Game Balance & The Endgame

[ABlueThingy]

I keep seeing people say that the players could just curate their own experience by only teaming with people that fit their playstyle.  In the "3 blasters clearing the map" example where you're... say a Scrapper or Defender who doesn't have enough AoE to remotely compete with a blaster or has all kinds of buffs that mean nothing when the NPCs don't even get a shot off/live long enough for a debuff to take effect.  You could just team with blasters who don't do as much damage or just other ATs that are worse preforming at clear times in general.

 

There's an argument to be had there but that's not really the argument this thread is around.  This isn't about what players can do to enjoy and experience this game.  This is about what kind of game experience the Devs wish to create.

 

I'd argue it's not totally UNREASONABLE to say "If you feel useless playing alongside top-teir powersets, quit and play with someone else" from a player perspective.

 

But from a Dev perspective should a subset of ATs and powersets have a significantly larger chance of being "Awesome" or "Super" or "Fun" or whatever in any given PUG?  By extension should some ATs and powersets be relegated to needing to curate their experience to be likely to be able to contribute meaningfully to a group?

 

If you have a high level, fully Incarnated Fire/TA Blaster with a billion inf IO set up.  The odds of you going into any random team and feeling like you're contributing is very high. Very few teams will have a composition that can invalidate your core gameplay loop.  It is POSSIBLE of course.  You might join a team of 7 Storm/Energy Def intent on breaking the world shotput records with every single minion. You might have issues with enemies having a lot of Fire resist but that's really only going to be a big issue with AVs due to the shear damage you output and the odds of teaming with at least one person who can put out -res or +dmg support powers.  While it's possible it is statistically rare.  Systemically rare.  There simply arn't a lot of things that break this kind of gameplay loop.

 

If you have a high level, fully Incarnated Emp/Psi Def with a billion inf IO set up.  The odds of you going into any random team and feeling like you're contributing are... not as high.  Your secondary is partially negated by the content and partially by players. It has two gimmicks. Psi dmg which is heavily resisted by end game monsters. There's also the controls which are partially negated by enemy status resistance and partially negated by enemies being dead before it matters.  The second one is important because it also negates a lot of what Empathy is there for.

 

 Empathy is mostly here to reduce recovery periods and heal in combat.  At the high levels you don't add anything there.  Fort and AB are still good but that's-- if you asked all Empathy players if they we're ok with just watching for when buffs fall off allies and refreshing them I don't think you'd get a lot of takers.  The core gameplay loop of the support *IS* broken consistently.

 

  You can't buff someone's damage if they're already at the cap.  You can't help someone recover if they never spend more endurance then they recover on their own.  And most importantly you can't heal people that never take damage.

Even if there is a chance you ended up on a team without blasters the odds that you team with an Ice/ or Time/ or Nature/ def who protects their allies so much you still end up with nothing to do are pretty good.

 

This is all something that is within the realm of discussion for developers. 

 

 

And I really do understand the anti-nerf sentiment.  But we're not talking about trying to make your character less super.  The game is literally running up against mechanic limitations, a ceiling.  We can either buff everything to the ceiling, which would homogenizing the hell out of the game.  Or we can mess with the numbers until the ceiling is further away.

 

I'm not saying Blasters should do the same damage as Def.  I'm saying there's only so much HP a given.  There's only so many targets before the AoE cap. There's only so much damage before the dmg cap. Blasters can't really get any stronger once they're at the cap.

 

 

If you nerf'd all AT damage by 50%.  Cut in half.  Just leave the caps where they are and halved all NPC healthbars.  What would happen?  Time to kill should be exactly the same or near enough. But now you could keep buffing Blasters.  Finding more ways to push your damage even higher with the damage.  Maybe change Defiance to last 30 seconds.  You COULD run in and spam one nova and maybe one other AoE.  Or you could open with a volley of ST powers to build up your Defiance buff to catastrophic heights before using your novas.  If you tried that stunt now you'd hit the cap and that would be that.

