PoptartsNinja

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.

The problem with universal damage sets is: they're unique. So if you slot this as a set, you get no real benefit because all of your tools are in one set; and if you slot them individually you obsolete an existing tool: the Sudden Acceleration KB to KD, which only does KB to KD. I suspect obsoleting Sudden Acceleration is the OP's intent: trying to render an existing tool useless by introducing more powerful versions of the same tool. Which I can't really agree with. What would be neat would be some new common sets for range/melee/ranged aoe/melee aoe whose 6th slot bonus was an inherent KB to KD proc. Something like: Pulled Punches (30-50) Acc/Dam Dam/End Acc/Rech Acc/Dam/End Acc/Dam/Rech Acc/Dam/End/Rech 2) X% recovery 3) X% energy/negative resistance 4) X% Energy/Negative/Melee Def 5) X% recharge 6) KB to KD With some reasonable but not overwhelming set bonuses that cap out with a KB to KD for the people who are more interested in fishing for bonuses than proc bombing.

So, tell us. What sort of melee set would you like to see?

That was never said, it's a long-running myth / misunderstanding.

Fault was always an AoE knockdown with a low-magnitude stun. It's great mitigation for defense sets that don't have innate +Def, like Electric Armor (Stone Melee + Electric Armor is really strong). The damage is new, and as far as I can tell applies to the projectile traveling along the ground not to the AoE radius. It basically does damage in a line between you and the AoE knockdown's final position.

IIRC Tank gauntlet adds a taunt to any attack, including pool attacks; but Brute punchvoke is explicitly scripted into Brute attacks and doesn't apply to pools, so a Brute shouldn't be re-taunting off the Pacify itself. It sounds like that might be a magnitude issue, you may have stacked more taunt magnitude than pacify's mag 3 placate can counter; or if you're soloing: the activated mobs aren't going to forget you unless you hit an elevator or exit the mission. You might have to do some testing, have two tanks taunt the same target and then have one pacify it to see if they switch to attacking the other tank. If that happens, it's a magnitude issue.

Skip O2 boost, slot Gale with KB to KD and the Chance for -Recharge enhancement. Enjoy on-demand -Recharge and knock entire spawns on their backsides whenever it looks like a friend is about to get overwhelmed.

I like this idea. They could even be opaque in different ways, like: matte, glowing, shiny plastic, or metallic and they'd all look pretty nice.

Do you have Hasten? It could be Hasten's end crash.

I don't think the toggle suppression would do anything since most defense comes from set bonuses, but I also don't hate the idea of nukes being a taunt. Agro management is pretty trivially easy unless you're at the target cap and Nukes are pretty notable. It would be another way to buff weaker nukes like Rain of Arrows without boosting their damage, too. They could just taunt less.

All tailor NPCs are now surgeons, the only remaining tailors are the trainers. Expanding the base tailor capabilities to match those of the zone tailors sounds good to me.

Honestly, MM pets should be the same level as the creator. That would be a survivability buff since the T1 pets would no longer be gray to +2 enemies. When the T2 pet is picked up, it could then reduce pet damage of the T1 pets by a % equivalent to a level loss (or perhaps slightly higher since being higher level would give them inherently higher accuracy). The T3 pet could then do the same, reducing the damage of both the T2 and T1 pets. That would create interesting (sub-optimal but potentially fun) scenarios where your lower tier pets would do more damage if you skip one or more of the higher tier pets. I've never understood Mastermind pet level reductions, they just don't make any sense.

The difference is: Blueside: Heroic deeds are all generally positive, or your character doing everything in their power to bring about a positive outcome on the rare occasion when you fail or are being duped. This sort of thing is easy enough to work into a character's backstory, even if stopping a bunch of wizards isn't something your power armor tech hero considers their usual "day at the office." Because heroes are reactive they lend themselves better to MMO-style storylines of "Hey, this happened, can you help?" Redside: The sort of evil deeds you do vary from petty theft to fun and campy mad science to kidnapping and murdering an innocent civilian schoolteacher to committing an act of bioterrorism that sickens or kills thousands. These aren't presented to the player any differently, and make the character seem like either a psychopath, a complete rube patsy, or a henchman who will commit acts of bioterrorism for even the smallest amount of money. In most of the redside stories, you're basically being set up to take the fall for something your contact wants done. Redside story arcs very much need a "suck up" story thread where you can betray contacts you don't like to Arachnos at certain break-points in their story. Imagine setting up Westin Phipps to take a fall to further your own personal agenda. I feel like that would be pretty satisfying without breaking out of the "villain" mold.

Male and huge characters have 4 different /e chairsit emotes, while female characters only get 1. That might be what they're referring to.