Llewellyn Blackwell

While ive never watched the anime referenced i totally got the gist of what they were saying i think. dating back to 2nd edition D&D and the optional Skills and Powers rules, the idea of taking flaws to add further bonuses to a character or specific abilities/spells. Its how in most of the Hero based PNP systems you create something akin to superman. You take a power, flight, attach a flaw that disables it like a rare element, something not common but accessible to those in the know roughly a mid tier flaw. But when you take that flaw over and over, for every power, some very cheap so the flaw actually pays for the power and gives back points, a creative and skilled character builder will be able to have power with no rival but with the risk of a single magic bullet being able to take them down. CoH did try this with the Kheldians and Quantum energy,but Khelds really dont get enough extra power to feel special, and Qs tend to just get stealth insta killed now days. Almost every PB I know said they used invis while leveling to negate the threat of Qs such as it is.

The blaster sustain wasnt the product of some random braod brush. It was the product of players like me using drain psyche and even the heal pool to make atypical blasters that could self sustain and then campaigned on the forums that blasters as a warrior AT deserved some self sustain in more sets in some form. And each 2ndarys self sustain we did get was pretty personalized.

Id take it one step further and make regen unique in having no animations or cast times on its click powers. Instant cast.

Was about to say this myself if no one else did. There was another thread recently basically pushing for all power sets in an AT to be carbon copy with different energy flavor so sets had Balance. Well Im a big stalker player, and have always championed Ninjitsu 2ndary as the best stalker 2ndary due to its 2nd and nice pbaoe placate. Nowadays that 2nd placate, or placate in general as others have pointed out is more for the old timers like me, most now really push the fast ATo fueled scrappy stalker approach, and its not hard to slip into, that ATO really works. However on my very flavor made very mortal humancentric batman homage the Black Flying Fox, that pbaoe placate is a vital tool in keeping enemies off balance. So OP if having this specific tool is really a need for your play style, play the set that fits your playstyle rather then trying to water down a sets most unique tool.

Well to be fair you are also talking about wildly different eras in the games development when your talking Gold Side and its fairly decent selection of options in branching arcs and options for the role players like us was made in the games final days, showing off as many of the tricks, sharpest graphics etc that the devs had to use. Meanwhile the VEAT patron arcs were made way way way back in the earliest days of red side. Red side was still under the control of Jack E back then. And he was pretty heavy handed with the hero side stuff, the red side was just gonna be that much worse. When i play redside I tend to do very little content and do a lot of street sweeping and random paper mishes. SFs when they suit my characters. Or AE arcs. I do this because to actually embrace the real red side content, you either need to go full arachnos lackey, or full arachnos mind slave that will eventually shake free of the programming and go rogue. Thats really the only 2 flavors of origin in rogue isle we got that make sense with most of the content you will be able to do. I did a Sky Raider that was deep undercover spying on Arachnos once which kinda worked ok. But yeah over all red side writing is heavy handed in the extreme. Gold Side wasnt perfect but I myself am sad we never got to see that approach taken in revamped old zones blue side. I had hoped we would eventual of gotten a revamped galaxy city start that would branch to other revamped areas and use a more complex story branching system akin to gold side even if it could only be hero/vig. Though Id of voted to see more co op zones or give up on the needless division of red and blue access anyways since it wouldnt matter in non pvp zones.

This position is why I find your position hyperbolic. As has been spelled out in this and other threads all beating on the old horse of global recharge, Plenty of sets simply do not benefit enough from global recharge to make it the optimal set bonus focus to invest in. A very simple example is Regen vs. Willpower on scrappers. Regen is going to be best off imo with a primary focus of global recharge in its set bonuses. Will power as a toggle heavy set has no reason to really want Hasten at the cost of other set options. Same can be said of any one with enough attack powers that make hasten needed for a good chain redundant. Yes there are plenty of by design very click heavy builds that leverage recharge bonuses. Its not any different then a squishy AT using sets and pools to be tanky enough to offset their inherent flaw enough to go outside the box. Finally I really do not think toggle hasten is ever gonna be a good idea. imo it simply rewards the worst kind of player the most, those wanting hasten plus other powers they prefer to leave on auto. Actions per minute and managing them alongside cooldowns etc are all part of active game play. ! power being made to be auto is the cap for a reason, and wanting to sneak in ways to remove a common lazy player complaint makes me find this whole thread whiffing of something unpleasant.

