aethereal

Gygax, not Gigax. Also, I don't think that old-school D&D actually is significantly the origin of holy-trinity team roles. Fighters in D&D were damage dealers, not just tanks, and in fact had relatively few tanking tools. Thieves weren't really DPS: yes they had backstab, but it was difficult to use in combat. Holy Trinity (tank/dps/heal) was created more by video games who had to find more of a combat role for D&D classes, than by D&D per se (which significantly balanced the classes through non-combat roles: thieves kinda sucked in combat but had a whole bunch of stuff only they could do). Mez protection is a creaky mechanic in CoH, no doubt. It kinda sucks that it's such a, to borrow an actual D&D term, save-or-die effect. Most characters either have essentially total immunity to mezzes in PVE, or else get really screwed over by them. It would be nice if there were some half-measures, if for example you could get partially affected by a hold which gave you a slow or a modest damage debuff, if a partial knockback caused you to have a very short stumble animation, etc. Honestly, probably the best balance for mez protection we have in the game are the (somewhat reviled) clicky mez prot powers that don't just let you set up a toggle that you completely forget about afterward and which gives you nearly 100% ability to ignores mezzes. But we shouldn't give blasters 100% mez immunity to everything forever the end. If you like to play Sentinels (and I do!), play Sents. Giving blasters some level of mez mitigation is find (note that there are anti-mez powers in at least a few blaster secondaries). Defenders would be ridiculously, grotesquely overpowered if they could put their armors on themselves. I don't enjoy playing buff sets, but hey, there are debuff Defenders. And holy shit, the last thing that CoH needs is to make Defenders tougher than scrappers.

Sure. I'm not saying they're overpowered. I thought you didn't know what dragonhawk was referring to, not that you understood what he was referring to but disagreed whether it constituted overpowered. Obviously, the sniper change constitutes a buff for characters who have snipes available.

Snipes are now fast in combat (that is, they do not have the wind up/interrupt time before doing their animation and damage, if you have attacked or been attacked in the last 8 seconds). They do good damage while fast, and more damage if you have +to-hit. They do even more damage when they are slow (ie, when you are out of combat).

There are apparently dominators with access to power build up that can Pierce purple triangle Mez protection.

That sounds like a bunch of basically good ideas that comes together into an incredibly complex package. If people don't understand the sentinel inherent now, how would they figure out all those different, largely invisible, abilities?

Dude, if the cottage role is, "what if build up built a cottage," that's a violation of the "wow" rule, which is, "what if build up logged you off, created a new account for you in World of Warcraft, and logged you in there?" You're proposing an entirely different AT.

I wasn't actually thinking of taking away -end and -recovery, just adding a chance to chain to, I dunno, maybe Lightning Bolt and Zapp. But my point was, not trying to tune -end and -recovery UP into a more useful secondary. They're such an all-or-nothing debuff that it's really hard to get good balance around them. My main on live was an elec/kin corruptor, and it was like "no secondary effect, no secondary effect, no secondary effect, EB is mostly locked down, AV totally ignores my secondary effect." EDIT: Maybe instead of Zapp, Tesla Cage could produce chain arcs in a short range around itself throughout its duration, that'd solve the "Tesla Cage is not good" thing while also giving Electric Blast a bit more oomph and theme. This would admittedly be a nightmare to balance.

Resistance debuffs are not affected by the purple patch as far as I know.

It would be a much bigger balance chore, but I think that the best way to improve electric blast while giving it more of a unique theme would be to add a chance-to-chain to one or two of the attacks (like the electric melee attack or the electric control knockdown). More AoE to a set is always welcome, and -end and -recovery is an inherently problematic secondary effect.

In what way does it not solve the problem?

Okay, but couldn't we just reduce those mags in PvP only? That seems like the easier fix than making it mandatory to slot a bunch of useless sprints.

No, seriously, can someone tell me why PvP KB mags are so high? I assume there is some reason, it seems like an obvious fix otherwise, but I'm now really curious about what the reason is.

Homecoming is, right now, inherently massively infringing NCSoft's IP. NCSoft has so far not murdered them with lawyers. Homecoming does not, by mere virtue of its existence, infringe Disney/Marvel or Warner Brothers/DC's IP (or a host of other superhero rightsholders), and also those entities have no demonstrated track record of tolerance to Homecoming's existence. I do not think that HC's policy against copyright-infringing characters is designed to prevent you from naming your character after obscure parts of City of Heroes lore. It is about keeping the number of people who can at any moment sue Homecoming out of existence down to just one, NCSoft.

I feel like if NCSoft wants to pursue a copyright claim against Homecoming, they don't need the pretense that you named your red-and-blue superstrength tanker "StatesDude."

I'm (genuinely) curious, why are PvP KB mags so high? Can't they be set independently from PvE KB mags? It seems like we could get the same benefit that the OP was describing, with less effect on the rest of the game, if there weren't a whole bunch of 30+ mag KBs in PvP. It's not a lot of powers, based on the list someone published mid-thread, couldn't we just tweak them all down to sane numbers?

Thanks!

There are a few "real" missions where all the emplaced mobs start off allied, and then after a trigger of some kind, they shift to enemy. I'd this possible to do in AE? If so, how?

The "just standing there" pose (shifting from arms crossed over the chest to hands down and slightly out from the sides) is the default pause of all characters. A few powers put you into different idle animations, including Tough and Weave, and they replay after you zone in. If you don't move after activating those powers/zoning in, you will end up with a different idle animation, but you can break that animation just by stepping forward. Beast Run and Ninja Run force you into a different idle animation as long as they are active, but deactivating the powers should bring you out of those animations and back to what I think you prefer, the standard idle animation. Finally, there are emotes that will leave you in a different idle animation after using the emotes. Again, stepping forward one step will break those idles and restore the default one.

