Game Balance & The Endgame

[Haijinx]

6 hours ago, Lockpick said:

Maybe an in game poll would be good. 

 

I alluded to this earlier, but I will add to it.  My bet is that people saying the game is to easy are the ones that planned out their builds to be min/max and are incarnated out.  Basically, they made their character into a godlike character and the character plays like a god.  Then we are being told the game is to easy for these gods.

 

Maybe a good way to check is do some data analysis on the characters being played.  I would look at data around character play time, types of IOs, incarnates, etc.  You can then at least see if the majority of active players are incarnate gods.  That should lead to some data supported decision making.

 

The progression path though is that sooner or later a larger and larger segment of the playerbase develops god characters. 

 

And a larger and larger segment finds the game too easy.   

 

And eventually boredom trumps nostalgia and ... 

[Sovera]

I have two things to add.

 

Players who feel useless should consider making their own teams. Advertise them as such and only those who care about it will join. And we have enough players that such people -will- join.

 

'Recruiting a small team (2-3) to do X TF at max difficulty.'

 

It's not perfect but duoing TFs has been a breath of fresh air for me

 

 

The second thing is what I have mentioned a couple pages back: the premise is flawed. We face the same enemies we find in the streets than we do in a eight man team. Does it not make sense that if a player solos the enemies they find in the streets then multiplied by eight the same enemies in a mission will melt like wax? It is not sustainable to have a spawn of ten enemies be five minions, three or four lieutenants and one boss. Even without nukes, even without incarnates, the minions die immediately. Now we have eight players VS five mobs. How do we turn this challenging? The foundation is shaky.

 

@Lineamade it work by exquisite enemy composition and even so by their own words (and my own experiences running it with Linea) 'one or two will die per run'. Imagine the hardest content in the game currently being the 801 AE missions and even it barely kills people!

 

(Linea could make it even harder, mind, but this is the exquisite composition I mentioned above: not suicidal, not too easy. Perfect. If there was but one thing that we could do for the game's health then I would heartily say to recruit Linea into revamping every faction's enemy NPCs)

 

 

We can say power creep. I say sandy foundation: we kill half the group in the first seconds and even the 801 series is manageable afterwards.

 

There is a reason the all boss ambush at the top of the hill in ITF is a common party wipe. That the climb in the second mission of the ITF with the constant ambushes tends to kill a few players in a team each time: there are so many enemies coming we are unable to quickly kill half a pack and face only five.

Edited September 27, 2020 by Sovera

[Wavicle]

Level 45-49 EXd Incarnates should only have access to the Alpha Slot.

Level 50 Incarnates IN NON-INCARNATE CONTENT (such as PI Radios or ITF) get access to Alpha, Judgement, and Interface but NOT Lore, Destiny, or Hybrid.

AE arcs get a switch the author can move to enable or disable each tier of Incarnate abilities within their creations.

Incarnate content (including all DA content, Number Six, Belladonna, Sister Solaris, Apex/Tin Mage, and iTrials) stay as they are now.

That is my proposal.

Edited September 27, 2020 by Wavicle

[Wavicle]

I'm not sure about the Hamidon raid...maybe the Hive leaves all the switches on...

I guess street sweeping (Hami, MSR, zone events) in general should leave all the switches on.

Edited September 27, 2020 by Wavicle

[ShardWarrior]

6 hours ago, golstat2003 said:

For reasons already stated in this thread balancing the game around IOs isn't realistic.

 

Higher level content sure, a full on rebalance of the game around IOs . . . you wouldn't see any new content or anything else till 2060.

I never said rebalance the entire game around IOs, only new level 50+ content.

[Lockpick]

4 hours ago, Haijinx said:

This is just the "Great Silent Majority" Argument writ MMO.  

 

And to be honest it is a fallacy whether or not you intended at such.  Its the my side is right because the masses agree with me argument.  Appeal to Popularity I think is the technical bit.  

