Did tanks get overbuffed?

[Bopper]

1 minute ago, Apparition said:

Brutes aren’t useless.  They allow you to skip Taunt, and to skip the tier one melee attack power which is useless on most melee attack sets.  For those two reasons, I still prefer playing Brutes to Tankers in most cases.

So true. I dont know many Defense powers who's T1 I would skip. But there are few T1 attacks I would use from Melee. Power Picks are seriously a premium resource, so throwing away any is rough.

[Apparition]

1 minute ago, Bopper said:

woah...how did brutes become useless? Sure, their damage cap decreased to 700% but their Fury was improved. If Brutes were strong before, how are they no longer useful? Not sure about that claim.

 

People that do very high end Incarnate game play largely consider Blasters, Defenders, Dominators, Fortunatas, and Tankers (with the exception of Kinetics Corruptors), to be the only valuable ATs.  Brutes and Corruptors (again with the exception of Kinetics), are no longer on that list.  Two guesses as to why.

[Bill Z Bubba]

5 minutes ago, Bopper said:

woah...how did brutes become useless? Sure, their damage cap decreased to 700% but their Fury was improved. If Brutes were strong before, how are they no longer useful? Not sure about that claim.

The claim comes from the theory that if tanks are dishing out nearly brute level damage with vastly superior mitigation then why should anyone ever roll a brute? Barring being able to skip the T1 attack power as @Apparitionso correctly noted. But dude... most of the time in high end builds the T1 can just be left unslotted/unused and ignored.

[Peacemoon]

3 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

How about I don't want years of brutes being useless?

You know sometimes I read these threads and feel like melee players have their own little balance game going on, completely oblivious to how they fare compares to other ATs 😏
 

I don’t think Brutes will ever be useless whilst we still have controllers, defenders, corruptors, dominators and masterminds who have a fraction of the defence and even less damage, and control and support that is not as important as it once. 😏 

Sometimes it does feels like a two tiered game, but that’s just my current mood.

[marcussmythe]

Just now, Apparition said:

 

People that do very high end Incarnate game play largely consider Blasters, Defenders, Dominators, Fortunatas, and Tankers (with the exception of Kinetics Corruptors), to be the only valuable ATs.  Brutes and Corruptors (again with the exception of Kinetics), are no longer on that list.  Two guesses as to why.

Because difficult content resurrects the not-thoroughly-enough slain Holy Trinity, and hyper specialization is rewarded when you are pushing the edges of the envelope?

 

Maximum tough AT, maximum damage AT, maximum buff power AT, Maximum CC AT, and a really high damage team buffing AT.  Yeah, thats what Id take to a raid in WoW, as well.

[Bill Z Bubba]

3 minutes ago, Peacemoon said:

You know sometimes I read these threads and feel like melee players have their own little balance game going on, completely oblivious to how they fare compares to other ATs 😏
 

I don’t think Brutes will ever be useless whilst we still have controllers, defenders, corruptors, dominators and masterminds who have a fraction of the defence and even less damage, and control and support that is not as important as it once. 😏 

Sometimes it does feels like a two tiered game, but that’s just my current mood.

You are not even remotely wrong.

[tidge]

22 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

How about I don't want years of brutes being useless?

[Sovera]

1 minute ago, marcussmythe said:

Because difficult content resurrects the not-thoroughly-enough slain Holy Trinity, and hyper specialization is rewarded when you are pushing the edges of the envelope?

 

Maximum tough AT, maximum damage AT, maximum buff power AT, Maximum CC AT, and a really high damage team buffing AT.  Yeah, thats what Id take to a raid in WoW, as well.

I don't remember the thread where it came up. Probably some difficult slider thread or nerfing incarnates. Yeah, probably the second. But I mentioned how the current meta makes the average Coh team not care one iota at their composition. ATs, levels, who cares, anything goes, just come along. I mentioned that once the difficulty increases to forget it. It will be standard composition teams with always one kin, always one rad, always four blasters, always one tank, etc.

