Zeraphia

Okay let me just throw this out here that really anything can tank LR with inspirations and mechanical skill or knowing the mechanics behind LR's repeated tower diving to... even just properly placing a craftable work bench in the right location to prevent him from moving during that phase (lol I kid you not this really is a thing...) But I think dismissing the idea that some Tanking sets far underperform their duties because "every set should be different" is wrong. Some sets really do need rebalancing in terms of how bad they have become in recent years, especially with how rampant Radiation Armor is in the current state of the game. Invulnerability not only lacks psi resistances, it lacks meaningful damage amplification and does not provide more actual resistances than something like Rad Armor which gets both (and caps its resistances to nearly all damage in the game.) I just don't really like the excuse of "well everything should be different" when some things do genuinely need a rebalance/buff. Energy Melee clearly needed something done to it (now whether its current form is way overtuned is another argument...), as did Electric Blast. Some sets need things to set them apart and make them a worthy pick at the character creation screen.

Dominate hurts really hard as-is with procs (like hardest hitting single target attack in many epic and primary pools) but yeah. I Agree with the list. Honestly, I wish Telekinesis was a repeated AoE knockup with some psychic/smashing damage. It would certainly fit the theme for what the power was supposed to do, definitely be an upgrade over what it is right now. Although, that breaks the good old, cottage rule.

The problem is, they aren't even the Master of being the Master of None. There are things that fill the niche better than they do at the current moment with more team impact... even a lot of non-meta builds just perform noticeably better. I'm at a loss, I think WS suffers due to their reliance on an inconsistent form of single target dps via their essences, and PB's just have horrendous DPA's with less overall burst. It would be something if they were able to build to at least 35% S/L defense or something while shifting forms but getting to that breakpoint without toggles is very difficult and probably not worth sacrificing the things you'd need to achieve that. I really don't know. I guess granting them toggles would be a start.

I believe Kheldians were created to be "hybrid" archetypes that could do the damage of a blaster or be a pocket tanker when needed. Unfortunately, in today's world, this type of duality and pigeonholing themselves into resistance-based sets with almost no way to build defense has made them to be squishier than most Scrappers and a few Blaster builds. This problem has made people question if going full human form was a better idea than shifting at all. Kheldians were a flawed concept from conception, knowingly, they'd be outclassed no matter how you sliced the AT for balancing. As for the suggestion, it's a start but I truly think instead of being these flip-flop knockoff ATs they current pose as, they should have a more unique and interesting niche than what they're currently given.

I edited in my message (apologies if you did not read it before typing this) that my SG ran similar trials, with the same people running the same ATs, and fully IO'd/incarnates, and we received similar albeit slightly less drastic results. Given this SG has very experienced players in it that have actually set speedrunning records and other extremely difficult content I can't really say it's solely due to lack of skill or coordination.

I actually think this is more understandable than it would appear. The way PB/WS works is that they have high resistances, but not the best defenses. When you encounter a lot of +4/x8 cimmies, it's very easy for them to completely shred all of your defenses and cascade you down with high damage melee attacks at which point their moderate damage output doesn't compensate for the damage received. Further, the crystals (I believe) cause very high damage to Khelds in the second mission and given this is a group of all Khelds, would explain a fair number of deaths.

While I would admit these numbers are far from scientific and completely 1:1, I do think he makes a point about how Khelds currently function as a group in comparison to other ATs. It kind of surprised me that Kheldians held nearly triple the amount of deaths of any other AT category with some of the longest times taken to complete a task force. What's even more striking is how vastly superior VEATs were in comparison to Khelds. Again, one can and may argue "these are just numbers based on ITFs my Kheldian is so great," I have to be more critical of that sentiment. VEATs layer tons of damage amplification and defense mitigations to become a really destructive unit when combined. Kheldians don't have anywhere near the same effect. I do support the suggestion of a more team-play oriented buff that makes Kheldians more receptive to their teaming environments. Their solo-ability is decent but I think this does reflect (even if it is a bit biased) the lack of team synergy their kits possess. Edit: I should add that I used to be in an SG that held weekly ITF "arenas" between different categories (like defenders vs corruptors, HEATs vs VEATs) and HEATs were the category that across the board did worse than anyone else.

Hello! So in my recent adventures playing CoH again, I've been finding that the Rikti War Zone in particular can get rather annoying when you have to go to Zone 1/2 and the fact that MSRs happen pretty consistently on some servers. It makes doing specific task forces (Apex/Tin Mage) a bit tedious to exit missions and have to click between a zone that's obviously full versus another zone that you must zone into. It would be very nice if there was a default option to stay in Zone 2 of the area when an MSR or raid encounter happens so that you aren't constantly clicking between zones. I recognize this is a minor inconvenience but it would be lovely if it could be implemented.

I'd rather receive more new content (sorry) in the form of task forces/endgame content/powers. There are bugs of course, but I think more content is generally desired. I think also some overhauls of previous powers (and an AT ahem) should take precedent.

If I had my way... I'd make it a PBAoE targetted absorb for all party members. Maybe nerf the effectiveness a bit, but I believe that would make it far more impactful and less people would fight over who receives the buff.