 

To be honest, I have no idea of the percentages of people that think the game is fine as is, who think it is to easy, or who think it is to hard.  I have no clue if the majority agree with me.  I suspect that there is no majority leaning in one direction and that all the players are split across several opinions.  That is why I suggested doing some data analysis on certain data sets.

 

My suspicion is that the people that think the game is to easy are the power gamers.  These people plan out build (which you do quite a bit), spend the inf to get billion inf builds, and then incarnate to T4.  I do this as well.  For all I know, the vast majority of our player base are power gamers and the existing player base are vets from Live, so they have the knowledge and enthusiasm to make these builds.  This could be the case, but I doubt it.  And even if it is you are still have some of these power gamers (like me) that think the balance is fine. 

 

The Live devs added IOs, IO sets, and incarnates with the intention of building harder content, which would have likely solved all the concerns about the game being to easy.  They are no longer here, so that means we either have to rely on the small volunteer HC team to solve our concerns or take matters into our own hands with the tools we have available.

 

6 hours ago, ABlueThingy said:

Now, in a Post-IO and Post-Incarnate world?  Most power set combos can solo most TFs.  Even that Mind/Emp can get surprisingly far.  The power difference is staggering.  The potential power an individual can get has increased many fold from the old days.

 

Exactly.  And the Devs planned to address this with new content, not mass AT and power set balancing.

 

8 hours ago, Ralathar44 said:

I think there has been enough discussion and different opinions to show pretty clearly that the current status quo is not ideal to a great amount of players and indeed this thread itself pretty directly states it's not ideal to the devs either.

 

I am not sure you can make that conclusion from this thread.  From this thread I see a few of the same people arguing that the game is to easy and I see a few people saying that the game as fine as is and you can use the existing mechanics to make the game harder.  From a dev perspective I will just say that just because they are devs doesn't make them right or make their plan reasonable.  I would suspect looking at the idea of fixing AE and doing the community outreach around it to drive significance new content has not been looked at by the devs in the details I have mentioned previously. 

 

Remember the complaint here is that the game content is to easy.  Again, I suspect these complainers are power gamers and no one has suggested otherwise.  Therefore, it seems to me that we need to create harder content to address the characters that have invested in power gamer builds (as the Live devs intended).

 

You tell me which is more reasonable and provides more benefit:

• Spending your time balancing ATs, IOs, IO sets, proces, incarnates, etc. with all the various testing that will be required or
• Spending your time making adjustments to drive more player developed content that can address the need for players to have Hard Mode content, which has the added benefit of exponentially creating new types of content for all players

To me the answer is clearly the 2nd answer and I mentioned the benefits in a separate post.  If you focus on balancing it will take forever and will likely lead to some ATs and sets over performing (see Tanker changes). 

[Wavicle]

9 minutes ago, Lockpick said:

 the Devs planned to address this with new content, not mass AT and power set balancing.

They were doing both. That’s why Ranged attackers generally and Blasters specifically got so many buffs in i24.

[macskull]

3 hours ago, Wavicle said:

Level 45-49 EXd Incarnates should only have access to the Alpha Slot.

Level 50 Incarnates IN NON-INCARNATE CONTENT (such as PI Radios or ITF) get access to Alpha, Judgement, and Interface but NOT Lore, Destiny, or Hybrid.

AE arcs get a switch the author can move to enable or disable each tier of Incarnate abilities within their creations.

Incarnate content (including all DA content, Number Six, Belladonna, Sister Solaris, Apex/Tin Mage, and iTrials) stay as they are now.

That is my proposal.

I feel like Judgement is a much bigger offender in the "everything dies too fast" department than Destiny or Hybrid.

[Wavicle]

2 minutes ago, macskull said:

I feel like Judgement is a much bigger offender in the "everything dies too fast" department than Destiny or Hybrid.

Yes, but this is only part of the fix. You can also introduce an all Bosses and EBs mode.

[skoryy]

10 hours ago, Giovanni Valia said:

1111 replies to this thread in the past 6 days. Geez

46 pages of the same people arguing the same things over and over.

[FoulVileTerror]

Well now, more like 39.  At least 10% of the posts here are from others' perspectives.

