Leogunner

Idealistically, that would have been something to implement way back when, perhaps not diminishing returns but merely the presence of a team bonus. I think there was conjecture of diminishing returns in CoX before and I'm fuzzy on if it was ever proven or quantified. I don't think many liked the idea of it. Quelling, culling or dividing rewards is probably a discussion for another thread. The idea of giving every player a selectable reward they gain "exp" toward obtaining, putting diminishing returns on express farm efforts or locking certain types of drops to certain factions/content could have many positive and negative effects on player behavior but it might be more structured than the laissez faire approach the game sports now.

The reason I say that ship has sailed is because of the already abundance of these rewards already. Either the new reward cap would be substantial enough that you're going to want strict dedicated builds/players and only aim for the cap or the bonus would be minor to be mostly inconsequential. Once you start giving concrete numbers on the new cap, that dilemma becomes more apparent. Looking at the accessibility and bonuses of the current game vs how it was live illustrates the trend.

On the first part, that ship has sailed a long time ago. Ideally, you'd want to make all kinds of content worthwhile to run rather than creating ideal content that max level will gravitate to more strongly.

I think, for the most part, it is. It's just once you get into the mid-to-late 30s that it starts to change. Correct me if I'm wrong. Even on my Tankers, I wouldn't be doing +4x8 in the lvl 20s but it's very doable in the 30s.

I personally dislike when people do the "roster shuffle" unless something very difficult comes up (to which one can also just lower the difficulty). Learning to adapt to what the team is doing is part of the challenge rather than prescribing what the team needs. I hear all this hoop and holler about how people can complete content with any combination of ATs and part of doing that is using what your characters have, regardless of AT. Just because you're a DPS or a Tank doesn't mean you also don't have support or control lobbed somewhere in your powerset combination. As a hypothetical rebalancing, I'd also want to rebalance -1/-2 as a viable setting meant for solo as well, possibly aimed for characters with more AoE focus. There have been other threads talking about ideas to make foes more dangerous in groups but maybe for another thread.

On that bar, perhaps recalibrating the game overall so +4/5x8 would be mostly a team dedicated settings across the board.

Easy counter: this game was built to not need the trinity so any particular class isn't required. ....I said it was an easy counter, not a good one.

They could create a mechanic with MM's specifically where you can "craft" inspirations that don't affect the user but affect all your minions at once. Like 1 of each level of the same type of inspiration gives a character-limited inspiration (so you can't sell it) specifically for your minions so you'd still need to dedicate effort to bolstering your minions and bolstering yourself. Having only one version of this type of inspirations means you're not looking at the ridiculous numbers of the highest type inspiration but you can get multiples to closer simulate the effect over time.

What does any of this have to do with what you just said? Also the top-end is skewed and shouldn't be what is compared or balanced around. The top-end being unbalanced is not really relevant unless you're talking about rebalancing the top-end first.

Translation: The thread has now become less entertaining.

Is this still on the beta servers? Might want to put it in the beta feedback if it is.

This is news?

I had a concept for a melee set that offered different effects upon defeating foes and thought it'd be an interesting mechanic for a set. With the melee set I suggested, granting a temp power to a minion and then "defeating" them would then cause a fear effect on several nearby foes but a Lt or above, defeating them while they have the temp power would spread it to others. There could be other ways to play with this concept like giving nearby allies a heal, the user a buff or cause extra damage or something.

Looking at the inherents currently that have garnered great success (things like Assassination, Domination, the new Gauntlet, etc), I'd aim for inherents to be more interactive to make them more entertaining and gameable so it feels like the player is accessing the capabilities of the AT rather than the inherent just happening to their character. While passive inherents aren't bad, they tend to lean on the AT having an extreme specialization like Scrappers having the highest melee mod or Defenders having the highest buff/debuff numbers. If this new AT has weaker armor and weaker support, you can give them a means of bolstering that deficiency or giving them some other advantage for a limited time or under specific circumstances. As for END issues, doesn't Defender and Controller have access to armor toggles in their epic and pool powers? Most armor toggles are actually pretty cheap compared to specialty toggles like Snow Storm, Arctic Air, Disruption Field, etc. And now that players have access to inherent Fitness AND SOs starting as early as the first few levels, I find this a hard point to make. If push came to shove, you could alter the click support to have reduced effect (either in the effect or in the number of affected targets) in exchange for cheaper END costs OR just give the AT more END (that was toyed with with the Tanker changes). There are so many knobs to toy with, I'm concerned only the obvious ones were even considered.

Good luck trying to get any concrete discussion going since it will likely get bogged down with assumptions and opinionated "facts" rather than ever getting further to the more minute details like what the inherent would do and how its actual power layout looks like.

Eh, are you really willing to look at this more objectively? Objectively, a lot of changes have gone in to make the game *objectively* easier all the way down to level 1 and up to max level but no one wants to consider rebalancing IOs or defense or mez or difficulty sliders, etc. Objectively, it's okay to suggest changes to give more power (either offensively or defensively) but we are not allowed to touch the max sliders? Personally, I don't see an issue with having the difficulty better balanced at the base level (+0/x1) so that it accurately scales rather than min/max styles basically hitting the ceiling...but being able to hit that ceiling is defined as "super heroic" so it's "objectively" out of bounds to discuss. On the other hand, I feel it's rather pretentious to consistently push for more and more buffs and conveniences to detract from the game on the premise that some players' time is too valuable. PvP vs PvE aside, things are probably better to keep the same.