This is an issue with all sorts of shades of grey folks, but I think in general we know well enough when it comes to homage/parody/outright copy what the line is for the most part. My homage to Bat Man, The Black Flying Fox is very batman esque in appearance and with the vast variations in outfits done in the comics my look more then likely hits close to a few. We know the intent is obvious on sight alone, but the name and look are also just off brand enough we can say yeah cool parody or homage etc and move on. As far as I know its usually a name+ costume that will bring down the generic., So if you really want to be Cobalt Champion and have a blue variant of the green lantern outfit you should be ok.

I guess Ill have to spell out a few things that have not really seemed to sink in for some yet. So a CoH character that is a finely tuned lvl 50 with all the sets they want to do what they do best, with all their incarnate powers unlocked is a Completed character. The proverbial You have won the game character. All those sets, thats like having BiS rarest of the rare raid loot in an MMO like WoW. When you have all that the only time a game has challenge is whena new level cap and raid comes out, and your BiS gear is instantly inferior to the common new gear a few levels up. We here at CoH I am pretty sure hate that constant goal post shift in finishing our toons. The altaholic nature of this game and HCs making them much easier to complete seem to be very on the nose with what most of us playing here want. Now look at how Live approached incarnates. Each new slot had new trials that forced and funneled players together into content many did not really want to do. HC team has done away with that. Even if they add new incarnate powers for the missing slots, it seems unlikely even if they add new trials with them, that they will be a requirement, and thus only large team minded players are likely to bother with them, so that then leads to would it be worth the time to even make that content for our volunteer team for a population small enough very few would even engage with that content. Accept that when your characters are done they are the bloody best of the best, a team of such heroes should make doing the day saving a walk in the park. We are the bloody JLA at that point not year one X Men, not the bloody Doom Patrol. Content is for leveling, the content for above that truly optional ITrials that lets face it few of us bother with on HC and only did on Live because it was a must.

Actually we have a great many more difficulty modes. Did you not notice the 1-8 and -1to +4 scale slider? Or that its a simple fact that some ATs by design will always have an easier time due to being front line dps dealers rather then support and CC? Or that we as players have great control over how challenged we want by choosing if we want to invest heavily in a build, or just by deciding to value you flavor more then META when choosing powers? Being OP in CoH isnt even really a thing, Its just being a cosmic class build vs a street soldier build which is ideal for a game in the comic genre. There is a reason some choose not to even slot incarnate abilities on certain characters even if they run post 50 content heavily like the shard TFs, ITF, or LGTF alongside incarnate friends. Because they value the ability to be able to create the character they want rather then feel forced into even the incarnate system and the very limited content out there only for them. When Batman and Superman team up, there is no equality in their power scale. In fact Kal El even on a intellectual level surpasses mere mortal Bruce Wayne because a kryptonian has a photographic memory with perfect recall, and can read the entire works of human history in less time then it takes Alfred to make Bruce a cuppa. Superman literally role plays an idiot to not make the entire JL feel pointless. Something I frankly can relate to in CoH on teams even with my mere mortal Batman homage just because well, people are gonna be people, and many people are not all that effective at attack rotations, managing different clicks and their cooldowns etc. As I said before you would have to ban players like me outright if the goal is to reduce the peak down to a hill everyone can reach. Because people like me will just build a tower out of the corpses of our foes and remain above the masses. "Take my love, take my land, take me where I can not stand. Burn the land and boil the sea, but you wont take the sky from me!"

Hell at that point they may as well ban players like me because even on my gimp builds made for flavor concept reasons there tends to be a large gulf between me and most of those on my teams. If the issue is power gap sometimes its a behind the keyboard issue more then anything else ime.

