Steampunkette

Poked at it in Mids. With a -fairly- middling build cost I could wind up on Demons/Pain with: 75% S/L resist at all times 48.6 Neg resist at all times 35% Toxic resist at all times Everything else 23% or lower Then have Rune of Protection every 110 seconds for 90 seconds of +25% resistance to everything. My lowest being Psi resistance at 41% resisted. 539% Regen and a constant 40% damage bonus with spikes here and there up to 160% (Two Build Up Procs) That leaves me with 2 pets (for Bodyguard and more damage) Hell on Earth (More Whip!) and 4 personal attacks that deal between 177 and 260 damage each. Nothing to write home about, really, but still pretty nifty that I'll be able to pull that all out.

I hang with a team of people at all times. I'm never solo 'cause I have a husband and close friends and also an active Supergroup... So I'm revisiting this idea a little bit with the idea of going for Whip/Sorcery powers as the 'Core Attacks', along with Soul Tentacles and Soul Storm because those powers look great. My main choice, now, is whether to aim for /Dark and be a Fearing-Debuffer with a powerful group heal... Or /Pain to increase my own damage output while going for a Regenish type build. If I do /Dark I wind up with Fighting and Maneuvers to get myself a decent (But not capped) ranged defense so I can use Fearsome Stare to diffuse the alpha, then drop Darkest Night to 'essentially' be softcapped before the actual fighting starts. If I do /Pain I have no idea what other power pools to take since I won't be aiming for solid defenses. In either case I intend to take Hasten and Rune of Protection. I know I'll never get it Perma but it's a great little panic button for if things go south! I am also planning to take the Lieutenants only, so she'll have some extra damage output and also Bodyguard. But no big demon and no babies. Help me Master mind Kenobi! You're my only hope!

I'd like to see a system that allows players to create an AE Enemy Group which must have (insert list of requirements, here) then creates an "Enemy" tag for that specific group. The player then goes about their regular business, but Paper/Radio missions gain a new variable at all level ranges: Enemy Wind up rescuing Lois Parker from your personal Nemesis Group once in a while. Have the "Named Entity" mob -always- spawn the current Elite Boss in the Enemy Group Requirement unless you're set to AVs while Solo, in which case you get that group's AV. It'd be a great way to expand our personal canon into the game world. And we all know AE Enemies with Player Powersets are more dangerous than generic Council or whatever (Unless you specifically design them to suck compared to your character, obviously), so that could increase the difficulty a bit for 50 +4x8 teams with Incarnates.

Thank you so much!

Can has on Live pls? Seriously, these changes look amazing, across the board. You've made some A-Game changes, here, and I eagerly await the chance to see what people do with the new base items and costume changes. Do you have a general timeline of implementation or is this all 'On Test 'til we have X quantity of mined data on each powerset change'?

A Zoomer is like a Corruptor with Melee attacks and no support powers and also some control effects. An Infiltrator is kind of like a Wolf Spider, S'truth! The Instigator is like a Brute or Scrapper with less defenses and Ranged attacks. It would be more accurate to compare them to Sentinels (since they'd share the same defensive sets) but a Tankier Sentinel that has more reason to get into melee than their Ult or the occasionally PBAoE. But a Dominator is like a Controller without the Buffs. So long as you're willing to ignore the things that make them different they're basically the same thing!

Also: Simple Pleasures are some of the best! I get to make Leaf-tornadoes! Also Bullet-Tornadoes and Garbage-Tornadoes. Quick! Someone Trow Fish at me so we can make a Sharknado!

I have to vote for the Instigator. I love the idea of the Infested Infiltrator but it's so hard to structure... The secondary Powersets were going to focus on Emanators, by the way. Ground targeted area of effect buffs and such. With defensive powers for the rest of the secondary. And the Zoomer is way better in my mind than the Paladin, though I still feel like it'd need a lot more than "Primary Sustain" to reasonably survive and deal damage!

