Kaika

So originally and for a rather long time, the developers of the game did not consider animation time when looking at a powers effectiveness... for some reason. Powers like Flares or storm kick used to have animation times of around 3 seconds, making them basically useless, like flurry is now. In this mind set they only really looked at raw damage and recharge when balancing a power. Most of these power got updated to bring them in line with a better understanding of balance and how impactful animation is. Even jump kick, which used to be just as bad, has received buffs making it only sub par, while Flurry for some reason was left out, and is still rotting in the terrible state it was in back in 2004.

This isn't just a case of "it's sub par thus the worst". Stuff like Jump kick, Air superiority and Boxing are all sub par, but you can find offensive uses for them on classes like controller, or even sub them in for RP reasons without a massive loss. This is Flurry doing about the same DPS as brawl with a 3.3 second activation time. Yes, the Damage per animation time, it deals about the same as the entirely free power you get and are encouraged to stop using at like level 10, while taking three times the time to come out. It's entirely arguable that brawl is more worth using at any level then flurry. As far as I can tell, it is the lowest DPS attack power pick in the game. When I say it has Abysmal DPS, I mean it's TRULY abysmal. If you asked me outside of this thread what the worst power pick in the game was, I would say flurry without a second thought.

Honestly just make flurry not abysmally terrible DPS and that's good enough for me, as it stands it's quite possibly the worst power in the game.

Looks really solid! I would maybe move a slot from somewhere to get ball lightning to 5 slots for that 10% recharge buff. Otherwise though, at a glance, looks great.

I tend to default with super speed and combat jumping, but I use any of them if it fits the concept, they all have their own strengths and weaknesses. Super Speed: Fast, but can be hard to control, especially in confined spaces. Combat jumping is almost a requirement with this or you will find your jumps sending you hurtling into the distance. It's got a bit of a learning curve but once you get used to it, it's extremely fun, and very easy to build into as Haste is one of the best powers in the game, and is in the same pool. Fly: Just a solid travel power all around, and with after burner, very fast as well. Flight can also REALLY play into your combat strategy, as it can make it impossible for some enemies to get in melee with you, and while all enemies have ranged attack, they are usually significantly weaker. Teleport: The Fastest travel power in the game once you get it down, and by like ALOT. The downside however is that its only really good at getting from Point A to Point B. If you want to roam a area, or search for something it's not too great at that, neither is it very useful inside. However there is utility in just being able to bypass anything, and combat teleport in the same pool can help with indoor spaces. Super Jump: This is kinda the jack of all trades travel power, it does just about everything and does it well. It works well indoors, outdoors, anywhere, even in confined spaces, small hops get the job done with little to no loss in speed, with the added bonus of not having to worry as much about getting stuck on geometry (with SS and even fly suffer from). The downside is that it tends to lose in raw speed, that is however not to say it's slow by any means, but on a straight away SS will run circles around it. Super Speed, Fly and Super Jump, also have alternate version in Sorcery, Experimentation, and Force of Will pools, these are effectively the same thing but come with different secondary powers, most notably Mystic flights and Speed of Sound's teleport powers, which can be really useful.

I do agree with the nuke thing, unfortunately like you said, too late on that. At 50 I think what people really underestimate is the Alpha level shift, which basically removes the highest level of difficulty in most content from the game. From my experience there is a fairly significant jump in difficulty from +3 to +4, particularly in enemy survivability, that no longer exist for anyone with the alpha slot above t3. It's effectively the point where the game starts to punish you for going after enemies much higher level then you. While it's certainly not the only reason why players are more powerful these days, I think its a nice low hanging fruit that could be adjusted, as it could be regulated to Incarnate content only like the other level shifts, without really effecting player builds.

Thank you. I've been telling this to people for a while now, with so many people lamenting "how easy" the game has become these days, and while I'm not gonna deny the game has become easier in many aspects, it was NEVER hard. As someone who has played since release in 2004, I can assure you that CoH has always been a very easy game, its a big part of the reason why it was successful. While IOs and incarnate certainly make us more powerful, all of these things pale in comparison to how much more experience and knowledge about the game people have these days, a large portion of this player-base has been playing this game for years. They know all the systems inside and out, they know how to handle specific encounters and how to take them on without issue. To add to that most players are very open to teaching newer players the ropes and provide them with all the resources they need to succeed, Knowledge leads to more knowledge. Information moves so quickly these days, MUCH faster then it did back when the game was live, you release content, the very next day there are comprehensive guides on how to do any aspect of it. For comparison, the OG devs didn't mark stores on the map, because they wanted them to be a secret, that only a hand full of players would find, they were surprised when players quickly shared all this information and it became common knowledge. The game may be easier in some ways for sure, but the player base, as a whole, is just WAAAAAY more knowledgeable about all aspects of the game. Much of the stuff that people are complaining about now has been possible since 2007 when IOs dropped, it's just easier to access. CoH hasn't gotten all that easier, everyone has just gotten better at it.