Personally, if an NPC can keep its pets long after summoning them, I think we should be able to keep our pets in the fight even after our death as well.

It's kind of sad that some of the speedrun records for Katie Hannon are based around how fast you can fly up and kite Amy Johnson to the end of the mission... Or when Desdemona decides that you should engage a group of enemies headfirst before the rest of the league during UG...

Alright, I'll be contrary to the argument lots are making here... maybe it's not so much about "tactics" mind you, rather it's about convenience. In the current state of the game, as I understand it, mastermind henchmen are not the tankiest entities (some combinations are much tougher than others) and well resummoning them constantly can get tedious. Yes, it is a few clicks and some really long animations to bring them all back, but it still takes easily 10 seconds or more each summon session and over time, that results in minutes and sometimes hours lost to just summoning minions depending on how often you play your mastermind. In incarnate content or difficult 50+ content even though there is an expectation that there is higher danger, the minions are after all, AI, and do tend to die and make "stupid" decisions. You can micro-manage these minions to the max degree possible and I support the people who have made guides on the macros, but more often than not there are errors made when controlling them and they can die quite frequently even in the most skilled hands. However, I think that this should be a click power or something rather than a set bonus. It would go a long way to helping MM's have an enhanced feel. However, I don't believe this alone is the buff MM's have been clamoring for. But, it is at least a good idea. Personally, I'd love customizable minions!

Stalkers are an exception. However, I think not buffing a set because of one particular AT getting "too much" out of it is worse than just buffing the set as a whole to make it decent on others. Electric Melee I think is the least damaging single target set in the game besides possibly Spines (although I think Elec is still sadly at the bottom.) It could definitely use some revamping. I would also love to see it used more often than it currently is on other ATs besides Scrapper/Stalker EM/SD. +1

This is a complex topic but genuinely merits discussion more than this thread is being given. There would of course be ramifications and I'm uncertain how hard this would be to implement, but for things like iTrials, turning off psuedopets like LS would be helpful for not messing up badges.

I think this is one of those things that we'll just have to wait and see what happens. We know that there will be buffs to the Sentinel. They could go the route of improving the damage and changing the inherent to make the AT more damaging, or they could make the supportive functions (+special magnification is still support-oriented) re-emphasized. While I suspect there is anti-meta sentiments on the forums, the real on-game players who don't post on the forums will likely prefer the former over the latter.

Alright, I'll bite. I'm a fire/fire main. I will just be totally transparent with you, I don't really get why you would be a hover-blasting fire^3. The sets are designed to place you in PBAoE melee-ish ranges for Burn, FSC, your aura even incentivizes this, Inferno also wants you in PBAoE range, and one of the better hits in the sets is Fire Sword. If you attempt to hover blast with this combination, you're essentially gimping yourself. Hover Blasting is supposed to be more of like a "woah this boss is way too dangerous for me to go into melee with, so I'll stick to some ranged attacks." I think honestly if you want a fire/ hover-blaster, or any kind of hover-blaster, I would stay far away from Fire Manipulation and pick something like Tactical Arrow. Possibly even another primary. This is quite literally the most anti-hover blasting combination you could pick.

You touch on an important point: Mind Control is borderline overpowered on Dominator and arguably the worst powerset you can take for a primary on Controller. The reason for this is because Dominator's domination enables you to double your mez magnitudes, to which the *entire* set is dedicated to doing. This allows you to do things like permanently hold AV's through PToD, permanently confuse lvl 54 PToD AV's, immediately "fear" bosses permanently into never hitting you again, instantly hold bosses in a mob, instantly confuse, if you're well IO'd enough, permanently confuse even bosses with MC, etc. On Controller however, you don't get the double magnitude buff. You sometimes get an extra magnitude with Overpower (I think), and even then the Dominator gets access to far more immediate damage. Further, of that combo you mentioned, it gets access to Drain Psyche. DP Is a critical power for shredding AV regeneration. This combination is up there for most powerful dominator builds. This however is not up there for "most powerful controller" builds anywhere to be found. I think also, just because someone can be so dedicated to a theme/idea, doesn't mean that that combination is performing "fine" or "acceptable" in true reality. You can surge a lot of stuff with tons of high cost incarnate inspirations and P2W buffs with set bonuses and incarnate pets and do quite a lot of things with skilled gameplay most wouldn't even imagine is possible.

I like this approach, it differs from mine as mine comes from a place of "how do we get Sentinels to be worth selecting over other ATs for their role." This wouldn't step on toes, Sentinels wouldn't be crazy or anything but it would be a large QOL improvement. This said, I still would advocate for a higher damage buff to some specific primary sets and rework some of the "nuke" cooldowns, otherwise fine. Possibly even a small base damage scale increase, but this would be a great step.

