aethereal

I had savage leap, it's great, but it didn't save the combo for me.

I ran a Sav/WP to the late 30s, and just ended up finding it boring. With no clicks in the secondary and savage's light combo system seeming like something i should mostly ignore, it was just click the same three powers over and over again. Felt reasonably strong, just not engaging.

I know this post is a month old, but resistance debuffs are affected by the purple patch (AVs have no special resistance to resist debuffs because resist debuff resistance is just resistance -- for AVs to have special resist debuff resistance they'd have to have high resistances. But purple patch is different and does affect resist debuffs).

I don't want to tune the game back down to the point where most people need to solo at +0/x1, no bosses. That's a just fundamentally less interesting solo experience than we have today. And reasonably powerful superheroes should absolutely be able to jump into a crowd of bad guys and finish them off. But I wouldn't mind if the a typical forum-build could manage +1/x4 or +1/x5, with the very toughest soloers were struggling to do +2/x6 or so, with +4/x8 laughably out of reach for any single player.

Making a full-on, "you may not pass this encounter unless you mez this person" is probably not a great mechanic for general play across lots of spawns. But you can I think pretty validly add softer but significant rewards to the table for mezzes. Give an enemy a toggle that gives them +30% or +50% resist-all, suppressed by mez. Give them an aura that gives +30% or +50% to damage to all their allies, suppressed by mez.

How's this for a problem statement: "For controllers and dominators to be useful with their control-set powers, there need to be enemies which are fundamentally more vulnerable to controls than they are to damage, and such enemies are very rare in CoH."

Uptime and "what power you click most" seem like they're over-prioritized by people in this thread. You can be a key contributor to a team by having a suite of three powerful powers that you use one of on every other spawn. Like, that's at least theoretically the case. We can imagine a world in which a dominator spends most of his actual playtime using assault-set powers, but every other spawn or so fundamentally changes the dynamic with a long-cooldown power that neuters some major threat or rescues the team, and that that is a worthwhile character even if the majority of his button-clicking is doing DPS and that DPS is much worse than a blaster. And similarly, we can imagine a troller who mostly heals or buffs or debuffs, and his heals, buffs, or debuffs are worse than a defender's, but again, he has these rescue power that get broken out only once ever few spawns but they are still super useful. Now, I think it is the case that the current meta, or at least what people see of the current meta, is: a. A world in which you don't need rescues, not every spawn, not every other spawn, not even once every two or three missions, because what happens is the team deletes every spawn in a few seconds. This is probably most true in things like PI radio missions or a few very commonly played, very well-understood TFs, but there's an undeniable element of it happening across the game, at least in high-level 8-perosn teams. b. The kinds of things which aren't just easily-deleted-spawns, which do provide some kind of threat that might need a rescue, are not necessarily well-handled by control sets. The escalating ability to simply ignore controls brought on by rank in CoH is not super-well tuned to a reality in which the team has a LOT of ability to instantly kill minions. c. The all-or-nothing aspects of control makes it very hard to thread the needle between "My supposedly powerful control does literally nothing" and "I can city-of-statues the entire game." But the solution to these problems is not, it seems to me, to throw up your hands and say, "A dominator is just a blaster with a useless primary powerset, you should bring its damage up to blaster levels," and "a controller is just a defender with a useless primary powerset, you should bring its buffs/debuffs/heals up to defender levels."

There's always a spectrum. Sometimes you're on a team with 7 great players. Sometimes you're on a team where the sets really synergize well, or the enemies can't attack your team's weaknesses.

Sadly, Rubi's power API does not appear to contain this kind of information, it has no hint of any kind of delay to damage from Neutron Bomb. It does confirm that activation time (not merely displayed activation time) is 1.67 seconds, but I was hoping to find that it showed like projectile speed or something, and it does not.

There is one way to make -resist debuffs "not work," which is give people overcap resists. I have no idea if Reichsman has overcap resists, but it is not quite the case that you can always expect someone with -resist-all to add X% to team damage output.

If the OP has softcap or a bit more without weave, then by all means skip weave. If not, get weave.

Drop placate and take kick, tough, and weave.

