JayboH

EDIT: forums are freaking out, double post. Why can't we delete posts?

Can confirm. Some of my requests and discussions were not only listened to, but verbally agreed to on the forums, PMs, and development changes were made in closed alpha/beta.

Great news: you can develop your own version of CoH nowadays so you will never have to bother with this.

Last I heard you could use all of your incarnate abilities on non-incarnate content...

Power creep was planned and designed intentionally. We only got half of the announced incarnate abilities. Now it's true that they also expected to have harder content for those abilities but power creep was definitely intentional.

Just to clarify, this may be true for Scrappers, but SR tankers can handle incarnate stuff as well as pretty much anything

Seeds.

Yeah I thought up this idea some years ago and thought I would repost it to see if there was any interest in discussion

Yeah for some reason I don't recall Stance, I don't think it was in any announcements either even though the other 4 were.

Did the respec. Unfortunately it will be a good while before I can finish it. You added yet another winter set and two purple sets and all of those are $20-$30 million a piece. I think I kept permafrost instead of going Hibernate thinking if I die with Hoarfrost and Energy Absorption and healing procs and Icy Bastion and Rebirth then I deserve to die. Put psionic resist proc in it. Can't afford it yet so this character will have to be sidelined until I can come up with a couple hundred million to get the 10 purple pieces.

Oh, I notice 'Stance' is listed in Mids as an Incarnate ability; I don't remember this and it isn't in the wikis.

Noticed this also. I usually just look for the map marker and when you know the maps you get an idea of where to look anyway, but still this would be a nice thing to get fixed.

Oh wow, yeah that's pretty bad. I haven't played a scrapper with that but I don't recall it not refreshing on tanks/brutes. Can anyone confirm this is happening?

Yeah I went Rebirth so far and haven't respecced into your build yet as I wanted to see your response. Having perma Rebirth at tier 4 I thought would make more sense than Barrier even for its resist and it sounds like if I can sew up the end management then Ageless makes little sense with the recharge it already has. So far going with Musculature Radial for damage and endurance, is that what you would go with?

The point of that are the ambushes which is a different style of play that would be removed, and I'm not sure that's a very good idea at all. That's also potentially lost xp/inf/drops. Yes, escort missions are notoriously annoying in most video games, I agree.

The pools outside of Super Jump aren't requirements; would you still go Leviathan with Spirit Shark Jaws to stack holds with Freezing Touch? Would I be able to have enough acc/tohit without the Kismet? Just curious if I would benefit more from Kismet or the Perf Shifter proc. I typically never grab the damage enhancement in purple sets because you hit ED limits without it (even more so if I am going Musculature.) I assume Assault Hybrid would make the most sense.

Well you can click it above to see, but on Ice Sword it's 118.8 which I assume is against whites. The buff is 43.43 from Touch of Death. What would Kismet replace? I tend to fight +4s in radio teams a lot.

As far as uniques it doesn't matter, this is the bonuses from combined set pieces, not the effects of the enhancements themselves, just the bonuses. The problem with this argument is that power creep was intentional and partially planned. Do you think Genesis, Vitae, Mind, and Omega wouldn't make you any more powerful at all? Yes correct, for the addition of the other Incarnate abilities this is very true. We would also have to see what possible combinations could max out the gains of such an ability and how much more powerful you really could be - adding one more set bonus across all abilities that might use such a set that isn't already 6 slotted. 6 slotted sets wouldn't gain any benefit at all from that Vitae category.

I had suggested this concept years ago, and with the addition of more developers and a rewrite of how portions of this game work (pseudo pets as a recent example) I wanted to toss this out there in case someone found it interesting enough to dig into it, because at the time of the initial discussion the game would have to handle things differently to accommodate this idea. Basically I picked the word Vitae from the options Genesis, Vitae, Mind, and Omega as thematically I thought the word fit best, as those were the Incarnate ability names for upcoming content from the original devs. Once the slot would be unlocked after Hybrid, you could craft an enhancement that basically would grant a +1 set bonus to your character for various enhancement set types. As you rise in the tiers, it would add another set type (but all would just grant +1.) Example: You slot 5 pieces of the Thunderstrike set, but with Vitae slotted with a Ranged Damage enhancement you would be given (6) Increases ranged defense by 2.5% and negative energy defense by 1.25% - the 6th slot bonus. As you go up in the Vitae tiers, you could see perhaps a Ranged Damage + Defense Debuff enhancement. This would grant the Thunderstrike 6th bonus plus also let's say you have 4 pieces of Touch of Lady Grey in Radiation Infection and would be given (5) Increases damage by 2% as if you had 5 pieces at the same time. This would follow the rule of 5 naturally. This only applies to set bonuses, so where does that leave SO / HO / plain IO players etc? It grants enhancement boosters that only apply to those enhancement types and only to the category they enhance. That makes the maximum +4 to whatever category you pick, be it damage, healing, (or both if a Vitae enhancement grants both) etc. This would mean you would still have to buy additional boosters for the categories your tier 4 Vitae doesn't cover plus 1 for each one it does cover if you want to +5 everything for your SOs/HOs/plain IOs etc. Yes, this means you could benefit from both set bonuses and boosters if you have a mix of sets and SOs/plain IOs etc. This idea is based on the Ring of Royal Grandeur from Diablo 3 - it basically lowers the set piece requirement for bonuses by -1. There would be quite a lot of work to even create a system like this (like any Incarnate ability) but also (from my understanding) a rework of how the game views enhancements and bonuses to begin with. Just thought it was interesting to toy with.

