aethereal

You're so emotional about this topic that you don't read what people say, and you're like, "Oh my god I'm going to shock you by saying this: Brutes are suboptimal!" I said right from the start that Brutes are invalidated by Scrappers and Tankers. Yes, they're quite literally suboptimal. You aren't arguing with anyone. But despite your deeply emotional beliefs, no, it's not in fact better to have Brutes invalidate another class than it is for another class to invalidate Brutes. If we can't figure out a way for all three of Brutes, Scrappers, and Tankers to be valid at the same time, there's no point in fixing Brutes. No, it's not about turns or retribution or penance. I don't think you read what I wrote, which was about Brutes invalidating Scrappers, not Tankers. Just to be clear, though: the likely result of slightly raising the defensive values of Brutes is "nothing." They probably remain just as invalidated as ever: Tankers continue to outclass them in clear-speed (because they continue to have better AoE and largely similar ST), and Scrappers continue to outclass them in DPS both AoE and ST, and Scrappers are durable enough that it doesn't matter if Brutes are a little more durable than Scrappers. Again, remember that back before the Tanker buffs, Tanks were largely invalidated by Brutes despite having way better defensive scores. But the build environment is complex, and it's hard to predict exactly when builders will be able to leverage additional baseline durability into higher proc performance that would allow Brutes to out-damage Scrappers. There's no real way for Brutes to outclass Tankers this way: the extra target caps are too potent. But maybe at some point they do outclass Scrappers. Homecoming's whole balance doctrine is not based in "let's make a speculative change, see what happens, and tweak." This is nothing particularly to do with Brutes. They just don't say, "Well, this current status quo is bad and we don't quite know what to do, so let's make a change for the sake of a change and see how the environment responds." Like, look at regen. Obviously has been in a bad way forever. Are they making little changes again and again? Nope. Or Kinetic Melee. Or Broadsword. Energy Blast. Archery. They make big changes that they think will conclusively solve a problem with a strong theory for what the new status quo will be. Is that a good doctrine of balance change? Eh. I'm not personally in love with it. But it's not insane: they clearly think that constant change is frustrating for players and perhaps strains their very limited development resources. Whether they're right or wrong, it's got nothing to do with Brutes.

Stalkers are in fact pretty clearly significantly worse than Scrappers, but they have some gimmicks that give them some identity, and that helps. Nobody was suggesting that Brutes should struggle to gain Fury. I think Brutes were in the best shape they were in back when there was a struggle to maintain Fury, which also necessarily means that you shouldn't be able to regain it from zero trivially. But the game has simply moved on since then, there's no way back to those days. There aren't really that many pure-resist sets. Fiery Aura, Electric Armor, and Dark Armor are all pretty bad on Scrappers/Stalkers. Radiation Armor is clearly better on Brutes/Tanks than Scrappers/Stalkers, but it's such a strong armor overall that it's basically fine on Scrappers. Regen is kind of the opposite: it's better on Brutes than Scrappers, but it's so bad on both that it's not much of a consolation prize for Brutes. Three armors isn't a class identity. I don't think that a survivability boost will do anything for Brutes. Like, survivability is not the problem that Brutes have! If you gave them huge amounts of survivability such that, like Tankers, they could start to devote a ton of build space to procs, they might surpass Scrappers and then we'd have two ATs again -- Tankers and Brutes. That's not preferable to the current situation of two valid ATs: Tankers and Scrappers. If the buff doesn't go that far, we still end up with: Brutes are less durable than Tankers and less good at AoE/clear time/farming, while they are less good than Scrappers/Stalkers at ST DPS, and with Fury kind of flattened out, they don't really have a gimmick, so they are mediocre and ignored. The Tanker thing was clearly a problem. This is crazy. The Tanker buff was just an overcorrection. Nobody set out to rub their hands together and try to invalidate Brutes, they just misunderstood how powerful the buff was. Given that we are in a status quo in which we have two of three of Brutes/Tankers/Scrappers valid, it doesn't make sense to go and try to make a change to switch which two are valid. Seems like a lot of work to go and do that to a very uncertain reward and hard to really explore the playtesting. With respect, touch grass. Nobody should tie their feelings so much to the mechanical balance of a particular class in a game that they feel the stages of grief about nerfs to it. It's a group of game mechanics, not a person.