After screwing around a little bit in the costume creator a week or two ago I loaded up an old concept called "Peacekeeper" who used white-white Street Justice and Willpower as a sort of 'Spielbergian Light Combat" concept but forgot that I had Bio Armor on my secondary. When I scrolled through the powers to change them, I saw wind. Genetic Contamination, in particular, looked windy as heck. I turned around and slapped Kinetic Melee on the character, set it up as a whitish-grey, and then started costuming because it looked great. In game, in play, it looks even better. Cyclone was born, my Wind/Wind Brute. Bouncy, Bright, and Fun she blasts enemies across the room and rebuilds their formations there. http://www.cohplanner.com/mids/download.php?uc=1496&c=694&a=1388&f=HEX&dc=78DA6594D952134114867BC8C4980DC2BE13B260582424A2D7966C5E400445BD4DA5621346C20493B10A2E79056FBCB24A5FC01BF772790F15041EC0A58A4B2DE349FEBF305599AAA9AFE7EFFEFB9CEE3E3D99DD85C0F3EBFB5795E19F2FE62A95EC5CF9A1A33DEB794BDB79ADE4F1CCEFE58B255B7BA43D50EFCD667451EBE4B2656BC7CA67AF394E2EBF1546D782DED0764527E7AC5276B55CC8D9B501E5ED5259F9D74AA56272A96815361D5FBDBDBEA3F5BD20E49A6AD985AEFAD7E2EE8E2E5BDBDA76728E55B2FB1777AC7C72D1D6E5C25E3693AB38BABC873CFB24A771793F87149FAAA936046953B514C84DD0BC4F5AE08B98D0A067441A09539D0B9331F07C948C805F42B488C7601C1FE3F81827C0F9038CF7553C2E7A5CD45AE96DA537446F88DE57929B9BB9B9BB8DBAD61122BBC0AE4EB2033C94381E78DC9E76B3AEF5B4817DAD64101C08802321F0B5C4F3C25B3D9079FC86BBD636FC53C867807C29E38218E70ADE45DCA13BE4E316CCF908F44BC1B461DDAA2D06FF91CCDDCEBD683F7061FC2138FA8D3C228FC1F7E2EDE45E74F27C223CAF08CF29C2F389F1BCA212BB1B1EA39BB9F79011E9EB655EBD59551F7F2C79F533AFFE2718177B463E05E30FB0AEB80D7E90BC06557D9FCCC19BD883F82DF0C23A799BE41E7925F630F31A5EC6FAD2A7E089E410660E61D64782F591607D24581F13ACA38F9243947B13FD8DBC26FE900AF34E56F13DF917FC249E319CAF39B68CBC2657C08B197295BC011A1EDCB3DA9E8D6F21B64BB429C69EEA95C6B0A9A62F21E6740ABEE92BE0CC2C688A27494F92753DC37A9E617DA759CF69D6775C3C29C64EED630D43E6D97D57EA84EB6CD4AAF2A85493926E52669B94CB4DCA9279F6A7A8AE34F67A91CD9A79F65750C62076C7FBFFD657BFFBA4DF603F6FC2CF462D0EED47A3360EED57A3360AED6DEDB672EE370DED770DED7FF54DDCB6 Because of Bio Armor's disparate needs and Kinetic Melee's own desires I decided not to try and focus my Defenses or Resistances for cap (soft or hard). I knew I'd need a lot of regen, too, because the set is built around a comprehensive sort of setup while Kinetic Melee desperately needs recharge. So I aimed my Energy/Negative towards Softcap and my Smash/Lethal to the actual cap. Then I grabbed a messload of Recharge to get DNA Siphon and Parasitic Aura up more often so I'd get some nice self-healing and regeneration bonuses. The result, so far, is that I wreck most enemy groups without slowing down. Ever. I use both auras and my torrent to gather aggro off teammates and generally make a mess of the battlefield and I'm only level 43 (I use Attuned IOs but my build is not complete, I generally don't boost my IOs 'cause I'd rather have all the bonuses when I exemplar). You'll notice I don't have a Taunt in this build. It's not that I don't have room for it (I could always drop Flurry and Whirlwind to pick it up at 24 or something and have room for Maneuvers), it's that I specifically don't want it. Repulsing Torrent is just -so- good as an Aggro Generator because it combines AoE damage, Aggro Generation, and Soft Control. Plus if there's a single dangerous runner I can always fling a Focused Burst out in place of Confront. 😄 But I did say 'Most' groups. Now obviously my build isn't complete because I don't have Weave, yet (I also don't have Flurry, I pushed that up toward the end in-game and took Boxing/Tough a little earlier). And this build is never going to be particularly well defended against Psychic Damage (22% is nothing to sneeze at, but come on that's less than a 50% reduction in incoming damage and I've only got 24% resist). But that's where Knocback Love comes in! ❤️ I start pretty much every fight against Psychics by blasting them end over end across the room. That's my Alpha: Spreading the group around a bit. I know, I know, it's not the most efficient way to win. I do aim for walls, though, -obviously- to try and get as much of the group onto the knocked down Psychics as possible. Then I start kicking their butts while they squirm around on the floor. Energy and Lethal attacks are coming at me, but even with my currently 31% Nrg/Neg defense and 72% Smash/Lethal resistance I'm not in serious danger at all! And if someone manages to get up, I've always got high chances for knockback with other attacks or could just torrent them right back into the wall. Regen, Recovery, Defense, Damage Resistance, Recharge... all of them make Knockback even more powerful! I love it to bits! ❤️

