XaoGarrent

The problem with this is that the absorb was designed specifically the way it was for the purpose of sustain. It's designed, intentionally, to be a small but frequent value as it's supposed to help you shrug off/recover from a lot of small, constant hits, and in many cases recover when you get some breathing room between spawns. It's not just Blasters, either. Blasters just got it universally because it was a good catch all fix for some of the problems they had, that also went well with the concept of Defiance. A lot of the newer armor sets were also intentionally given some kind of ability that helps sustain for this reason. I can't remember exactly *when* but I think it was BABs that mentioned they had an epiphany in regards to a lot of the power sets that people considered 'good' all having one thing in common: Small but constant HP (also energy) recovery in some form. Be it a passive, a toggle, or a recovering click.

Ice being that high suggests something about his methodology is producing skewed results... But all the same, it's not by much. Ice is easily A tier, but I think it's getting placed too high on account of certain choices he made in the testing format. Most notably, only using one secondary, and even then only using it for Build Up. I know why he's doing it like that, but it skews the results severely because how well or badly a primary can synergize with one or more sets bumps its viability up or down. There's some other questionable issues with the testing. +0/x3 is going to skew all sorts of things because different sets rotate in different ways, so you're going to get some really sus results that don't match real world performance, where TTK changes just enough to allow some minions or LTs to survive against a set that can't follow up with another AoE blast quickly. It gets more murky when you factor in differences between Blasters, Sentinels and Corruptors/Defenders, too. Ice actually goes up on Sentinels due to Blizzard being up so often that it's dependable from spawn to spawn. Sonic, as is well known, is a bit better on defenders, since a lot of its flaws don't matter as much as a support. It's not a bad test, but take it with a serious grain of salt. Interpret the data yourself and use critical thinking.

The problem is most other things that blast sets do, they do so either so sparsely or so weakly that more damage ends up becoming the universally better option. Especially on the Blaster AT where damage is your primary goal, and your utility options aren't quite as good as say, a Corruptor. You're not wrong, but if we're using most other power sets as a baseline, Fire Blast is still "overperforming," and has been for a long time, thus it needs a whack. I actually don't agree with this, personally, and consider the entire category of blast sets to have fundamental flaws in their versatility, but that's what strict adherence to hammer-the-nail balance would have you do. Probably along side giving a few other, newer sets a whack, too.

I've been through this discussion so many times that I really don't have the energy to do more than give the summarized version, which goes as follows: "Yes, it matters, but it's not a very high priority." This isn't just true for MMOs, either, it's true for pretty much all games. Balance is very rarely if ever the point of a game, whereas design and mechanics, story, atmosphere, etc, command a lot more direct player engagement. Balance can make a game better or worse, but it can never make a game, if that makes sense. This is the thing that Emmert and Cryptic on a whole didn't seem to comprehend in the early days of the game, and it's why they almost killed the game. I will say this, though: The dynamics of balancing games vary incredibly widely, just as the design of games does. Balancing a fighting game and an MMO or any sort of other primarily PvE game is VERY different, for one key reason: You completely control one side of the equation in a PvE game, whereas you don't completely control either side in a PvP game. Players can only drive the bus on one end of a PvE game and thus you have a lot more room to play with numbers, mechanics, AI, etc without ever touching the things players share control of. It's always far less risky to make adjustments on the E side of things than the P side of things, and the fact you even have two completely distinct sides to begin with, means you can balance them both separately and across the aisle to accomplish whatever you're trying to accomplish. Everything in that Core-A gaming video is actually more true of PvE games than PvP games because of this.

Fire Blast will get nerfed when hell freezes over. ...I'm here all week, folks.

Yeesh... Okay, well... I'm of the thought that nothing can reasonably be done to improve power pools, because the problems with them are so large and so across the board that they need both a massive diversification, as well as a complete overhaul of the ones that already exist. Since day one of playing this game, I've always considered them to be a sore spot in the game's design. The problem with Power Pools boils down to two primary factors: They are... Thematically limited. Mechanically and/or statistically weak, with some exceptions. More often than not, power pool attacks/heals/"Things that directly make numbers happen" are too weak to be worth putting into your regular power rotation. Ally buffs and enemy debuffs fare a bit better, but usually not by much. Really the only place where power pools tend to shine tends to be self buffs, and even then, only when min/maxing- Aside from some outliers, such as Hasten, obviously, and some of the click buffs. One could make an argument of "take it anyway, it fits the character concept." ...Not really. Aside from the obvious issue of gimping yourself by robbing yourself of better powers from your primary and secondary, this falls through because thematically most power pools are either lame, too neutral (which is good if you just want the buff), or too specific (if I want my life magic using Plant Dominator to have a bit of healing magic, well I'm SOL because that stupid tricorder). And don't even get me started on how lame punch and kick from the fighting pool look. We really should be able to use animations from different unarmed melee sets with them. I will say the new origin themed power pools are a step in the right direction, in regards to theme, if only because... Again, diversification of the power pools is nice. Even if you have two versions of the same pool with slight statistical differences, but different FX on the powers, that's a partial win in my book. But at the same time, the fact that so many attacks are so weak, really exacerbates the problem, because the attacks are arguably among the most thematic powers in any set, in the sense that they're some of the most metaphorically verbal powers. Visceral actions. I've always felt that power pools should be balanced and themed a little closer to the epic pools, honestly. Except instead of being a toolbox or swiss army knife of random powers, they're more like a miniaturized version of one or two pre-existing powersets. It'll never happen, I know. ...And as a result I'll probably continue treating the power pools like they're just a grab bag of little things to min-max with. It is what it is.

