Brutal Justice

People do play things outside of TFs that will also be affected. Striga arcs, Faultline, etc.

We’re talking about toons that exemp and thus don’t have a slotting issue and also have these powers much lower than the game is built to accommodate. The t9s have been moved down 6 levels. Add the +5 for exemping. Now they have them 11 levels earlier than the game was designed for. 13 levels for secondaries. NPCs do not have the HP, resists, durability at these levels. They are designed to withstand much much lower levels of offense.

Telling people to choose who they play with is such a dumb statement. My list is a short list. There is only one person on it. That person? Anybody. I have chosen. There is also only one thing I want you to bring. What’s that one thing? Anything. I disagree with a lot of people on the forums from time to time. There is only 1 person on my ignore list. Who is it? Nobody. See where this is going? I might disagree in a forum post but I will gladly team and be friendly in game. Exclusion exists in the game but it’s not good for the game. It’s not part of the CoH culture and never should be. I’ll continue to run PuGs. I’ll continue to roll the dice. Sometimes it’s a 20 minute Tinpex. Sometimes it’s a 40 minute Tinpex. 1 hour Synapse, 2 hour Synapse. I have chosen!

Make sure to have at least 1, probably 2 fully built exemplared blasters or tanks on your team. Since that is the main concern that has been presented. You could also try having one blaster for each group of citizens on that first mission and speed run it and just nuke each mob. Completion time 1 minute. Then nuke the 3 mobs in the second mission. 2 minutes. You’re longest delay will be waiting on Clamor to respawn. 5-6 minutes for the whole tf. ITF speed run shenanigans now available at lvl 21.

That sounds so fun! Can you share your build?!

Yes, thank you, we all know that. It’s not Superman. It’s “Superman”.

The Superman issue is with his power level. When he’s there, there is no reason for the rest for the justice league to be there. The inverse is also an issue. If the rest of the league can handle the situation, there is no reason for Superman to be there. This is already an issue with exemplared toons joining your missions or TFs. Lowering the availability level of the top tier powers compounds this issue when somebody exempts down and joins your team. That one person joins the fight and now you feel pointless. It makes for bad story telling. It makes for not fun games. If they follow through with this, which I am sure they will, they need to remove the +5 from exemplaring. I want to be Batman. I don’t want to be Batman on a team with Superman.

When you change things from “10” power sets/combos that can roflstomp the game to “50” that’s a pretty sizable power increase. Hypothetical numbers. You might on occasion encounter one of those 10 builds while leveling and it’s a sight to be seen. When it’s almost guaranteed to have one on your team it becomes an issue. The OP build was probably already an issue but it was easily ignored/tolerated. Once they are all over the place it can’t be ignored/tolerated.

This is pretty much the discussion that was happening when all the posts were hidden. These changes are more in line with game theory than just simple number crunching and bug reporting. I’m glad you’re allowing subjective feedback on this topic.

I’m pretty sure I said selection. Not unlock. Nice try.

Opening t2 at level one actually allows earlier selection of pool powers like hasten. You may cause a choice later with the level changes but you’ve reduced that conundrum at the same time.

It’s not a flat curve. You do less damage at lower levels. True. But you do a higher percentage of the mobs hp at lower “edit: level, not damage” than you do at higher levels. Its not the whole story to just state you do less at lower and higher at higher. A nuke at lower levels will do a higher percentage of damage to a mob than at higher levels.

1. Lower level mobs have lower hp and lower resists. Your nuke may have lower numbers but now it’s in a part of the game designed specifically without those nukes. Use assassin strike at lower levels with no slots and see if it takes a larger chunk of a hp bar from a boss than one at higher levels and slotted. It does. 2. Again. People exemping don’t have this issue. They are just flat out more powerful than they used to be. They were already an issue. Now they’re worse. edit: I was working on this reply during the dev warning and post purge. Just FYI.

Well apparently a “balanced” team is a team with 6 of 8 members playing a support class. A “diversified” team is only 5 of 8 as support so maybe you should be looking for one of those to join 🤪 The best way truly is to form your own and let people who join know they can play whatever they want. You do that enough times and you’ll also run into like minded people and you’ll learn what sort of team is forming just by who is forming it.

This has been my mentality for any of the more active support sets for quite a while now.

I’m not sure our definitions of a balanced team are the same...

I think what really brings a costume together is most often the combination of the name and costume rather than the costume alone. You can have a super intricate and awesome costume but if your name is “Man Who Punches Hard” you’re costume is not going to get appreciated. Wild Wing posted up above is a nice simple costume. Name it Wild Wing and instantly your brain and eyes make a connection. Name it Blue Devil and it doesn’t make that connection. @Jawbreaker made this. It’s a good costume in general. I read Speed Fiend and instantly my minds eye says, “oh yeah, that guy has serious issues! Look at that grin! That is a Fiend!!!” Speed Sentinel just doesn’t do it. @First Player made this. Pretty standard knight. He names it Dungeon. The likes poor in! Instantly Sir Elwin goes from knight number 11457 to possibly immortal, died hundreds of times, battle hardened, armor dwelling spirit, man of torment and darkness, artifact seeking, etc. Instantly your lore, your story, everything is so much richer. His bio could be Steve from accounting for all I know. @Without_Pause said, “ First Player’s true super power is good names”. It’s so true for anybody who gets tons of likes on their costumes. It’s not the costume itself, it’s the name and costume combo.