[shrikefire]

31 minutes ago, Wavicle said:

Yes, but this is only part of the fix. You can also introduce an all Bosses and EBs mode.

Why not also an only AV and EB mode? I'm not really kidding.

[ShardWarrior]

8 hours ago, ABlueThingy said:

There is no amount of social engineering that will counter the structural inequalities built into the mechanics of the game.  Specifically the ones I presented.  I've told you the challenge I'm looking for. And explained how I can't get it.  Because it's not an option. None of the content presented fixes the issue I'm talking about.

 

To be blunt, stop assuming I lack the ability or willingness.  The system is broken.

You are lacking the willingness because this simply is not true.  Roll a toon on Torchbearer and join the channel I mentioned.  You will be able to find the challenge you are looking for and then some.  Post a request there that you are looking to find a challenge and I am sure you will find others to help you. 

8 hours ago, ABlueThingy said:

But-- this is an important one now. Pre-IO, until the Envenomed Dagger and the Chemical Warhead, only a handfull of builds could solo the hardest content and it required a great deal of effort.  That's WHY people posted screenshots.  It was a challenge, it was hard.  There were some builds you could never do it on.  The math just wouldn't allow it.  Like that Mind/Emp I proposed.  No -regen, no -res, purple triangles, almost no damage.  They couldn't solo an AV.

 

Now, in a Post-IO and Post-Incarnate world?  Most power set combos can solo most TFs.  Even that Mind/Emp can get surprisingly far.  The power difference is staggering.  The potential power an individual can get has increased many fold from the old days.

Yes, it was a challenge.  It still is.  That was not the point.  You keep alluding to this mythical golden age of CoH where scrappers and tanks could not solo GMS or where Empathy was never totally outshined by Kinetics in the late game.  This was never the case even before IOs.  Players were always able to achieve the levels of power they can today, most chose not to due to the price of admission.  Those that did are not much different today.  Why would you be expecting to easily solo and AV on a low damage AT intended for support even today?

8 hours ago, ABlueThingy said:

I am not. I was making a point. A bit further beyond the part you quoted actually, the next line.  If you want to do something that invalidates AoE damage so much that pure AoE + softcap is no longer the meta build, which opening up the meta to more build types would do... you have nerfed AoE damage and building for the soft cap.

 

If we're going to nerf AoE damage then why don't we... just... nerf AoE damage.  Frankly I'm not even saying we should specifically nerf AoE damage, there's a lot of things to take into account here.  But if, *IF* AoE damage is the issue... why build some kind of Rube Golbergian mechanics to nerf it... just... nerf it.

You must not do many Hamidon raids.  The Mitos required a coordinated effort and each AT has something to contribute.  Ranged ATs are not going to clear Yellow Mitos faster than melee because that is how the Mitos are specifically designed.  New villain factions and new content can be created with similar concepts in mind.  No nerfs to AoE that impact the entire game from 1 to 50, just being creative and imaginative to raise the ceiling that people have been hitting since the game was live. 

[RageusQuitus2]

On 9/25/2020 at 5:56 PM, ScarySai said:

I know the Tar Patch and Rage nerfs were stupid overkill, but real talk: There's nothing to suggest they are going to massively overhaul how TW plays, all we know is that it's performance is going to take a hit, so let's at least put the pitchforks down until the appropriate time.

I cant seem to find anything regarding these nerfs ie, when and patch notes????  Just curious as I have a dark/ice defender and elec/ss tanker.

[Darkneblade]

13 minutes ago, RageusQuitus2 said:

I cant seem to find anything regarding these nerfs ie, when and patch notes????  Just curious as I have a dark/ice defender and elec/ss tanker.

Basically Tar Patch now does -%22.5 Resistance on non-defenders. And Twilight Grasp heals less on non-defenders and Fade now can't be affected by powerboost. Fade interaction with powerboost was a bug though so it is okay.

