jack_nomind

Imagine thinking those are the only two things where team composition matters. Yikes. I mean it's basically those and Synapse.

I don't know; did you? It does do what it's advertised to do. "Properly" might be a judgment call. I too would like to be able to put a button on my car that says "ignore police scanners and don't hit anything." But no matter how simple the idea is in my head, I couldn't have that without changing a lot of other things about how cars and traffic work. Similarly as just one of the problems with the 'simple' idea, your character doesn't know who your team-mates are unless some other piece of code knows to tell it, doesn't know how much damage they're taking unless it has some way to ask and be told, and those other characters don't know not to take that x% of damage themselves unless the game tells them not to. People throw around 'spaghetti code' as a kind of pejorative -- I do it too -- but the truth is that consolidating the number of places you have to change in order to implement something brand new requires both an enormous amount of work or oracular prescience. Sometimes both. In this case, 'redirect' isn't a thing that's ever existed before, and it would have to be done from scratch.

Can't make everyone happy -- but I'm not trying to, neither are you, and that's not what we're talking about here anyway. If you genuinely think adjusting IO sets is a good way to improve Tankers, take the floor. Fully agreed with the overall point. However, there's no non-cottage change directly to taunt that would make the difference. Even slightly cottagy changes like your to-hit debuff get into a kind of redundant space; Tankers are already the tankiest, and making them a tiny bit tankier isn't terribly compelling. What they need to justify the power is trouble holding max aggro... and the best way to do that is to raise their max aggro.

Gauntlet isn't an effect, a power, or even (in any meaningful sense) a proc. (You could call it a proc the same way damage or endurance cost is a proc, I guess, but at that point proc just means 'anything that happens in the game when a button is pushed.') All Tanker secondary attacks have an AoE Taunt component, just like they all have an endurance cost and like how almost all do damage. If you want them all to have an AoE Bruising debuff as well, that's a fine suggestion; but it will not have any innate relationship to the Taunt. If it were that simple, Brutes would also have powers that could get them to their caps. If by Spider-Man you mean a Scrapper, then in point of fact Brutes are taken out just as quickly on their own; their actual scaling is nearly identical. And like Spider-Man and Scrappers, they can stay in most fight just fine with those numbers. What they have is an additional space of resilience that could originally only be reached by outside buffs. This was so teams of Villains could handle SH/AV-class enemies, which was difficult during CoV design and testing. But even then they probably didn't need the full 90%... there was just no particular reason not to give it to them, given the lack of redside Tankers and the difficulty of exceeding power scaling limitations. Now that additional sources of resistance are so common, they're being grandfathered into best-in-the-game resilience thanks to an obsolete "meh, why not?" justification. Your vision for how you'd like Fury to work isn't how the game has ever had it, either. I don't think I agree with you that it would be a beneficial change... but more to the point, it's misleading to rely too heavily on evocative analogies as analytic tools. well... yeah. players who are breaking the game are the ones to point out that it is broken or at least break-able. i agree with your point elsewhere that 'more damage' isn't much of a good change for Tankers, but i disagree that 'better team role' is a either a mere edge case or a lost cause.

TW's best mitigation isn't its Parry, it's flooring enemies before they floor you. Fiery Aura augments this strategy. Killing your best ST attack chain -- Rend Armor -> Follow Through -> Crushing Blow -> Arc of Destruction -> Follow Through -- is a terrible idea. Using DS to open a fight is fine, but maintaining it throughout is also a terrible idea; again, the idea here is to floor everything asap, not get into a grindy slog. There absolutely are builds that can work that way, even on Brutes; Staff or Dark Melee are great for handling that kind of fight. I wouldn't immediately recommend skipping DS on /FA, but I really wouldn't bat an eye at someone who chose to do so. I *would* bat several eyes at someone who recommended a TW Brute build with neither Follow Through or Hasten. And who didn't include a data link in their export.

The Gauntlet "power" is a placeholder. Gauntlet is just the name for an effect that's coded into every Tanker power. Bruising, similarly, is something triggered by Tanker secondary T1s because of how those powers are written, not because of the Bruising power itself. In both a theoretical sense and a practical sense, it can be. Practically, the aggro "cap" is mostly just a check that mobs do during their hate calculation. When they recalculate hate against a target that's got hate from too many other mobs, they ignore that target and just move on to the next one down their list. They could instead conditionally only do that if the enemy isn't a Tanker, or check whether or not the enemy is a Tanker early on and handle the process differently. Bug testing this would likely be a little obnoxious because of the game's spaghetti code, but it would be much less difficult to implement than, say, grappling hooks. Theoretically, if the way the game handled aggro couldn't be 'relatively' easily changed to support conditional caps, it could be rewritten to do so. that still wouldnt solve the supposed issue for tankers, just make brutes less rewarding for those willing to invest time to maximize them. Those 5 percentage points would make a big difference in how those characters would then play. Nefing brutes to buff tanks isn't really helping tanks and is kinda like lowering the speed limit because one cars engine isnt running optimally. Analogies aside, Brutes should never have had a 90% resist cap in the first place. This isn't a rules-of-the-road situation; the resist caps are already different for different ATs by design. To my mind, a better question is, "what's interesting about Brutes having the same resist caps as Tankers?" I think the answer does change a bit with the frame. In early CoV, it was arguably interesting because Brutes were inferior Tankers who were relying on inferior Defenders, so those caps were supposedly only achievable for brief periods... but in practice, it was already too easy to just sustain them. In a modern environment there's not even that pretense. Taunt Magnitude doesn't appear to do anything; the only thing that matters is duration. Changing the duration significantly would cause other problems. Any implementable version of this suggestion really becomes "rewrite the hate code." Which I fully support. We need smarter encounters for the game to grow.

