AgentForest

I think that's a great start (as this power desperately needs help), but I think being attackable is an issue. Nanites, by definition, are microscopic. That always annoyed me about the move. They looked like robot cockroaches the size of a softball. That's not a nanite. If you could see nanites to attack them, they'd be in such large numbers that they'd appear as a "grey goo" or a floating smoke-like cloud. One of the reworks for this power I saw making more sense was the idea of a nanite swarm. You pick a target, and they encircle it, either providing a strong regen boost, or a heal-over-time to them. But once that target's health is full, it looks for the lowest health pet nearby and jumps to them, continuing its job like a chain heal-over-time. If anyone's ever played League of Legends, Malzahar is a mage with a damage-over-time spell that eats at a target's health, and if they die while afflicted with it, it will reset it's duration and jump to the next nearby target. I always thought of nanites more like a healing version of that (without refreshing its duration, obviously, but jumping to new targets when its job is done on the first target). For how strong the ability would be, I wouldn't mind a long cooldown. But it just can't remain as-is.

That's how balancing should be handled for these things. They should be ways of doing what your class can't already do. That being said, I will admit that while the Patron pools compared to Epic pools have some discrepancies. I get that the villain themed pets are unique, and should remain unique. Hero sets shouldn't necessarily get hero themed pets. I don't demand that be changed. The biggest issue I have is the magnitude of quality you get from similar moves when comparing hero and villain epic pools. Look at Tankers/Brutes for example. Hero sets offer a single-target immobilize, but villain versions give you AoE ones. Across the board. I think Ring of Fire should be replaced with Fire Cages. Tweak the radius if you must, but all of the Tanker ancillary options SHOULD have comparable levels of utility.

I generally dislike basic enhancements now that crafting exists, but your solution combined with the "upgrade all" from the enhancement screen feature actually would make me use them again. If they were cheaper (since they're short-term and disposable, needing replaced frequently), and the need for replacing them was less frequent, and the ones I could use dropped more, then I honestly would use them again. As it stands right now, I tend to just team on missions and TFs until 27 or so, without any enhancements, just selling my loot to stores or the AH, then I make a checklist and send money to my crafter. I have 80+ characters across 4 shards, lol. I have one person do all the crafting and email them back. Most of my money goes to him. I just skip getting enhancements at all until then, short of any useful ones I find dropped. If I can get close to level 30 fast enough, I never need the disposable enhancements. But under your suggestions, I wouldn't hesitate to use them again.

HP is the amount of DAMAGE one can sustain, not the amount of PAIN one can sustain. Having more HP would mean it takes more hits to break your arm. More intense heat to cause burns to your skin. A bullet still hits you, but doesn't quite penetrate to vital organs. If a passive ability increases your max HP, fine. I have no issue with that. You are just inherently more durable than other characters. But that shouldn't really be fluid throughout a fight. It doesn't make sense. But pain is more mental than physical. It has to do with perception of damage, not damage itself. You can't literally take more damage without dying just because your pain response is dulled. You can just ignore more of that damage, but will still succumb to the same injuries. Sort of like illusory damage from Spectral Wounds, but backwards. The very concept should be temporary and not "real" hitpoints. Otherwise it isn't dulled pain, but bonus durability. If I give someone morphine to dull their pain response, a gunshot will still go through them just the same. They just won't notice right away. This is why absorb is ideal for such a mechanic. Obviously, the best mechanic for "Dull Pain" isn't in CoH at all, which would be to stagger any damage received over time instead of lump sum. Get hit with a 100 damage attack, but only take 50 damage, while the remaining 50 comes in over the next 10 seconds, buying time for regen and healing to take effect. But that's another debate entirely. That would be truly reversing the "illusionary damage" idea and would be thematically most accurate. But working that into the game would pretty much require a ground-up rework of any sets that have Dull Pain powers. Too much work, and it would only anger the purists.