 

Now mind you this is just an example, I'm not saying it would be a good idea to do this specific change just... there's more to this equation then just "NERF BAD" or "NERF GOOD" or even "Nerfs make you weaker"

 

Sometimes nerfs make you more super.

 

 

 

[Ralathar44]

 

9 hours ago, Ralathar44 said:

If you have to cherry pick a team to make survivability buffs even be useful because PUG teams are so safe they never use them....that's a balancing issue.

 

3 hours ago, ZacKing said:

No it isn't it's a player laziness issue. anybody can create the challenge they want here.  what you're looking for is nerfing everyone to force them to play how you like instead of letting others do their own things.  That's selfish no matter how anybody tries to hide it.  You want the rewards without putting in the effort.  I'd love the play in the NBA but I'm nowhere near as good as any of the pros.  Should they all get nerfed so I can join and "feel useful"?  sure, fix stuff that's totally broken.  don't nerf people just to make the game bland. 

 

Once again this is another reply I like because it's more telling that perhaps the commentor intended and it stands for itself.  Once again a poster paints everyone who feels less valuable as a bad player.  I'm relly confused as to why yall believe this is a good approach lol.  Yall are really having a field day with the attacking other people.

+4/8 content in the current state of the game is the most difficult non-incarnate content available in the game proper and it's so easy for the average team that nobody dies and mobs die in 10 seconds or less.  Currently all of that content is completely trivialized past level 30ish.  1-30 or so has a good spread of power and I've faced +3 as early as level 8 on some really good teams but people don't start trivializing content until 25-30ish.  30-50 is a complete mess that becomes an utter cakewalk on the vast majority of teams.  Incarnate content is a mix, some of it is challenging and some is not and there is quite little of it. 

Heck, my high level blapper has tanked +2 for teams and he's not even close to optimized yet since he's just frankenslotting for power enhancement values lol.  And blasters are the least survivable AT...or at least they used to be lol.  These day's the average level 50 blaster with IOs is prolly more survivable than the average pre-IO level 50 scrapper on sunset :P.


So my option to "get the challenge I want", which is just the challenge the game used to have pre-sunset, is basically limited to a fraction of incarnate content or custom created AE content.  And, ironically, I'm being told I want the rewards without the effort while being told I want more challenge...which are contradictory statements because more challenging content actually requires you to work harder for the same rewards. 

Also, my goal isn't the challenge, my goal is to have content challenging enough for all ATs to be equally (roughly) useful again like it used to be.  While I personally enjoy more challenge, it's not the goal here, the goal is to make every AT valuable at using their full set as much as they used to be able to on live in high level content.

Edited September 25, 2020 by Ralathar44

[skoryy]

I feel like a lot of this discussion is getting lost in the weeds of trying to balance versus trash mobs, when trash mobs by definition should be a quick and easy drop.

 

[Ralathar44]

8 hours ago, carroto said:

I guess the implication here is that if people playing support ATs truly felt that their contributions were wasted, then people wouldn't play them, and we would see nothing but melee and Blasters?  I don't think that's necessarily true.  It's possible to favor a play style and continue to play it while also lamenting the change in the experience of doing so.

Honestly that's pretty close to what we see. 

Top 5 classes at 50:  Brute, Blaster, Controller, Scrapper, Tanker.   Controller originally looks like an outlier here until you realize the top 2 controller powersets are fire/illusion kinetics/rad and those are more popular by such an extent that they are like 50% of all controllers.  So the majority of controllers are damage focused as well, not support focused.  There are as many blasters alone at 50 as there are Defenders and Corruptors put together.  In fact once you get past the melee/blaster oriented classes (plus dmg controllers) you can see the popularity immediately fall by almost half.

In fact, the only damage oriented class that isn't at the top of the most played list by almost double the supporting classes is Sentinel.  Because blasters are so survivable these days sentinels don't really have a place, they are essentially just lower damage blasters since blasters are not dying in the vast majority of level 50+ content.