Just because you're part of the floor doesn't mean you make a good foundation. ...while levelling, skip everything in your secondary except FS, PS, and Consume. Always be teamed. At 50, get Ageless Destiny and respec to take everything from your secondary.

Regen is very difficult to build for SR. The best bonuses come mostly from Heal sets, and SR doesn't have any native slotting for that. Aside from Health and probably Physical Perfection, your two best options are either going Medicine for Aid Self (and probably Field Medic) or going Presence for Unrelenting. Medicine is undoubtedly the more responsible choice. Tanker TW is the most flexibile version of TW, though (since you'll be replacing both Crushing Blow and titan Sweep with Defensive Sweep for Bruising), so you've got the option of being a little crazy if you want. Unfortunately, even with the additional slotting you're still going to be getting a lot more health per second from Aid Self or even Unrelenting than you will from (pre-Incarnate) regen. And although Tanker SR resist scaling is inexplicitly low, you do still get some -- building for S/L resist is absolutely going to get you more bang for your buck than chasing regen through a lot of bad build decisions. Of course post-Incarnate, you can run around as a Melee Hybrid, Rebirth Destiny uber-monster and skip every power in your primary except Practiced Brawler and Quickness.

BS is excellent on Stalkers and fine on Tankers. For Scrappers and Brutes, it's still the only Parry that works with Shield Defense, which leaves the set uniquely well-off. If it needs a buff then giving it slightly better crit or fury would probably bring it easily to par. Like you point out the thing it *truly* needs is better visuals. I'm still hoping for a knowledgeable community member to do a brief tutorial on making and packaging CoH-friendly animations.

DB really only cares about Attack Vitals and Blinding Feint, so you can skip 4/9.

Dark is the best set: it has excellent resistances, builds easily to softcap (thanks to a bonus Weave), has a great self-heal, and additional utility on the side. Levelling it is a chore because it doesn't start nearly as well-off as some of the next tier sets, but where they plateau out it just... keeps... going. The next tier are sets that are very strong but fail in one of those areas: Rad, Invuln, Shield, WP, and Bio. Of note, Invuln is gonna live here forever because it's so darn easy to build for that it opens up the overall potential immensely. Rad by all rights shouldn't be here -- it should be with Electric or Fire -- but it was kissed with beautiful numbers. Below that are sets that are a bit more niche. Electric, non-granite or dual-use Stone, and SR. These can work well but are noticeably lopsided. Non-granite Stone seems like it should be higher since it's so similar to WP or Shield, but the set pays a heavy price for that T9. At the bottom are sets that rely entirely on some specific trick to function at all: Fire, Ice, and pure-granite Stone. Ice requires everything in range of Chilling Embrace; Granite Stone is the infamous teleporting pillowfighter; and Fire... uh, y'all know Fire.

Well... I don't know what you meant when you proposed it, but what I took you to mean is that the hit formula ought to look very roughly something like one of these things: [*]Equivalent to Defense vs Accuracy, such as (Acc - Elu) * (TH - Def) [*]A regressive or reductive element, roughly (Acc(bonus) + 100)/(Elu + 100) * (TH - Def) [*]Literal anti-accuracy, (Acc) * (TH - Def) / Elu (with some substantial variations possible, for example, 1. could be done as something like 1 + acc/100 - elu/100; or 2 could compound/decay accuracy rather than dividing it.) I don't understand why the developers chose 3 for PvP elusivity but I imagine something in the family of 2 would be much easier to balance for PvE, particularly if Elusivity is difficult to come by.

For reasons I don't understand, Leandro hates this idea. I'm all for it as well, personally; although I would like to see Tankers (and Defenders and Peacebringers) given a tune-up across the board. I think there's a good bit of potential there for them (for all three) to move into bluer waters than damage-racing a counterpart archetype.

