Why I think Corruptors are taking a back seat to Defenders

[Solarverse]

13 minutes ago, skoryy said:

Scourge just needs improvement somewhere to give corrs a boost when dealing with non-AV/GM.

First let me say, that I am soooo glad that my interpretation of the base damage between Corruptors and Defenders was wrong. I am very pleased that the community showed me that I was wrong instead of just going with what I had believed to be true.

Having said that, I still feel their damage output is not enough. I feel Scourge outside of AV and GM fights is near useless and should scale all the way from 100% health with having a 5% chance to scourge, all the way down to 10% health with the 100% chance to scourge. I think that would make a big enough difference to bring them where they should have always been. And this is coming from somebody who hates buffing sets in game because I find the game already overly easy. However, I also believe in class balance.

Also, I believe a Defender should have the same base damage values as a Corruptor, only no scourge. I think if scourge were to be implemented as stated here, that alone would set Corruptor's damage output far above a Defender's even if a Defender's damage were buffed to match the base damage of a Corruptor.

[Glacier Peak]

1 hour ago, Solarverse said:

First let me say, that I am soooo glad that my interpretation of the base damage between Corruptors and Defenders was wrong. I am very pleased that the community showed me that I was wrong instead of just going with what I had believed to be true.

Having said that, I still feel their damage output is not enough. I feel Scourge outside of AV and GM fights is near useless and should scale all the way from 100% health with having a 5% chance to scourge, all the way down to 10% health with the 100% chance to scourge. I think that would make a big enough difference to bring them where they should have always been. And this is coming from somebody who hates buffing sets in game because I find the game already overly easy. However, I also believe in class balance.

Also, I believe a Defender should have the same base damage values as a Corruptor, only no scourge. I think if scourge were to be implemented as stated here, that alone would set Corruptor's damage output far above a Defender's even if a Defender's damage were buffed to match the base damage of a Corruptor.

Scourge is a tricky inherent to compare though. The closest I can think is maybe the Stalker's inherent. Situationally dependent I mean. You need to have damaged an enemy to a certain degree before it becomes active, while every other AT can use their inherent passively given the appropriate context. If you aren't putting up enough damage, it is useless in my opinion as well.

[srmalloy]

14 hours ago, Riverdusk said:

Personally though I'd rather see corrupters get a bit of a boost, and the easiest one is to up the health point at where scourge kicks in as that is kind of their cool "thing".

Perhaps implementing something like the Blaster inherent, where your damage rises as you keep attacking, except that you get a boost to the 'scourge point' with repeated attacks.

[Luminara]

12 hours ago, kiramon said:

I think cor damage needs to get closer to blasters. Let’s go up

to 100

 

so it’s 

 

120 - blaster

100 - cor

80 - defender 

 

okay thx

 

Corruptors would still deal less than controller damage at least 50% of the time, and only have a chance to deal more damage the other 50%.  Additionally, when Scourge did kick in, corruptors would be dealing 2.0 scale damage, multiplied by whatever -Res debuffs they had active.  I don't have to reach for a calculator to be certain that there would be corruptor builds capable of dealing more damage than blasters.  That would be seriously problematic.  Setting aside the furor it would cause amongst blaster players (rightfully, because it would be horribly unbalanced), it would create massive extremes in damage output, fluctuating wildly between sub-controller and better-than-blaster.  In the end, the problem still wouldn't be fixed, just covered up by other problems.

 

As others have noted, the problem is in Scourge, not the base damage scales.  Corruptors simply don't have an inherent unless the enemy has less than 50% health.  When they are fighting enemies below 50% health, the inherent's value is too dependent on critter class.  It's worthless on anything below bosses.  Underlings, minions and lieutenants, even with + level modifiers, are too easy to defeat already, and Scourge is just over-kill the vast majority of the time.

 

Scourge needs the health scale restriction re-examined.  0% chance above 50% HP doesn't benefit the archetype at all, and 2% chance below 50% HP doesn't benefit the archetype where it needs it the most, against the most common foes.  A 1:1 Scourge chance to enemy health ratio would be better, less likely to divide the community and go a very long way toward improving corruptor damage output without making it so reliable that it begins overshadowing scrapper, brute and blaster damage.

[Omega-202]

2 hours ago, Luminara said:

A 1:1 Scourge chance to enemy health ratio would be better, less likely to divide the community and go a very long way toward improving corruptor damage output without making it so reliable that it begins overshadowing scrapper, brute and blaster damage.

Assuming "1:1" means a 1% chance at 99% health, 50% chance at 50% health, 99% chance at 1% health, etc., that would work out to an overall 50% boost to Corruptor damage, assuming no wasted Scourge opportunities.  Being that Scourge would be more prevalent, instead of being bottom heavy, there would be less Scourge waste.  That's compared to the theoretical 30% boost current Scourge gives (which gives them a theoretical 0.975 damage scale).  