I mean, sort of. They look like DoTs, but they're actually set up as pseudopets, and they actually are doing a separate power activation for each pulse of damage. As opposed to other DoT powers (like say ball lightning), which actually only have one power effect and apply an actual DoT effect and check scourge only once.

I feel like you're reacting to the weakness of control sets in the current meta, which was not true at release of CoV and leads you to discount the fact that Trollers and Doms have, after all, almost entirely the same powers in their primary and surely most important powerset. Trollers are meant to be control-first, with buff/debuff to fill in the holes of stuff they can't keep fully locked down. Dominators are meant to be control-first, with damage to kill the stuff they can't keep fully locked down. Dominators get pets just like Trollers do. Like, yes, things evolved and perma-dom became a thing achievable to anyone who worked hard for it and blaster nukes got buffed and now a control-first playstyle, at least on teams, is kinda bad. So successful trollers lean more heavily on their secondary, and dominators lean more heavily on their secondary. And I'm not saying that there aren't significant differences between Controllers and Doms. But also, Masterminds only "spend a lot of their time buffing/debuffing" because their primary, AT-defining powers do not take a lot of combat-time to use, and they do not lock down opponents. They just aren't that much like Controllers except, perhaps, in a loose, thematic, "Oh, this is kinda how my playstyle works, man" way. And at that point we go back to Stalkers are the Blaster correspondents -- sure, their powers are very different, but they're high-DPS, one-shot, run if you don't kill everyone kind of way. Like, if you look for "mirrors" in terms of just straight up "whose powers are most like whose other powers," then you get Tanks/Brutes, Scrappers/Stalkers, Defenders/Corruptors, Controllers/Dominators, ???/MMs and Blaster/???. If you look for "mirrors" in terms of roles, you have all kinds of possible thematic matchups, including Tank/MM, Blaster/Stalker, and Blaster/Corruptor. I think the people suggesting that villain ATs are a blend of heroic ATs are the closest to accurately describing the how things came situation, but I don't think that there's much sign that they are describing a unified design intent. Rather, I think that the designers probably took inspiration from the heroic ATs, tried to come up with things that "felt villainous," and, if they ever had an intention to provide 1:1 mirrors of the heroic ATs, abandoned that as a design goal as they refined the ATs.

Controllers don't have "aggro" control (except Illusion), they have crowd control -- through almost entirely exactly the same powers that Dominators have crowd control. Like, yes, I get it. I can see what you're saying. But also obviously Controllers play a ton like Dominators, using the same primary powersets to lock down opponents the same way. Especially when you do straightforward play of the kind that we had more of back when CoV was released and fewer people had perma-dom.

I mean, it's super obvious that a Controller plays more like a Dom than a Mastermind. Is anyone willing to say with a straight face that this isn't true? But more to the point: you're still making the assumption that each villainous AT has exactly one "pairing" with a unique heroic AT. That's just... not necessarily true. It seems clear to me that some kind of pairing and mirroring was a concept in play at some point, like it's not crazy to point out that some of the villainous ATs look a lot like some of the heroic ATs, but there's a big jump between there and, "each villain AT was designed from beginning of Cov development to release of CoV with a mandate to mirror one unique heroic AT."

This presupposes that someone said, "All five ATs must have a one-to-one mirroring." And what's the implication of the rest of your post? That Masterminds are a mirror to controllers?

Being first at a very specific challenge that is relatively far from ordinary play is a data point, but it's hardly the beginning and end of the matter.

They buffed max hp, added Assassin's Focus, added the ATOs, added crit-chance, added chance-for-AoE terrorize & minus-to-hit, and gave fast-Assassin's-Strike out of hide. You are correct that most of those bonuses are offensive bonuses, not defensive (though note that the ATOs add 5% S/L Defense, 6.5% S/L Resistance, and 5% AoE defense as well as their offensive bonuses).

Stalkers have also moved closer to Scrappers over time. Originally, they were considerably more glass-cannon-y than they are today. Yes, they have always had melee and armor powersets, but they weren't the toe-to-toe fighters that they became, and the comparison to blasters made more sense. (Of course, blasters also became less glass-cannon-y).