This reminds me of a suggestion I had for Forcefields > Containment Field. Make the power apply a sleep/hold that has an absorb HP bar, say for the sake of demonstration, 100 HP absorb. If you break that barrier, the containment field implodes, collapsing in on them for 150 damage but ending the cc. This would use it as a sort of "target painting" mechanic instead of just a "welp, can't hurt him now, how annoying..." power. I also suggested making Force Bolt penetrate and lower defenses, and have significant bonus damage against absorb shields, specifically to help the Forcefielder break the containment field. If something like that was done for the "stuck in something" sleep powers like Salt Crystals and Flash Freeze, that would be great. The knockdown mechanic for the other "actual sleep" sleep moves is great too.

Poisons: It would be nice if for Poisons, the first two click debuffs had larger AoEs. Even if it meant the AoE debuff was weaker than the target you shot directly, it just feels awkward to shoot a group of enemies and only get a third of them if you're lucky. Why is the Mastermind T9 a temporary toggle? Defenders, Corruptors, and Controllers all put the toggle on themselves as long as they like, but Masterminds put it on a pet, but it expires. Can theirs just work like everyone else's? The T1 heal is GARBAGE. At least O2 Boost can protect people from end drains. Alkaloid is just... so bad. It's as weak as the AoE heal for Empathy (half the strength of the single-target heal from that set), but still costs as much as they do. This is only made worse by the fact that Corruptors and Controllers have to grab it by default, lol. Forcefields: Force Bolt should deal more damage, with a bonus against absorb shields. It should also penetrate and lower enemy defenses. Containment Field should apply a hold with an "absorb" health bar to it. If you break that bar, the hold ends, but the barrier implodes, dealing that damage as well as a bonus burst of damage to the target. Say for example Containment field creates a 100 HP barrier on the target. If you deal 100 damage to them before the hold ends, the enemy takes 150 damage, and is freed. Obviously those numbers are just for illustration, not necessarily balance tested. This works well paired with the new "bonus damage to barriers" effect granted to Force Bolt, allowing you to more easily pop containment fields. Repulsion Field should work more like Force Bubble and Hurricane, shoving enemies away slowly, with a knockdown chance, but instead of applying a debuff to accuracy and range like Hurricane does, it should apply a debuff to damage and recharge, since the repulsion field pushes on their attacks lowering the velocity. Force Bubble should be a single-target powerful absorb shield, maybe with some regen and resistances added in, but mainly just the absorption. However, when you pick up this power, your Dispersion Bubble also gains a weak absorb-over-time effect, like Frigid Shield and Instant Regeneration for Sentinels, but to all people protected by your bubble. It's small, but constantly replenishing if in range. Sonic Resonance: Some similar tweaks like with Forcefields would help here. Make the containment field type power breakable for bonus damage or something. The T9 power is basically just Earthquake with meaningless damage and a longer cooldown. Why? Just make it an earthquake clone and replace the Sonic Repulsion power since that's pretty useless. Give it a new T9 power that allows for some sort of emergency protection, like my Force Bubble suggestion. Maybe a toggle placed on a target that makes them reverberate with energy, causing a rapid heal-over-time on that target, and half that to targets near them. Make it a short cooldown so you can just move it to where it's needed as a sort of noise therapy thing.

You use the absorb to soak up the hits, and the regeneration tops you off while the shield buys you time to regenerate. It's not a hard concept to understand. Many MMOs have healer specs that utilize this combo of regen or heal-over-time effects with barriers to buy them time to work their magic. One of the reasons people like +HP is because it increases base regen, which is why I suggest giving absorb effects a regen bonus. Not because the BARRIER can regen, but because your health bar could still use the help while the shield protects you, lol. Also, the regen effect would have a duration, like all regen buffs. It wouldn't just "disappear" because the barrier's gone. The barrier has a max duration, sure, but it also has a health. Just because you killed the shield doesn't mean the regen has to stop. Just like how waking someone up from Salt Crystals still leaves the defense debuff in effect. Your argument that the devs clearly wanted +HP to exist separate from Absorb mechanics despite switching mostly to absorb for new powers once they'd managed to make it work in the game's engine is akin to saying: "The devs clearly didn't want Hero ATs to have passives. Villains got them, and if they wanted heroes to have them, it would have been in from the start. They could have done it. Therefore, any old ATs should not have passives." It just doesn't work as an argument as far as I can tell. They hadn't originally planned on it, but felt it was only fair that older content get the same dynamic, fun overhaul that newer content got. The engine didn't allow for adding a separate absorb HP bar originally. So they used the workaround of just adding to your HP pool instead. Minor differences (like being able to heal the new HP, and affecting base regen), but ultimately it got the job done without needing to dramatically revamp the game engine. Later, they found a way to make absorb shields work. The game was shut down so fast after those powers came out that there was no time to ever see how well-received it was and build it into other older sets. But my guess is, much like with hero ATs getting passives, it was only a matter of time. Anyway, it seems you're getting really heated over just a friendly conversation about possible mechanical tweaks, so maybe you aren't the person to talk about this stuff with. I'll keep that in mind in the future. Have a good night, everyone.

