Mezmera

Yes the game was developed as originally a game where you just straight fight npcs. Lots in this game changed over time, you have the IO system, Incarnates, cross morality teaming. Then they had to have realized they should at least have some areas for PvP since MMOs are supposed to be somewhat ambitious. Those that loathe pvp that's fine do your thing but why couldn't there be all avenues of play for anyone that wants to play this game? My gripe like most is how different powers interact between pve and pvp and how many just cookie cutter pvp builds are only viable. Make blaster, add proc, go pew pew pretty much sums it up at the moment. At the sunset they started to revamp the whole thing for better and worse and it seems the worst parts after live have just been so exaggerated to where I kind of enjoyed it to now what's the point if you're not a select few types of toons. Like AE, PvP is player driven where there'd always be fresh content. And Just like AE the devs just couldn't wrap their heads around how they wanted to fully implement it. You could tell though that was the thinking was to be able to stand off a bit from the expectation of adding so much new content and just allow people to create their own experience through AE and PvP. Both are still in their infancy with their growth stunted thanks to the shut down.

If you look in the auction house for recipes and the type of power you're enhancing, for instance your confuse powers you can see the Coercive Persuasion. This is the list of purple sets for the various types of powers. https://cityofheroes.fandom.com/wiki/Very_Rare_IO_Sets You're going to have to spend a lot of slots to make up for that 70% you can get from Hasten, doms are already slot starved, feasible but you are knowingly gimping yourself.

Yeah lots of powers can slot the 6.25%. You have to dabble into the purple sets with 5x 10% recharge ones plus then the LotG's. It's feasible to get perma without Hasten, but Hasten is too good of a power to pass on. That one power is equal to 7 purple 10% bonuses.

You're not over the 5x limit are you? Like you can only have 5 bonuses of that 6.25% and all other bonuses. The only unique thing is the LotG 7.5% recharge doesn't factor into the 5 at 7.5%, it's separate so you can get 5 of the 7.5% plus then 5 of those gamblers.

If you have hasten slotted with 90% internal recharge with it's 70% global recharge and then at least another 75% more global recharge from bonuses you'll have perma-dom. I like to have hasten plus another 85-100% more recharge for a better buffer so I have a moment to click domination again without being frantic about it. Not sure about what mids has to say but this is what you need to shoot for.

I wouldn't mind seeing a brawl just all of a sudden break out in front of me if it's all agreed upon. It'd be fun to feel the mounting tension in the atmosphere with their big girl chatter and then the gauntlet gets thrown down right in front of Mis Lib. Hopefully I get some popcorn ready in time for the festivities.

But what if they come up and smack you with their glove? Would there be no way to bait you into a duel? What if they start talking about your momma?

Just in case they dare to start nodding off instead of concentrating on making new powers for us to enjoy? I'm all for it! Let's order them some pizza's under the guise of "thanks for a job well done" and have the pizza guy slip some trackers into the boxes. They would need to be able to move from the box once in place and then while monitoring able to send out small subtle doses of electricity to keep them on task.

I haven't had a Widow since live but if I recall the Bane Mace from the Mace Mastery pool hits like a truck for veats. Might want to see about working that in.

I'd go with @Riverdusk and slot the panacea solely in most of my characters health slot. If I'm sucking wind then I'd add miracle but I find the slight benefit to endurance either that or numina give is outweighed by having the extra slot to play with.

Probably yes. Fire Assault usually then goes with the fire epic pool where you'll get fireball that gets greatly boosted thanks to Fiery Embrace plus then the fire shield is useful especially for fire farms.

The way the grind was back on live was atrocious. I had to screen the very few characters I genuinely liked to play for those expensive builds. Here every character I make has a thorough build. Nothing from live makes up for how much less of a grind the player run servers are. Kudos to them for that! Aside from that if there was anything I'd say I did miss it would be the sheer numbers of people to play with comparatively. Excelsior feels like a mini version of Freedom. Plus also I do miss a bit of the mess that was PvP back on live, the PvP right now is just a hot mess. Recluse's Victory on live there was a good selection of plucky players from the hard talking SR scrappers until a psi attacker showed up to those elusive vulture flyers and everything in between.

There's not many Mind powers that have actual substantial damage though, the only aoe one is terrify with minor damage. You shouldn't be dependent on damage from Mind in all honesty. It's the uber control you get from being perma dom that'll carry you through. Plus then you can proc the longer charging aoe controls like the hold and confuse, but that'd still equate the same be it controller or dominator. To me its that the dom has access to more aoe assault powers through their secondary and epic powers. Heck my dom has its own mini Fulcrum Shift in Soul Drain that also does great damage on top of boosting my damage and tohitt. The base damage of doms plus the instantaneous control that Mind nets you with Domination running really carries the day to damage at your leisure. No amount of moderate ST damage from a containment proc'ing can make up for the base and all of the other tools in the kit for doms. Doms all the way baby! But in terms of purely damage solely from their primary it's likely evened out with containment equating in.

Yeah there could be an option to select default or listed pvp event if there's takers. If no takers then it resorts to the default style. It could still be built off of all of the same timed events and stuff, Villains get to run in with a head start and the Heroes have 15 minutes to stop them. The escape route can only be shown once the bank has been looted so that the Heroes don't just get to camp the exit. If more villains make it out than there are heroes left the villains win a little bit extra, if the heroes hold it to a draw or capture more then they'd get a bit more of a reward. Only 1 defeat though too so if you get killed and a teammate doesn't have a rez power then you stay unconscious (no temp powers or wakies), or it can transfer you to a proper jail cell until the event is decided. The winning criteria should actually be more fluid and would need to be scaled with team size too so that the solo villain gets all of their glory if they make it out against the 8 heroes.