 

So, that 50% boost would put Corruptors at an equivalent 1.125 scale damage (0.75 × 1.5 = 1.125), the same scale as Blasters.  I get the idea, but that seems like stepping on toes a bit, especially when there are sets like Kinetics that allow a Corruptor to permanently cruise at 500% damage cap, with a heal, an endurance drain and a bunch of  +recharge from 2x Siphon Speed, as well as a better shield modifier on Tough/Weave/APP armor.  Why play a Blaster at that point?  Hell, why even keep Sentinels as an option?  

 

I agree that something needs to be done to make Defenders and Corruptors more effective in the current 'MOAR DAMAGE' metagame, but we also don't want to just play see-saw with the game balance where they just invalidate Blasters.

[ShardWarrior]

4 minutes ago, Omega-202 said:

I agree that something needs to be done to make Defenders and Corruptors more effective in the current 'MOAR DAMAGE' metagame, but we also don't want to just play see-saw with the game balance where they just invalidate Blasters.

Keep in mind that Defenders and Corruptors are more than damage dealers.  Both are effective where debuffs are concerned.  Those debuffs can make a big difference in AV fights, especially in TFs like Kahn.  Reichsman can be a huge, long winded slog or not depending on what kind of debuffs your team has.

Edited October 6, 2020 by ShardWarrior

[Omega-202]

3 minutes ago, ShardWarrior said:

Keep in mind that Defenders and Corruptors are more than damage dealers.  Both are effective where debuffs are concerned.  Those debuffs can make a big difference in AV fights, especially in TFs like Kahn.  Reichsman can be a huge, long winded slog or not depending on what kind of debuffs your team has.

SOME Corruptors and Defenders are effective in that role.  Not all Corruptors and Defenders have -regen and/or -res.  And that's also part of the problem.  A Cold or Dark support will be a boon to a late game team, whereas a FF or Empathy might as well have a blank set a lot of the time.  

 

But even then, having at least one Reactive and Degenerative Interface on the team, a few P2W Daggers and 2 or 3 people cycling attacks with Achilles, Annihilation and Gladiator's Fury slotted (which a lot of well built endgame characters will have) can make the Defender/Corruptor less needed.  

[Luminara]

17 minutes ago, Omega-202 said:

Assuming "1:1" means a 1% chance at 99% health, 50% chance at 50% health, 99% chance at 1% health, etc., that would work out to an overall 50% boost to Corruptor damage, assuming no wasted Scourge opportunities.  Being that Scourge would be more prevalent, instead of being bottom heavy, there would be less Scourge waste.  That's compared to the theoretical 30% boost current Scourge gives (which gives them a theoretical 0.975 damage scale).  

 

So, that 50% boost would put Corruptors at an equivalent 1.125 scale damage (0.75 × 1.5 = 1.125), the same scale as Blasters.  I get the idea, but that seems like stepping on toes a bit, especially when there are sets like Kinetics that allow a Corruptor to permanently cruise at 500% damage cap, with a heal, an endurance drain and a bunch of  +recharge from 2x Siphon Speed, as well as a better shield modifier on Tough/Weave/APP armor.  Why play a Blaster at that point?  Hell, why even keep Sentinels as an option?  

 

I agree that something needs to be done to make Defenders and Corruptors more effective in the current 'MOAR DAMAGE' metagame, but we also don't want to just play see-saw with the game balance where they just invalidate Blasters.

 

I agree.  With every word.  But Scourge is where the problem starts, it has to be where the problem is addressed.  A better ratio would address that, but, as you note, it would also piss off blasters as much as an increase in the base damage would.  A flat crit value, independent of enemy health, would also improve it significantly, but then scrappers would be up in arms.  No change leaves corruptors with a crap inherent and no real self-definition.  More damage would help differentiate more fully them from defenders, at the very least.  Some kind of modification to the Scourge:health ratio would be a step in the right direction.  1:1 was a starting point.  0.5:1 scaling up to 1:1 after X% health.  0.75:1 scaling up to 1:1 after Y% health.  Etc.  Changing scale values is easy, so a bit of poking at the tables and testing would give a good balance point, and that 0.75 base damage mod would actually mean something in comparison to the defender 0.65, rather than simply be a footnote.

 

Personally, if I had a hand in making Scourge, or had license to revamp it, I'd redesign it from the ground up.  The effect would be to reverse or steal enemy buffs, more in keeping with the concept of the archetype, and where there were no buffs present, cause a PBAoE buff (centered on the corruptor) or an AoE debuff (centered on the target) of some kind (something like +/-Special, a MaxHP debuff, or even a flat +Damage if nothing else) centered on the corruptor.  This would make them more valuable on teams, allow them to perform better solo and give them a unique inherent which would always be useful, in any situation.