Synapse exemps one to lvl 20, taht means attuned LOTGs will still work due to the 5 level grace. Purple sets work no matter how low you exemp. One can grab the recharge bonus of 20% from base empowerment to help fill any loss. I do not lose my perma drain psyche because of such things at that level and love running synapse. Not every build is good for exemping but blasters and doms ime do damn fine exemped down pretty low as do stalkers( fyi synapse is very easy to solo on all sorts of stalkers. Bring the right tool for the right job I say. Sands of mu and a staff plus plasmatic taser are all handy tools when exemping low to help augment dps. Also grenades, lots of grenades.

Let me ask a question of the anti hasten/anti global recharge faction members. What is the end result your hoping to see as the outcome should your wants come to pass? Do you want to see all powers that are able to be permafied no longer able to be? Do you want those powers recharges shortened so hasten/global recharge isnt needed to perma them? Do you want offensive powers like nukes able to be used less often, indirectly buffing judgement in end game play as rotating between them would become far more common place to compensate for the lack of nuking from the ATs like blaster which would suffer a huge loss in dps not being able to nuke in the 30ish second range? What about the support powers like healing and buffing? Describe the game play you are trying to see come to pass as clearly and detailed as you can please. For example is your desire to see players being able to with a heavy investment in their build no longer able to solo +4X8, and make teaming more a must, and for teams to be forced to stick tightly together at all times during group play rather then being able to spread out and finish objectives more timely by dividing up.

Which again is way to like the brute fury mechanci, one I personally loathe and why I favor scrappers and stalkers over brutes by a large margin. How dom works is just bloody fine in my book. Like every AT a low end inf build functions but can struggle. A fine tuned bruce wayne inf build will as it rightly should utterly dominate. HC has made it so very easy to deck out a build, those who continue to act like getting the inf to get 5 purple sets and all the rare sets and specials because they are too much an altaholic and cant be bothered to just perfect a toon before moving on are not going to get a lot of sympathy. High end recharge builds give up high end soft def or dmg res set focuses in a fair give and take. The less valued global recharge becomes if demands to make it not as needed to achieve the effects its favored for or neutering those effects in general mean people will just gravtitate towards those other focuses. If for example perma dom either goes away, or becomes easy to get without set bonuses then it leads to soft def being the set focus priority.

Im sorry but why on earth shoulda sent even come close to a blaster or offender in terms of DPS. They are more like ranged scrappers. That is the AT they should be most directly held up against outside of PBs who are the most obvious counterpart as the old tank mage AT. Offenders are a special kind of thing and are not a standard but a outlier. Outliers are not the measure by which balance should be discussed. And blasters should and stalkers are the DPS kings and should pretty much have no one else even remotely close to them in blasters for aoe, and ranged ST, adn stalkers for melee ST obviously. These re the king of the hill ATs for DPS and everyone else should be down the hill closer to the base then the peak. Sents have more then enough DPS to easily and rapidly clear base line dif at cap. A well developed one can easily handle high end dif scaling solo. Mine would regularly take alt paths solo in tf mishes to speed them up because X8 groups posed no threat to him and died plenty fast. If people are struggling to make a good sent well I shudder to think what a scrapper or blaster performs like in their hands. Go makea dark/regen or dark/bio and fine tune it and get back to me that its just too gimpy and in dire need of buffing.