Edited September 25, 2020 by Ralathar44

[Ukase]

So...37+ pages of mostly valid opinions, with a measure of well-intentioned testing. 

During my morning row - which was longer than I could truly enjoy - I was thinking about the test results of the blaster primaries with build-up alone being taken from the energy secondary. 

It was an impressive display of a curious mind, wanting to definitively know, or at least come up with a best guess of where the primaries are in relation to each other. 

I replied that the test was interesting, but determined it didn't measure fun. Fun is certainly subjective. Some days, on some characters, I want them PL'd to see for myself how they'll turn out. Mids' numbers are great to know before-hand, but it's hard (for me) to know if an attack chain will truly shine until I execute it under various circumstances. Other days, I feel the character should develop organically, Mids' be damned. I know enough about set bonuses to know if I should get more end recovery or more accuracy or more defense/resistance, etc. 

And then I thought - while I realize this thread is "Game Balance & THE END GAME" (emphasis added by me) - this is not the proper way to analyze and compare AT primaries. It doesn't show the full picture. 

It's common knowledge that there are more than a few folks who have never seen level 50 in their character. They claim it's not of interest to them (how they know this is beyond me - some explain it, but I don't recall how they know this). Other's have been there, consider it over-rated. Others go to 50, then stop, start over with another AT/Powerset combo. 

And of course, there are those who have done the content of red, blue and gold enough to know they don't want to do them anymore - even if they haven't done them in years. They want the end game- which is every bit as acceptable and fine as the previously mentioned groups of players. 

If we really want to test a set of primaries -we cannot only test them at the end game. Too many players never get there. We need to test them at level 12, 22, 35, 41 & 50 vs various npc factions, solo and teamed. 

I could be wrong about this - but I don't think I am. Determining one AT/powerset to be "OP" in a farm, ergo it should be nerfed, is just silly. What about the player that doesn't PL to 50 and takes them up through Gold and switches alignments willy-nilly after level 20? Every AT has growing pains at some point in the leveling path. It's probably part of the reason so many like to PL to 50 - to skip the discomfort. But before we can think about improving or nerfing any sets, we need the full picture. And that means playing the powerset/AT combo all the way through to 50 to get a hopefully more clear picture of what's really going on. 

Just my opinion, I could be wrong. (and no - I have no desire to roll all the AT/Combos necessary to see what's really going on - that would be a huge undertaking. I don't mind testing out a couple..but even still, that's a lot!

[arcane]

8 minutes ago, Ukase said:

If we really want to test a set of primaries -we cannot only test them at the end game. Too many players never get there. We need to test them at level 12, 22, 35, 41 & 50 vs various npc factions, solo and teamed. 
 

I’m not convinced that the number of people that never get to 50 is significant once you factor out things like inactive accounts that played a couple days and then gave up.

 

I’m also not convinced that it’s very important to balance characters around incomplete rough drafts. The only exception here is that it’s presumably at least important for the GM’s to consider what level powers are available and whether or not a set is too front/end-loaded. But I would be against balancing “out of context”. The level 50 possibilities HAVE to be considered IMO.

[ScarySai]

3 hours ago, ShardWarrior said:

I would argue they underperform all the time lol 😁

laughs in thug/storm and demons/cold

Edited September 25, 2020 by ScarySai

[Ukase]

2 minutes ago, arcaneholocaust said:

I’m not convinced that the number of people that never get to 50 is significant once you factor out things like inactive accounts that played a couple days and then gave up.

 

I’m also not convinced that it’s very important to balance characters around incomplete rough drafts. The only exception here is that it’s presumably at least important for the GM’s to consider what level powers are available and whether or not a set is too front/end-loaded. But I would be against balancing “out of context”. The level 50 possibilities HAVE to be considered IMO.

Please don't misunderstand me - I do think the level 50 possibilities MUST be considered, of course. But it would be short-sighted to change those possibilities without considering the impact those changes would have on the lower levels. 