#1 is absolutely NOT a rule. Even if the ultimate position is that a control secondary can't control as good as a primary, part of that is covered by the level gap difference and if that happens to be the case and the magnitude is decreased, you can balance this by having the inherent greatly increase the damage instead. As far as glacial kill speeds, we can obviously look at Controller and see that not only is it viable but in some instances, it's actually very prominent in the meta. Ultimately, this all boils down to how the powers are balanced and while you can cite some rules-of-thumb with regards to powerset specializations and what not, OP, it is certainly not impossible. I consider Controller my least favorite of all ATs due to how clunky and unrealistically its powers are distributed but it could be used as a template on what is going to be needed if you want to round out your idea. Considering the veritable smorgasbord of out-of-set attacks available to everyone, giving it the mods to utilize them well (thinking around Stalker melee mods and Corr ranged mods) and some kind of inherent that gives them more offense, maybe limited on targets who are controlled similar to Controllers, it might make it workable and as conceptually sounds (i.e. barely) as a current Controller.

I think there was a better argument in another thread for just shifting some of those tier 9s earlier in the set instead since getting a defense "nuke" isn't really needed once your build is stable in the 35+ range. Having a crashing buff in the 12-30 range is much more beneficial even if it ends up causing you to die once its over and you can respec out of it if you don't play early game and you can keep it in your build if you often exemp down.... ....is what I would have said if the early game wasn't further simplified with easy SO access right off the bat. Soon we're probably going to see recharge times chopped and/or easier access to pretty much any meta buff like Hasten.

Considering the constant casualization that continuously keeps floating to the surface, I'd argue just keeping certain powers as niche, even if that niche is that specific power is only really useful in PvP. Notice that the T9s aren't *useless*, you just create a build that doesn't want or need it which is completely different than the powers being broken and need to be reworked.

I beg to differ. I like that Regen is the "click defense" set. I just wish some of its clicks were available more often (and that IH had more enhanceable regen ontop of overall +debuff resists). It might not be ideal on a Tanker or Brute (although on a team with any kind of buffs and if the set had debuff resists, it probably would be up there with DA), but for any AT that doesn't require keeping mob attention (like Sent, Stalker and Scrapper), being able to just click your way out of any mess can be fun if you actually approach the set with that in mind. Too often, players fixate on perma-this and perma-that, completely ignoring that when you are able to perma something, you then need to balance it in those circumstances. If something isn't perma, you can make it as powerful as you need it to be to fulfill its role of "get out of jail free" card. On my Elec/Regen Stalker, I aimed to have as many click "buffs" as possible with the main downfall being some pools just don't let you access more than one. I lament that Scraps/Stalks don't have more clickie buffs in their epic pools so I have more choices than Shadow Meld.

If any changes to Bio ever happens, I think they should just make the different modes more distinct. Rather than reduce the regen, tie it to efficiency mode and tie more defense (thus less in efficiency and offensive) into defensive mode and offensive mode should have all the perks of -res, damage, +ToHit, +dmg but come with a def and res penalty more prominent than currently. Same could honestly go for any set that has a 'modes' feature. They really took a conservative route trying to make them all "perks" with no drawbacks making it set up to pick the better/meta perk and ignore the rest instead of making all the modes more a necessity to utilize on a consistent basis.

A different mental experiment question: If Force Bolt was a hold instead of a KB, how much more worthwhile would it be to use it on a Underling vs a Lt? How about a Minion vs a Boss? Now consider that hold function like other ST holds that require stacking magnitude to take effect...

Curious if you came up with that suggestion organically or if you heard it from other posters. It's been so long, I can't even remember if I read someone else suggest it or if I was just tossing out random niche changes for Regen and grew a liking to that particular idea. But like I was saying in other threads, I feel the set's concept isn't "Wolverine" regeneration (that is now WP) but rather damage immunity. The closest analogy I could think of is cartoon damage negation, like dropping a piano on Tom's head, crush him, his teeth are replaced with piano keys then he shakes his head and suddenly is back to (almost) normal within a few frames. On a concept level, people that want passive regen should be playing Willpower as Regen's concept is and should be different. On that train of thought, it needs debuff resistance (maybe scale it with your clicks so the more you click, the more you resist). Giving it scaling resistance to -rech, -movement, -END, -regen and -def would be a strong change that would make the set particularly strong when paired with a team.

Huh, noted.

Being honest, "street sweeping" has been mostly niche and ignored. To me, if I'm a "hero", I can street sweep regardless of if the enemy is at my level or 10 below. You're rescuing people and helping the neighborhood. Needing to get exp and drops feels mostly inefficient and pointless compared to running missions. You'd have to start implementing aspects of overworld impact or events to make street sweeping more than just grinding random mobs for stuff. Probably better for a different discussion. I wouldn't mind street sweeping being a thing, but it gets messy (read: obnoxious) trying to keep the same-level players in the area not overwhelmed by scaled mobs aimed for street sweeping prospects.