The basic problem is that Brutes exist in a very crowded space. There are five armored classes, and particularly Scrappers, Tanks, and Brutes live in a continuum where it's just hard for all three to be valid at the same time. It's also understated how much the core concept of Brutes has been broken as the game has gone on. The original concept of Brutes was that they were a high-risk, high-reward class, where you would careen from mob to mob in order to keep your Fury high, when other classes might instead take a rest to recover health/endurance. But then we got Inherent Fitness and access to set IOs were democratized, and the pace of the game accelerated. Now everyone careens from mob to mob. Building to durability goals that keep you from needing extensive rests, and recovery goals that make endurance management fairly trivial, is easy. It's no longer high-risk, high-reward to sustain movement from mob to mob, it's baseline. Brutes in the modern environment pretty trivially keep their Fury at near-maximum all the time. We've made it trivial to build fury, so that a Brute can play well on a team with other Brutes or with a Tanker -- we don't want Brutes to sit at very low fury levels if someone else is getting a significant portion of the aggro. That's well and good, but it removes the core concept that you have to make gameplay adjustments in order to maintain your fury. So if the Brute experience isn't "deal with highly fluctuating Fury," then we just have "Brutes have a damage level that's mostly fairly constant at whatever the maximum attainable Fury is." Tankers and Scrappers and Brutes are all melee classes with largely the same powers with a damage level and a mitigation level. Okay, you say, but then why doesn't the Brute have a viable existence as "less damaging than a scrapper but more damaging than a tank, less mitigation than a tank but more than a scrapper"? Well, the basic issue here is that all the armored classes can build enough mitigation to be able to solo +4/x8. Brutes can do it, Scrappers can do it, Stalkers can do it, Sentinels can do it. So if Tankers' role is "more mitigation than the other four classes," but the other classes can be defensive enough to not die to a full team's max-level content solo, what does that role actually mean? That was the situation at the start of Homecoming. Tanks were seen as widely useless because you might as well have a Brute that had mitigation that was good enough to survive everything and better damage. There are some asterisks there (a few very hard TFs, then as time went on Hard Mode), but for 99% of content of the game, Brutes invalidated Tankers. So they buffed Tankers. Too much? Yeah, too much. Now Tankers get vastly enhanced AoE damage. And as build sophistication went on, we increasingly saw ways for Tankers to use procs to shore up their ST damage. This crowded out Brutes. We can imagine a large number of things they could do to make Brutes better, but: a. Unless those things are "nerf scrappers and tankers," they'd power-creep the game. b. It's likely that these buffs would invalidate one of scrappers or tankers. It's just genuinely difficult to find a niche for these very similar classes.

Proc rate for an AoE has nothing at all to do with number of targets, and everything to do with the physical area that the AoE affects. The larger the physical area, the lower the proc rate. It checks that proc rate separately on each target, so if you do hit lots of targets, you can potentially have a very high chance of the proc going off at least once. Vice versa, if it affects a large area but a small number of targets (either inherently because it has a low target cap, or just situationally because right now there's only one target in the area), then you gonna get screwed.

Frost is pretty good too! High damage for an AoE, and the range is enhanceable so you can get it to be a pretty meaty size. But man, Frozen Fists and Ice Sword are rough.

It's because you decided to call out an Omega K'ong fight as your basis for why you didn't want a softcapped build. Hope this helps. It's nowhere. As I said from the start, lack of context is endemic on these fora. Why am I responding to you? Because you're the one who said, "WHAT??? HOW DARE YOU IMPLY THAT MY BUILD IS ORIENTED TOWARDS THE HYPER-SPECIFIC SITUATION THAT I MYSELF CALLED OUT???"

I'm sure that you thought that your caveats about teaming vs soloing and doing it at level 50 with Barrier support and so forth were apparent in your first post, but in fact, they weren't, nor was it particularly the case that your advice was targeted towards people who might care about hard-mode LGTF. I think it's probably the case that more people want to solo Carnies than want to do hard-mode LGTF. But, to be absolutely clear, there's nothing wrong with advice that's targeted towards people who want to group Hard Mode content, nor am I arguing against your advice for people who have similar characters goals to you. But it is just endemic throughout these fora that people shear all context away from their advice. Half of the content on these fora is person A saying "Build X is way better" and person B saying "You're insane, build Y is miles better," with person A not saying, "I care about the leveling experience on SOs," and person B not saying, "I care about the level 50 experience with billion-inf builds." The advent of first incarnate trials and then hard mode has created yet more pretty highly divergent environments for builds to target, and for people to fail to specify.