Uhm this sounds like you actually do not know D&D all taht well nor the history of ranger and the favored enemy aspect. In the earliest era ranger was a specialized class that demanded above average ability scores and a commitment to the ranger code( if one played in the original setting greyhawk this was the ranger knights of gnarly wood) which meant good alignment. Giant kind at that time included a very large variety of common to encounter monsters. Everything from little Kobolds( in that era the small cousins of the giant kin Gnolls) up to and inlcuding Titans, with all sorts like ogre, minotaur, half breeds, and in fact any one even normal humans of 7 feet or greater in height counted as giant kin for the bonus. And the bonus was not really part of their total power. A rangers two weapon fighting alone in that era meant they tended to out dps every other class. Then came 2nd ed, Rangers still got kits, could choose from standard generic fighter kits, or specialized ranger kits including justicar which gave them access to weapon specialization making them in ever aspect better then the common fighter. Then came skills and powers, now rangers could dip into other warrior classes. I had one that was the son of a paladin and had spent points to get a paladins special mount and holy sword access on top of being a lawful good ranger justicar who was specialized in his chosen weapon. Then came 3E, now rangers were just a common class with no special stat demands, and in fact if evil could pick their own race as a favored enemy. 3E+ was based around the idea of absolute player control of their character, and to be tailored to the campaign setting. With prestige classes etc all being outlined before players even making the character. So if it was an undead heavy campagn for example the ranger obviously would take favored enemy undead, and likely build for the feat that let them be able to crit undead because that is how 3E was designed. never touched 4 E or later so cant input on those later eds. But no a rangers favored enemy was not really ever a major factor in their class power balance. as in 1st and 2nd a ranger was out and out meant to be better then a commoner class like fighter. And in 3rd like all characters was meant to be fine tuned for the specific setting and campaign the DM planned to run before dice ever got rolled for stats if RNG stats even got sued as in 3E+ stat point allocation became the mainstream in RPGA run games. Nice try bub but I am a true old school D&D nerd hell Id even dare say a scholar of D&D and you trying to reference ranger just falls flat imo.

My main dom is named bella kiss, he is my main red sider and based on a monsterous serial killer from history. He is a mind control/martial assault dom. I would argue that such a psychology as he is meant to represent as a true villain is very much in line with being able to patiently away unleashing oneself when the time is most opportune, but also being always at the read so as to never be caught unprepared( look up obsolete oddity's channel on youtube and his episode on bella kiss which should explain exactly what I mean here)). You are basically saying here that how you think the concept is, is the only right way to view it from an RP concept and frankly I strongly disagree.

stalkers ATO sets and the ability to re-enter hide status is a far bigger perk then perma dom, as it can let a Stalker often 3 or 4 hit even a EB that often otherwise challenges entire teams. From Frostfire onward a stalker with the ATO sets basically has zero issue with anything short of larger then baseline groups or anything less then AVs. Even with perma dom a dom cant lock down an EB or AV with ease or rapidly solo murder the clockwork king at level on a synapse like a stalker can.

But its not a uniquely huge binary. A mental 2ndary blaster with perma drain psyche vs a low recharge build is a huge gap in sustainability. a perma light form PB is hugely different then a pure SO PB. Your basically here trying to say that the baseline and the meta should not have much if any of a gap. You do not need perma domg to solo +0X1 dif. That is the baseline a AT needs to be able to solo while leveling to be viable. That is it. They dont need to be able to solo lockdown an AV, they dont need to eb able to be the single CC toon on an LGTF. That is the perk and the reason to pursue the high end IO set builds. It is easier then ever for people to achieve this, those that dont are frankly imo lazy, not merely casual, but out and out lazy and can simply not be bothered to learn the how of using IO sets. We all amass plenty of merits via normal content play to build up basic sets with plenty of recharge to get perma hasten and perma dom. LOTG specials are not even a must in such a pursuit, just one of the easier big chunks. Somone at 50 can easily build up to 5 purple sets for 50%, fit in other sets for between 5 and 8 % more per set while not hurting their powers in any way, if perma whatever is a goal they care about. IMO its usually those who want soft cap defenses and high dmg res in addition to perma whatever that chafe the most, as typically the big def set boosts are not the same as the recharge sets. If you got your way all that would lead to is making it a bigger no brainer to get soft cap def without giving up the perk of perma whatever.

MY PB nukes, only bosses are standing, LTs are near death, and its clean up time for the scrappers and stalkers while I move on. Minions all die in the blast bosses barely get moved, maybe a few LTs need to be run downa few feet. Anti KBers are very quickly put on ignore and never get into my TF runs again. Its good to be the leader.

Yeah, and wouldnt that just lesson us as a community? Just like taking away the joy of winning a CC and getting a nice reward of inf or a purple set that we as a community have long done?

Hell sometimes when I get a purple I dont need, I just straight up do a looky loo around Atlas and if I see a lowbie with a bio that I like I reward them with a drive by gift they likely wont even have a clue where it came from. Its fun being a secret Santa.

Bro the proper response is "Karate is for defense Daniel-San!"