And it made nearly every set worse. Meanwhile, the best version of elec happens to be the Stalker version. Not all things are as simple as they seem.

I mean, we could just have a downvote function, but I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be up to Mr. Cocteau's standards either. Really, arguing with people on here is futile. I'd just like to have a way to log my disagreement and go. The alternative is we all just go back to posting /jranger, and that's even less constructive.

This has always been a problem, even pre-IOs, it's just IOs make it more obvious. IO's aren't even the most drastic frame of reference here, though. More than anything it's the newer, better designed sets. In the early days of the game, the "vision" certain devs had was so out of line with the actual game they were making, that many, many mistakes were made. I think the homogeneity both within certain sets, the schizophrenic design in others (Dark Armor I'm looking at you) and the insistence on trying to pigeonhole players took a toll on the game's design we're still picking through to this day. The majority of blast sets have secondary effects that not only is just copy and pasted across the whole set, whether it makes sense or not, but exists at values that only really matter on the likes of Defenders, who in turn have pretty universally bad damage. The fact that slotting -res and various other types of procs in blast powers matters more than what the powers themselves do says a lot about where things went wrong. The problem with Blast sets is that if they don't have great damage, they don't really have anything at all. Because what utility they do have is often mediocre at best, and becomes almost a non-factor once purple patch is factored in. However, there *are* a few sets that compete with Fire Blast. I don't think most people have really dialed in how much they do, and exactly why they do. They're sets that came later, and they all have... Some special X factor to them. Maybe even a few. In much the way most melee sets do. Which is to say they use a design approach that is less homogeneous, and less conservative. One of the biggest contenders is Water. And water is, amusingly, balanced more like a typical melee set than a blast set. It's chock full of utility, and it has good AoE. You have some soft and even hard-ish crowd control, a small health leech, slows, defense debuffs, etc. The only place it's lagging is in single target damage, but the set doesn't need to be good at everything when it's great at a few important things. After all, even if Dark Melee has some problems in the AoE department, I don't think anyone around here would say that it's a bad set, right? Beam is also pretty impressive, though it's a more single target driven set. It features one of the only sources of meaningful regen debuff not just in a blast set, but outside of debuff sets altogether. There's a reason you see characters with Beam and regen nerfing secondarys (or some kind of other strong damage amp/debuff secondary) running around. High single target focus and a little bit of extra regen nerfing: It's just crying out to be used in a meta build designed for AV slaying. I don't think it's simply the new sets and decisions made later in development. I think it's actually the inverse: Most blast sets were always pretty mediocre, and it wasn't until newer, better design came along that players had a clear enough vision to start asking hard questions.

I swear I didn't shoot that man in the head officer, I was just giving him a "cranial adjustment."

Depends on whether you prefer truth or power. If you're a Raymond Cocteau sort of tyrant, than no, it isn't. After all, controlling the ways that people are allowed to express themselves is conducive to that delusional vision of rainbows and unicorn farts.

I could care less about offense, and you are very much misunderstanding and misinterpreting what you claim I am. I perfectly well understand what's been said, and I went through it in no small detail. Don't like it, too bad. Context matters, you ignoring it doesn't magically make it go away. You joining in the projection fest does not make you or Snowdaze any more correct.

This is really priceless considering the whole reason I made my post was because of the very thing you're accusing me of. Now you're just calling people trolls, you've posted almost nothing but useless noise since you showed up in this thread. Projection is considered an informal fallacy, by the way, and frankly it's just a really bad look. The OP provided more than just a mention of popularity, you opened in this thread by arguing only that. Essentially perpetrating a fallacy that they managed to largely side step by providing enough context to make it not only obvious they weren't arguing from a place of simple popularity, but their metric of popularity doesn't even seem to be the same one you're attempting to jam into this conversation. There's implicit reasoning here that you're just completely ignoring. It would be nice if they would lay that out in detail, but the thing you're not getting here is that they made a wider argument, which in itself can be argued, in addition to what seems to be implied by the wider argument. Which is that Regen's lack of popularity, which is implied by their post to not be absolute usage metric, but rather a rating of its effectiveness, is hampered by a lack of resistance to debuffs. Which is frankly a provable problem with the set, especially given its one trick nature, as previously mentioned. There's a great deal of clarification implied, and not just that, it logically checks out. Could there be something deeper going on? Is there more to say on the subject? Sure. But your opening post, in contrast, is entirely shallow, containing nothing but a single fallacy, with no implications of a deeper argument. There's a ton of explicit and implicit reasoning that can be argued for or against in the OP, there is none in your response. The only way to respond to you constructively is to point out the fallacious nature of your response, because that's factually all you presented. Well, that and a bunch of doubling down.