I mean, I think one of the big differences between this is just that enemies don't tend to run toggles, where any armor-set character and honestly a lot of non-armor-set characters will run 7+ toggles. And the difference between running those 7+ toggles and running 0 of them tends to be like an order-of-magnitude to 2 orders-of-magnitude difference in power and mitigation (I mean that literally: incoming damage that would, with all your toggles running, reduce your health by 1-10% will just kill you if you don't have your toggles running). This is a weird asymmetry. Having your endurance briefly touch zero for a critter is like a fairly short-term soft mez, where you can move but not attack. Having your endurance briefly touch zero for a player is very likely death. If I were trying to balance this, I might have player toggles suppress when they can't draw endurance instead of toggle off -- that way, if you eat a blue, next second all your toggles unsuppress at once. I'd also probably convert a few toggles in each armor set to auto powers. I'd make critters actually pay endurance for their powers, lower their base durability somewhat, and give them all a toggle that got them back to their current durabilty, so they'd have at least a somewhat symmetrical durability loss to what players have. And I'd probably give them all a 0 end cost, 15 second recharge time 30% endurance heal with a 1.5 second animation time (that they'd only use at 5% end or less), so it isn't the case that you can statue them by draining them once and then keep them on their heels forever. But that's a lot of changes to make to support sapping.

Resistance resists resist debuffs, so it's impossible under current mechanics to have high resistance debuffs resistance without also having high resistance. It doesn't seem thematic to me that regen has high DDR, and as a mechanic it sounds either useless or exploitable with very little space between.

This doesn't seem a lot better than the current power? I mean, it's neat and all, but you have 15 seconds of invulnerability to turn your toggles back on, debt isn't that big a deal, and it seems better to choose whether or not to use the power than have it be automatic?

You can, I think, make this work in detail. It doesn't have to be something where you need to go deep in the red to get good use out of it. Imagine it's a 30% damage boost plus 1% per percent of life you are below 60%. Use it at 40% life, 50% damage boost. Heals can scale with maxHP if they're coded to (some are, some aren't). And of course, even if current IH were 3x stronger that would certainly make it stronger when it's there. But the complaint about IH is not that it's a weak power when it's active, it's that a lot of the time, when you need it, it's not there, it's on cooldown. The virtue of my proposed version of IH is it's always there when you need it. You aren't going to spend time using my version of IH when you're at max hp, and you aren't going to be at 20% health and look and say, "Oh shit, it's on cooldown." This is essentially the same thing we'd get from turning IH into a toggle, but with more ability to tune cost and reward -- because your point that heals/regen as a mechanic have a thresholding problem is well-taken. One of the issues with IH as a toggle is that it's going to be hard to get the values right. A little too good and your character is unkillable, a little too bad and the set remains weak. With my version of IH, there's more flex. It's more okay if a character is "unkillable" if they also can't do much because they're pounding IH for all their animation time -- we can make it more powerful because it comes with a built-in tradeoff. Now, might it be "right" at 7% heal instead of 5% heal? Sure. That's what testing would be for. But if it's a little too weak (or a little too strong) in terms of basic numeric power, then you could increase the heal or decrease the animation time slightly. That kind of thing is only really discoverable through playtesting. People who want a set that mixes healing, regen, and absorb have bio available. It's right there. It's a great armor set. I'm not arguing against heal + absorb, I'm arguing that we already have heal + absorb. Regen needs to differentiate from bio and willpower, hybrid sets that are significantly stronger than it is. If there were a form of mitigation to hybridize with that weren't well-represented in the other armor sets, I'd be fine with hybrizing with that form of mitigation.

I was thinking like a 1 second animation time. But the idea would be very sensitive to small changes in animation time, heal amount, endurance cost, and recharge time, so ultimately the answer would really be "depends on testing." The idea is that it's certainly not something you want to auto-cast, all you'd be doing is instant-healing over and over again. Your ideal case is that you can just use Reconstruction for your heals, which would be more efficient in, like, "HPA" (heal per activation time, think of it as an equivalent to DPA). Instant Healing would be bad HPA, but good HPS, as it were. Thematically, think of it as one of those times when Wolverine is getting his ass kicked all over the place, and healing up, he's not gonna die, but he's on his heels, just getting hit and healing, not counterattacking.