Edited September 27, 2020 by Darkneblade

[macskull]

11 minutes ago, RageusQuitus2 said:

I cant seem to find anything regarding these nerfs ie, when and patch notes????  Just curious as I have a dark/ice defender and elec/ss tanker.

So the Rage thing ("nerf via bugfix") happened after shutdown but before Homecoming launched - back on live if you stacked Rage you avoided the defense debuff but that was apparently a bug and the defense debuff is no longer something you can avoid. As I understand it the live dev team was aware of the bug but chose not to fix it while they decided how they were going to rework the Rage crash. The Tar Patch/Twilight Grasp nerfs happened with the Page 5 update - all ATs previously used the same pseudopet for these powers so the -res value on Tar Patch and the heal value on Twilight Grasp were the same across all ATs. These powers now obey AT modifiers which is a nerf for any AT that isn't a Defender.

[Ralathar44]

9 hours ago, golstat2003 said:

To be clear I'm fine with new difficulty options. I am not fine with making the base game harder. I've said this in various other suggestion threads over the past two years. I am fine with a buffs to some support sets that need it. I do not agree that Support classes needs as much extreme help as some in this thread are stating. I am also fine with nerfs where needed. I am not fine with extreme nerfs that make us "need" this or that. 8 random players should continue to be able to form up in any composition to get missions done. Especially radio missions. Needing more support sets in harder high level content is fine. (Radio missions of council are sure as s%$# not high level content lol).

 

A re-balance around IOs isn't happening, we don't currently have the dev manpower for that. And I for one think it's better to spend dev time on new content, power-sets, new tfs, new iTrials, new incarnate powers, new costumes then wasting time on an IO balance that could take years to decades due to the side of the current team.

 

Let's keep our expectations realistic. This isn't paragon studios from live.

 

There I think I have a good summary of my position. Carry on. LOL

I don't think you can just make new difficulty options for the same reason you can't re balance IOs.  Too much time investment, too many people left behind, and essentially fractures a playerbase that's already spread thin.  It's a huge  amount of work for little return.

- You can't just scale up the current system, purple patch is already eating into alot of classes like MMs and +5/+6 is not viable as a balanced difficulty since we're talking debuff/control getting 30%/15% of the original value.
- If you scale the new difficulties to challenge the defense softcap then you basically screw over anyone who didn't softcap. 
- Same thing with to-hit.  You can't just scale the difficulty to all the set bonus levels of accuracy because anyone that doesn't have that is completely screwed.  It'd just force people to bring leadership onto the team and it's already over-prevalent. 
- How do you balance out the risk reward of the new content vs the current +4/8 if it's actually challenging with assumedly more deaths and less kill speed?
- This is a horrible state of game balance mentality to be stuck in, if no significant nerfs are acceptable and only buffs are acceptable then it's only a matter of time until your game goes off the rails or becomes stagnant.  Even adding new content will not help hardly because the new content will have to follow the previous difficulty for the reasons already mentioned and thus after an initial spate of novelty it'll either become the new farmed content or we'll just go back to the previously farmed content within like 2 weeks to a month.  We have a crapton of great content in this game people already never touch.

- After all this work if you actually made it challenging a significant amount of people who currently run content at +4/8 would still never touch it and 90%+ of teams would still be focused around.  It's clear that some folks want to scale to a point there they are never threatened by content again.  There was alot of talk earlier in the thread about people wanting to feel like a god and if we didn't to find another team.  If that's them being genuine they are not going for the new content.  Genie is out of the bottle. so long as +4/8 is super easily rolled and lucrative people are not going to stop doing it for the same reason people are not going to stop rolling fiery aura brutes and choosing fire farms.  And just like AE farmers influence the market and availability of team mates as they farm and powerlevel people so too will folks rolling easy content.  Finding teams for the new higher difficulties levels would be difficult and only the most dedicated players would do it.

Edited September 27, 2020 by Ralathar44

[Ralathar44]

3 hours ago, Lockpick said:

My suspicion is that the people that think the game is to easy are the power gamers.  These people plan out build (which you do quite a bit), spend the inf to get billion inf builds, and then incarnate to T4.  I do this as well.  For all I know, the vast majority of our player base are power gamers and the existing player base are vets from Live, so they have the knowledge and enthusiasm to make these builds.  This could be the case, but I doubt it.  And even if it is you are still have some of these power gamers (like me) that think the balance is fine. 