You are still suggesting balance changes that operate in too much of a vacuum, is what I'm saying. And I have to heavily disagree with you on that second notion. Especially considering support sets in particular can have near 100% uptime on many, many debuffs. Not just that, support sets are probably the most all over the place in terms of uptime. Do note: I'm not saying imbalanced. What I am saying is that they're a demonstration of how comparable powers in less than comparable sets can't be balanced 1:1. That's even before getting into how not-comparable powers in the same tier can often be, which is a reality of T9s between many sets. There's a place for broad, sweeping changes, and a proper way to do it, but this isn't it.

You can say all this, but it doesn't make it true.

I did not strawman you, your "evidence" was an argumentum ad populum fallacy, the most bog standard form there is in fact. Your case of fallacious reasoning couldn't be any more cut and dry, you could use your post as an ideal example of it. You didn't even attempt to imply there was deeper reasoning for the statistic. Also, what the OP posted has no bearing on your failings. Especially as there's more than one metric for popularity. Which is precisely one of many reasons why your line of argumentation is fallacious all on its own merits.

You can't go around just doubling durations and more than halfing recharges lol. I agree this game has some serious issues involving recharge, but relative balance between sets wont improve unless you take a targeted approach. Regen needs some help, but Rad is fine and if you go buffing them both the same exactly way you've accomplished nothing. How much control sets are hampered by long CDs on AoE mezz also varies greatly, especially sets with multiple AoE control powers or ones on short cooldowns, I. E. Seeds of Confusion. Also, don't compare damage dealing powers to buffs like that. They live in very different worlds in terms of how they interact with time. There's a reason why so few farming builds rely on big damage nukes and instead lean on buffs, auras and shorter cooldown, more moderate damage attacks.

I'm just here to post some bog standard support of IH being a toggle again in some fashion, Regen, Absorb or otherwise. ...Oh, and rain on the parade of the usual fallacy that gets posted involving Regen. https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/bandwagon Ciao.

Pre-IO sets WP is hands down the winner for any content that isn't near or completely exclusively S/L. It is a bit squishier against S/L heavy content, though. which makes early game life a little harder for it. Post-IO sets it's harder to say. They both get absurdly durable with a bunch of set bonuses. But WP just has better across the board coverage, and Invuln's vs psi is more of a pain in the ass than WP vs toxic, especially as WP's regen and +HP together means even its toxic hole is more of a... Weakness, than an actual hole. Double especially in this comparison, when you realize that Dull Pain is going to have its recharge nerfed by psi attacks. Having an end recovery booster also pushes WP up a notch. I'd argue overall WP is actually the better set. I've always felt like WP is what Invuln would have originally been like, if someone's "vision" didn't get in the way during its development.

My gut instinct is to respond with "Good!" Because it's a rare case of resistance based sets learning what life for a defense based set that isn't SR feels like. Mind you it's only/mainly in lolPvP that players have to face this, but still. Point stands conceptually at least. That and I hate how anything short of a large resistance debuff or a massive stack of small ones is rendered pretty much pointless once both purple patch and mob resistance is factored in. A system on a curve would have made way more sense, at least for enemies.

ＧＥＮＤＥＲ　ＤＩＭＯＲＰＨＩＳＭ　ＩＳ　ＲＥＡＬ ...It actually makes a lot of sense. I'd expect most of the women working in the Paragon PPD to either be using power suits or be trained as a psychic. Especially considering the absolute nonsense they're often up against. What doesn't make a lot of sense is why there are no women Trolls! What, you think only men do performance enhancing drugs that turn you into a psychotic meathead? Pssshhh, what a bunch of misandrysts, those devs!

I just had an ITF yesterday where Romulus spent a solid 10 minutes trying to run away from my DM/Ninjitsu Scrapper. I jumped in first, and before anyone else could so much as drop an ability on him, he immediately started running. He took off like he had a plane to catch from the moment I threw the first punch, and then proceeded to just endlessly run all over the damn place. He went as far as to jump on top of the roof and start climbing the rocks above and behind it. It was both hilarious and incredibly frustrating. Resulted in the team wiping multiple times.

...Diabolique is living, breathing proof that purple triangles was a mistake.

The price of standard rare IOs that aren't super unique in some way (LotG, certain PvP sets, archetype, etc) looks to be on a slow and unstable descent towards crashing. Been watching stuff like Aegis pieces drop to sub 2 million prices. This would be terrific if A: It wasn't slowly approaching the point where it's not worth it to make and sell them and B: Purps and those extra special sets were following suit. I feel a crash of some sort coming on. I don't care all that much personally, I don't play the market, I just farm and sell. But for those diehard marketeers out there, I wager now would be a good time to cash in and play it safe for a while, if you can.

Hey, it's the smooth pink skin's home planet. The weird hairless apes evolved there, built their nations and culture, did all the hard work themselves, and they have a right to it. You don't. Unless your planet got blown up somehow, you've got your own, go home if you don't like their rules. You don't have a right to simply migrate to other people's planets, you galactivist cosmonaut.