Hopeling

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.

Right, I'm not saying that pylons are a better metric than farming overall. I'm saying that neither pylons nor farming are good examples of normal gameplay. Farming is maybe less dissimilar, but still not very similar: you get a fuckton of inspirations, you have an insane saturation of enemies, you have no disruption from teammates. That's why we're trying to come up with another metric.

I don't understand what there is to be confused about. People think TW is better than Spines in normal gameplay, but not better at farming. This is not a contradiction. It's exactly the same argument as you saying that TW is great on pylons but not in normal gameplay. We're trying to get metrics that more closely correspond to normal gameplay, rather than only using extremely limited metrics like pylons or farming. The meta farming build used to be SS/Fire, which doesn't have a second aura and isn't especially user-friendly because you have to manage crashes. With the rage crash -def now unavoidable, Spines seems to be the next-best thing. Its popularity over, say, Rad/Fire can also be partly attributed to the fact that some people wrote very popular guides about it shortly after Homecoming first appeared.

Part of the reason I don't want a thing that involves a second player is that it means I probably can't contribute to testing. I don't have a reliable second player, and my schedule is erratic. I'm not sure no inspirations is a fair condition if we're trying to represent normal gameplay. For example, Super Reflexes and Shield Defense look a LOT worse without inspirations, because they have absolutely no healing or endurance recovery, rather than having it in limited but nonzero amounts from consumables. But I can go with no inspirations as the default test condition if that's what the consensus is. No, but you do face AVs. I mean, you don't face them often, but the subset of people who came up with pylon tests did. The whole reason that pylon tests became popular is because Scrappers (and some others, but the pylon thread was always a Scrapper board thing) wanted to see if they could solo AVs under challenge conditions, and a pylon has about the same HP and regen as an archvillain, so it made a reasonable measuring stick or dry run for comparing builds and attack chains. Pylons really are reasonably representative of the amount of DPS you can do in an AV fight. Likewise, that's why the default test condition for pylons is "no inspirations, no temporary powers". It's not that nobody wants to know how much DPS inspirations or temporary powers are worth. It's that AV hunting was the thing people did for fun and bragging rights, and AV hunting with inspirations and/or temporary powers was already pretty easy, while AV hunting without them was still a challenge, so that became the standard. If we're measuring under farming conditions, we're only going to find out which sets are the best at farming. I don't think the answer there is going to surprise anybody: it's Spines, followed closely by SS and Rad. But that doesn't tell us much about regular content.

I'm not sure that's a better test condition than an NPC. It also makes the test harder to construct, since you need a second player, and it introduces an extra variable of how evil that player is. (And it cuts inspiration drops in half compared to the solo condition, which is another variable to account for.)

Well, what you don't do is throw your hands up in the air and decide that game balance is unimportant or impossible. There's almost never going to be a single metric you can point to and say - aha, this is ironclad proof that powerset X needs to be brought down by exactly Y%. You may not have any metrics that aren't confounded in some way. But you take whatever metrics you do have and look at the picture they make in gestalt. A powerset that overperforms in one metric may just be a fluke; a powerset that overperforms in every metric you can think of may be a real issue to be addressed. Determining what's the right change to make is then another difficult problem, but not an impossible one. You come up with possible changes, see how they affect your metrics, and decide on a candidate. Generally, it's better to make small changes rather than sweeping changes. All of us in this thread seem to agree that, if TW is changed at all, it should be something conservative, with maybe further adjustments later if the initial ones aren't enough. Changing every melee set except TW would be an example of an unnecessarily broad change: if people like most melee sets just fine as-is, why mess with all of them when you could instead just change one? I agree that a farm map is probably a bad idea, especially if it's the one on the asteroid map with a bunch of patrols. The whole point of that map is to achieve target saturation way beyond what you can have in normal missions. An asteroid map with ordinary spawns (but not patrols or ambushes) of not-too-dangerous enemies should suffice. We may not even need a custom enemy group; Council or Freakshow may work fine. Steampunkette's idea of using an energy blaster NPC is a good idea; it allows a reasonably controlled test that still incorporates the idea of teammates disrupting Momentum cycles. This shouldn't be the ONLY condition we test under - a teammate spamming Explosive Blast without slotting for KB>KD or knowing how to use positioning is closer to a worst-case scenario than average-case - but it should be one of them. We still need to agree on some conditions for tests before we can get started. We don't have to pick just one set of test conditions, but as a measure of baseline performance, what about something like: SOs only. Slotting can be at the player's discretion, as is the rest of the build, but when in doubt, slotting attacks with 1acc/3dam/1end/1rech is a good default. Run at +0/x4. You have enough targets available that AoE is worthwhile, but not so many that it completely overshadows ST damage, and some spawns will have bosses. Inspirations are allowed, but you have to start with an empty tray. No stocking up on 20 [Enrage]s before zoning in. Level 50 character, but no Incarnate powers.

It's great that your coalition is having a good time, but again, that doesn't seem to stop it from bothering other people. It's great that making melee sets stronger won't affect your friends, but of course it won't if they don't even play melee. I've pointed directly to threads full of people that such changes would upset. When the proposal was changes to TW, you (very reasonably) insisted that the burden of proof was on me to justify why a change should be made; it's not enough for me to say that I personally don't mind a reduction. That still applies the other way around: if all melee sets should get buffed, that still needs to be justified. It's not enough to say that you personally wouldn't mind it.

That does not seem to prevent other people from having problems with it. Like I said, if the difficulty settings went higher, this would not be an issue. Game too easy, just turn up the difficulty. But we're currently at a point where at least some decent fraction of the playerbase finds that turning it up all the way is still easier than they want. Across-the-board buffs amount to reducing the difficulty further, in a way they can't opt out of. Meanwhile, if you feel that current difficulty levels are fun and challenging, why exactly do you want to reduce them?

Buffing powersets across the board amounts to making the game as a whole easier. This is not necessarily a popular thing to do. For example, see the power creep thread in the general forums right now, which is not the first of its kind and probably will not be the last. Homecoming has made the game easier-as-in-less-tedious in many ways, like reducing merit costs or allowing double XP, but they haven't literally made enemies easier to kill across the board. Such a change would be largely unprecedented. If the difficulty scale went higher, this would be less worrisome. And maybe I'm overestimating the impact of buffing melee sets. But it is at least a potential concern. Since nobody ever answered this: yes, every TW attack has a chance to crit, and the area attacks get a separate chance to crit on each target. This part works the same as any other scrapper set. Like most sets, it has one power with an increased crit chance (15% instead of 10%), in this case Arc of Destruction.