Not exactly. To dull pain is to blunt it. To shrug it off. You are essentially numbing yourself to a blow. If a portion of that blow just didn't happen, that's an absorb. You aren't increasing your health. You're just ignoring the pain of a hit.

I don't think the game engine has the tools to do this, but I wouldn't mind that if mousing over a power icon caused the effect radius/area to show up on-screen. Again, it likely will never be a thing in City of Heroes, but games that make all cones work that way often make it very clear where they'll land, like MOBAs.

BOOM! This plz. Honestly, they got rid of the crash for Blasters because they were so boring to just one shot a whole group of enemies, then be useless for 30 seconds, only to repeat. So they made those moves weaker, but have no crash so they can just be a strong nuke during one's regular rotation. So they should do this for defensive T9s. Go the Moment of Glory route. Make it maybe 10 seconds, but really good, no crash, and then a minute or two cooldown. There really is no need for a crash. It just breaks enjoyment and the flow of combat.

There it is. Defenders are a specialized roll, not a jack of all trades. They are the strongest support in the game, and their blast sets exchange damage for stronger secondary effects. For example, Sonic Blast debuffs enemy resistance FAR more on a Defender than on a Blaster or Corrupter. I think it's actually double the Blaster strength, with Corrupter being somewhere in between, but closer to Blasters. This is because their job is specialized. They facilitate a team's ability to win. In order to make them at least capable of soloing, they gain a damage buff when without teammates. Not a DEBUFF when on teams, but buff when NOT on teams. If you want greater damage in a team environment as a support, play a Corrupter. That's literally their job. They are a hybrid class. They support, but they get better base damage, and get crits the lower enemy HP gets. They are MADE to both support and deal damage. To make Defenders deal more damage on teams would be to essentially make the Corrupter an obsolete class.

Every sleep move should have some secondary effect unique to it or its set. Mind Control sleep moves should deal a burst of bonus damage if the target is forcibly woken up. I suggest this for Mind Control because it has a hard time dealing damage compared to other controller sets, so it would give their Containment a hand. Sonic Blast's sleep move should lower enemy resistance by a decent amount, lingering after they wake up. Spore Burst should lower the target's Damage output significantly when awakened. Salt Crystals already has a defense debuff, but that could be made stronger to make it as strong as the other suggestions. Ice Control and Ice Melee AoE sleep effects should cause a large recharge/speed debuff. It's been suggested already, but it's definitely the easiest idea to incorporate into the game.