[Omega-202]

@Luminara I get where you're coming from and I am not opposed to a Scourge revamp or an inherent revamp as a whole, but I don't think that would be the most effective use of development time/resources.  All 4 of the Support set ATs need help fitting in the current meta, so we should start there instead of trying to fix each one individually in different ways.  

 

Personally, I would start with a revamp of the endgame bottom tier sets (FF, Empathy, Pain) and then look at animation times/general uptime QoL on the higher tier endgame sets (Storm, Dark, Radiation).  

 

In terms of differentiating Defenders and Corruptors, I don't really agree with the premise that one is out performing the other in a way that requires addressing ahead of fixing Support as a whole.  The fact is that there are sets and combos that Corruptors do better than Defenders (Ice and Water primary due to the rain+Scourge synergy, Kinetics and Dark secondaries) and sets that Defenders do better (Cold, Thermal, Time and Sonic Blast) is more than enough in my view.  Anyone saying that one AT is objectively ahead of the other is incorrect in my view.

[Luminara]

38 minutes ago, Omega-202 said:

All 4 of the Support set ATs need help fitting in the current meta, so we should start there instead of trying to fix each one individually in different ways.  

 

Personally, I would start with a revamp of the endgame bottom tier sets (FF, Empathy, Pain) and then look at animation times/general uptime QoL on the higher tier endgame sets (Storm, Dark, Radiation).

You can make a power or a set more popular in the meta, but you're making that power or set more popular for all of the archetypes.  You're nudging the meta, not really shifting it, because the archetype differences are still going to be there.  Players will still see corruptor numbers, defender numbers, and make threads like this.  The archetypes, as whole units, are what determine where they fit, or don't fit, in the meta.  If you want players to diversify and expand the meta, addressing the archetypes themselves is where to begin.  Addressing powers or sets will only make those powers or sets more popular on the same archetypes in the meta, not shift the meta to a more even distribution of archetypes.

[ShardWarrior]

2 hours ago, Omega-202 said:

SOME Corruptors and Defenders are effective in that role.  Not all Corruptors and Defenders have -regen and/or -res.  And that's also part of the problem.  A Cold or Dark support will be a boon to a late game team, whereas a FF or Empathy might as well have a blank set a lot of the time.  

Well sure, but that was not really the point of my post.  I was simply pointing out that damage is not the only metric to be concerned about.

[Rathulfr]

13 minutes ago, ShardWarrior said:

I was simply pointing out that damage is not the only metric to be concerned about.

 

Hey!  Speak for yourself, pal.  😆😁

 

Did I mention I play a Blaster?

 

[Omega-202]

13 minutes ago, Luminara said:

You can make a power or a set more popular in the meta, but you're making that power or set more popular for all of the archetypes.  You're nudging the meta, not really shifting it, because the archetype differences are still going to be there.  Players will still see corruptor numbers, defender numbers, and make threads like this.  The archetypes, as whole units, are what determine where they fit, or don't fit, in the meta.  If you want players to diversify and expand the meta, addressing the archetypes themselves is where to begin.  Addressing powers or sets will only make those powers or sets more popular on the same archetypes in the meta, not shift the meta to a more even distribution of archetypes.

I don't think you actually understood what I wrote, so let me clarify:

 

A) I disagree with the base premise that there is a major imbalance between the support ATs (or at least Corruptors and Defenders), both in practice and numerically, as noted in my previous post.  Having extensively played Defenders, Corruptors and Controllers the base complaint of this thread is factually incorrect.  

 

B) When you have 15 cars on the track, and 4 of the cars at the back of the pack have a flat tire, you fix the flat tire FIRST and then discuss suping up their engines.  Doing any other upgrades first before fixing the obvious flaw is backwards logic.  The Support sets are the flat tires.  And I think you're misunderstanding me.  ALL Support sets need a balance pass, thereby boosting all 4 ATs.  This wouldn't be picking and choosing individual sets, but some do need more help than others.  Then once they are all in a better spot, we can discuss how each AT should be better differentiated from one another. 

 

But boosting Corruptor Scourge damage first, and then eventually getting to the Support fix means you will break them in the other direction, or that Support sets wouldn't get tuned up to where they need to be, for fear of creating overpowered Support ATs.

 

Say we redo Scourge so that Corruptors do better damage, but short of Blasters.  Then what happens when Support sets get addressed and made endgame relevant?  All of a sudden Corruptors are outperforming Blasters with a better toolkit to boot.  

 

Just now, ShardWarrior said:

Well sure, but that was not really the point of my post.  I was simply pointing out that damage is not the only metric to be concerned about.

...Except your example of Kahn and Reichsman is all about damage, just indirectly.  The debuffs that are useful in Kahn are the ones that help you do and keep damage on Reichsman.  That fight isn't all that hard from a survival perspective, so I don't know what your point is.  