That sounds correct, but to add to that, Statesman was also severely depressed, to the point that when he died in the comics, he refused to be resurrected. Manticore had to literally blow himself up and drag him out of the afterlife with him. Even if you had the capability to res him, he likely wouldn't accept it, dude just wants to rest.

As someone who was around back then, he was incredibly unpopular, The guy was confidently the face of nerfing your characters into the ground. In retrospect the nerf's like ED back in the day were kinda needed for the game to have any semblance of challenge at all, but Jack could be a case study in how to not break the news to a community. He just had this vibe about him of not caring about the players opinions, and wanting the game to fit his vision, ironically, he had the air of a Tyrant about him. From what I hear though he is a nice enough guys IRL, but he was not doing himself any favors with the community. When "Who will Die" came out, literally everyone knew Statesman was gonna die, it was obvious. I'm pretty sure Sister Psyche was killed partially so they still had something to surprise players with, but her death also served to push Manti fully down the vigilante path as they wanted to have major characters on each side shift alignment (Scirocco was going hero). Statesman was kinda the perfect character to kill off though, he was attached to a unpopular dev, easy to remove from the game as he barely was in it directly, and would parallel the whole "Death of Superman" thing being this games "Superman". On top of that it makes a vacuum for the player to take his place as "The Big Hero" which seems to be the sort of move they were starting to make when the game shut down. Either way, killing off characters purely for shock value, is an EXTREMELY comic book thing to do, if anything the move fits well with the genre, good writing or not. Keep in mind too, that this was the first signature story arc, and required a monthly subscription to access after the game went free to play. They had to make a big impact to convince people that these story arc were worth paying for. I suspect this is likely why States and Psyche were straight up removed from the game outside of oro while wade is still chilling in Sharkhead, because it drums up curiosity from those not subscribed when big important figures suddenly are replaced. Wade gets to stick around because he isn't an important or well known figure, and him getting removed would spoil his involvement.

You can go on the beta server and check for yourself, though I would assume no, since its a full model replacement. On the same hand I would assume it does not work with PB/WS forms. Either way I've never seen a mini of either. It should work with all other powers though as they are the only model replacement powers I'm aware of.

For Guile, the re-hide proc always goes into Assassin's strike, since Assassin's strike from hide is lower DPA then hide-less AS and can cause issues if you unexpectedly hide into it. It works well anyways since you basically always wanna be using Assassin's strike on cooldown, it adds to the quick burst with a high damage follow up, and its kinda right in the perfect golden area for consistent proccing even when slotted for recharge. Splitting it for the double 5% S/L is a solid plan if your a res/non-positional secondary, but going the full 6 for the 10% recharge and 6%s/l res isn't a terrible idea either, it's really build dependent. As for Mark, it can kinda go where-ever I like to 6 slot it in my T1/2 for the 10% recharge bonus since I rarely wanna put procs in those, but since the proc is global it can go where-ever, just you do have to use the power at least once per zone to get the proc to activate.

I have literally done both those things, no idea why you are going to 55%-60% on a stalker anyways, that massive overkill.

I have no idea what you are talking about with the "extreme dip in survivability". First of all that's EXTREMELY build dependant. I personally I never had issue managing that, all of my stalkers are capable of 4x8 with most if not all groups, and usually have around %190 recharge and at least S/L def at 45%, its very doable without a "extreme dip in survivability". So, yes, the rotation is not air tight, but it's no were near 0.7 seconds, not in my experience at least. I think you might be forgetting to include ArcanaTime or did not have Albating strike enhanced for recharge? In practice in it's closer to a 0.1-2 second delay and after Assassin's Blades, when you repeat the rotation, at least on my character, there is no delay after sweep. This does cut into your DPS a little bit but much less then Power Slice would. Even if that were the case then, Zapp or Moonbeam would be FAR better choices, even with the loss of a assassin's focus as they do over twice the DPA.

