XaoGarrent

I have a truly absurd amount of time invested into Warframe. Something on the order of 3,500 hours. I think I've spent maybe $500 on the game total, but it might be more. I've been playing so long it's hard to remember. This is in total half a decade of play time. A lot of the appeal is oddly similar to that of City of Heroes, especially if you're willing to throw some money at the game for cosmetics. Grab a frame, make an interesting build you like, and then "fashion frame" until you get something that looks really cool. They go out and just throw hands for hours. Collect loot, build new stuff, and then repeat the cycle. It's also got this... Super unique sci-fi setting that somehow feels alien and nostalgic at the same time. It picks at the same part of my brain that things like Final Fantasy 7 or Mega Man X do, and I have trouble figuring out exactly why. The frame on the left here is Gauss, with the Graxx skin. I added some accessories and colored him to make him like some kind of anime robot. Warframe is a game that is heavily about mobility, and Gauss' whole thing is speed. Gauss' first ability is literally "hit this button to go a thousand miles per hour." Hit 1 to become the Flash. Basically, he's super fast, super durable and does a ton of damage. He can clear many missions in a couple of minutes (he can do captures in under 60 seconds), provided you can actually manage to control him. Some of the frames in this game are so fast that they're actually difficult to control, and Gauss is one of them.

It still has most of the same major problems on Sentinels that it did before. Burn is still awkward as it requires them to put themselves in melee range, and is still their immob protection. They lose Firey Embrace, which is why Fire tends to competitive with sets that have much better and more dependable protection. Consume is better, but it also still requires a Sentinel to put themselves in basically melee range.

Your best bet is probably Energy Blast with either Willpower, Energy Aura, or Invulnerability... But... I can tell you now, it wont be quite right. It'll never fight like a DBZ character in practice. I'd honestly just not bother, personally. You're not going to be happy with it, as a "DBZ style" character, no matter how much you tweak it. I've gone through this like four times now, three of them during the OG run of the game. Unfortunately, if you're looking to make shonen characters in general, you're barking up the wrong tree with this game. It's never been doable with any real amount of accuracy, because you need... >A mix of ranged and melee attacks It's fairly common in comic books for heros and villains to use both ranged and melee attacks frequently, but it's almost ubiquitous in Shonen. I have trouble thinking of a Shonen character that doesn't fight at both melee and range in nearly every appearance... They do exist, but it's hard. Even characters who approach battle with the singular strategy of PUNCH A DUDE tend to punch so hard they can hit their opponent at range with lethal force, by creating a shockwave. >A good degree of durability Even characters on the weaker end of power scaling feature superpowered levels of speed or durability. Yu Yu Hakusho characters barely reach early DBZ levels of power, and characters like Hiei and Kuwabara almost demand Super Reflexes and Willpower, respectively. Oh, and Elder Toguro who is perhaps a great candidate for Bio Armor. Or just the creepiest interpretation of Regen ever. >A good degree of damage, with at least one super powerful attack. Beams and massive energy balls are common in DBZ in particular... Sentinels probably are your best bet for DBZ in particular, just because of how frequently the fights in that end with a giant nuke attack... But throughout shonen you'll also find a lot of big lethal punch attacks, or characters with giant beam swords, etc... >Preferably some martial arts, or at least skilled brawling. Even more ubiquitous than the mix of melee and range, is that everyone is kung fu fighting, or at least brawling, when they're not chucking around fireballs. You might be better off drawing inspiration from a shonen other than DBZ, honestly... Even then, it's hard, though. Yu Yu Hakusho style characters you might be able to get away with, by making a Tank or a Scrapper... But even that show often had incredibly powerful ranged attacks, Hiei being an extremely good example of this, fighting with fists, a sword and a massive energy dragon he whips around an enormous area. Younger Toguro's power was basically that he could ponch reel gud, and he could use his arm strength to flick objects with such force as to drop an opponent instantly. DBZ characters are basically outright impossible, as you need a set that mixes energy blasts and martial arts, or a summoned energy weapon of some sort. Getting ranged, melee and an armor set together is your main barrier here. Champions Online is or at least was a much better game to try and make these sorts of characters in... It even has something that works well as a giant beam attack. Champions let you put both martial arts and energy or elemental attacks on a character... It was with varying effectiveness, but you could at least do it. CoH has a strange inflexibility in getting certain features together in a character, making certain archetypes close to impossible to do properly. A lot of why it's hard to do a shonen character justice is also why it's hard to do comic book low-power anti-hero types justice, ironically... Both tend to fight with large kits and regularly rely on a varied or flexible approach to combat. CoH just isn't kind to this. Even Deadpool falls into this problem just because he's a regen character that chooses to fight with both ranged and melee weaponry. Actually, come to think of it, Silver Surfer is hard to make for the same reasons. Silver Surfer has much of the same skillset as a Shonen character, sans the martial arts... Incredible speed, super strength, high durability and energy projection/cosmic powers... Huh. Y'know, that never occurred to me until just now. This is an old lament of mine, it's one of this game's oldest weaknesses. CoH invites the player to create their own supers, presumably mixing and matching tropes from all over fiction, but in reality it's less of a canvas and more of a coloring book. ...And that coloring book struggles to cover just the traditional cape and tights superhero genre properly sometimes.

