Hopeling

Yes, and everything else she mentioned was during Going Rogue. EM certainly was in a bad place from i12 on, but many other sets were not. She did not mention the ITF, but the IDF, a Praetorian enemy group.

Any positional defense set will work equally well against all damage types. Willpower, Electric Armor, Dark Armor, and Radiation Armor also offer psi resistance. I mean, if you build to have no damage output, sure. You get attacks for a reason though. If nothing else, knocking down enemies is a form of mitigation. That's because you're not supposed to just taunt. Taunts in this game are a multiplier to your threat, but do not directly force the enemy to attack you. If you taunt but deal no damage, you're not going to hold aggro very well. Your attacks have taunt effects built in, too (weaker than Taunt itself, but still strong enough to matter). Provoke will taunt five enemies, but Fireball will taunt sixteen.

The content she's talking about (Praetoria, mostly) happened during the time period you didn't play the game: the last couple years before shutdown.

I honestly don't find that any of the melee sets have mechanics that are difficult enough to make it useful to think about a skill cap. Using three builders before a finisher is no harder than lining up a pencil cone. Merely playing a minigame shouldn't automatically be an advantage, IMO, not when the minigames are as simple as the ones we currently have. Powers that have actual drawbacks or limitations deserve corresponding advantages. For a non-melee example, Storm Summoning has some ridiculously powerful things like Hurricane, Tornado, or Lightning Storm, but this is counterbalanced by the fact that it's very difficult to get full use out of them: Hurricane scatters enemies out of its own debuff area, and Tornado and Lightning Storm can only get their full effect if something stands in that specific location for the entire duration of the power. Or back on topic, the two TW powers that require Momentum really should get some kind of corresponding bonus for that limitation. If eg TW does better than War Mace on a perfectly static target, that should be balanced out by the fact that it does worse on moving targets, so that these roughly cancel out in practice. Then if the player finds a clever way to remove movement from more fights, great for them, let them do it. Since we're 27 pages in, a new thread is probably a good idea once we're collecting data. The "Archetypes" parent board is barely used, but seems like a good place for general powers discussion.

I know you didn't actually ask me, but I'm gonna answer anyway. I don't think the answer is automatically that you bring down the one overperforming set. It's possible that set is the only one that's where you want it to be, or that the target is somewhere in between. This is what happened to Blaster secondaries in i24: /Mental had Drain Psyche, and all other secondaries gained a Sustain effect to give them a comparable amount of +regen and +recovery. That really was buffing all other sets to match the best one. But this was done because the devs thought that Blasters as a whole were underperforming. I don't think that applies to melee as a whole. So assuming that War Mace, Fiery Melee, Street Justice, etc are in a good place in absolute terms - which I think they are - yeah, you bring down the outlier to around that level.

Depending on the AV's level and resists, beating that regeneration can be harder sometimes. They also just have a lot of HP: if you have 200 DPS, that's about 100 after you take off the regeneration, so it's going to take 28271/100=283 seconds to kill her, or almost five minutes.

Straight DPS. AV regen is only about 100 hp/sec, which many strong builds can beat.

Yes, but people did it anyway: you needed 6 to start (or whatever other number for various TFs), but that just means bugging a few people to sit in zone with you for 60 seconds, then they could leave the TF once it's underway.

I doubt you can softcap to everything. But you don't need to; /Elec is not a defense set. It has very good resistances and a solid heal; it's designed to be able to take a few hits. Having high defense to just S/L or melee is plenty to keep an /Elec brute alive.

Way more broken than what? Scrappers and Brutes were soloing the ITF long before we even had Incarnate powers. A blaster doing it is only noteworthy because it's a blaster, not because it's impressive in absolute terms. For melee, that's baseline performance. Moreover, that has been baseline performance for most of the game's history. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Scrapper players like myself and @MunkiLord were soloing AVs and TFs during precisely the same time period when you've claimed it was impossible, using powersets that haven't gotten any better since then. This idea that melee have only recently become able to do these things is simply not based in fact. Bring the bottom up, as I've said before.

Neither you nor I were there, so I'm not sure how you can know there were no issues nor complaints. Power creep and TW being overpowered were recurring topics of discussion before shutdown, and still are now. As far as I can tell, essentially no balance adjustments of any kind occurred between shutdown and Homecoming. But that doesn't mean the current dev team is uninterested in balance; for example, the most recent patch significantly adjusted Devices as well as most Dominator secondaries. Nor are nerfs off the table; Envenomed Blades was brought down significantly. Nor did /Martial Dominators revolt: the primary reaction seems to be "oh well, it's still fun". Why wasn't TW nerfed? Well, based on GM posts in this thread, it's because nobody had time to look into it. That's why he said they'd take a look at the data if we can collect it.

After shutdown? I assume so, yes. I wasn't in on it.

Not correct, no. TW was live for less than a year before shutdown, and development ended just a few months into that time. Many other changes occurred between i12 and i24. They just weren't changes to the melee sets from launch. Those were basically unchanged in that time period, hence my using them as a benchmark.