In all seriousness though they should consider a bank heist as a joinable instance for Heroes to get beat down by (or get to thwart) Villains. Say a Villain gets to go rob a bank it scales them to the level of the instance and depending on the amount of teammates on each side the lower amount of players in the opposing team would get a handicap level. Say you have a team of 8 villains robbing the level 25 range bank. It'll set your level at the top level and que you up. Then there'd be a signaled event on the hero side, if say 7-8 heroes join up they all stay at level 25 and duke it out. But if only 5-6 heroes join they get a level handicap so they'll show up as level 26's, 3-4 would be 27's and then 1-2 would be 28's, they'd still only have access to the powers 5 levels above 25 still though like normal if they are exemped. This could also be inversed if there's only 1 villain that wants to take on the world. Also if no one on the other side wants to que then it can just then default to the npc version. You could also add in a nice pvp recipe drop or some attractive reward on top of the temp power to entice people to partake, kind of like the SBB with the once per day reward lockout. If it's fun for you you can still que up as much as you like in the day.

They should make it so that when you complete the LRSF it'll spawn his henchwoman Ghost Widow and the bunch into AP at the bottom of the steps alongside those newly minted heroes. Or if you defeat Hamidon in the Abyss he'll spawn on top of Mis Lib. It'd be funny to realize the police drones are the most OP npcs in the game when they one shot Hamidon.

On my Energy dom the 4th power pool I take is Force of Will. I'll Power Up that mighty Unleash Potential. I have it slotted well with defense so it regularly nets me 20% defense to all and power boosted it nets me another 10%. 30% defense for a minute down for a minute and a half then right back ain't nothing to sneeze at, especially when I just can cycle in Barrier and alternate the two, then there's Demonic if I ever feel the need. But yeah you can't boost values of powers with resistance coded in like the others are saying. The short bursts of added defense to things like Weave is nice while Power Up is active but long lasting clickable defense buffs without resistance coded in is the thing you want to make most use of with having access to Power Up. I feel like the old devs knew how well power boost interacted with long lasting clickable buffs so I think that's pretty much why you'll notice all of the power sets with a self affecting clickable defense buff have resistance coded into the power as well so that power boosting didn't make things too strong. Except for Time which wasn't on Live and had most of its refinement done by the player devs. Link Minds though should just give way better psi resistance than just a measly 1.7% .

Loser deletes their toon on the spot.

Well I've run an "all melee" Underground Itrial and we could not dent that last Warwalkers regen even with walking him to the corner. Then I've run an "all squishy" Underground Itrial with my dom lead tanking and we smashed that robot with ease. Different AT's do have different things they bring to the situation. I'd take a team of all squishies with some debuffs all day before I take some Tanks/Brutes.

There's one I played a week ago with every minion in the group replaced with an Elite Boss with an occasional AV thrown in. 16 EB's are a pretty tough fight especially if some have cold debuffs and laser rifles.

Tanker's have a higher base and can reach values much easier than Brutes and other ATs. Say the same powersets between the two AT's were trying to reach a value of 70% resistance to whatever, it's much easier to do on the tank with less slotting of particular IO sets to reach the value desired. So with the extra slots available to the tank to reach that same value a Brute would need to dedicate for set bonuses the tank can just slot a bunch of damage procs into their attacks. This thus exacerbates the problem because the tanker does not have to maintain a fury mechanic and has room to slot procs much easier than other AT's that need to balance in more survivability. Mind you I think Brutes and Tanks are fine, maybe Tanks got a bit over tuned but whatever. I do think 1-2 damage procs in certain powers are fine but when it gets to be 4-5 procs that's a bit too much. It feels like the old devs put too many damage procs into the game but with the way things are at the moment it's going to be hard to put that genie back in the bottle. I could see them changing some damage procs in some sets from damage to other benefits like heals and debuffs and the like.

This animated enough for ya?

Same. If I'm using that Mass Confusion I'm jumping in ready to fight. The ST confuse for me is to sneakily make a target I want my pet before I decide to fight.

I think there's just a mindset of competition between the two AT's that once one gets a leg up on the other they get envious, which brutes had for a longer time, tanks now are a bit better overall imo because if we needed a tanky toon on the team I'd rather have the tank that's likely to do better with something like say Lord Recluse with less of a build than a Brute would require. I only hop on my tank once in a while when the team specifically needs the tank. I also have a brute I haven't touched in ages, but when I did play it I'd run ahead of the tank and they'd get mad "I'd kick you because you're endangering the team, but you're not dieing", eventually I'd get kicked because I want to keep my engine running but being still in the map I just finished the mission for them. Now when I play my dom that way what do they have to say when the dom is out-tanking the tank? Nothing, they just need to up their game. Being aggressive and staying fighting is what keeps the brute engine running where it's just easy to be the tank. I definitely don't think Brutes need buffed and I don't have any Tanker envy so I think this whole topic is moot when there's other things needing addressed. And no to the idea of nerfing defense caps.

I remember doing that whole arc once on Live and taking the powah like I did on HC but I don't remember that buff persisting for so long. Maybe I hadn't just paid such close attention before seeing how now I do have a few active stats showing on the side where I didn't before. That 10% damage buff that lasted forever was quite a nice reward for being villainous.