I don't know how other pairings are fairing, but Necro/Time got a whole lot from this patch. So yeah, I can't find anything bad to say about the Necro Buffs. We'll see how they age, but right now, Necro feels like what a Mastermind primary should be like.

Burn is where the set gets its immob resistance.

Barely. Same for the damage debuff. They're tiny enough that they get completely eaten by the purple patch. I have to wonder if you've played any of the sets you're attempting to comment on.

His response doesn't make any sense, he's arguing against points I never even made. I can't even begin to comprehend where he's coming from.

I think this is the most accurate thing said in regards to the sentinel changes. The bump in damage did push Sentinels more firmly into their role, but it's most noticeable with sets and combos that were already borderline comparable to high performance combos from other ATs. Sets and combos that were hurting before are still hurting now, demonstrating something I've suspected for a while: Much of the problem with Sentinels is on a set by set basis, or due to a wider issue in the fact Blast sets were never really optimized for use with armor sets, and vice versa. Even with the changes they made to the Sentinel versions of various sets. Primary sets like Water, that have strong crowd control or mitigative effects, or powerful AoE damage, were doing good and are now doing better. Primary sets like DP, which is lacking in the crowd control or mitigative department, and doesn't even have an aim clone or any click you can slot a gaussian's in, still struggle without a lot of attention or specific synergies or taxing slotting. Secondary sets like Bio, which have less holes in their defense, higher values, overlapping types of defense, etc, and provide a meaningful amount of extra damage, notice either no change or a slight bump in performance. Secondary sets like Fire, which has more problems on Sentinels than I really care to list here, are still struggling. The overarching trend with Sentinel performance is that the top performers consistently lag behind other AT's best top performers, by a smaller or larger margin... Larger before the patch, smaller now. But the worst performers are significantly worse than most of the worst performers other ATs have, and the patch didn't help them much if at all. This isn't a new problem, it's just more apparent now. To summarize, while further tweaks to the AT itself could help the AT fill its role better in a general sense, I don't think further adjustments to the AT itself would make particularly meaningful difference to balance at this time. It's probably time to start looking at individual sets and asking questions like "do certain secondaries make sense mechanically/functionally," "do certain primaries need a little something extra on this AT" or "should all Sentinel secondaries have a damage boost of roughly the same power."

I'm pretty sure this problem has been around since... Well, I'd say Issue 9, but more likely since CoV launched and Masterminds were added to the game. I remember this being a problem on my Necro/Dark which was the first Mastermind I made.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheyChangedItNowItSucks Give whatever reasons you want, any changes would have been treated the same way, because it was in fact about "abusing broken stuff." Not that the PvP community could ever openly admit that, knowing how bad it would make them look. But they don't need to: Actions speak louder than words, and the actions and behavior of the PvP community was not consistent with what you claim ever, or at all. Rather it was a pattern of behavior consistent with exploitation, something that absolutely defined this game's PvP.