Joshex, your argument doesn't really make sense. You seem to be the one saying the tides control the moon here. I'm simply looking at the development process as it has played out. New mechanics were added, and in their addition, old mechanics that did similar things just sorta stopped being used. +HP was implemented before the game had the ability to add temporary HP to a character through absorb barriers. It was the same idea, but more awkward because those temporary HP were capable of being healed, which doesn't actually make logical sense. If I dull the pain I'm receiving, I'm not actually increasing my hit points. I'm merely shrugging off more of the damage. I'm ignoring some of it. Like a barrier would provide. But the game engine didn't allow for temporary barriers until years later. Nearly a decade later. WoW came out within a year of CoH, and this mechanic was known from its beta, so I doubt the CoH team hadn't heard of it. But their engine didn't allow for shields like that. So they made due with a work-around. The weird part of this work-around was that it meant that "shield" could be healed and regenerated. It also had some collateral of causing a regen boost because regeneration in this engine is based on max HP. The fact that when the game finally DID incorporate Absorb shields, they almost entirely stopped providing +HP powers says something. You may not want to admit it, but it's true. They fixed the issue with the engine, and had finally worked out a way to do what those powers used to provide more clumsily through +HP. That being said, pretty much every +HP click move could easily be replaced with an Absorb, +Regen, lower cooldown move. The whole point of dulling pain was to reduce the impact of large hits, and letting people do this through a barrier just makes more logical and mechanical sense. Auto-powers still make more sense being +HP instead of Absorb though, as they are passive, and thus constant. If it's constant, it should be an HP increase, because HP is supposed to be constant. In an RPG, max HP is supposed to be more static. It's not really meant to dramatically change from minute to minute. Even in games that have HP buffs (like Blessing of Fortitude in WoW), they tend to be very long-term buffs, or permanent character stat changes as passives. Having a button press decide that you are now 40% more person than you were before, short of growing in size, doesn't really make sense. If you want the same effect from a more logically consistent set of effects: Absorb +Regeneration +Resist (all) That would be functionally identical, minus the "healing a barrier" mechanic that +HP has that makes no sense. However, splitting +HP into those 3 effects would allow for more fine-tuned balance fixing of powers, and allow for more thematic implementation of such powers. Perhaps the version of Dull Pain that Regen Scrappers get offers greater +Regen, but the Dull Pain that Invulnerability Tankers get offers more Resistance and Absorb. Perhaps Earth's Embrace is just tons of Resistance with a weaker Regen boost. Maybe Hoarfrost is more Absorb than regen/resist. Then the cooldown on those powers could be adjusted to how situational it is and how often such a move is needed for that set to function well. There's a lot that could be done to update these older powers, and the only complaint I see about doing it is, "No, I'm used to doing things the old way." Okay, fine preference I guess, but that doesn't actually contribute any real balance or readability assistance to the conversation. It doesn't address the clear design direction that had happened ever since Absorb was added as a mechanic. It's just arbitrary personal preference to keep it as is.

I didn't say it was a balance issue. I said we have the processing power and ability to make that cosmetic change, and a post about Regen seemed a valid place to put it. I'd also support doing it for Endurance drain/recovery as well. It would be a lot easier to visually gauge when your bar would be full or depleted. Instead of seeing it tick down every second, then up every 5 seconds, just having it replenishing at a constant rate because of the current boosts and drains on your Endurance balancing out to form a single, constant contribution would be better for quality of life. If your base recovery is 2.08 per second, and you activate a toggle with 0.26/sec end cost, it would make more sense and would make power activation more reliable (less likely for toggles to just drop in combat) if it just made your endurance recover at 1.82/sec. And make that happen steadily throughout that second. For Regeneration as an effect, it wouldn't change the number values of the regeneration, but would help visually express how fast your health is actually declining at a glance, which helps when one is deciding when to activate panic moves. Other people already brought up ways to mitigate dying to burst damage. It would be redundant for me to go over all of those suggestions again. Having Integration provide that Absorb over time shield that "Instant Regeneration" provides for Sentinels is a great start for that. Converting "Dull Pain" into an absorb shield plus regeneration effect helps too. But I felt it wasn't really useful to reiterate old comments.

Honestly, I have always had issues with these from the start. They have rare, situational uses, and those uses rarely make up for the immense endurance costs and the opportunities to screw up a team's fight strategy, lol. If you made Repulsion Field do what Force Bubble does, but at a much smaller radius that you could use to finesse people into positions (like Hurricane), that would be far better than the knockback chaos. To make it on-par with Hurricane, it would need some other benefit too, like maybe a reduction to enemy damage output (as you push bullets and weapons away, lowering their velocity) like how Hurricane reduces accuracy. For Force Bubble, I always felt the Forcefield set in general was the IDEAL set to utilize the newer Absorb mechanics. Force Bubble should be a single-target powerful absorb shield you can throw on someone in danger as a panic move (something FF lacks as a set). It should also passively make Dispersion Bubble provide a small Absorb shield over time like "Instant Regeneration" and "Frigid Shield" for Sentinels, but to all allies in the area of the bubble.