Just to correct this you can actually do better with a little more recharge BU> Assassin's Blades> Ablating strikes > Sweeping strike > Ablating strikes again No Power slice needed as Ablating strikes does almost twice the DPA and insures that Archlies heel proc has max uptime

Movement - 5/5 I used to PvP and still haven't lost my skill in kiting and jousting, I keep super speed on all times and joust around to minimize melee downtime, and maximise my AoEs. Regardless of the character I'm basically always in motion. Leading task forces/raids - 2/5 I can do it just fine on most basic TF, but I usually prefer not to, and I don't even try to lead stuff like Itrails Character builds - 5/5 I have over 100 builds I have made in my mids folder, I don't consider a build complete unless it can solo most groups at 4x8 and solo 54 AV/GMs (unless that's specifically not what I want or effectively impossible). Badging - 3/5 I badge casually but I'm no were near the level of some of the crazy folks around here. Key binds - 2/5 I can do some basic binds but.... I don't play PB/WS, even my MM just lives on the simple stuff. In-game knowledge - 4/5 I'm shocked when I learn something new, I feel like I'm about at the edge of what one can learn with this game without becoming a huge number cruncher or going into the code itself. Not that I'm never wrong though, CoH is an absolutely vast game.

I've done ToT with several characters to get the PAPs and it's been consistently inconsistent, so pretty random. Thats not even a large enough sample size to get the badges, so you likely just got unlucky.

Damage type honestly means very little overall, the impact it has in most situations is minimal. For sure it can become relevant but for every situation where it matters, there are magnitudes more where it did not. Lethal is pretty unarguably one of the worst damage types in the game, but that doesn't stop sets like Axe from being considered one of the best melee sets the game has. On the flip side, negative is likely the best damage type, but I can count on one hand the number of Dark blasters I've seen. What I'm getting at is that even from a min/max perspective is has a fairly minimal impact overall, with the actual effects of the powers being way more important. Damage type really just amounts to a situational bonus/downside that if anything just serves to make characters feel a bit different vs different enemy types. This is of course assuming that the character is being made for general play and not like, specific speed runs or other more focused play.

You generally should fire off AS whenever its up even without the assassins focus just due to the high DPA. With Ice melee if I recall, most use moonbeam or Zapp as a single target fill, as the damage gain is worth the loss of a single Assassins focus.

-1x0 and you can run literally anything with little issue, even without full enhancement slotting. But yeah as others have pointed out: Tank, Brute, Scrapper, Stalker, Sentinel, and Mastermind These classes all tend to have a easy time solo, if -1x0 is your goal though, literally anything will work, though those AT will still have a easier time.

Oh I didn't mean to imply it wasn't useful, sorry if it came off that way, more that I found the knock up more constantly useful, while the sleep tends to be more situational.

Like I said, it a issue with how the info is being displayed in game It's listing the controller critical damage, as the base damage

Well for one, less accuracy isn't really a big deal past the early level It's only takes 0.2 seconds longer to animate and it more then makes up for that in damage coming out to about 15% more DPS. They both have 6 second recharge, so I'm not sure where you are getting that from. And the 1ish endurance cost difference is fairly trivial. On top of that, levitate causes knock up, which is consistently reliable in most situations. While Mesmerize causes sleep, which falls off the moment you join a team or deal any AoE damage. The real issue here seems to be that that powers info is showing the controller "critical control" damage as always being a thing. This effects all controller powers and makes them deal double damage to enemies already controlled, this effects both levitate and mesmerize, but mesmerizer's info is listing it in it's overall damage numbers (even on dominator which does not get this), basically making them power look like it deals double the damage it actually deals. This is a fairly common issue among alot of sets, in reality mesmerize is dealing half the damage it shows in the info.

I hate to say this, but the fact you see that as a "flex" for the set is downright adorable, even on SOs, around that level just about any melee should be capable of that. To add to that, saying that tough and weave were never "intended" for scrappers to use is baffling considering they have been in the game since day one, and were even common back in the day. As someone who does not consider my character complete till they can comfortably solo most groups at 4x8, saying 95% is from outside their secondary is absolutely ridiculous, or else secondary choice would barely matter. For sure, they all can reach that 4x8 point, but they go about it in different ways and have different strengths and weaknesses, this wouldn't be the case if it was just IOs, and Barrier doing all the work. If that was even remotely the case wouldn't that make regen better then the rest, as it's "more powerful" without outside mitigation. Regen being considered bad isn't a new thing, it's been considered that ways since IH got nerfed effectively, long before IOs and incarnates. To say "a small vocal minority of players" are calling it bad is just incorrect, even most people who defend the set know it's a pretty unpopular opinion, and it has been for a fairly long time.