Primarily PvE games that shoehorn in PvP generally have horrible design issues and imbalances due to the game's systems never being designed or balanced for a player versus player experience, thus they attract the sort of people who seek to play games where it's possible to obtain a vastly unfair advantage without cheating, basically. This is ESPECIALLY true of games with RPG mechanics. Most MMOs have large amounts of... Let's just say less than nice people that love abusing whatever is utterly and completely broken and imbalanced in PvP, especially if it allows them to make other players miserable. MMO PvP (and for that matter MOBAs) has always been a magnet for egotistical and childish people who aren't skillful enough for shooters, fighting games, or any other genre where a reasonable degree of fairness is commonly built into the foundation of games at a base level. City of Heroes largely lacks these sorts of people. The same reason you don't run into a lot of griefers in PvE is why so many seem to despise PvP. The original devs were right to largely ignore PvP. Attempts to fix PvP specific imbalances angered PvE players if they were effected by them somehow (and rightfully so), and the PvPers almost universally rejected such changes because so many of them are in it to abuse the really broken stuff. Time and resources are simply better spent elsewhere. Disclaimer: Nothing about genres here is universal, only typical. Warframe, a PvE shooter with optional PvP, actually has this exact same problem, and the developers have taken largely the same route of ignoring it for the same reasons listed above.

/Fire is just kinda bad on Sents. They took away the buildup and gave it a mediocre toggle instead. Most of what makes it king of damage on melee ATs either is gone, or doesn't really apply well to Sentinels. Go /Bio or /Rad instead. Both are tougher and have a damage buff. /Rad has an extra AoE, too. /Rad is basically a better in every way /Fire on Sents... It should be noted that it has the same cascading defense failure issue, though. But you'll be doing more damage, so maybe that's not as much a problem. Fire is probably a better primary if you want both AoE and single target. Water is an amazing set, but it's a little slow on the single target front. It's sorta the Spines of Blast primaries, except it actually has decent secondary effects.

Rad is never going to be dead. It still just has too much good stuff in it. It is, however, a bit awkward to use- And always has been. I think one problem here is that Rad on Masterminds is harder to synergize. There's really not much that can be done about that, though. Controllers are sorta just the best AT to put it on. Debuffs and lockdown are two things Rad does well, and Controllers are the premier debuffs and lockdown AT. I do agree cast times on toggles should be shortened and the radiuses should be larger, but these were tweaks I thought should have been done even back on live. All anchor toggles should be normalized to 25 feet, really. It's silly how Rad, a set with two anchor toggles, has a lower radius.

Has a thread title containing something that is ironic or dissonant, bonus points if the OP doesn't seem to be aware of what they've done: ✔️ Doesn't address the biggest underlying problem with whatever they propose needs adjusting: ✔️ Hits an especially contentious player time investment (in this case, even for an MMO): ✔️ Preemptively invokes a much older change that was extremely hated, in order to try to poison the well for anyone that would draw comparisons to that change: ✔️ Ignores the fact there's multiple places in game where what they're suggesting is already sorta in place, and that everyone strictly ignores that content: ✔️ OP is clearly aware of multiple reasons why the suggestion will be deeply opposed. Posts it anyway, giving themselves the appearance of a troll who's baiting: ✔️ This definitively feels like bait. It's hard to tell for sure, but the title really makes me think it is.

I'm late to the party, but it really just boils down to Blaster melee numbers being really, really, really, really big. I'd say the only competition Blasters have for raw damage in melee is a handful of AoE centric Stalker builds. Unless you're playing Dev or TA (until they nerf it anyway) avoiding melee on a Blaster is a huge waste. Especially these days where you can comfortably get Scrapper-ish defense/resistance through IOs, and self healing isn't even completely out of the question. Not to mention that having pretty much every type of attack in the game makes slotting large IO sets and getting the specific bonuses you want way easier than it is on a character with an armor secondary. I keep putting off making a Blaster with more of a melee focus, and I keep regretting it, because I keep running into IOed Blasters that are just doming fools like it's going out of style. You'd be surprised how fast IOs + a support AT on the team can hit the soft cap for a Blaster. An IOed Blaster with Fort is basically the damn grim reaper.

This sort of confusion happens when you make distinctions that don't really matter or even exist in reality. You're really just proving the point by demonstrating a consistency in range focused sets having this feature, showing that by being consistent on one rule, they're actually breaking another one. The way they're range focused is different, but none the less, they are, and now one reflects this properly, while the other doesn't. This is precisely why over homogenization is a bad, bad idea. It's a downward spiral because eventually you find that in your quest for balance you've effectively made pong.