There are times when it can be nice for RP, 0th Power: Like, my character might accept a jacket as a gift from another player, and it'd be reasonably neat if I could very rapidly create a costume with the jacket (and if they could create a costume without the jacket). It's very far from what I'd call "necessary."

Yeah, as QuiJon says, there's a fundamental threshold issue with regeneration per se (that is, with "buffing the healing that you get over time in a straight forward manner." Not the set Regeneration, the combat attribute regeneration). Like, let's say that your baseline expectation is that a "normal" encounter will lead to 100 DPS, and that a "normal" scrapper armor should mitigate 75% of that. For resistance, you set resistance to those damage types to 75%, and bam, this person takes 25 DPS For defense, you set defense to those damage types to, whatever it is, 30%, and 75 out of 100 of those attacks miss, and this person takes 25 DPS, albeit in a less smooth way than resistance. For regeneration, you set healing to 75 health per second, and bam, this person takes 25 DPS Now let's say that the player scales their challenge level up or down a little. Instead of taking 100 DPS, they take 90 DPS Resistance takes 22.5 DPS (that is, 90% of the damage they took in the 100 DPS scenario) Defense takes 22.5 DPS (that is, 90% of the damage they took in the 100 DPS scenario, though again it's a little more complicated than the resistance case) Regeneration takes 15 DPS. Hmmm. What if the player takes 110 DPS instead of 100 DPS? Resistance takes 27.5 DPS Defense takes 27.5 DPS with the usual asterisks Regeneration takes 35 DPS Or, just to drive the point home, it's pretty easy to scale your threat up by 2x in CoH, so call it 200 DPS: In that scenario, the resistance person takes 50 DPS, the defense person probably takes somewhat more than 50 DPS, maybe 60 or 70 DPS, and the regen person takes 125 DPS. Willpower finesses this by providing some resistance, some -to-hit, and also by scaling the regen rate based on the number of enemies near you. Regeneration will have to do something like that, something more complicated than "bonus to regen, click to heal," if it wants to avoid strong thresholding issues.

I softcapped my arch/nin sent in all positionals without mindlink or incarnates.

My interpretation of what Captain Powerhouse means is "I'm not going to tweak the mechanic to have, for example, more uptime," and also "I don't like feast-or-famine as a theme." Not necessarily, "the new inherent will share nothing in common with the old inherent." The impression that I get is that plans for the Sentinel rework are at a very early stage. I don't know how much CP is interested in feedback from people in this thread, but I read CP as saying in this thread Fairly hard statements: 1. No taunting 2. No increase in AoE caps 3. Inherent will be completely reworked: a. Will not need to click green or red circles to sustain DPS b. Will not have a feast-or-famine theme Fairly soft statements: 1. Would like the sentinel to be a spotter/lookout 2. Might give -def or +to-hit or +perception to allies But who knows.

-recharge is much more useful than -to-hit if you already have softcapped defense. Which definitely shouldn't be the only scenario we should care about, but should be a scenario we care about.

I've been thinking more about it, and I think that the right role for sentinels is extended single-target damage. Fighting "hard" targets, where, depending on your optimization level, a hard target might be a boss, an EB, an AV, or a GM. My concept here is: You need something that takes advantage of an armor set. You've gotta take damage. Tanks and Brutes seem like they have traditional tanking pretty well-covered. Scrappers are better initiators because Sents may naturally initiate from back with the squishies, and the squishies suffer AoE splash. Scrappers and Brutes are probably also both pretty good at AoE. Only stalkers, of the current armored ATs, are heavily oriented towards single-target damage, and their damage is front-loaded. So a sentinel can have a natural role as sort of the flip side of a stalker: you don't have that ability to instantly melt a medium-hard target in just a few attacks, but you have more ability to take a long fight to its successful conclusion than an equally-optimized stalker. A straightforward way to do this that wouldn't confuse any new players would be for sents to apply a debuff to a target: again, I think that -X% resist-all, where X is the animation time of the sent attack power (in seconds), is the right one. Stacking, with a duration that allows you to get to a sustained -20% or better. Then also give sent attacks that hit a target that has such a debuff a chance to proc a mild heal and/or endurance gain to the sent (similar to how defensive opportunity currently works). If you wanted to get fancy, you could try to make it so that the heal/end heal got more likely or better the more debuffed the target was, but I think it'd also be fine to just have it be simple. The -res gives the sent a team role that's different than just "inferior scrapper or blaster." It's not confusing, new players don't have to parse green and red circles etc. Min-maxers can work out the ways to have their attack rotations land their biggest hit at the moment when the res debuff is maximized. They continue to be a good solo AT. Is it really a role that's about being a "sentinel" in the common parlance? I mean, no. So what? Masterminds aren't all that mastermind-y, either. Corruptors are only pretty loosely "corrupting," especially if you take a buff set. EDIT: Is -stealth a possible debuff? We usually give the effect with +perception, but if it's possible to give -stealth, or -strength to stealth or something, then you could have the -res debuff also be a -stealth debuff and you could get a little bit of that sentinel flavor, especially in PvP where it might actually matter. That wraps up the "I'm removing stealth" thing with what Sents are actually good at -- fighting -- instead of being a team aura.

Yeah, resistance debuffs are fine as they are.