Even so... just taking your word for it that they did, true -resistance flat values are probably not the way to go with how imbalanced that would actually be for the state of the game. It would turn what is arguably one of the worst inherents in the game into probably the most broken mechanic in the game (especially when stacked...) Honestly, -resistance is a really funky way to bring support to a team (either being way too good in the case of a Tar Patch situation or being "meh" in the current case with the base Sentinel inherent) from an AT that's not really dedicated to it in the way that Cold/Sonic are dedicated to doing that. To be truthful, I think the best ways to go about it are either a form of "enemy takes bonus total damage" (adding a true 30% bonus damage to all attacks received from a marked enemy that get diminishing returns the more you add it), straight up damage boost increases, or criticals. Of the options, criticals are the tried and true to me and that's why I favor that solution.

The reason this probably would never happen is because of the way resistance and debuffs work. If anyone was there for the time that Tar Patch was a truly unresistable form of -resistance, they'd know why you cannot have this. The simple reason is this: there are enemies that are meant to have invulnerability phases such as Reichsman (apologies if I spelled that wrong) in his T9 "god mode." If you applied Tar Patch or what would be this Sentinel's debuff, his resistance would completely flatline. True -resistance flat values are not really something that can be implemented without a lot of overhaul.

This is a topic that I've gone quite in depth on in another discussion but to reiterate some of the things that were said and addressed: Sentinel's role was supposed to be akin to a "ranged scrapper" - they'll never deal the AoE damage that blasters do, but should serve as a damaging and contributable member. This is something that can be accomplished but I feel that Sentinels need some sort of access to a taunt power. I think a big proponent to bringing Sentinels into being more viable is to make them able to actually aggro enemies off of squishier members from range and attack them at range (this would be a desirable and good role to have in lower level teams and some AV situations). The inherent is... awful. The only worse inherent(s) I can come up with off the top of my head are the VEATs (nothing but slight recovery/regen gain but they make up for this with having great kits that can be designed in many different ways). As macskull put it, it should be divorced from the powers themselves. Further, it's just not up enough to apply to an entire mob. Honestly, Sentinel and Stalker on paper seem to be the closest role/relationship-wise but play differently and even Stalker isn't in the greatest position in team rotations/meta at the moment. Except Stalker has the advantage of just being able to dish out exceptionally high burst damage on demand that Sentinel literally does not. This is a bit of a "liberal" approach to buffing the inherent and making the AT across the board competitive with Scrappers/Stalkers/Blasters: make the inherent a power at the top of your bar, target an enemy, fire off the power, and now all of your hits have a chance (probably about 30-50%) to critical your hits. Also make the bar fill faster. You aren't getting the constant non-demanding crits the Scrapper gets for free, you aren't getting the *guaranteed* crits the Stalkers get for free, but you get this at range and having a decent T9 mini-nuke that those two don't. In their current state, they don't even do enough damage to merit being chosen over Tankers. Sure, Tankers go into melee which does differentiate them, but when you get double to even maybe triple the defenses for the same amount of damage, the ranged advantage starts to evaporate at that point. This is sort of an absolutist point, but frankly by the way things are now, Blasters are just better in most situations and can be made durable enough and with skilled precision and evading situations, the high damage gives it a noticeably better spot on teams/general state of the game. because of Sentinel's nature of being a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none, I don't think it's reasonable to ask for the AT to be better than the already existing ATs. Because of its nature of mixed range and damage, it probably has to be in a place where the AT is: Not so good at AoE damage that it completely out-classes Blasters being the best at that. Not so good at ST damage and bursts that it steals the reason to make Scrappers/Stalkers But maybe has a good enough feeling mechanic (like the suggestion or really any big improvement on its current state...) to make it flashy/cool to play, has an aggro stealing role to defend squishies to an extent, keeps its T9 mini-nukes and lack of manipulation secondary to make it never better than Blasters at dishing out damage in general, does high enough consistent damage to feel good and generally doesn't die much, make it an AT that's like "well it's not a specialist AT that's better than Scrapper/Sentinel, but it is very easy to play, and does comparable damage to them over time with some big hits here and there."

As long as knockdowns stay knockdowns and KB->KD IO's are a thing, by all means!

This above all else. I would love to see more developers for updates and more frequent updates to the game so that there is more content. Hiring dev's or allowing for some sort of contract work would be great!

Hmm, my personal thoughts on this task force after running it as a duo the very first time blindly with a friend and the second time as a speed run are that: It has a lot of really interesting mechanics (especially when the car teleports you to another dimension hehe) I don't think it's really that difficult although if you're not careful you may suffer some deaths. I think it's plainly obvious defense-based builds are more favored in this task force than resistance-based builds, so it brings in more shine to sets like SR/Shield rather than the meta Rad Armor, which I appreciate. While I have to admit I didn't get all the references in the story, I did get a number of them and I found them genuinely funny. The rewards for the task force are acceptable and make it worthy of running on a rotation. I think the length of the task force is also great because you are not as time-locked to this task force as say Synapse or Quarterfield if you have a set amount of playtime. There is optional difficulty spikes you can choose to do if you're up for a challenge but are not obligated to. Overall, I think this is an A+ task force and it makes me want to play the game again as someone who hasn't been as active lately. While I realize incarnate powers are likely going to undo whatever challenge is thrown at us, I think it is an excellent addition to the game.