Shield is a beast of a set for tankers. How does Incarnate-softcapped defense, 90% S/L resist, and 87% DDR sound? War Mace will be even nicer after the changes, with Shatter becoming a 90-degree cone and Whirling Mace a 16ft radius.

It should be usable when the ring lights up. Are you exemplared down? For example, if you took Follow Through at level 10, and you're running DFB which sets you to level 1, the power won't be usable because you're more than 5 levels below when you took it.

Yes, that was my point. These things may be new to you, but they are not actually very new. If War Mace has been fine since the buffs, that means it's been a good set for the last eleven years, which is well over half the game's lifespan. Hence me saying it's been "in a pretty good place for a pretty long time".

@Infinitum, the War Mace buffs are not at all new. They came in issue 13, back in 2008, just four months after the EM nerf. Meanwhile, SS was always top-tier up until the rage crash change, and Claws, Dark Melee, Fiery Melee, and Katana (among others) are also about as good as WM, and have been soloing TFs essentially since the beginning. Melee builds with IOs have never not been powerful. That's not OP, that's the baseline.

I agree that it would be useful to have a standard. That's what we've been talking about for the last several pages. I think it's fair to say that, whatever the standard for melee ATs is, it's somewhere in the range of where most sets have been for most of the game's life. Scrappers and Brutes are very much not categorically underpowered; it wouldn't make sense to say that TW is the first set that has ever been up to par. I don't think anybody seriously contends that War Mace is underpowered in its current state, for example. Does that sound fair to you? (The same thing would NOT be fair to say about certain other ATs; I think that most blast sets really have been underpowered for most of the game's life, for example, at least until the i24 snipe and nuke changes. Blasters really did deserve to be brought up across the board. But melee have been in a pretty good place for a pretty long time.) If the pre-i23 sets range from Energy Melee at the bottom to Fiery Melee at the top (or whatever), then the standard is somewhere between Energy Melee and Fiery Melee. If TW is way out ahead of Fiery Melee, that means TW is above the standard and probably warrants a change. If the data comes back and TW is somewhere in the pack with the rest of the melee sets, or even if it's the best but not by much, I'd happily admit that I was wrong and that TW isn't really far enough from the line to warrant a change. I don't expect that to happen, but if it did, it would prove me wrong.

For like the ninetieth time, literally nobody at any point in this thread has proposed anything like a nerf wrench. The only two concrete proposals are "slow down TW attacks by 0.1 seconds" and "remove the DoTs" (two mutually exclusive proposals; nobody has proposed doing both). The former will have literally zero impact on you; you're already not running gapless chains. The latter removes a small fraction of the damage from two powers, one of which you don't even use. Do you honestly think this is going to make it substantially harder to form teams or take down AVs?

Is the amount of damage you deal a measure of how much fun you're having? If so, why did you ever play Claws/SR instead of Claws/Fire? I honestly don't think that TW being merely top-tier instead of in its own tier would make the set less fun to play.

As I've brought up before, hardly a week goes by that we don't get another thread in General Discussion complaining about power creep. Not everyone is fine with it; I am one of them. This isn't concern-trolling; it's a real thing that is directly making the game less fun for a sizable number of players. TW certainly isn't the only source of power creep, but it's a stand-out example among melee sets.

I don't think you're understanding my point. I agree that secondary effects are important. But TW has very good secondary effects. I'm proposing a test that ignores them because I think TW has some of the best mitigation out of any melee set. It has Katana's defense buff plus War Mace's knockdown. I'm saying we should handicap TW by taking that away, and see if it still overperforms. This isn't me trying to put my thumb on the scales; just the opposite. This is me accepting the burden of proof. If we run these tests and TW comes back in the middle of the pack, then I'd have to admit I was wrong - maybe it deals "pretty good" damage and has good mitigation, but that's not the monster performance I think it has, and doesn't warrant a nerf. But if it comes back top of the pack for pure damage, AND also has great mitigation on top of that, that suggests it does. I'm making a declaration against interest. Not just on the basis of its damage, but that's because the comparison here goes the other way. Fire Blast deals more damage than Ice Blast because Ice Blast gets much better secondary effects; that's a fair tradeoff. But if Fiery Melee deals less damage than TW, and TW gets much better secondary effects, where's the tradeoff?

I'm not sure what you think you're disagreeing with me about. I agree that secondary effects exist and are important. I said as much above.

No, just because that's literally not what we're trying to measure right now. First we want a working baseline damage comparison. Once we have that, we can add different test conditions to account for things like secondary effects or knockback from teammates. Moreover, if durability is an issue, that limits certain kinds of testing. Maybe you want to turn it up to +2 instead of +0 and see if TW suffers much more than other sets from reduced hit chance, but if every build just dies a lot on +2, you're not going to get very useful data. Like you say, TW offers pretty good mitigation, with a Parry-type buff and multiple powers with high chance for knockdown. Ignoring them isn't going to make TW look any stronger.

Ah, maybe we're talking past each other. The Jamison Park map seems more or less fine. I was talking about the asteroid map with all the patrols, where you can routinely have multiple times the aggro cap.