Why not both? The powerset already has a moderate damage ranged attack and a moderate damage ranged AoE. Give Quick Strike some range and the set has the 3 ranged powers it needs to be an assault set. Power Siphon works just fine as it is, no need to change anything. The only power that would need changing is Taunt. And by swapping in Repel from the Kinetics Set you give the assault set a neat survivability tool that isn't overpowered or broken. It's both thought out AND a lazy port 'cause there's very little work that actually needs to be done to it. Which is great! 'Cause the team is small, right now, and we don't have a ton of animators or anything so the best we can basically hope for is mix-matched sets of extant powers.

Literally just take Kinetic Melee off Brutes and port it over to Dominators. It'd take minimal effort to make it work for them. Give Quick Strike a long range, make Burst have a slightly larger area, and replace Taunt with Repel from the Kinetic Support set. Then I could make a Grav/Kin that doesn't get begged for Speed Boosts!

... she became my main. Cyclone is the best. And I'm the only Cyclone on Everlasting, right now, though I didn't get the name (Someone else is sitting on it with the intent to make a Corruptor, dang it! >_<) so I used i for L.

Simple enough suggestion: Add NPC Spawns to Kallisti Wharf. Different groups on the Red and Blue sides to give people a reason to go to one side or the other when there's no costume contests around. Leave the Plaza devoid of NPC Spawns and just have it be a social locale. Harder suggestion: Make all the NPC spawns level-scaling to the person fighting them. Turn Kallisti Wharf into an "All Levels Good Time!" zone for everyone to enjoy. Even better: Add some "Street Sweep" contacts that give you strong-XP-reward repeatable missions to fight specific groups around the Wharf. By making an attractive zone for both sides to use, we might be able to pull people into doing their DFBs cross-faction in Kallisti, encourage people to team up with more variety for street-sweeping, and generally create more incentives to play together. Bonus Suggestion: Add a 'Null the Gull' type NPC to the zone so that if teams decide to stick together after street-sweeping they can head to the Null and side-swap if they need to without leaving the team.