I do cede the point that there's no point in taking into account those players with inactive accounts. I'm talking about players who are active in game and on these forums who clearly state they don't go over a certain level for reasons of their own. While I'm sure they're in the minority - compared to level 50 & end game players, we shouldn't discount them. 

[Ralathar44]

2 hours ago, skoryy said:

The thing is, you're comparing mildly challenging content (mid-level TF) to end game easy mode (PI radios).  The better comparison to Penny Yin at 50 would be Hami, MLTF, Tinpex, or the incarnate trials.  In those, more support will always bring faster drops.  Vice versa, support's not going to be all that important if you're blazing your way through a Talos Island radio mission.

The difficulty on the TF was set much lower than the difficulty on the PI Radio mission.  I think it was at +2/8 vs the  +4/8 of the PI mission IIRC.  The mob grups we delt with were smaller and defeated far less quickly and clockworks are inhernetly far less of a problem than Carnies and Arachnos or even Family/Council.

Talos Island is terrible for radio missions because it often sends you across the water constantly for long distance hikes.  The story arcs are actually way better...especially Ray Cooling's arc.  The building burning mission is a bit of a lull but the rest of them provide a bit of variety while still maintaining constant fighting and a fairly good rate of both challenge and exp for teams of that level.  Deaths are not uncommon if the difficulty level is set right and the pace is led appropriately. 

That being said Talos Radio missions are nowhere near as cake as PI radio missions because the average level of player power relative to enemies is dramatically different.  There won't be hardly any Talos radio teams cruising at max speed on +4/8.  +2/8 is much more common and +3/8 for the better teams.  I've leveled so many alts through Talos recently while running teams so I've got copious and recent experience with this.  Prolly 50+ hours in the last month leading teams through Talos in various ways.  (most people avoid First Ward sadly or I'd mix it up more lol)

Edited September 25, 2020 by Ralathar44

[Apparition]

Using radio or newspaper missions to advocate for any kind of balance changes is a folly.  They’re intentionally easy and full of trash mobs.  And what do players do with them?  They intentionally run the easiest of easy missions with the trashiest of trash mobs.  There is no balance to be had there.

[skoryy]

56 minutes ago, Ralathar44 said:

The difficulty on the TF was set much lower than the difficulty on the PI Radio mission.  I think it was at +2/8 vs the  +4/8 of the PI mission IIRC.  The mob grups we delt with were smaller and defeated far less quickly and clockworks are inhernetly far less of a problem than Carnies and Arachnos or even Family/Council.

For starters, Penny Yin is all Freaks and Council, so I'm not sure what TF you were actually discussing.

 

And there's more to difficulty between radios and TFs than just what you have the difficulty set to.  +0/x1 or +4/x8, a single warehouse map of of S/L attackers with nothing stronger than a boss warwolf just isn't that tough compared to, say, a massive ambush of Freaks with tanks, stunners, rezzes, and an AV.

Edited September 25, 2020 by skoryy

[ABlueThingy]

18 minutes ago, Ralathar44 said:

+4/8 content in the current state of the game is the most difficult non-incarnate content available in the game proper and it's so easy for the average team that nobody dies and mobs die in 10 seconds or less.  Currently all of that content is completely trivialized past level 30ish.  1-30 or so has a good spread of power and I've faced +3 as early as level 8 on some really good teams but people don't start trivializing content until 25-30ish.  30-50 is a complete mess that becomes an utter cakewalk on the vast majority of teams.  Incarnate content is a mix, some of it is challenging and some is not and there is quite little of it.

 

13 minutes ago, skoryy said:

I feel like a lot of this discussion is getting lost in the weeds of trying to balance versus trash mobs, when trash mobs by definition should be a quick and easy drop.

 

 

I think these two are related.  What should the mix of trash and... what's the opposite of a trash mob?  Treasure mob?  We'll go with that.

 

How fast should Trash mobs die? How many mobs should their be? What should the mix of trash to treasure mobs be? 