Your suspicion is wrong.  I build seat of the pants and the game is still a cake walk.  I'm an experienced MMORPG veteran across much harder games than COH, but HC COH is really easy even by COH standards because of the IO availability difference and the prevalence of leadership in teams (primarily there are other reasons too ofc).  It's a cakewalk even on my stone/regen brute who is not pursuing +def in his sets.  He focused on +regen in set bonuses and resists.  He's not optimized by any means, he's still got alot of frankenslotting, he doesn't even have great set bonuses currently and no ultimate set bonuses, no set +recharge to speak of, regen is one of the weaker defense sets, and he just barely started to get incarnate abilities.  I can solo +2/8 and I can tank +4/8 for teams and I've got a huge amount more power to gain still.  Heck on most level 50 teams enemies are dead by the time they are done bouncing from Fault + Tremor.

Now I'm getting incarnate levels on him and slowly replacing weaker set bonuses with better ones and i'm sure he'll be able to solo +4/8 by the time it's done.  My brutes/tanks/scrappers using more powerful armor sets would already be completely untouchable at this point.

Edited September 27, 2020 by Ralathar44

[ABlueThingy]

1 hour ago, ShardWarrior said:

You are lacking the willingness because this simply is not true.  Roll a toon on Torchbearer and join the channel I mentioned.  You will be able to find the challenge you are looking for and then some.  Post a request there that you are looking to find a challenge and I am sure you will find others to help you. 

You say this like I haven't tried.  Like I haven't crunched the numbers.  Like I haven't run dozens of both AH runs and ITFs to iterate multiple times on my builds to make them work.  I cannot get my build to meaningfully change the clear times of a team that is equally geared and skilled.  I bring nothing.  I make no one safer, I make no one faster.

 

X is so far over Y that nothing I do makes any change to it. I've actually checked, 7 manning a TF with a full team of well built and well played characters finishes with an average clear time of roughly the same, paper missions are even worse.  Varied by tens of seconds.  Literally within the margin of error.  I make no more difference then random chance on that build. The mechanics of the game don't allow it.  Mind you, I have a Fire/Ice blaster that can shave off a good 30-60 seconds from that same team.

 

I could make my teammates worse? I could find people who are bad at the game and baby sit them?  But that's not what I'm asking for.  You keep glossing over the specifics of what I'm saying and just tell me to find people who will help with the challenge.  But you won't say how. 

 

How would a any team playing at maximum capacity, in the end game, experience mechanical value from a fully built maxed out (in this example) Mind/Emp that couldn't be improved by the same player switching to a meta build?

 

1 hour ago, ShardWarrior said:

 

Yes, it was a challenge.  It still is.  That was not the point.  You keep alluding to this mythical golden age of CoH where scrappers and tanks could not solo GMS or where Empathy was never totally outshined by Kinetics in the late game.  This was never the case even before IOs.  Players were always able to achieve the levels of power they can today, most chose not to due to the price of admission.  Those that did are not much different today.  Why would you be expecting to easily solo and AV on a low damage AT intended for support even today?

Yes there was a time when not every scrapper could solo AVs, which is what I said.  Post ED?  No, most of them couldn't.  Most Tanks and many scrappers couldn't generate the damage needed to overwhelm a GM's regen.  Sets like Claws, Mace, Katana.  And many defensive sets couldn't keep you alive. Before their later changes they couldn't compete.  Remember, -regen was a very rare debuff in the early game.  Until Warburg and the Envenomed Dagger temp.

 

Yes, Empathy always was crap though. Relative to kin specifically.  Even if people didn't understand it in the early stages of the game. (lots of people thought you needed a healer... you didn't)

 

If you think players in the old days could achieve the same levels of power they can now, prove it.  Show me a Stone/Mace tank using only SOs and HOs that can preform the same stunts a fully Incarnate and IO'd Stone/Mace can do.  I bet you only one of them can come close to fighting GMs.  If that's too much a challenge how about an MA/SR.