WoW lore through the ages: WC1: shut up wizards did it WC2: wizards did it, now with boats WC3: demons made the wizards do it WoW: at the beginning of time, azeroth was ruled by elementals and then cthulhu invaded BC: everything is elves. trolls are elves, naga are elves, demons are elves twice removed, it's just elves, all the way down. WLK: at the beginning of time, azeroth was ruled by cthulhu. actually only half of everything is elves, the other half is rocks. humans are soft baby rocks. Cata: at the beginning of time, azeroth was ruled by dragons, and elementals and cthulhu tried to take it from them but instead just made the dragons evil or crazy, except for red dragons who were never evil or crazy except that time they were. MoP: nvm about everyone being elves, that was dumb, trolls aren't elves. elves are trolls. for real you guys there are three types of people in the world: trolls, rocks, and furries. let's talk about furries. WoD: oh shit wait what are orcs [still catching up on legion and bfa lore. bfa appears to be: female leaders are fickle warmongers, amirite guys]

The first sentence was also that the title is clickbait. But I have more at issue with the earlier comment that the point "falters" when discussing global recharge. Let's take the example of a 15s attack with a 6 ppm proc. Ordinarily it's a 90% proc chance per activation; at 95% power recharge, it's a 7.69s recharge power with a ~77% proc chance. If you slot a little differently and instead only get ~67% recharge, you keep the 90% proc chance, but have a 9s recharge power. With no global recharge. If on the other hand you have ~160% global recharge, the first version is at 4.22s recharge and the second is 4.59s. That can but won't usually make a difference to an attack chain. In this case, it's a matter of about 13% chance or one additional proc per minute 'for free.' The difference is even more dramatic with lower proc chances, aoe powers, and especially with aoe and/or low proc chance powers that are slow-charging. It's almost always possible to make the choice between full recharge or slightly less than that in a power's slotting, so your point about all sets having some recharge isn't well-taken. (In fact, as Hopeling pointed out, many desirable sets don't even offer full recharge naturally - you have to give up a slot to another recharge enhancement if you want it.) The point is exactly about global recharge and gaming the system with it.

Raids and fingers.

Intended to directly follow the last sentence of the (your) immediately previous post, Specifically, a +3 AV has a net 1.95x Accuracy modifier. Against a zero Defense, full Resist kit, this translates into a ~90% increase in incoming damage; against a full (whatever that means for this enemy) Defense, zero Resist kit, it translates into a ~95% increase in damage. As you say, so far, so boring. But there are two other concerns. You also mention tohit bonuses, and their uncommonness. What's much more common both among AVs and their associated groups, though, are defense debuffs. Our Resist tanker has very quickly hit their minimum avoidance against the accuracy buff -- but the Defense tanker has a great deal more to lose. This is compounded by few sets (really only SR) achieving DDR equivalent to Resist tankers' innate RDR, and I find resistance debuffs to often be less common and lower in magnitude than defense debuffs. The second concern is somewhat lesser and works against the first, but still not in favor of the Defense tanker. It's relatively easy for a Resist tanker to achieve 30% or more Defense and a commensurate 25x effective hit point total, falling to ~13x ehp against our +3 AV's improved accuracy. Most Defense sets also include a significant S/L resist component -- but for Ice Armor or against energy or exotic damage, Defense sets struggle to build the same relative Resist values and often end up in the 40% ballpark. From a starting place of only about 17x EHP, they fall to ~8x against accuracy-improved enemies. The relative difference is still similar but in application that five lifetimes' worth of HP is very significant, particularly when it knocks the tank into single-digit ehp multipliers; and further, even, when it's the already spike-vulnerable Defense tanker who has to deal with the thinner buffer.

Most Scrapper secondaries don't have Taunt auras. Bio does, I think WP does, maybe one or two more.

I hate to say it but... play a Brute. Putting Tankers and Brutes (or Defenders and Corruptors, for that matter) on an apples to apples scale devalues both (pairs of) ATs.

More or less, but Because it's easier. I can do a 100x ehp Tanker build that holds aggro half asleep, which is a way that I play sometimes. It's not a great place for the AT to be, but it's... you know. A thing. Tankers have a super low ceiling, but a pretty high floor.

Pfft. 4/9 powers are "punch hard." What we really need for a Spidey-set is a version of SS that substitutes the Propel pool and Whip animations for Hurl (webbing throw), replaces Foot Stomp with the Mighty Judgment animation, and replaces Hand Clap and Rage with... more Taunts, I guess? "Banter" and "Psych Up"? Bam. CoH SS Spidey.

Played a BS/SR hoverscrapper on Live for a while. If you can get enough Hover speed, I feel like it's actually easier to melee with -- just Follow the target to close with wherever its hitbox is actually centered (which is very often near the visual center, but not always).

I'm not familiar with that game, but yeah, that looks pretty paladin-ish. How do they deal with the action economy issue? (i.e., how does the class mix healing with attacks without being terrible at both?)

Does Superman have perma-rage? (Does Statesman?) I don't think using the game's particular implementation is the best guide. Or flipped, in terms of visuals, the closest we have to Spidey's fighting style is Martial Arts. But of course he isn't a trained martial artist, so how would we reconcile that? I think accepting that we can model Spidey as either throwing chunks of concrete at people (which he does do) or using ninja kicks (which he kinda does) are both close approximations within the CoH setting.