 

Because right now lvl54 bosses last only a few seconds longer then the minions outside of Incarnate content. Frankly not much longer IN incarnate content.  The opening novas wipe out the minions and most of the LTs and the follow up AoEs and one or two ST strikes take out the boss.  And all of that can hit almost simultaneously.  If a boss lasts long enough to get a few Debuffs on him they evaporate like a snowflake falling into the sun.

 

But what is the answer?  Make a +5/9 difficulty?  Make a "No minions" option that fills the gap with LTs?  A "Double mob size" option that halves the XP gained but doubles the number of mobs?

 

All of those options are really presupposing that the developers are(or should) consider this is an issue of player personal choice.

 

I don't think that's a healthy way for a developer to look at things.

 

It shouldn't be controversial to say that that a Kin/Regen Scrapper and a Mind/Emp Controller should be just as important to team success as the Bio/TW Tank and Fire/TA Blaster.  Mind you, this is when played at absolute capacity.  Player skill is equal between them.  Obviously even the most well build character will be sub-par in an unskilled player's hands.  This also means all power sets need good IO sets they can slot comparable to the options afforded to others.

 

This does not mean everyone is completely equal all the time. If you have a team with 4 Regen Brutes and 3 Fire/Fire Controllers doing nothing but fighting Carnies then that mind/emp is gonna feel like dead weight I imagine. You'd be better off bringing something else to the team.

 

What is true right now is that a team of 8 with any combo of ATs and sets can take on something like 99% of the content in the game with no trouble.  And that's good mind you.

 

What is NOT true is that any team of 8 with any combo of ATs and sets has each member being equally valuable.  If you have 4 maxed out blasters taking turns obliterating the mobs.  You... can't really improve that much.  Maybe one good buffer to knock them the rest of the way to the cap and then... that's it. The team is at maximum damage(All of the enemy health instantly) and maximum safety(never take damage) and maximum sustain(Blaster sustain toggles)

 

You cannot replace any of those blasters with even the most skilled player using the most perfect an expensive IO build if they have the wrong power sets.

 

You couldn't replace them with that Kin/Regen and have them helping the team just as much. The remaining Blasters still do overwhelming amounts of instant damage.  The scrapper would never have time to build their +dmg stacks or even execute their high damage attacks.  Even if they did their target cap is super low.  And the thing scrappers are good at, killing bosses, does nothing when the boss dies just as fast as the minions.

 

Even a TW/Bio would have issues bringing as much to the table as any of those blasters because it's a solved equation. A hand full of players can deal more HP then virtually any group of mobs up to and including AVs with enough speed and safety that their health is never in danger.  They can recover and continue indefinitely without running out of steam.  If a team half-full of just one specific set of characters can do that then everyone else is just window dressing.

 

I don't think you can buff anyone enough to match that. There are no buffs that could make people more valuable because there's a finite capacity for value. Four blasters can hit the soft cap for value.  You only need controls and aggro management and support if there is risk of failure. You only need more damage and debuffs if there's more health to remove.  Once you've solved those two issues more teammates bring minimal value.

 

Now mind you, most teams are not that refined or skilled.  But even PUGs at the end stages of the game are nearly that refined. You can easily find teams that are "Complete" at 5 or 6 members and new players add nothing even though the difficulty is maxed.  Not that I think adding higher difficulty settings would even fix that.  Just means you bring even more high damage players. As long as that's all it takes to solve the problem.

 

 

 

 

[ZacKing]

1 hour ago, Ralathar44 said:

Once again this is another reply I like because it's more telling that perhaps the commentor intended and it stands for itself.  Once again a poster paints everyone who feels less valuable as a bad player.  I'm relly confused as to why yall believe this is a good approach lol.  Yall are really having a field day with the attacking other people.

Dude seriously, get off your high horse.  I'm not your mother and I'm not going to sugar coat what I want to say just to appease you.  I didn't say anyone is a bad player.  I said it's a laziness problem because it is.  Were people to spend a tenth of the time they do whining on the forums about feeling usless looking to form groups with people who like the same playstyle looking to form groups with people who like the same playstyle, they'd all be having tons of fun right now.  Options are already available to play the game however you like.  use them and stop trying to force everyone into one way of play.