Well Practiced Brawler is superior to Dispersion when it comes to solo protection by quite a lot, unless you modify it to grant similar numbers only for the caster. I guess I would have to see an example of what the secondary would really look like. It's really a completely different concept of what I posted, that's supposed to be position-focused and reliant on to-hit from an attack set. I tried to give Brigitte from Overwatch as an example.

Ah, just poor context. You can see how that could be misinterpreted. Don't shoehorn them into attacks, modify the support sets to include a few armor toggles instead. The problem with this idea is that support and armor sets are balanced around themselves considering all of the abilities as a whole, which means that your armor is going to be much weaker or the supports would be much weaker - I suppose you could buff/nerf them to counter this but only to a degree, especially if scrapper survivability is still the goal - take SR for example. You would have to combine the auto powers with the armor toggles and the slotting would be completely out of whack and possibly overpowered due to theoretically being able to get the same power from two abilities that have 12 possible slots with just 6 slots. This also doesn't fix the issue with not wanting to skip a single power but I don't really consider that an issue unlike others.

That's exactly what everyone does to other players when they rip Sentinels to shreds - they completely dismiss those that enjoy the AT, which is exactly why I posted that in the very next sentence you cut out of the quote. Shoehorning it into the armor toggles would make them perma, would cut the positioning focus of the AT in half, and would actually increase the player's survivability even more since tohit checks couldn't be implemented (think about it - even if you made it possible, how would the game know you want to heal off the minion instead of the AV?) Putting them into armor toggles would be like granting Soothing Aura on a bigger scale or like an Emp Defender with Healing Aura on autoclick to the always-on armor toggles. Downtime might actually be encouraged for group hugs.

The first two attacks aren't going to both be AOE heals however for this AT. I suggest making the AOE heal part of the second attack choice for most. The first ability might be something minor, like a single-target slow tied to an attack. As far as pairing a great melee attack with a sub-par effect, first of all there is no requirement for sub-par effects to exist, but let's pretend that happens: I don't see an issue at all. Making it very hard to choose abilities vs skipping them should be a goal in any set's design. Make it kind of suck to skip an ability always for everything in every set! That is a very good thing in my opinion. If you want your attacks to be attacks and other powers focused on their respective effects... well the good news is that there is other ATs that do just that. I think Sentinels need an overhaul as do a lot of people, but in the meantime there are players who enjoy playing them as a mixed AT: range blasts + armor. This is similar in that regard. Shadow Maul got changed recently by the way.

It would be no different from a defender skipping their aoe heal in order to pick something else. It's also no different from a blaster not taking their first two powers that they are supposed to be able to use while mezzed according to their inherent design. People can and do skip armor abilities as well. If we did it the way you mention, that would basically make every secondary a required selection, would it not? That wouldn't really solve the issue you presented if so. The concept here is that everything would require a tohit check with the exception perhaps of the tier 9 if you want to do something special there on the primary. Positioning is key, kind of like how Grant Cover works only on a bigger scale. You could however take certain abilities out of the secondaries that debuff enemies or deal direct damage like damage auras and replace with a single target heal perhaps and make that part of it (and the AOE heal on primary hit concept stays too.) Now that doesn't do anything if you are soloing, unless you want it to grant a passive regen buff perhaps that you get just by picking the power.

I know - the topic has appeared multiple times over the years, here's a few ideas: Attack primary / armor secondary Scrapper-level armor/health/caps Primary damage does somewhere in the neighborhood of dominator assault and non-vigilance defender numbers. Primary grants AOE buffs/heals/debuffs upon enemy hit only around the caster (or enemy) with a few exceptions: build up attack which is in every primary and only grants it to the caster, like Claw's Follow Up. The buffs/heals also affect the caster. The heals would likely come from the second attack and would likely be a bit weaker than a corruptor's, but since the cooldowns are the same from other melee AT's they will be typically casting these weaker heals more often. Debuffs would have a smaller radius than the heals/buffs. A support bar gets filled (like dominator/sentinel) and the player can click a special ability that spends the bar that grants a buff/debuff in a large aoe around the player that lasts a decent duration. This buff/debuff can only be one or the other dependent on a selector switch (like Dual Pistols/Staff.) Whatever selection the player chooses will appear on the buff bar as an inherent gray icon with a green or red border. This buff/debuff ability can vary between sets - like electric melee can grant recovery or debuff recovery, dark melee could grant to-hit or debuff to-hit, staff could grant an endurance discount or a recharge debuff, etc. The buff/debuff special ability can be perma if the player continues to successfully attack enemies and recasting it before the previous buff/debuff wears off. The heals/buffs/debuffs from your primary are always present - this Special ability is a separate ability on top of what was mentioned. Positioning is intentionally a big deal with this AT by design. Players would likely want to be within the various AOE radius of the Melee Support to take advantage of the primary support and the special ability if the Melee Support has it switched to buffs (since the inherent icon can be seen on the buff bar for the player by anyone in a standard team.) Super teams of all Melee Support would likely do fairly well. Think Paladin class or for a more-recent development, look at Brigitte from Overwatch. Buffs/debuffs cannot stack - they just refresh or restart the duration if used repeatedly within the duration window. Just tossing some ideas around. Survivability would be high for the player however damage cannot compete with other melee ATs solo without the build up attack and the inherent special active. They can mini-tank like scrappers in a pinch but have no primary or inherent taunt ability - only damage and possible taunt auras from their secondaries.