Captain Fabulous

Much like Controllers and Dominators with long recharge powers, Traps definitely needs +recharge in whatever form you can get it. Yeah there are a bunch of skippable powers, but that's OK.

Mercs/Traps is the only MM I've ever played to 50. He's ridiculously fun and just melts whatever he comes up against. And he's a common IO build with a handful of globals.

Again, you know full well they listen. But you also know full well it depends upon what you're saying. If you're complaining a change added 0.4% to your pylon times it's far more likely to be ignored than if a change made a once functional character now unplayable, even at low/moderate difficulty levels.

True, which is why we do extensive closed and open betas. Com'n man, you know this already.

I am 10000% OK with minmaxing, as long as it doesn't have a negative impact on everyone else. I have characters all across the spectrum of effectiveness. from borderline gimped themed characters to fully IOd unkillable powerhouses (with the majority of my characters being somewhere in between). My point is that level of performance is not the norm, and should never be considered the norm, because the majority of people who play will never achieve (and have no desire to achieve) that level of performance. They want to hop on, beat up bad guys for an hour, and hop off, without having their play time eaten up by theorycrafting. The fact the game allows you to play a suboptimal themed character effectively is because it's balanced around basic SO builds. If balancing was based on higher levels of performance that character would have been unplayable, and to me that would be unacceptable.

This could very well be true. I don't honestly know. But I'm not entirely sure it's a metric of any value. It makes me think of Champions Online, where it's been in life support mode for the better part of a decade and the only people that play are a small group of die hards that keep it alive. There's no need to cater to the casual suboptimal player because there aren't any. Looking at what people play and how long they play might be a useful metric in deciding what kinds of new content to add but I don't think it's something that is valuable when it comes to balance.

I can't speak directly to dev intentions. My limited interaction with them in closed beta leads me to believe they genuinely do care about balance and are constantly monitoring ATs and specific powersets (using data mining tools we don't have access to) to see which are over and under performing. For the two examples you cited, Tanks really weren't nerfed (the changes are a wash, people shouldn't notice any significant changes in Tank performance), and Creepers was straight up broken when it came to procs and was finally fixed. You also have to remember only a very small % of the playerbase is active in the forums. They do tend to be more invested in the game (and very vocal about changes) than casual players who are largely unbothered by most changes (and I dare say in many cases don't even realize anything's changed). You also have to remember the game has always been balanced around SOs, not IOs/sets/procs/Incarnates/etc, because that's what the majority has access to and uses. That's the baseline. I'll give you an example. I have a dear friend I recently discovered plays CoH with her husband. They are ultra casual players. They hop on for an hour or so maybe 1-2x a week as time permits and only play as a duo (I join them when I can and we play as a trio). They know nothing about the START vendor. Nothing about IOs or crafting. Nothing about DFB or TFs. Nothing about the Auction House or Architect. Nothing about transport hubs. Nothing about the forums. They run at the default notoriety settings (not sure they're even aware they can be changed). They take whatever powers look good to them, slotting in enhancements they get as drops and buying what they can with what little INF they have. They've been playing for years and the highest level characters they have are in the mid 20s. I've offered to give them build advice in terms of which powers to take and how to slot them and they are quite happy to just wing it as they go along. Playing with them is very different than the average PUG. They're not in any hurry to finish a mission. They leisurely go from one mob to the next with no care about their DPS or XP. They take the time to read all the mission text and are invested in the story. And in an hour of play time they maybe level up once. Maybe. From what we've always been told about the playerbase they are the majority, not the minmaxers or loud vocal forumites. And this is why suboptimal SO builds are the baseline. Because otherwise players like them would be forced out of the game.

The problem at least as I see it is that the minmaxers seem to forget they are a small % of the playerbase, and that the rest of us actually exist and our play styles are just as valid as theirs. Just because we don't do it their way doesn't mean we're doing it wrong. It's unfathomable that people with suboptimal builds can actually have fun and enjoy themselves, completely unbothered by their suboptimalness.

Because using the same 3-4 attacks over and over again can get boring AF? Because I play to have fun and really don't care if it takes me an extra second or two to kill something with my sub-optimal build and power rotation?

The quality of the forums would greatly improve if the maturity level of most posters advanced beyond that of pre-teens.

/powercreep

I don't see how Sands of Mu really breaks SS immersion. But if that little bit of fluff around your fists really bothers you the Rage crash is also a good time to use Taunt or Handclap. I mean, you can use any powers really, but damaging powers affected by the debuff aren't going to do much other than generate punchvoke or apply a mez effect. Sorry, I just don't see the crash as a big deal. This is not to say I would be upset if it was removed (I think all penalties should be removed), but in the grand scheme it's not an issue. There are so many ways to deal with it. You don't want to break immersion by using Sands of Mu, Blackwand, or Nemesis Staff, but you want to be able to conjure a giant chunk of the ground out of thin air? Superman can't do that (tho shooting beams out of his eyes is right up his alley). Some powers only work near the ground (Foot Stomp and Mighty Judgement should be on that list, but that's a different discussion). Hurl is one of them. It makes no sense otherwise. Even with Hover or Flight running you should be able to use it as long as you're close to the ground. But never mid-air. NYET comrade. Leave Rage alone! It's one of the few things that makes SS unique, and it's really irksome how so many of you want to see it converted to Build Up. SS powers already have secondary effects, including KB/D, stun, and hold. Giving it -res would almost certainly mean losing them.

This character has a lot of temp powers. And they're technically not duplicates, they're different versions of the same accolade powers. Tho I really do need to organize them better.

I literally showed you the area of effect for Dispersion Bubble is 25' in the vertical. It's also 25' in the horizontal. In other words, it's a SPHERE. Believe it, don't believe it, I no longer care. 🙄

It does seem very VERY odd you would lose those names within minutes. I lost a name due to a move that was maybe 3-4 days and I still thought it strange. Kinda makes you wonder if someone is running a script that keeps testing names until it finds a valid one and then takes it. How else would someone snatch those names in such a short window,, not once but twice? Seems sus. It's easy enough to see who has the names, though you'd need a GM to investigate to see if there appears to be anything fishy going on. This is why if I'm going to move a character I reserve the name on dummy characters on both the current and target server before I do the move. I came up with a way around having to alter the database that would allow more than one person to have the same name, essentially you'd use a delimiter character and a string in the character name. Then set the game to, in most places, not display the delimiter and string. For example, you'd have "One-Eyed Jack" and I could have "One-Eyed Jack^1". The client would be modified to not show the ^1 in most places in the game making it look like both those characters had the name "One-Eyed Jack". Since the delimiter and string are in the character name field there would be no alterations to the database other than to allow the use of a symbol in character names. Simple and rather elegant. Is it a perfect solution? No, but I don't think there is a perfect solution. But it's fairly easily doable with very few downsides.