I’ve run probably six 3 star ITFs since the issue dropped. I have never had a stalker on a team. I think I’ve had 2 scrappers. One of the scrappers was, unfortunately, only running common IOs. It was floor paste more time then not. The second scrapper was leaps and bounds better but still dead quite often. Typically they were not in the middle of the main melee scrum and were skirting the edges instead. In these hard mode TFs there is so much to hit that defense sets are getting hit. There is also so much damage behind those hits that when they get through you better have high resists. The resistance cap and hp cap on stalkers and scrappers has become a real liability at these diffs. The tankers are still the tankers but they are not able to dps build and be that tanker in this content. This has given brutes more of a role of melee dps. Scrappers do more dps but are too soft. Tanks are more durable but have to focus on that durability instead of dps. The gap between scrapper and tank is much wider in this content. Brutes fill that gap nicely. I wanted to nerf defense to achieve this very goal. Give brutes more space to fill. This appears to be the route the devs have chosen to achieve that sort of thing. Which do do you feel is more valuable on these hard mode TFs, scrappers or brutes? Which do you see most often? Which do you see performing at higher levels? All questions regarding hard mode TFs.

There are some comically strong statements about only caring about math and balance and facts made in this thread. I’m sure if I entered the discussion with my personal balance axe to grind I could make many hypocritical quotes. Just comical really. In my experience brutes are much quicker at early levels thanks to fury. Cranking the diff on a super reflexes tank in the early levels is such a boring slog. You don’t even have the accuracy to hit those higher level mobs. Archetype modifiers don’t really even come into play until lvl 20? So the higher damage mod of the tank doesn’t help at all in those levels while fury is cooking right along from level 1. Tanks generally have fairly few aoe options before lvl 28-38 so the increased aoe area doesn’t come into play that much. Plus solo you can easily group the mobs into the smaller aoe. Running mostly on SOs the tank isn’t even going to feel like they can keep pace with a brute until the mid 40s and by then the leveling time gap is quite large

The Hollows. The King Row skulls arcs. Faultline. Striga. Croatoa. I love running all the story arcs in these zones. The missions go in order so it’s easy for somebody else to join in and receive merit rewards alongside you. The missions keep you in a specific zone with enemies directly relevant to that zone. It also feels extra rewarding after completing all the arcs, like you actually just closed an entire book and not just a small story arc. Gold side has great missions and arcs but with all the different “alignments” it was never that team friendly even when it was new and more populated. I team almost all the time so I don’t run over there very often. The Wards are great but it’s also hard to round up teams for them. I wish they they had this similar style of content in the other great zones that are under utilized. Eden and Crey’s Folly are criminally under used. Boom town could have a string of story arcs.

Nooo! /e shakesfist. The trump card has been played! Misdirection! There is no possible way I can recover. Possibly had there not also been the combo of curse words? Alas. Farewell dear friends. I have been bested. Until next time! (Hangs head in shame and slowly leaves the chat)

We also know that defense automatically dodges defense debuffs and resistance doesn’t. Resistance resists -resistance. Defense defends -defense. RR-R DD-D Umm. My argument was never about 90% = 45%. That’s just nice math that’s easy for people to see the disparity between 75% and 45%. The basis of my argument has always been that the ability for every archetype to reach softcap is grossly unbalanced. Nothing more than my say so? No. I gave lots of math to show the disparity. I welcomed correction if it was needed. I used other people’s survival calculators to show the disparity. I chose those numbers but if the devs decided it should be the lower numbers then that’s fine. The point is and always has been that softcap shouldn’t be available to all archetypes. Apologize if you want. I was only defending myself against your accusations of me. I bring it up when I just happen upon a discussion where someone like @Blackjoy is recognizing the situation and theory crafting how to fix it all on their own. They’re basically talking about doing the same thing just using different terminology. It seems like it happens all the time because there are always new people, who care about balance, entering the discussion. They often haven’t crunched any numbers, or might not know any numbers. They just know by an eye test something is not right. They try to mention something and get shouted down by the likes of you and several others, even though you’ve demonstrated, not to them, you have full knowledge of the imbalance. You just don’t care.

Who’s waffling? I always pushed for 45, 43, 40. Was I incorrect in stating that would still leave them slightly above the 75% resistance numbers? Seems to go with my statements. You’re right. I never advocated for 42.5 and 37.5. Why? Partially because round numbers are nice and it’s close enough to create some semblance of balance. Also we all know there are more -def debuffs in the game than -res so it’s fine to leave a little cushion. I wasn’t incorrect with my math. I could have simply plugged in these numbers to get the equal numbers had I wanted to. The fact you know the exact defense numbers to achieve perfect harmony, on paper, and yet still deny there is an issue that should be fixed, is evidence enough of how discussing it with you is a waste of time. I believe I was responding to you belittling the “Unenlightened “. It’s not negative or incorrect to say people who don’t know about the 45% soft cap wouldn’t notice the change because more than likely, if they don’t know, they also don’t ever reach 45% on their own. Some do. Some don’t. I would wager the “unenlightened” as YOU call them, mostly run hodgepodge IO builds or mostly SOs. Some might also wander in here and borrow a build. If somebody doesn’t hit 45% defense already, they wouldn’t notice. There is nothing negative about that statement.

On the contrary. Those who don’t understand the underlying math of the game probably wouldn’t even notice because they don’t know they are supposed to hit those math numbers for optimal performance.

Or some people have jobs... With your post history, you’ve also clearly demonstrated you realize there is a massive imbalance between resistance and defense but you refuse to accept it. True to your name. You’ve already been defeated you’re expressing hopeless rebellion.