 

At some point you have to bow down to the math.  This is a video game, a program based on code and hard numbers and mechanics. Some people may have "Felt" they could be just as powerful in the old days.  But anyone who thought that is wrong.  The math doesn't care about your feelings.

 

 

1 hour ago, ShardWarrior said:

 

You must not do many Hamidon raids.  The Mitos required a coordinated effort and each AT has something to contribute.  Ranged ATs are not going to clear Yellow Mitos faster than melee because that is how the Mitos are specifically designed.  New villain factions and new content can be created with similar concepts in mind.  No nerfs to AoE that impact the entire game from 1 to 50, just being creative and imaginative to raise the ceiling that people have been hitting since the game was live. 

I'm from Victory, I've done more Hami raids then I can count. Please stop assuming what I have and have not done or know.  Just because I came to a different conclusion doesn't mean I'm lacking information.

 

If you will recall they had to nerf hami raids back down to 50 people because people could just completely overwhelm the mechanics of the raid with the level of power people can put out now.  I believe they are actually going to try a pure Tanker Hami raid here soon, love to see how that's going to turn out.  I expect they'll win.  That was not possible pre-IO.  It's always been a pure numbers game.  If the power creep continues we'll eventually have to restrict the Hami Raid even more because even just 50 will be able to overwhelm and zerg it.

 

My point being that all the creative and imaginative methods you can come up with can be undone by pure raw, overwhelming, numbers as long as players are allowed to reach them.  It always comes down to X>Y

 

 

[BitCook]

10 hours ago, golstat2003 said:

The game was never balanced in how it handled ATs. You're looking at it with rose colored glasses. There have been certain points where dominators, controllers and blasters were terrible to play. And the devs had always had to make changes to fix it.

 

There was never this good ol'd days nerva of balance that folks keep referring to. It never existed as COH has never been all that balanced in the majority of it's time.

I have played since around i3.  

If you have, then we will have to disagree in our assessment.  I would agree that the game has never been "balanced" in that every AT brings the same amount of power.  However, where the game was balanced was that you could play content with any 8 ATs and make it through.  However, since the power creep was not where it is today, every AT brought something valuable to nearly every mission.  I don't feel that is the case anymore.

I have several posts where I talked about how the relative value of support goes down as kill speed increases.  Controls are devalued by the same as well as the increase in player survivability.  As individual power goes up, team related benefits, buff/debuff/aggro/controls become relatively less valuable as the threat and damage that mobs can put out has remained static.  .

With that said, that is something I think the game currently misses.  Sure, no one's turning you away because you're a controller.  Because the game is at the point where not only can any 8 characters do any content, but any eight characters will likely crush any content.  There's a subtle distinction in being able to do anything and be able to steamroller anything.  In the first case, all ATs have more relative value because the team kill speed requires more damage/debuffs/aggro/control/support/whatever.  When the game gets to where 1-2 players can solo the hardest content, then nothing really matters beyond the 1-2 players who can do so.  However, it disproportionately affects support players and those that rely on team mechanics as the core of their AT because they by nature do not have the kill speed of many of the overtuned ATs. 

So they are not contributing to the kill speed in a significant manner with their abilities, and the don't have the kill speed on their own to compensate.  It's just bad design and bad balance.

No, the game was not perfect in live.  However, I do think that from IOs to about i22 the game enjoyed a rare spot that most MMOs don't.  ATs weren't balanced, but they all had a needed and useful role.

[ShardWarrior]

18 minutes ago, BitCook said:

If you have, then we will have to disagree in our assessment.  I would agree that the game has never been "balanced" in that every AT brings the same amount of power.  However, where the game was balanced was that you could play content with any 8 ATs and make it through.  However, since the power creep was not where it is today, every AT brought something valuable to nearly every mission.  I don't feel that is the case anymore.