[Troo]

15 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

then can we all agree that something is very wrong?

yeah... this is where folks will require really digging into it and they'll need to see strict controls for a variety of situations. I'd love know. (Even if Tanks = Brutes, they are simply different play styles)

 

8 minutes ago, Bopper said:

He is putting in the work. But the guidance I'm trying to provide is to help him prove his point. I'd hate for BZB to spend 2 hours doing a test that was flawed. I've been doing testing for 12 years (wow, actually today is my 12 year anniversary on the job, neat), and I have seen many missions waste millions of dollars on bad test practices. This does not have nearly the financial risk (I sure hope!!!), but if the results are going to matter or interest anyone, I would recommend taking some of my advice. BZB has captured my interest to see the comparison in damage. And sure, there are some parameters that are not controlled with even what I proposed, but it's a compromise I'm willing to live with.

 

I will still be taking the results with a grain of salt given we are looking at only one build combination. But all that being said, it's still a good enough test doing it this way as opposed to doing a random mission test that has too many variables to draw any conclusions. If that's the results that were to be produced I'd just leave the thread. It wouldnt be value added, just anecdotal. 

yep, yep, yep.

The controls required to account for all the variables to answer the question beyond a small selection is daunting.

 

I think we'd find after all that work:

• Some power sets favor one ATs over others.
• Tanks will out damage large groups in general by a small percentage.
• Brutes will out damage single targets in general by a small percentage.

It's a great discussion and to me, as intended. This should be the debate and it should be hard to determine. This part of what makes the game so great (and the costume creator).

 

[Bill Z Bubba]

4 minutes ago, Sovera said:

I don't remember the thread where it came up. Probably some difficult slider thread or nerfing incarnates. Yeah, probably the second. But I mentioned how the current meta makes the average Coh team not care one iota at their composition. ATs, levels, who cares, anything goes, just come along. I mentioned that once the difficulty increases to forget it. It will be standard composition teams with always one kin, always one rad, always four blasters, always one tank, etc.

So why did my group run a max diff all troller/dom ITF the other night and have absolutely zero issues burning right through it?

 

Regardless, that line of thinking also does not belong in the current discussion. This discussion is 100% about whether an AT with tank caps but scrapper base levels for their mitigation powers should be seeing that other AT with much higher base mitigation levels be doing damn near equivalent damage output.

 

This is CoH. No AT is needed for anything to get the job done.

[Bill Z Bubba]

Gorram it. Suddenly mission ID 15873 is no longer available after I finished my tank run. WTF.

I've contacted the mission owner to see if they'll republish as it was.

Edited July 7, 2020 by Bill Z Bubba

[Bill Z Bubba]

1 hour ago, Sovera said:

A Tanker doing 66% of the damage of a Brute (with no Kin involved. I must be the only person doing PuGs where a kin shows up every ten runs) while the Brute has 86% of the defenses of a Tanker sounds reasonable to me.

I have already proven that this is completely false.

[Bopper]

28 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

Gorram it. Suddenly mission ID 15873 is no longer available after I finished my tank run. WTF.

I've contacted the mission owner to see if they'll republish as it was.

On Beta it's Arc 23655: 

 

[Bill Z Bubba]

I'm not on beta. But I guess I can be.

[Bopper]

2 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

I'm not on beta. But I guess I can be.

Do be. You can easily copy your characters from Live over to Beta (it takes 2 minutes to process), and you can easily mod things on Beta (any IO you need, any incarnate, whatever).

Edited July 7, 2020 by Bopper

[Xanatos]

2 hours ago, Apparition said:

 

People that do very high end Incarnate game play largely consider Blasters, Defenders, Dominators, Fortunatas, and Tankers (with the exception of Kinetics Corruptors), to be the only valuable ATs.  Brutes and Corruptors (again with the exception of Kinetics), are no longer on that list.  Two guesses as to why.

 

Because the person who made the list doesn't understand corruptors? (Or the current meta?)

 

Fire, Ice, and Beam are great  corr primaries. Cold, Dark, Sonic, Poison, Rad, Time (and as you mentioned, kin) are all great corr secondaries.

 

There's a reason the TF olympic teams use corruptors. (They're really good!) If anything, the most valuable ATs at the top end are Blasters, Corruptors, and Scrappers.

I agree that Brutes are kinda useless. Especially since Tanks now can take aggro off-of them with ease, and Scrappers do more damage.

Edited July 7, 2020 by Xanatos

[arcane]

Brutes = useless? Now I've seen it all.