I still like the idea of doing irresistible bruising. It wouldn't quote-unquote replace defenders or support characters because they can do buffing debuffing and healing, and typically do so to large numbers of enemies. But it would make tankers more valuable against Archvillain enemies who normally have ridiculous quantities of resistance to debuff. It wouldn't have much effect while leveling characters up since the task force AVs aren't as overtuned as high-end ones. They would just die marginally faster. Meanwhile all other content would essentially be unchanged because bosses don't resist debuffs nearly as much as elite bosses or archvillains. And it's really only in the high-end that brutes and tankers really start to have this problem where a brute is better for a team than a tanker.

Keywords Heraclea: For Tankers. I'm not sure if you read the rest of the post, but the thrust of it is we can increase the cap for everyone or for no one, but not on a case-by-case basis. The aggro cap is not tied to the character. It is part of the NPC AI scripts. I also remember the days when there was no aggro cap. I also remember the days when there was no target limit. I remember the days when there was no enhancement diversification. That does not mean we can give the tankers an infinite aggro amount while keeping other players limited to a lower aggro count.

Mag 30 immobilize Pet aoe inherent click for MMs only affects allies...

My thing is if we just continually throw out pie-in-the-sky ideas that our current development team cannot do or isn't interested in spending months or years trying to do we wind up either alienating them from the suggestions forum or burying stuff that can be done in a pile of stuff that cannot be done. if we as a community have some kind of understanding over what can be done and what cannot be done can we can make suggestions that are meaningful to the development team. That are actually useful and helpful in a rather immediate sense.

Aggro generation is a function of character, aggro reaction is a function of NPC AI. There is no way to increase the aggre cap for Tankers. it's not a function that's tied to the character it's a function tied to the way NPCs move, attack, and determine their current morale when it's time to run away. If you go into a mission as a tanker with your taunt aura active you can run through four or five groups then run back to the beginning of the mission and murder the first group. At that point the second group will already be running towards you. When they die in comes the third group. Even if you haven't interacted with them within the last minute there's still aggroed on you but their AI is telling them that they're not allowed to attack or even run over to you because there are too many NPCs fighting. Now let's say you do this and bring a second tank with you. And he runs up to the second group while you're still fighting the first one. They will attack him. Because he is a separate entity on the aggro table that determines their actions. But because the aggro table is based on the NPC, rather than the player, it cannot be increased on a per character basis. Now for the sake of argument let's say there is a way with a reasonable resource increase to cause the aggro check table to behave differently for tankers. How big a group would we want? There are some groups who would say that a tanker should be able to handle to mobs spawns or clusters of enemies. Cool beans, but what does that actually get you? By holding aggro of two spawns you're not increasing the rate that they go down because they're still at Target limit on the number of NPCs hit by a given attack. At best this would allow you to heard slightly more efficiently? But not really because it would take twice as long to kill the pull. Functionally it is impossible. Mechanically it is meaningless. Tactically it is dull. The only time it would really be useful is when somebody accidentally aggros a second spawn. Not only is that a hedge benefit, it would be pretty much entirely useless in the end game content because you're not going to get together 24 players and have only two or three of them be tankers or brutes while everyone else is somehow squishies unless you are specifically building your raid team like that. If tankers are going to have some kind of buff to make them shinier next to brutes it's going to have to be in a different facet than aggro cap.

There are actually a great many things that cannot be done in the City of Heroes engine. Would it be possible to create the code required to allow City of Heroes to do those things? With an infinite amount of time and manpower sure. But there's stuff that could take literally years with the development team we have to try and add to the game. There's also going to be stuff that's strictly beyond their abilities. No offense intended, obviously. To some degree or another we need to pull back our expectations. The biggest bottleneck in game development is artwork. It has been for a very long time. That's why schools like Full Sail University offer "game industry education" programs and then it's just modeling and artwork rather than the discussion of game mechanics or spreadsheet management. Artists are constantly cycling in and out of game development simply because they have their own projects they want to work on. The turnover for artists at any studio is going to be significantly higher then any other position except maybe community moderators and testers. Now there's a fairly large number of people who are volunteering to be artists for the game, and I am super excited about that! But until it's confirmed that the team has grown by adding artists we probably should aim for suggestions that don't require a lot of artwork. So things like proliferation of power sets or value tweaks, new ways to do old things, and stuff that requires minimal art investment are much more reasonable suggestions then a brand new power set with a whole new art style for all of its various effects or the creation of new costume pieces or weapon types or animations. Unfortunately those are all the coolest f****** things!