Well, that and maybe glue arrow and the new oil slick, but yeah. If you're not taking TA specifically for the buffs now, you probably should be looking at another set. All it does well now is the buffs. TA's gimmick has always been on shaky ground. It's a set that leans heavily on low damage control powers, on an AT where control powers are and have been universally mediocre at best... And this AT is an AT that does damage very well, about all it does well, and it exists In a game where more damage is always appreciated. It's always been in this situation where it needs to break the rules to be competitive, and in this case the rule it's breaking is actually a bad standard that should be overturned anyway. And here we are, stuffing the square peg into the round hole. Even if you put near controller level duration and recharge controls on Blasters, those powers would still be significantly worse, because of no critical control, and no domination. Bosses are typically the only thing you really want to use single target control on outside of solo play, so if you can't lock them down quickly for a meaningful duration, there's no point in even firing off your control powers. Control is so strong on Controllers and dominators not because they can stack the control, but precisely because they don't need to, often times they can just point at a hard target, or many less hard targets, and just straight up make them stop doing anything for 10 seconds. Blaster controls are already a losing proposition out of the box, and then you get massive nerfs on top of that and it's just no bueno. Better to ignore most control and go for more damage. The devs don't seem to understand that the old devs spreadsheets and standards were actually really bad, very unrealistic and ideological, in a lot of ways. EDIT: Also, I'm going to steal "carpet inspector." That term is great. 😄

Hey, I realized a silver lining to the TA nerfs: We can dump the gimped crowd control and pick up defense granting toggles and other power pool stuff that allows us to slot global procs. It's not a great trade for those that make thematic characters, but this set just became one of the top twinking sets, it's basically made for munchkins. From this patch onward TA is going to be basically a prime candidate for being used as a mule set. Take the buffs, pull net arrow off your power bar (less to manage on an AT with two attack sets is always nice), leave most of the rest in the trash can. Grab the usual suspects and IO it to basically be a ranged scrapper.

I guess you really want people to experience how outdated many of the design decisions in this game are. I mean, not that they were good decisions back then, either, but that was also before over a decade and a half of progress in the industry. "Bold strategy, cotton. Let's see if it pays off."

lol so many nerfs for no reason Having a mezz focused blaster secondary was already of dubious value over going for one more damage focused, especially given the current meta. This is a mistake. I guess you guys really are trying to live up to the legacy of the live devs, Jack especially. I guess Devices is just a better Tactical Arrow now, since it was already as good at the very least.

Elec/Shield is the Stalker AoE meme.

Not even remotely on target. You still have this idea that I said something I didn't. I'm going to continue to leave it up to you to figure out where you went wrong, because I'm tired of arguing with people who can't be bothered to read and understand.

No, but there wasn't a post where I said that, either. The error is on your side.

Please use reading comprehension.

1. Doms get their T9 pets early. This really is more of a solo/small team thing. Also, Mind gets its AoE confuse earlier. Really, it would be nice if it got that psychic vortex pet that Penny has, but... Cottage rule makes that hard. 2. Doms get a higher consistency/uptime version of whatever their set's soft AoE mezz is. Shorter cooldown, higher base accuracy, more consistent knockdown, stuns roll to last longer on each target, etc. 3. Yet a little higher damage. Frontloading DoTs could help with this, but I think maybe focusing on the Assault sets would be a better idea. Especially the lower tier powers, which tend to be lackluster altogether. Some of the recent changes did already help with this, though, namely the sets that got reduced animations with little or no tradeoff. 4. Port Illusions to Dominators. ...A man can dream. EDIT: Also, making sure Domination works on everything in some way is a real good idea. That's a good suggestion. Domination rework: People probably aren't going to like this, but... Basically, domination is now a toggle. Some very important other things change, too, though. Dominators now get most of their mezz resist as part of their passive, and domination just increases it a bit. The Domination meter is split into 4 bars, it can be activated any time you have at least one bar, and when Domination is active it slowly drains. Deactivating Domination will eat whatever is left of your current bar, but you keep any full bars in reserve. Domination... No longer can be perma'd Still requires some commitment to use But also... No longer is all or nothing, can be activated earlier, and can be managed No longer is required for mezz resistance