It's certainly not! But also, like, nobody at all is suggesting it is? It is certainly possible to overemphasize durability. I played an excruciating mission duo with someone who built a tank into like god I don't know the mid 20's with only their T1 and T2 attacks (and I was vastly underleveled and still doing all the damage). And one also understands that the regulars on the forum have now built 500+ characters and are desperately starved for novelty. Just, like, adding the note that the reason the whole meta of building defense or resistance came up in the first place is it is a generally strong tactic.

Lots of people who reply are saying: Oh, I don't build for [softcapped] defense [and I instead eat purple insps constantly to actually have softcapped defense] Oh, I don't build for defense [because I'm doing 4* Hard Mode content and my team will give me 100+ defense with rolling barriers and other team buffs] Oh, I don't build for defense [on my perma-dom dominators who lock down the entire spawn] Oh, I don't build for defense [on my character who only does large-team faceroll content] etc But if you don't fill in the stuff in []'s, you are not getting a clear view on what's happening.

Ice Melee has Freezing Touch. Its base damage is lower than Energy Transfer (148 vs 232), but its crit is on-par, because it gets full crits and not partial crits like ET -- so 296 damage for a critting Freezing Touch vs 297 damage for a critting Energy Transfer (and both have a 1 second animation time). Half of Freezing Touch's damage is DoT, which is worse than ET, but on the other hand FT is also a hold and thus can fit an additional purple proc and lots of additional normal damage procs. What Ice Melee lacks is a decent third ST attack -- it has Assassin's Ice Sword, Frozen Touch, and then very mediocre attacks like Ice Sword, or you can use Frost as a ST attack to, again, mediocre effect. If you have high recharge, you can mostly just use AS, FT, and an epic snipe, but when you do that your ability to build assassin's focus suffers.

I don't think that there's anything magic about Fire/Shield in terms of Tankers vs Scrappers. I mean, is there an argument that tankers outperform all other melee? Sure. But Scrappers, more so than Brutes or Stalkers, do have their own merits (they can achieve much higher DPS than the other three ATs), and while yes you can always argue that the greater durability of Tankers plus their AoE bonuses outweigh that, at least it's an argument (while with Brutes in particular you are in the situation of Tankers not being that much lower DPS).

Slotting sets early really helps with endurance, both because minor endurance bonuses are pretty common filler set bonuses, and because the increased slotting efficiency of sets vs SOs means you get more acc/dam/end redx into your powers earlier.

No, sorry, I got that, I was jumping in to support you.

I've run Scrappers with and without taunt auras, and honestly I don't holistically notice a difference. I know that some players really, really, really feel like taunt auras make a big difference in their experience, and I'm not here to fight anyone about what they should like, but I just want to inject a note of ambiguity into the constant refrain that taunt auras are super important -- reader, you may not agree with that! Try it yourself and see if it bothers you.

This is just Fire Melee and Savage. For some reason that I think is probably conceptually wrong, if you have DoT as a "secondary effect," then it doesn't get multiplied by crits, while if you have DoT as the primary point of the power, you do get it multiplied by the crit (and typically delivered as a single up-front package to boot). But Scrappers don't need buffs, so we're probably just fine without changing it. In practice, I think it basically only implicates Savage, which has more consequential DoTs than Fire does.

Nothing wrong with a concept build, but the practical problem with this is that it's overkill. It's already Very Safe to team with a tank, aggro control is frankly all you need to keep your teammates from dying, and the marginal additional damage debuff or to-hit debuff or whatever is going to largely speaking just be overkill durability for yourself, because, stay with me, all the enemies are attacking you. If you do do something like intentionally aggro significantly more enemies than the aggro cap, the small amount of durability that you provide through your secondary effects won't really make a big difference, and also the nature of Gauntlet is that it's going to be very hard to have "some enemies are only attacking me and other enemies are debuffed while they attack my team." Instead, you'll have debuffed enemies attacking you while, if there are enemies that you aren't controlling aggros of, dominantly non-debuffed enemies attack your team.

Have you tried a S/L farm instead of an energy farm? You have much better S/L defenses than energy.

While I'm not a dev or anything, it is my strong belief that there is not currently any way for a power to have an optional target. It would require new powers code (not just new powers effects). The closest that I think you could get right now would be to allow placate to work on a friendly target and just do nothing to the friendly target, while having a self-effect when cast on a friendly.

