to LTs.

Fun fact: That's how Statesman thought people would play the game, by picking one or two toggles and only running them as the circumstances warranted. It didn't work then, it won't work now. Toggles aren't a major spender, they just increase the amount of time it takes to recover after a fight. The only thing this would bring back is needing to use the rest power after every fight, which would be as incredibly boring now as it was back at launch.

IIRC the biggest reason Wide Area Web Grenade didn't wind up in Arsenal Control was to keep it unique to Soldiers of Arachnos, I'd bet the same would apply to Venom Grenade. Cool ideas, though, and I'd love more APPs in general.

Slotting a chance for knockback proc into the power (if possible, if the power takes a set with a knockback proc) doesn't increase the chance the knockdown will fire, but would give you an extra chance for a knockback to fire. If both fire at the same time, you'll get a higher knockback magnitude; but there's a good chance only one or the other will fire which would somewhat increase the consistency at which that power knocks things back. Not knowing which power you're talking about makes it hard to offer other suggestions.

Defense is also "so tough the attack doesn't hurt" which is why it's in stone and invulnerability.

And Teleport gets 10 seconds of free hover after each teleport.

Laventera's first mission introduces you to every other regular contact in the zone. If Borea's missions can be taken before an introduction, she may need to be changed to give an "I don't know you, go talk to Laventera" to keep this from happening to someone else.

Pets just need to inherit their owner's running speed, since their built-in tools are so unreliable. They might start and stop a lot and you'd still outpace them, but at least you wouldn't outpace them so badly. It'd be nice if pets inherited their user's flying speed too, but that would take away group fly's only practical use case. Edit: But I also feel like hostages should have either "normal running speed + 1 SO-slotted swift%" or "normal running speed + 1 SO-slotted swift% + sprint" rather than the weird midway they're currently at, where they're too fast for normal running speed (causing them to catch up, stop, and then have to take a moment to re-path before they start moving again) but aren't fast enough to keep up with you while you're sprinting, causing them to get stuck on corners (or, more likely, on chairs or warehouse boxes).

Energy Drain has a longer cast time (2.37/2.508at for Energy Drain vs 2.03/2.244at for Power Sink), and the animation time before the end drain effect takes place is longer for Energy Drain than it is for Power Sink (1.767 for Energy Drain vs. 0.833 for Power Sink). That makes Power Sink easier to use as an "Oh shoot, I'm nearly out of end" power. In an edge case where you have exactly enough endurance to fire Power Sink or Energy Drain, Power Sink will almost certainly get you your endurance back before you detoggle but Energy Drain might not.

The Warriors are (not so secretly) weird hypocrites. Half of their leadership are magic empowered, and the other half are on super soldier drugs.

Slot the accurate healing chance for +end into it and it's also (usually) a blue bar reset after use.