One idea I had for the intangible trap moves like Detention Field would be to give it a HP bar, and if you break that bar before it wears off, the enemy takes the damage dealt plus a bonus all at once. You let the team sorta "collapse" the barrier on them by overwhelming it, and they get crushed in the implosion.

This would encroach on Sonic Resonance territory, but it's not a bad idea to give it SOMETHING useful to do when it hits a target. For example, being that you control forcefields and barriers, it would be thematically relevant, unique, and helpful if Force Bolt dealt bonus damage to Absorb shields, penetrated enemy defense stats, and lowered defenses.

That's kinda where I got the idea, lol. In PvE only content, this sort of issue doesn't really come up much, but the moment you have someone always popping out of melee range in PvP, you've broken the game, lol. There always needs to be a check on mobility moves in a PvP environment.

It would be nice if Teleport pool came with an attack like the other travel pools. Honestly, I had an idea back before the shutdown that they could make all of the travel pool attacks have a repositioning effect. Air Superiority should let you knock the enemy from the sky, but zip past them a short distance (like overshooting them and hitting them as you pass). The attack for the Speed pool could be to dash into melee, hit the enemy, and dash back, essentially a ranged move scaling off of your melee attack scale. Jump Kick could activate at range, but send you flying into melee when cast. Teleport Foe could easily be the opposite of Jump Kick in this scenario, dragging the enemy into melee range and hitting them when they arrive.

If there was a weaker move called "Warp" that's very fast cast time, short range, and lower cost, and provides a minor regen buff or something upon warping, so you can jump around a battlefield, that would be neat. The only problem with balancing that would be PvP. This was just an idea off the top of my head. Perhaps make it so it builds up stacks, and each Warp cast increases the cooldown of the next one, so if you use it too many times in a row, you end up unable to use it when you need it, forcing you to be more careful with it. Attacking enemies eats up the stacks so you can Warp again.

Yeah, that's the issue. Though, if this was ever fixed, I would LOVE to play a Shield Sentinel.

I do like the discussion going on here, but my brain, upon first seeing this post's name, was hoping to find one thing here and did not. So I'll include my suggestion here: Can regen, finally, heal in smaller intervals more often? Across all power sets? For example, you tend to heal in chunks every second or two, but what if the powers just increased the rate at which you received single hitpoints. Not changing the overall total of healing per second that regen stats provide, but changing the rate and frequency at which that value is added to your health bar so that it's a constant, consistent flow of health instead of a weird, staggered jolt of HP every so often.

You know how Super Reflexes for Sentinels has two "[insert word here] Brawler" powers, which are mutually exclusive? If you pick Practiced Brawler, you can't take the other one, and vice versa. What if that was implemented for Mind Control's Tier-9 power? Add a pet option for people who aren't huge fans of confusion mechanics, or like more standard Controller gameplay. This would let people still build Mind Control characters as they always have, but also give the option for a pet build.

That works too, but honestly I'm not sure it would need to go that far. Most costume options have two colors to select. Masks and other facial textures don't, but I don't see why a second color couldn't be put in. For makeup, you should be able to set one color for the eyes and another for the lips. But yes, if under "skin tone" you could set more than just the skin base color itself, that would be great. I mean, skin tone needs more options to begin with, as many of them don't match costume piece colors, making it hard to match skin to other aspects of a design. If you could set the base color, blush, lips, and other options from the skin tone tab, that would be really useful.

Honestly, if I could just click the number of a power tray to just lock the tray position, tray number, and power placement where they were until I clicked the tray number again, that would be fantastic. I mean, if we want to get fancy, you know how there's that one "lock" outfit pattern in the costume editor? You could just put that symbol behind the number to show it's locked.