EM is among the best ST damage sets, but not like "the uncontested first." Really high-end pylon times only truly predict pylon times. Like, if someone gets a really amazing pylon time, you know they have very good ST damage, but you don't really know if they have better ST damage than someone who gets a few seconds less. The -res procs are the main offenders: having them go off against an even-level opponent and not be reduced by the purple patch makes them way more impactful, when essentially any other hard target that a very high-end scrapper faces will be +3.

Some Protectors have Unstoppable, not Moment of Glory.

It gives you recharge and recovery (EDIT: actually not recovery but endurance discount), but no extra damage.

No, most US cities are pretty straightforward grids, except as dictated otherwise by geography. Visual interest.

Neat! I honestly missed the Mark & Recall power because it's behind Labyrinth content that I ignore. I also note that that topic you linked had zero replies and zero reactions. I'm not like... one hundred percent sure that it actually causally resulted in the mark & recall accolade power, though the same naming certainly implies a linkage. So I guess a slight modification to my claim: My understanding is that the threads in Suggestions & Feedback that get very heated are the ones where someone is like, "Okay, here is my detailed critique of power set X and how I think it should be revamped," or the ones where someone says, "Okay, here's a fundamental modification to a core subsystem of City of Heroes," or one where someone says, "I think the direction of development should be [going further down the incarnate path|focusing on such-and-such a subplot|whatever]" I continue to see zero sign that those topics are ever, at all, impactful on the development of the game. Little one-off micro-suggestions -- I still don't know if they are worthwhile, but even if they aren't, they don't result in big blow-ups and mod actions. Certainly there's no harm to them. Side note here: one of the reasons why I'm dubious that the devs actually pay attention to the Suggestions forum is that they never say, "Hey, look, this kind of suggestion is just... be aware that we're never going to take one of your 5 hours of effort mega-posts on a powerset revamp and actually use it. What would be more helpful is this kind of post instead: [blah blah]." Like, if the devs are interested in the Suggestions forum as a tool, they sure don't do anything to aim the tool where they want.

But you could do both. You could put another slot into Gravity Distortion Field, put a proc into that slot, and you'd have a power that was up more often (due to the higher global recharge) and which did more damage (albeit not a ton more), without giving up anything. Or hey. You love your current build? Okay. Drop Aid Other. Add Hasten. Take two slots away from Lift, put one in Hasten and one in Health. Put the Preventative Medicine proc in the extra Health slot, two Slot Hasten with 50+5 Recharge. For Lift, reslot with Hami-O's or 50+5 Acc/Dam/Rech enhancements. End result? You have basically exactly the same build you have today, +64% global recharge. Like, again: I get that you're satisfied with your build as-is, and that's fine. I doubt that any of these minor tweaks that I'm suggesting are huge winners, but tearing your entire build apart and redoing it, while potentially having more upside, seems not worth it for something that you won't use, and also probably is beyond my skills anyway. But just as a general principle, what you're espousing here doesn't really make sense. 50-60% global recharge is not a small amount! You can go through every place you have local recharge slotting and see if there's a different enhancement you could put in that would give you more of some desired trait, and still have more uptime on that power. You can go through every place where you chose a set for its having a recharge bonus and contemplate a different set that gives you something else instead. There are a lot of degrees of freedom here, and it's just not really plausible that literally none of them result in a better build. To the extent that we're talking about just your character, like, you're happy with it, that's the end of the story. But to the extent that we're giving people advice about how to slot other builds, what I'd say is: "If you are already slotting for lots and lots of global recharge, Hasten just clearly adds versatility. If you hate Hasten, cool, don't use it. If you hate managing the Hasten clicky as well as the Domination clicky, cool, don't use it. But purely mechanically, it is clearly the higher-power, higher-versatility move."

I'm sure that at some point in the thousands of posts on the Suggestions board, someone has suggested something that at least loosely is similar to what actually happened -- I just have some serious doubts that the relationship is causal. Like, if a dev wants to come here and say, "Oh yes, I read the Suggestions board religiously, and while there is very little that makes it 1:1 into the game as suggested, I find it an invaluable tool for springboarding into the changes that we actually do make, and a lot of what makes it into the game owes some amount to the suggestions board," then cool, I'd be happy to take them at their word for that. But honestly I think it's very likely that most or all the devs either don't read Suggestions or read it from a sense of obligation and then ignore it.