[arcane]

2 hours ago, Apparition said:

 

People that do very high end Incarnate game play largely consider Blasters, Defenders, Dominators, Fortunatas, and Tankers (with the exception of Kinetics Corruptors), to be the only valuable ATs.  Brutes and Corruptors (again with the exception of Kinetics), are no longer on that list.  Two guesses as to why.

Can you provide any data that supports this assertion that doesn't seem consistent with the reality I've perceived?

[Heraclea]

3 hours ago, Apparition said:

 

People that do very high end Incarnate game play largely consider Blasters, Defenders, Dominators, Fortunatas, and Tankers (with the exception of Kinetics Corruptors), to be the only valuable ATs.  Brutes and Corruptors (again with the exception of Kinetics), are no longer on that list.  Two guesses as to why.

This looks to me like a content problem.  Encouraging hyper-specialization is as bad as imposing too many demands on attention or writing melee out of the game entirely,  which are also problems with some of the late added content.  Revision of the material is what's needed, as I've said before.  That stuff should play like the other 98% of the game.

Edited July 7, 2020 by Heraclea

[Xanatos]

6 minutes ago, arcaneholocaust said:

Brutes = useless? Now I've seen it all.

Hah! Fair. Think I got carried away at the end, there.

 

I guess I just don't understand why anyone would play a brute when scrappers do more damage, and tanks handle aggro better.

[kiramon]

3 minutes ago, Xanatos said:

Hah! Fair. Think I got carried away at the end, there.

 

I guess I just don't understand why anyone would play a brute when scrappers do more damage, and tanks handle aggro better.

See that space between tanker and scrapper there? 

😛

 

 

Edited July 7, 2020 by kiramon

[arcane]

7 minutes ago, Xanatos said:

Hah! Fair. Think I got carried away at the end, there.

 

I guess I just don't understand why anyone would play a brute when scrappers do more damage, and tanks handle aggro better.

That statement makes sense but only if we have already all agreed on the assumption that an archetype must be the absolute best at one single thing to earn their seat at the table, as opposed to offering their own variety of things. 

 

If you haven't made that assumption though, we have to consider that 2nd best survivability and 2nd best damage might be every bit as valuable as best survivability and 3rd best damage or vice versa. For instance, in the most obvious example, in the realm of +4x8 AFK farming with EB's, scrapper survivability is not ideal, nor is tanker damage; brute's unique balance gives them supremacy there.

[modest]

Obviously, the only sane and reasonable solution to this very real and extremely serious problem would be for the Homecoming developers to immediately delete the Brute archetype.

 

But that's not going far enough. I posit that all players who previously had a Brute character over the level of 40 should be required to level a new Defender character up to 50. Only then will balance be brought to the game and this genuine injustice be resolved.

[Xanatos]

9 minutes ago, arcaneholocaust said:

That statement makes sense but only if we have already all agreed on the assumption that an archetype must be the absolute best at one single thing to earn their seat at the table, as opposed to offering their own variety of things. 

 

If you haven't made that assumption though, we have to consider that 2nd best survivability and 2nd best damage might be every bit as valuable as best survivability and 3rd best damage or vice versa. For instance, in the most obvious example, in the realm of +4x8 AFK farming with EB's, scrapper survivability is not ideal, nor is tanker damage; brute's unique balance gives them supremacy there.

Yeah I run 3 AFK farmers every day for $$$. Brutes are good in that specific circumstance. They're also great at winning "which AT best rhymes with flute" contests.

 

With that said, I still don't get why anyone would pick, for 99% of the content of this game, a Brute over a Tank or Scrapper. If Brutes had the same taunt scale as tanks, like they did on live, then I'd understand the appeal.

 

Stone Melee on a damaging character and Regen on a survivable character are kinda cool, I guess?

[Haijinx]

4 hours ago, marcussmythe said:

Because difficult content resurrects the not-thoroughly-enough slain Holy Trinity, and hyper specialization is rewarded when you are pushing the edges of the envelope?

 

Maximum tough AT, maximum damage AT, maximum buff power AT, Maximum CC AT, and a really high damage team buffing AT.  Yeah, thats what Id take to a raid in WoW, as well.

Pfft.

 

"Difficult content"