[ZacKing]

2 hours ago, ABlueThingy said:

I keep seeing people say that the players could just curate their own experience by only teaming with people that fit their playstyle. 

Yeah man that's called socializing and being in an MMO and it works.  Nerfing everyone to make everyone the same isn't a solution that suits everyone.  options are.

[golstat2003]

2 hours ago, Ralathar44 said:

This is a false dichotomoy.  Support was much more valuable post-ED but pre-homecoming and never was there a time where you NEEDED support characters to clear content.  There is room for everyone to be valuable but that does indeed mean that no one group can get too powerful or they remove the abilities of others to feel powerful.  That's means non-supports can't get too powerful and that means non supports can't get too weak.  That means supports can't get too powerful and that means supports can't get too weak.

I too firmly believe that a flexible team comp is a core feature of the game and we had that along with supports feeling super in every part of the game pre-sunset.  And every other AT felt super too.  The one AT that prolly needed help pre-sunset was prolly blasters faceplanting a little too much and between direct HC team love and plentiful IOs they've gotten huge amounts of power increase to their survivability, offense, and sustainability.  So they are definitely not hurting anymore, they might even be too good, I need to do more testing.  So far results are not encouraging since I've actually tanked on my high level (but not 50 yet) blapper on multiple occasions and he's nowhere near optimized.

Yeah we have supports feeling useful TODAY on HC. Again, some folks and I are playing a completely different game.

[Grouchybeast]

2 hours ago, Ralathar44 said:

The one AT that prolly needed help pre-sunset was prolly blasters faceplanting a little too much and between direct HC team love and plentiful IOs they've gotten huge amounts of power increase to their survivability, offense, and sustainability.

The blaster love actually came initially from the devs on live, not HC.  Most of the blaster changes, like non-crashing nukes, sustains and the core of the snipe changes were in I24 and about to go live when the game shut down was announced.  IIRC they were the result of data-mining by the devs that showed blasters were one of the ATs most frequently abandoned as players levelled them up.

[arcane]

Although you can pretty much have a team of anything nowadays, I definitely do not agree it was always this way. In the early days especially I remember an awful lot of waiting around for a tank or support. 
 

Now the only semblance of this I still see is maybe a brief mention of “Think we’re ok with a sentinel as tank this TF? *yups all around*”

 

On another note, the tiny minority actually asserting that no nerfs should ever occur and that that’s somehow a sustainable position sounds awfully thoughtless to me.

[ABlueThingy]

17 minutes ago, ZacKing said:

Yeah man that's called socializing and being in an MMO and it works. 

So some powerset combos should resign themselves to being redundant or pointless in PUGs?

 

19 minutes ago, ZacKing said:

 Nerfing everyone to make everyone the same isn't a solution that suits everyone.  options are.

Who is suggesting we make everyone the same?

 

[arcane]

1 minute ago, ABlueThingy said:

So some powerset combos should resign themselves to being redundant or pointless in PUGs?

 

No such thing exists fortunately.

[Lockpick]

2 hours ago, ABlueThingy said:

And I really do understand the anti-nerf sentiment.  But we're not talking about trying to make your character less super.  The game is literally running up against mechanic limitations, a ceiling.  We can either buff everything to the ceiling, which would homogenizing the hell out of the game.  Or we can mess with the numbers until the ceiling is further away.

 

 

Not true at all.  Use AE to create Hard Mode content if you don't feel the current content is at the limits you want.  Anyone can do it and it has been proven to work.  Instead people just want to nerf / rebalance instead of owning their own game experience.

 

Any character in this game can be powerful with the right build.  Some will be more powerful than others, but so what?  Superman is much more powerful than Spider-Man who is more powerful  than Batman.  You are going to have power tiers.  Everyone should embrace it and own their game experience.  Nothing could be more boring than having every AT at the same level of effectiveness.

