BelleSorciere

Thank you for clarifying, and I agree with this. Right now my metric on teams is "Do I feel like my actions have an effect" and so far with everything I play, I do.

Isn't this shifting the goalposts? The comparison in question is Brutes and Tankers.

I was on Apparition's team and went to Oro to get to FF for the Kahn TF, and no one got kicked. It may be improved, at least.

I tank on my Brute all the time. The only time I cannot tank an entire TF is when someone has a Tanker on the team, because the Tanker can override any aggro a Brute collects. My Tanker is more durable and has a smoother experience, but both are fine for the role. Defenders are likely more popular because of their ability to leverage damage proc IOs.

And the point of this hypothetical is?

Back on live when it was harder to come by magic salvage I had the final Carnie arc mission saved on my Dark/Dark scrapper to farm for said salvage. Just avoided defeating the AV. I think I finally completed it just before Sunset. This worked fairly well for me, but having decent psi resist and end drain resist helped a lot. I don't think most people wanted to do that and with AE + some other balancing magic salvage was no longer more valuable.

Yeah brutes will hit ten targets harder than tankers will hit 16 but they're both using the same power and the larger AOE + target cap isn't irrelevant. I don't think tankers need a nerf, btw. I'm more concerned about sets like FF or entire ATs like MMs underperforming in at least some content.

Yeah, I was in agreement. Especially Phantom Army Especially

It's actually perfectly reasonable to define sets by their primary form of mitigation.

Yeah, that. It just seems to me that tanker damage benefits most in the most frequent situations. An argument could be made that on teams it doesn't make a big difference, and I'd agree, but when doing solo content it seems tankers have the advantage. I don't mind all that much - I have two level 50 tankers which is twice as many as level 50 brutes - but I do think Bill has a point.

Curious. What kinds of fights are more frequent do you think?

I just mentioned to @Apparition how -20 Rularuu killed my scrapper during the random zone invasions when the Shadow Shard was added to the game.

Having read this entire thread I have to say that hard capping defense at 40-45% depending upon AT strikes me as an extremely bad idea that will effectively shred the effectiveness of defense-based sets whether defense or support. The argument that 45% is also the "soft cap" doesn't really fly, as defense debuffs are everywhere. This won't solve any problems but it'll definitely make super reflexes and force field even less popular. As far as people never hitting the caps on blasters, https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Inspirations

CoH was my first MMO so getting to WoW where there was no collision was a surprise. I don't mind player collision except when zoning somewhere and 2+ characters spawn in the same place and start leapfrogging madly until someone moves. I really wish pet collision were removed. I thought it had been but that was probably wishful thinking. Or maybe only some pets.

"The crutch of teaming" This is an MMORPG, Bill. Teaming is intended play, not some kind of cheat code. Not all ATs solo equally and every character probably has a sweet spot in level + #Players where leveling is fine solo. That's not a bad thing really. Some people want to push things as far as they can and solo at max difficulty and others want something different. An AT's value isn't determined by one person's subjective judgment.

I've got 41 characters but I like to be able to play any character I want.

It doesn't really matter what they were intended to do if the intention wasn't "to unslot enhancements for any reason."

And not necessary since unslotters are cheap.

I attempted and failed a respec with untrained levels the other day. This was the only time I've ever had one fail, and that includes in busy zones. I've never tried in a base.

Oh I won't disagree - Shield's fantastic.

I get the impression resist sets are heavily undervalued in this thread.

A normal 8-person spawn is 16 mobs. Any named mobs (such as named bosses, elite bosses, and AVs/Heroes) add one, for a total of 17. Groups don't come larger. You can impinge on other groups, but this isn't WoW and squishies aren't helpless if they pull aggro. Some "squishies" can tank, even. Every "squishy" has tools to manage mobs in their face. If they didn't, they couldn't solo. The game shouldn't be about perfect control or perfect DPS or perfect support. There should be gaps, those make the game more fun and exciting.

A level 25 team will do fine in level 25 content and even zerg it, but also every aspect of the game is valid for discussion here.

My level 10 Illusion/storm joined a Posi 1 and Posi 2 task force and ended at 27. Double XP is free at the P2W vendor. Death from Below happens all the time. People power level in AE and RWZ mothership raids. 1-50 takes as long as you want it to take. And I can't speak for anyone else, but I start switching to IOs at 32. Some IOs much earlier, depending. Also the Posi TFs went much the same way as I described above. My dark/dark brute went from 38 to to tier 3 in five incarnate slots and tier 4 in the sixth in under a week thanks to teaming all the time, but not exclusively playing that character. And that actually seems slow.

Ranged and tanker AOEs have higher AOE caps. Why do tanker AOEs have that higher cap and also increased AOE size? Why do tankers create more hate than any other AT? Why do brutes create more than any AT but tankers? Why should brutes or tankers be able to flawlessly control all aggro? Does it really take such a long time to defeat spawns that tankers (and brutes) need to have higher aggro caps? At level 50 virtually everyone has a Judgement nuke, IO sets provide significant boosts to offense and defense, temporary powers and Destiny powers can significantly buff survivability. Damage output is through the roof and survivability on teams is similar. This isn't World of Warcraft where tanks need to hold onto all the aggro (or tanks + off tanks in relevant fights) and never let any slip away or disaster strikes. You can do missions without any tankers or brutes and still be fine with a few exceptions. Some mobs slipping through the tank's aggro are great targets for the single target holds you mentioned, or stuns, or just dps them down in a few moments. If someone does drop they can use the prestige self-rezzes or get rezzed by someone else and debt is gone in moments. I don't see what the tanking problem with 17 mobs is. I've been on eight person +4 level teams with 2-4 melee and several players grabbed spawns or joined someone else who already had one and just kept blowing everything away nonstop until mission completion. If there's an overflow mob on a squishy the mob's defeated before the tanker can taunt it anyway. Also on eight person teams everyone's likely a tank mage thanks to buffs and debuffs.