"Valuable" is entirely subjective.  The game always had sets that were not as "valuable" or "desirable" for team content as others.  Always.  To say otherwise is spreading misinformation.

[Ralathar44]

Technically all ATs/powersets are still useful or "valuable".  OFC technically A scrapper with only Air Superiority, Jump Kick, and Flurry is still useful or "valuable".  Realistically we'd all know that they would contribte very little relative to the average scrapper ofc and that's the problem alot of sets find themselves in.  They contribute, but the amount of their contribution is pretty token.  This includes Trick Arrow.   I don't actually thingk Trick Arrow needs significant help (maybe not any) because I don't think it has a powerset issue.  I feel like the set performs pretty well on all content +3/8 or lower, +4/8 cutting it's debuffs enough to make them token values (48% and 30% of original values respectively.).  40% -res gets cut down to as small as 25% -res in +3/8.  So assuming you captured a full blaster rotation and you had 4 blasters you're doing a blaster's worth of damage.

Ofc mobs wont survive that and it's 20% AOE and 20% -res stacking onto a single target (or small cluster) but it's for illustrative purposes! .  That's significant and worth you not being on a blaster yourself.  Even though you wont hit that full potential most of the time the potential is theoretically there so combined with your other debuffs it's effective.

But you get to +4/8 and you're facing +4/+5 level enemies and the debuff goes down to 19.2% and 12%.  So your max theoretical pull from 4 blasters (which again mobs will not survive a full rotation from) is theoretically as up to 48%-76.8% of a blaster's damage.  So we're already down to the point to where, if mobs survived long enough, you'd be better to just bring another blaster as far as damage goes.  But that's ok, it's not all about damage right!  We have survivability debuffs.  Oh, they also get murdered by the purple patch and oh nobody needs them anyways because nobody dies.  But that's ok we have weak blasts ourselves, we can make up that damage differntial.  Oh, mobs are killed so fast your disruption arrow is only up every other mob group and Oil Slick Arrow is only up every 4-6 mob groups.

Well #@$@.

Edited September 27, 2020 by Ralathar44

[RageusQuitus2]

1 hour ago, macskull said:

So the Rage thing ("nerf via bugfix") happened after shutdown but before Homecoming launched - back on live if you stacked Rage you avoided the defense debuff but that was apparently a bug and the defense debuff is no longer something you can avoid. As I understand it the live dev team was aware of the bug but chose not to fix it while they decided how they were going to rework the Rage crash. The Tar Patch/Twilight Grasp nerfs happened with the Page 5 update - all ATs previously used the same pseudopet for these powers so the -res value on Tar Patch and the heal value on Twilight Grasp were the same across all ATs. These powers now obey AT modifiers which is a nerf for any AT that isn't a Defender.

I think it was the unresisted damage that I was thinking about.  A few months back (but after the patch you mention) dark was banned from certain TF competitions because of this iirc.  Thats why when I heard about a dark patch, and then saw the date I was confused. 

[ABlueThingy]

18 minutes ago, BitCook said:

I have played since around i3.  

If you have, then we will have to disagree in our assessment.  I would agree that the game has never been "balanced" in that every AT brings the same amount of power.  However, where the game was balanced was that you could play content with any 8 ATs and make it through.  However, since the power creep was not where it is today, every AT brought something valuable to nearly every mission.  I don't feel that is the case anymore.

I have several posts where I talked about how the relative value of support goes down as kill speed increases.  Controls are devalued by the same as well as the increase in player survivability.  As individual power goes up, team related benefits, buff/debuff/aggro/controls become relatively less valuable as the threat and damage that mobs can put out has remained static.  .

With that said, that is something I think the game currently misses.  Sure, no one's turning you away because you're a controller.  Because the game is at the point where not only can any 8 characters do any content, but any eight characters will likely crush any content.  There's a subtle distinction in being able to do anything and be able to steamroller anything.  In the first case, all ATs have more relative value because the team kill speed requires more damage/debuffs/aggro/control/support/whatever.  When the game gets to where 1-2 players can solo the hardest content, then nothing really matters beyond the 1-2 players who can do so.  However, it disproportionately affects support players and those that rely on team mechanics as the core of their AT because they by nature do not have the kill speed of many of the overtuned ATs. 