As someone who has played since "Issue 0" I can assure you that this game never "needed" a holy trinity on teams. Many players just thought they did. Early on players were understandably considerably worse at the game, there was nothing quite like CoH, and they didn't have nearly the info that we have today. In these early days players turned too emps in particular as it was very easy to understand compared to the other support sets and other games had taught them that "healing is needed". For sure players could understand that a force field bubble reduces damage, but not by how much or how it even did it. Comparatively Empathy was very easy to understand, you get a big green number and your HP goes up by that number. One of my oldest memory of this game was playing a FF/dark def, slotted for def and -to-hit. From the moment I would join teams they would simply stop taking damage, as nothing was even hitting them, this would almost inevitably lead to someone telling the emp on the team, who hasn't had anything to heal since I joined "GREAT HEALS!", and it was one of the most eye opening experiences I had in this game. I'm sure I'm not the only one with this experience, once I realized "healers" weren't really needed, I started running my own teams and experimenting with non "standard" team comps. No tank? No problem! 8 blasters? Everything is dead before they get a chance to hurt you. 8 Defenders? Literally the smoothest team in existence. Just about every comp I could think of worked, an over abundance of one strength could easily cover for the lack of another. Sure you would sometimes need to adjust play style, but you could make basically everything work and even well. My point is the perception that you needed the "Holy trinity" was not true, but was simply a popular misconception back in those days due to most players haveing little understanding how how the game functioned and sticking to what they understood. Some of the best teams I was ever on back in those days, lacked a tank and a healer. Keep in mind these were the days of a single fire tanker, herding entire maps into a dumpster and burning the whole map at one time, seriously if you think AE farms are bad, image that with no target/aggro cap. There was alot of broken stuff back then, it's one of the reasons why there were such massive waves of nerfs and they had to revamp the entire enhancement system. Look I'm not gonna pretend like the game hasn't gotten easier, because it has, but the game as it was on release wouldn't have lasted this long and become beloved enough that the player base still keeps it alive after it was shut down, without changes. Over the years the game started to lean more into it's unique aspects and power fantasy, and while it did lead to the game becoming a easier, I think it was a good choice, even if they over did it a bit. In just about any other game of it's a era, a healer, tank and DPS can crawl methodically through a dungeon, but CoH was the only game were you can throw a team of DPS at a army of enemies, with the strategy of "blow them up before they blow us up" and it would work, and it's a major part of the reason I love this game so much.

Just to clarify a bit here, this isn't that big of a deal for the 1.67 AS sets. For sure it holds fire melee back a bit but the set makes up for it due to how good GFS and cremate are, and access to -def to slot for -res, on my main I can still get a plyon time of around 90 seconds and I'm built for generalist/AoE play, I would even say it's arguably top teir, though definitely arguably(the bottom of top at best). Two other sets have the same issue, Ice melee, which everyone will likely agree is in contention for best stalker set, and BS which is not really great, but for alot of reason, a bad AS only being one of them. For sure it's not good, but if either Ice or Fire had it, they would likely be the best stalker set in the game, and by a decent margin(ice more then fire), BS though really does not need it. I think this still speaks to the raw power of AS though, where even the worst ones are good enough to not really bring down the sets that much. A better example of how important AS is would be Kinetic Melee, which has the best AS in the game, at a lightning 0.67 seconds, which (along with 100% crit from hide in burst) elevates the set to a pretty solid level. For comparison on the other melee ATs Kin melee is almost unarguably the worst melee set, and by a decent margin. Stalker getting Build up does help here but the ridiculously fast AS is what puts this set on the map. To add to this as well, DPS wise Assassin's strike outside of hide > Assassin's strike in hide, and that's before we factor in crit chance via Assassin's focus procs. Basically this means that you would really only use AS from hide as a initiation burst option, or in order to use the AoE fear. For this reason, and since you are basically gonna be hitting this on CD due to it's High DPS, the hide proc is almost always placed here. I think the only attack in the game that realistically contest with AS is Fast Energy transfer, and that power is basically the entire reason Energy melee is so good.