Reading this topic caused me to go make a Wind Brute. Kinetic Melee and Bio Armor.

The key to Bruting a KM character is to shift your thought process. Your attacks are a trio of single target strikes with the occasional big hit. Your Taunt is a Cone AoE with damage and Knockback (Or Knockdown). You get a neat Confront power with some damage on it. And you get a cool foot stomp, but it's really more for showing off. Quick Strike > Body Blow >Smashing Blow are your bread and butter. Use them to build up your Rage and Power Siphon stacks (Especially Quick Blow with just a hint of recharge, it's -fast-). Skip Taunt entirely. You won't need it. If a runner goes after the Defender and you're surrounded, poke 'em with Focused Burst. If you've got a clear line to a squad of killers, use Repulsing Torrent instead. Torrent is also nice AoE damage if you don't mind the scatter -or- the IO slot use. Or, y'know, Hovertank and shoot it down. Or aim for walls. Lots of options, really. Concentrated Strike is basically Total Focus. It's a big beautiful hit that hits hard, but it takes a while. Aim at something with good health 'cause you don't want it to die before you finish the wind up! Burst, like I said, is Foot Stomp. It does good damage, but instead of not being able to Fly while using it, your area is smaller. Really it's mostly for showing off 'cause the animation is cool. Or for when you've got enemies stacked -tight-. Hovertanking makes it -MASSIVELY- more useful.

I earnestly don't see a problem with it. If we keep adding incarnate level shifts in the future, it will make content more and more trivial. Let the slider go higher. I'd love to be on a level 35 team tearing through +6x8.

By that logic damage-dealing is a form of mitigation after all if an enemy is dead it can't hit you anymore. The true fact is that all game functions for combat can be broken down into two clocks Time to Kill and Time to Die. your goal is to make the time to kill clock shorter than the time to die clock. You can do this by making the time to die clock longer through damage mitigation in the form of heals, buffs, debuffs, controls, and defenses or by making the time to kill clock shorter through damage-dealing buffing and debuffing. But that's not really a useful expression of what the archetypes do. Which is why we separate them out as much as we do! Use control as its own pillar because it is functionally different than tanking or supporting even though they all three increase the duration of the time to die clock.

Control is not Tanking. Control is Control. A Tank does 3 big things: Manages Aggro, Takes Attacks, Mitigates the damage they take from the aggro. You could -argue- that Control locks down aggro, but it doesn't, actually. The aggro is still present. It's still being generated by everything everyone does to that controlled target. When the control breaks, the target is unleashed and goes after whoever has their aggro (Like when Purple Triangles pop up on an AV). Support heals damage, buffs you to prevent damage from coming in, or debuffs the enemy to reduce damage coming in by a specific amount. Defense does the same thing but for a single character. This is Partial Mitigation. Control is the only form of Absolute Mitigation. Control doesn't reduce the amount of damage an attack does by 30% or increase your HP so the attack means less. It just stops attacks from ever happening. If you're going to create "Pillars" then you need four of them.

It is a potential issue. Though that's a big part of why I suggested lower maximum resistance and lower maximum HP with no damage-enhancing inherent. A tanker's Bruising improves their damage and their whole team's damage. This character doesn't offer that sort of benefit to the team. Though... huh. Interesting thought: What if a Tanker's Bruising was Unresistable? That alone would make Tankers highly valued in AV Fights. Gonna add that to the thread...