So they are not contributing to the kill speed in a significant manner with their abilities, and the don't have the kill speed on their own to compensate.  It's just bad design and bad balance.

No, the game was not perfect in live.  However, I do think that from IOs to about i22 the game enjoyed a rare spot that most MMOs don't.  ATs weren't balanced, but they all had a needed and useful role.

 

I agree 100%

 

It seems the Devs do as well.  They appear to be looking to nail down an "Average" and then balance everything off that average.

 

If you nail down an average damage and average speed then you can decide to make one set extra strong but also extra slow.  Without making it too strong or too weak.   All the sets can be balanced against one another.  One control set does more damage while another has stronger holds.

 

Get everything to that fuzzy balance where nothing is 100% equal but there are trade-offs and exchanges and on the whole everyone can equally contribute to a team.

 

By the same token, IOs need to be combed over and every build needs to be given options to increase their power.

 

 

4 minutes ago, Ralathar44 said:

Technically all ATs/powersets are still useful.  OFC technically A scrapper with only Air Superiority, Jump Kick, and Flurry is still useful.  Realistically we'd all know that they would contribte very little relative to the average scrapper ofc and that's the problem alot of sets find themselves in.  They contribute, but the amount of their contribution is pretty token.  This includes Trick Arrow.   I don't actually thingk Trick Arrow needs significant help, I feel like the set performs pretty well on all content +3/8 or lower, +4/8 cutting it's debuffs enough to make them token values (48% and 30% of original values respectively.).  40% -res gets cut down to as small as 25% -res in +3/8.  So assuming you captured a full blaster rotation and you had 4 blasters you're doing a blaster's worth of damage.

Ofc mobs wont survive that and it's 20% AOE and 20% stacking onto a single target (or small cluster) but it's for illustrative purposes! .  That's significant and worth you not being on a blaster yourself combined.  Even though you wont hit that full potential most of the time the potential is theoretically there so combined with your other debuffs it's effective.

But you get to +4/8 and you're facing +4/+5 level enemies and the debuff goes down to 19.2% and 12%.  So your max theoretical pull from 4 blasters (which again mobs will not survive a full rotation from) is theoretically as up to 48%-76.8% of a blaster's damage.  So we're already down to the point to where, if mobs survived long enough, you'd be better to just bring another blaster as far as damage goes.  But that's ok, it's not all about damage right!  We have survivability debuffs.  Oh, they also get murdered by the purple patch and oh nobody needs them anyways because nobody dies.  But that's ok we have weak blasts ourselves, we can make up that damage differntial.  Oh, mobs are killed so fast your disruption arrow is only up every other mob group and Oil Slick Arrow is only up every 4-6 mob groups.

Well #@$@.

 

Yeah, it's not that there are NO situations where Powerset Z or R can help.  It's not that, say, a TA/Elec Def is useless in all situations.  It's just that they fall off in usefulness as you get into the end game through no fault of their own.  And that's a mechanical failing that can only be fixed by the Devs adjusting things.

 

 

[BitCook]

22 minutes ago, ShardWarrior said:

"Valuable" is entirely subjective.  The game always had sets that were not as "valuable" or "desirable" for team content as others.  Always.  To say otherwise is spreading misinformation.

No one is spreading misinformation although lots of people are giving their opinions without bothering to give anything more than "I say so".

Please stick to arguing things that people actually ARE saying.  I agree the game was not balanced between ATs even then, but I do believe that the roles for each AT were better defined and more useful than now.  Each AT usually brought something needed and useful to a group and usually increased team killspeed, whether that was another Blaster, a Controller, or a Defender.  Sure, it was in different proportions because there are a lot of variables but now, that is not necessarily the case.

I should edit myself and say "Most people are not spreading misinformation" this has been a long thread and there have been some doozies.

Edited September 27, 2020 by BitCook