 

Guess what?  Once you rebalance there will absolutely be an AT that is at a higher tier and will then need to be rebalanced. Rebalancing begets rebalancing and it is a no win situation for everyone.

 

 

[Murcielago]

RIP Titan Weapons. I want to see F in the chat. 

[ZacKing]

38 minutes ago, ABlueThingy said:

So some powerset combos should resign themselves to being redundant or pointless in PUGs?

PUGs are a different animal man.  If you're a rookie getting tossed into the game with a team full of pros, what do you expect?  this is why you form groups with others that have the same style of play. 

[ZacKing]

3 hours ago, ABlueThingy said:

And I really do understand the anti-nerf sentiment.  But we're not talking about trying to make your character less super.  The game is literally running up against mechanic limitations, a ceiling.  We can either buff everything to the ceiling, which would homogenizing the hell out of the game.  Or we can mess with the numbers until the ceiling is further away.

how about doing what many people have suggested already and creating harder end game level content that is made for incarnates?  there's already a shit ton of content for pre-50 to do. 

[Ralathar44]

1 hour ago, skoryy said:

For starters, Penny Yin is all Freaks and Council, so I'm not sure what TF you were actually discussing.

No you're right, it was freaks.  Sorry about that I've played alot of TFs recently including Synapse, which is the clocks and I got my wires cross on the TF name/mobs.  The one I was talking about was based out of independence port where the same chopper being half the missions so it's definitely yin and freaks.  I know the team mates and the level range since I had oil slick arrow but not emp arrow when exemplar'd down, but mixed the enemies up for some reason.  End AV was Clamor in the Terra Volta room, which honestly is pretty ideal for the TA I was playing due to the multiple waves of enemies in the same area and my persistent debuffs. (had to shrug off a little debuff aggro but meh, expected)

As mentioned even council and freaks are a notch harder than clocks.  But nothing like Arachnos or Carnies and mission was definitely at +2 and our tank went down a few times during the TF.  I was on my TA and there was another defender and a controller all helping out with buffs/debuffs/heals to help keep the tank alive on the larger pulls.  The times they went down was when they broke LOS from us and pulled a larger group.
 

1 hour ago, skoryy said:

And there's more to difficulty between radios and TFs than just what you have the difficulty set to.  +0/x1 or +4/x8, a single warehouse map of of S/L attackers with nothing stronger than a boss warwolf just isn't that tough compared to, say, a massive ambush of Freaks with tanks, stunners, rezzes, and an AV.

Freaks are pretty toothless honestly.  Their heavy hitters are mostly s/l, minor knockback mostly from freak tank grenades and clap.  Stunners and Juicers go down too easy to be a real threat.  The only actual threat in Freakshow is the super stunner who does decent end drain and mostly the self rez drains quite a bit and then shuts off your recovery for awhile.  If you avoid that self rez though freaks are easier than Family and Council are.  Family is s/l but they do good damage with alot of holds (bosses tend to murder squshies) and their -def stacking can lead to cascades on alot tanks or others taking aggro.  As you get more def the amount this affects you diminishes in a multiplicative fashion ofc.  Council isn't much to worry about at high levels when everyone has stacked defense from IOs but in mid levels the AOE can result in squishy casualties pretty easily.  Also the cold marksmen giving -recharge can actually make a significant difference if your team is roughly even on power level with the enemy mobs.

We had absolutely zero threat from the AV, remember the end mission of that is the TV defense and is just a horde of freaks.

Edited September 25, 2020 by Ralathar44

[Saikochoro]

22 hours ago, arcaneholocaust said:

This totally-new-to-me narrative about debuff sets being weak is really making me wonder what game I’ve been playing.

I have to agree. The only thing I like on my team better than a debuffer is a kinetics support. 
 

I would take a kinetics support over another dps/tank 10/10 times if I had the option. I would take a heavy debuffer over another dps/tank 10/10 times as well. I LOVE having supports on my teams even at +4/8 end game. 

Edited September 25, 2020 by Saikochoro