First off depending entirely on pure RNG to finish a character is not an accomplishment. Its just another form of virtual gambling. Second, CoH dont need help in the longevity department one bit. While virtually every other MMO ever has struggled to beat the 5% mark when it came to player retention, CoH was a legend among MMO with a solid 20-25% retention rate unheard of among MMO. Know why? Because the game is just fun to play in a way so few others are. The exemplar/sidekicking system makes it so easy and painless to team up and enjoy every bit of content you favor over and over, and are never forced to run specific content for specific gear. We often play finished toons with no need to chase the dragon of new BIS for them. Some are altaholics, some revel in a stable of completed characters and some are both to varying degrees. Without a reason to use inf, and making reward merits basically be just for us, a great amount of the player inter active community would wither away. What value would costume contest and trivia contest hold if the inf we would offer as a reward would be basically useless? What good would sg storage of enhancements so we could share that which we dont need with any ally in need be beyond personal hoarding space? Its very clear to me you have not thought out this idea beyond some silly reactionary feeling, and referencing D3 does nothing to buy you credit. Im a PoE for life ARPGer and have been since the day CoH was murdered by NC Suck. D3 is a souless abomination compared to the glory that is PoE. PoE doesnt use an AH but does allow trade. I rather revel in the live trade and bartering of Wraeclast. PoE is the true heir to the legacy of original Diablo and anyone who thinks anything and I mean any little thing done by blizzard with that so called game that is basically the best case for allowing post birth abortions for every single failure of a human that helped make that waste of programming hours, should likely just go back to D3 and leave us connoisseurs of gaming in peace. I mean who the hell even makes a suggestion like this? The winner of a tide pod challenge?

I frankly disagree as someone who has both. A PB is supposed to be unique by being a nuke capable tank. While with great investment blasters etc can reach this to some degree, a Sent does so right out of the box. Because you can make one with a better nuke set with more useful debuffing like dark etc they surpass a PB in the offense aspect. Because they can take far more adaptable sets like Bio or regen they surpass khelds in the survival aspect, all imo of course but in game play that is exactly what it feels like to me. Perma light form does have its advantages, but not as much as the diverse options Sents can choose from. And then when you factor in Khelds not having any epic/patron pool access, and yes the bane of Qs which can make especially early solo play much harsher on khelds then anything any other AT has to deal with by and large, it becomes a why do sents need any buffing especially before khelds and PBs specifically? I very much consider of fine tuned dark/regen sent to be leaps and bounds more tanky than my perma light form PB and possessed of greater utility and adaptability build wise. If a number cruncher wants to break down the baseline stat differences between the closest equiv a energy/inv sent and a PB and then factor in the things like a epic/patron pool the sent has access to on top of that I suspect the PB will not really seem like anything special. Im not saying there is no need to look at or further fine tune sents. I am saying that they should not be before kheldians get a serious fine tuning. Currently they simply do not stand out as anything special, and the old limits put on them like no epic pool, a built in bane, and a real lack of build diversity options makes me feel like they barely have a place beyond flavor builds. And I love my PB a whole lot and my sent a whole lot. I consider them the two most overlapping characters in my stable however as even among ATs there is far more variation in how they can approach things vs sent tank mage and pb tank mage.

Cant say I agree. My Dark/Regen sent feels extremely powerful. In fact I feel the Sent At basically undermines and obsoletes the unique nature of Peace Bringers. A energy/inv sent is basically a PB with access to epic/villain patron pools. Since we can take a travel power now at low level and without a prereq the advantage of starting with fly/tp as khelds to as also been heavily nerfed indirectly. IMO before anything can be done to the sentinal AT as a whole, this issue of the Peace Bringer being made almost entirely obsolete by this hybrid ATs creation, alongside the fact the kheldians still must suffer the existence of Quantum enemies needs to be recognized and addressed. Sents can tank and they can nuke. Hell their villain patron pools give them in the games own words the strongest of the widows as their permable patron pet. Hell a /bio sent is capable of some very real mass murder, so just broad brushing up sents dps as a whole only makes their strongest outliers truly OP.