TheAdjustor

I am not familiar with the spreadsheet you mention. Sorry to be asking for a link again but do you have a link ? I have no idea how he arrived at that or how it was paired.

I agree and disagree. You are absolutely right the whole set was balanced around that one power and the idea it was one of two non crashing nukes in the game. The set has very poor single target damage, the most resisted type of damage in the game and a secondary effect that might as well not be there. Rain of arrows however have multiple problems that aren't just the cast. The nuke has no seconday effects of its own and doesn't properly benefit from procs because it's a reticle power without an actual target and a pseudopet. I am not even certain that it properly gives you credit in terms of contributing to kills. The cast time isn't so bad, but it has a delay after casting before it starts to tic which is also a problem. Just an example if you have eagle eye active, only the first tick if any will get the accuracy buff.

I don't doubt it The PPM system really benefited Ice. Oh just a note, KD was indeed in the main focus, but also the fact you can't hold a pylon. ( I think controllers get containment because they are immobilized but that's a side topic) Firey Melee is behind lots of things. Do you really want it to be the scrapper "Top End" ? By the reasoning in this thread it should be the absolute top damage set. It has no secondary effect except damage, disadvantages have all been tossed to the curb

There's been a lot of abuse of statistics (perhaps unintentional) in this thread. It's been especially bad with people discarding every other metric you need to judge a set. You see the worst of it with people writing off the inherently more complex mechanics of some sets because they aren't a problem for them. It's the ultimate "why we can't have nice things" setup.

Sorry didn't realize that was a link my eyes aren't what they used to be. Anyway here is your quote. No Idea why I didn't cover that the first time, it's rather low hanging fruit and really I would have thought you knew better than that. Ice can actually have better single target damage than fire while still being immensely safer. Being able to stack a mag 5 hold on targets while having just about every other mitigation trick in the book available to you (-to hit, soft control, and killing them before they actually get to hit you at all). Isn't even a valid comparison. Ice is also a good example of why pylon testing isn't particularly a good metric. Pylons don't knock down and have high debuff resistances. It's also why I laugh when people in that thread go into a tizzy over -regen. Pylons have an 85% give or take resistance to regen debuffs. Edit: You did realize I was speaking of Fire Blast, not Fire melee ?

Sorry I don't recall what you are speaking about. It would have helped if you linked to it.

The revision had them(/regen) farming the ring of pebbles arc, for the wedding band, so they could properly take an alpha strike. Is there a point in your statement ? Pretty sure they can still Tank Hami for a raid. EoE handles most of that.

Man I really want to give both of those a golf clap. With the first one Titan weapons is supposedly "Overperforming" in single target damage. So the concern isn't burning minions and underlings, it's the bosses that have to be killed before you can move on. Taking a group average only matters for the farming scenario where you are trying burn down an aggro cap worth of bosses on you, really not even then. It will always be the resistance of the bosses in the group. The second ? Melee has been over powered for almost entire lifetime of the game never stopped people playing other things. Hell as things stand, for mostly damage ATs blasters are still number three in damage somewhere between tankers and brutes but you know what ? They are still intensely popular. Matter of fact there are more level 50 fire blasters than there are level 50 TW scrappers. So yes if you want to ignore how the game actually plays and its observed history there's a good case you have there. Of course I have never heard anyone say, "Gee lets play that game they are nerfing things". Maybe that's just me. Sad to say this thread was already over by the time I noticed it. We have a developer who's job is to balance things, that creates a need to do things even when the best course of action is do nothing and concentrate on the creative action that actually improves the game. Couple the above with the usual forum crowd that enjoys screwing with other players nerfs are now likely inevitable no matter what "testing" shows or how biased it may be. That's unfortunate because it's this sort of thing that does drive people away. What's next ? Nerf fire blast. It outdoes every other blaster set in damage by considerably more than 30% (exception being procced out ice)

That seems to be a very abbreviated version of Culex's spreadsheet http://web.archive.org/web/20070309030440/http://www.culex.us/ig/CHres.xls Which has 1366 rows of data and shows the data on particular enemies not group averages. Wow there are some pretty big resistances on here. I always new that DE had some high resistances but no idea it was this much and that's without the buff pets. Real shout out to Culex for compiling that sheet. It's truly amazing the labors of love this game was able to inspire.

I have to disagree on that. Does damage is hardly the same as does really good damage. These days Energy transfer doesn't even compare with clobber. The original instant healing was good enough to let you take an alpha strike from a team sized group. A big enough nerf does change the nature of an ability/

Maybe try putting the stealth IO in a sprint, and put a KB IO in superspeed. Don't know if you would be willing to give up any of the set bonuses from entomb in radioactive cload to fite in another set with a lockdown proc so you would have a 90% chance to have a mag 5 hold with that.

That's actually been the greatest problem with how this game has been balanced. A set with potential would get in the hands of good players that would really enjoy it and perfect the heck out of it, and then people who didn't want to put in the effort or couldn't perform at that level would be upset about how they were doing. Always ignored was the fact that self selection is a very real thing and people who weren't able to squeeze performance out of sets would remove themselves from the sample pool. I really wish I could view things with the simplicity you are putting forward but a lifetime of experience prevents that. I know full well that just because the glove doesn't fit, it hardly means I have to acquit.

