ScarySai

That's a rather interesting spin on otherwise non-hostile phrasing. Wanting to work with and to better understand the designer mindset isn't an attack on the devs.

Fixing what isn't broken for the former by nerfing double rage and removing a fantastic DC change in favor of a weird 15 second DoT due to irrational balance fears before shitcanning the whole thing, deserved the backlash they got. Devs can have their ideas, but CoH would never have crawled out of the hole Jack left behind were it not for community feedback.

As am I, and I stated earlier that you are correct in a sense with the client-developer relationship. But essentially calling the community at large mindless, unstable morons is uncalled for. Most are uninformed, few are educated, but only a handful are angry chimps.

/eyeroll A lot of pretentious assumptions, here. It was a quick fix, but the issue was vastly overcomplicated for whatever reason. The first round of changes was fine as it was, but if they had to nerf it, they could have scaled back the damage instead of two highly I'll advised reworks.

Preach.

It could work if it wasn't so much "community gets final say" so much as what to prioritize. Say the HC team wants to work on a bunch of things, but can only reasonably work on two. The community vote could let HC know what to prioritize.

I agree, it entirely depends on how they do it - but that's part of the problem, we have no idea how they would want to do it. If it was making under-performers stronger, great. If it was to hit top performers so that under-performers could be competitive, that's a bad call.

This would be a hard undertaking unless massive nerf-waves happened across the board, I for one don't care to see another Jack Emmert era for this game. I half agree - clients typically have no idea what they want in my industry and likewise, the majority of players aren't as well informed as some of us with how the game works, calculations, coding required and such - a voting system would have to be very carefully considered and more carefully implemented. Still, the call for transparency is something I agree with in the OP. A lot of decisions ranging from fantastic to questionablehave been made and I'd like some insight on how the developers are approaching this problem, so that I may offer feedback in a more...'digestible' way.

Can't speak for many others, but WoW is currently going downhill for exactly the opposite reason. @ApparitionListening to every bit of feedback would be bad, I saw a handful of awful suggestions in the dark melee forum - but the deciding voice should be informed enough to sift through the garbage and understand the data being presented.

This set needs a bit more power behind it, as it stands - it seems like you're afraid of making it too OP, which is making it end up rather anemic.

I don't understand why this thread lasted longer than DM's, but this should be settled by now. Just distracts from giving feedback on the actual powerset, the part that matters.

Working on an elec/shield build currently, but I'm having trouble working out the best chain for single targets. Side question: When do you use thunder strike? Seems kinda 'meh' even on AoE.

The sentinel should be either stackable, or permanent.

Don't pin this on us, the second iteration was worthless and a fifteen second DoT wouldn't be much better. You aren't missing much. First version just needed a slight nerf, honestly.

I wonder if you can go lower than Assault/ninja. At least it has a cool theme going for it.

From a purely min/max standpoint, Ice/elec/fire seems like the play here.

Funny you mention it, the lore AmAs referenced the idea of an elite variation of Malta where they all had a ton of nanite empowered sapper tech.

Gravity's already one of my favorite control sets due to wormhole and singularity, this would be all the more reason to dust off my grav/storm.

It really seems like it's being assumed that Dark melee is just able to naturally hit hard without Soul Drain, it really isn't, Soul Drain saturation is the set's claim to fame. That and the lack of AoE is why Shield is such a good combo for it. Soul drain is a huge part of the equation, a heavily damage buffed AoE SHOULD be wiping things out. I know a lot of people were critting for crazy amounts on +0 mobs in the first build, so what? If I send my blaster after some +0 mobs I'll be showing you some successive casual 1,500 hits with damage buffs. Please rethink your approach to this.

The problem with that is that wiping out +4 minions is a trivial task. A critical shockwave can do that by itself with some damage buffs. Remember: Dark melee is buffing the everloving crap out of it's own damage, if it's unable to wipe out minions with 200% damage buffs while being balanced like a mini-nuke, it's a garbage ability, full stop. I can agree with removing crits, but this thing being able to obliterate people with fully saturated damage buffs isn't a big deal, because again - dark melee is buffing itself to absurd levels. Have any other scrapper match the buff of a soul drain buffed dark melee scrapper and they'll be wiping out minions without effort, it'll just accidentally happen as they're hitting the boss. The concern about it being too much doesn't hold up.

Honestly, the original way it dealt damage with criticals, bonus damage and such would be just fine, I don't know why we're reinventing the wheel, here. It did too much, so scale it back. Why totally reimagine how it works with every revision?

Balancing around incarnates is one of those things that makes sense as an idea until you think about it, the actual game and how it's played, in addition to the whole idea behind the incarnate system. Ageless Destiny, Assault Hybrid and a few Alpha slots would have the biggest direct impact on the abilities themselves here, neither of which would cause Dark Consumption to break anything that isn't already demonstrably more broken somewhere else, in a much stronger set no less.

Unless this thing ends up being the meatiest DoT in the entire game, I already don't like it. That is way too long. I think you are over-complicating this.

Improper use of that, but sure. The solution to an ill-conceived taunt aura problem isn't to formulate an over-complex fusion mechanic to device abilities that will never see the light of day. Would it be cool? Sure, that'd be cool. I don't like the drone/bomb fusion example, but it could be neat in other places. Will it ever happen? Not a chance.

Its over-complicating a simple issue. Time bomb being a remotely placed entity with taunt would accomplish the same thing, realistically, I doubt CP would ever implement that.