At that point you would have to be against allowing slotting enhancements past serious diminishing returns, or allowing people to slot attacks without putting in at least 1 end red enhancement. Heck don't allow new players to role blasters or khelds. My point is being a noob makes everything a trap, but you get over it, real quick and once you do finding new ways to do things is a lot of fun. Hell I have been playing this game forever and I am still finding new ways to make my builds.

Sorry to use your quote in this manner but it's exactly why threads like this are so problematic. They always degenerate into a nasty form of PVP where people for whatever reason dig a hole into their positions and refuse to accept the idea they don't have the whole picture. It gets worse if the powers that be actually act on the issue whether or not the action was prompted by the topic. The people who wind up being affected rightly see themselves as having been dragged into a forum game they didn't want any part of to begin with. It's especially bad with the level of selective focus that has happened in this thread. Titan Weapons may or may not need a nerf but that question's answer does not exist in a vacuum. Trying to frame it as something isolated is just plain wrong. The game has for a very long time in both calendar years and years of operation needed a serious look at where things should be balanced. As long as that's the case making little tweaks is like treating cancer with Dramamine

If you are at the point you can't figure out 0.5% isn't very much no matter what the circumstance, the game isn't a noob trap for you, life is.

The better question is where should balance in the game be ? For the entirety of my time playing the game Risk/Reward for Melee has been entirely out of whack in regard to other ATs . When mechanically more complex sets like Dual Blades, Street Justice, and Titan Weapons were introduced, there was little if any consideration given to where their balance point should be with regard to the other sets. I had a Will Power/ War Mace tank on live, I could literally set clobber on autofire walk away make myself a sandwich come back and find everything hunky dory. Scrappers and stalkers do the best damage in the game have little risk in melee where they do it and in the days of drop farming over inf farming they were top tier at that as well. Currently by all reasonable measures sentinels underperform by a significant measure what's more their ranged attacks are gimped for what reason ? So the question is just where are the balance points in the game supposed to be. If you don't know where you want the game to go or be, making adjustments to individual powersets within a group is like being concerned about the arrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic. P.S. If the devs do have an overall vision in place of where things should be, it would be a great service for everyone who plays the game if it could be articulated to the community. While people might not agree (not at all a bad thing) they could at least look and say yes this is where the game said it was going.

Going to the whole where should things be. Just how much better should street justice which has a combo level mechanism be than war mace ? Should it be 10 % better, 30% better, the same, x% worse ? Just what should the skill cap in the game be ?

I am sorry but considering all the factors isn't dodging the question. Narrowing down a question until there is just one possible answer isn't actually asking a question it's manipulation.

It really wouldn't be out of line to ask that the blaster Status protection proc be a global fixed percentage as well but it's hardly that important. In truth I would much rather see a global damage proc for that the way scrappers get the global crit, but that would likely be bad for people that enjoy the current mechanics.

I can't speak for infinitum but I have to ask this: Against what set of melee powersets ? There are sets that you can face roll on your keyboard and get their maximum damage, and then there are sets with mechanics that need to be leveraged to achieve their top performance. While the guy who is face rolling may resent the fact that people who are putting in more effort do better, that's hardly valid.

If you look at the Blaster ATO's They are mostly in line with Scrapper ATOs. With two important exceptions, 1 The Scrapper Set has both a minor and incredibly powerful proc. The minor proc is a global that boosts overall damage (I know pretty damn good for a minor), the incredibly good proc when placed properly can massively boost the damage output of melee damage set. Blasters on the flip side have a purple damage proc, (nice but a real pain to properly leverage) and a proc that provides a very minor level of status protection. 2. Both Scrapper and Blaster ATOs provide 2 superior defense bonuses, a typed/positional and a positional/typed. Ignoring the obvious disparity in the procs, what's even worse is the scrapper set gets it's typed/positional bonus at 3 pieces slotted while the blaster gets it at 6. My suggestion move the defiant barrage EN/Ranged defense bonus to position 3 instead of position 6. The nice thing about this is it would have absolutely zero effect on anyone that was happy with the way their blaster works now, on the plus side it would allow more flexibility in blaster builds especially when it came to how to place the status protection proc.

I'd actually like to see this or something like it as a secondary powerset. Blasters are the ranged damage AT that doesn't do their good damage at range. Aside from the whole bait and switchiness of it, it would be nice to have the range focussed option. (No sentinels don't count for a whole variety of reasons not the least of which is they are shortchanged on range)

I was thinking something like that would have been much better than the regular Alpha slot. But I think incarnates took a 20 pound sledgehammer to the game, shattered it, and then proc changes took a claw hammer to the pieces.

Couldn't agree more. I started remaking my Bots/Dark and by the time I got to the kill contaminated in outbreak, I was sick of the little guy charging the enemy.

They were perfectly willing to break the cottage rule, instant healing ring a bell ? And they were certainly willing to liberally interpret it when they wanted to, energy transfer comes to mind on that as well as many other examples.