[Luminara]

46 minutes ago, Omega-202 said:

I don't think you actually understood what I wrote

 

I did.  We're looking at the same issue from opposite perspectives, with the same end goal.

 

47 minutes ago, Omega-202 said:

the base complaint of this thread is factually incorrect

 

Yes.  That was established on page 1.

 

47 minutes ago, Omega-202 said:

The Support sets are the flat tires.  And I think you're misunderstanding me.  ALL Support sets need a balance pass, thereby boosting all 4 ATs.  This wouldn't be picking and choosing individual sets, but some do need more help than others.  Then once they are all in a better spot, we can discuss how each AT should be better differentiated from one another.

 

That's where we're approaching from different sides.  I agree with your conclusion.  But I disagree on how to arrive at mutual goal.

 

If you improve sets before archetypes, you're creating restrictions on how you can improve, or alter, archetype attributes.  Let's say you buff the least popular sets.  Give them all greater utility, stronger buffs/debuffs, make them "meta worthy".  The underlying archetypal issues are still there, but since the sets are all performing well, you can't really address those issues in any meaningful way because that disrupts the work you did to balance the sets.  That leaves you with very few options.  You could nerf the sets for the archetypes you improve, but that's going to be poorly received.  You can leave the sets alone and let one or two support archetypes have overpowered aspects, but that puts you back to square one with the other two or three archetypes.  You can ignore the problems, like mastermind endurance costs, or Scourge, and tell the players to just deal with it.  Or you can try to wiggle the archetype problems, but without wiggling the sets, too, you don't have much room to make any changes.

 

If you address the archetypes first, then the sets, then you have fewer limitations on how you proceed.
 

1 hour ago, Omega-202 said:

Say we redo Scourge so that Corruptors do better damage, but short of Blasters.  Then what happens when Support sets get addressed and made endgame relevant?  All of a sudden Corruptors are outperforming Blasters with a better toolkit to boot.

 

Or you can address the sets so all of the support archetypes are performing better, but find that trying to do anything with Scourge ends up doing the same thing.  What you believe can happen, can happen any way the problem is approached.  It's always going to be a balancing act, regardless of which way you try to do it.

 

I'm simply saying that it's easier to balance if you work with the foundations before trying to do anything with the walls.  The archetypes are the foundations.  If the foundation isn't solid, you'll spend the rest of your life reinforcing and fixing the walls, and praying that the roof doesn't come down on top of you.  By addressing archetype issues first, you're giving yourself a lot more leeway in how and where you make changes to the sets and individual powers, without resorting to nerfs or being forced to leave a problem unaddressed.

 

And, again, I'm really not married to making Scourge into a blaster-stomping inherent.  I'd prefer something that leans more toward something like what I popped off of the top of my head earlier, something more... defendery, for lack of a better word.  Something that would emphasize what a corruptor is and does, without infringing on any other archetype's demesne.  More damage, for lack of anything other option, would at least be useful to and valued by players, but I think there are better options now that different people are looking at the mechanics.

[Vanden]

So help me understand. A crux of the issue people have is that Scourge isn't useful against minions or lieutenants. But minions and lieutenants are basically just trash mobs that evaporate in the face of a typical team anyway. So why is it a problem that the inherent doesn't really help Corruptors kill them even faster?

[Omega-202]

14 minutes ago, Vanden said:

So help me understand. A crux of the issue people have is that Scourge isn't useful against minions or lieutenants. But minions and lieutenants are basically just trash mobs that evaporate in the face of a typical team anyway. So why is it a problem that the inherent doesn't really help Corruptors kill them even faster?

I'm with you.  I don't get the complaint there.

[kiramon]

8 hours ago, Luminara said:

 

Corruptors would still deal less than controller damage at least 50% of the time, and only have a chance to deal more damage the other 50%.  Additionally, when Scourge did kick in, corruptors would be dealing 2.0 scale damage, multiplied by whatever -Res debuffs they had active.  I don't have to reach for a calculator to be certain that there would be corruptor builds capable of dealing more damage than blasters.  That would be seriously problematic.  Setting aside the furor it would cause amongst blaster players (rightfully, because it would be horribly unbalanced), it would create massive extremes in damage output, fluctuating wildly between sub-controller and better-than-blaster.  In the end, the problem still wouldn't be fixed, just covered up by other problems.

 

As others have noted, the problem is in Scourge, not the base damage scales.  Corruptors simply don't have an inherent unless the enemy has less than 50% health.  When they are fighting enemies below 50% health, the inherent's value is too dependent on critter class.  It's worthless on anything below bosses.  Underlings, minions and lieutenants, even with + level modifiers, are too easy to defeat already, and Scourge is just over-kill the vast majority of the time.

 

Scourge needs the health scale restriction re-examined.  0% chance above 50% HP doesn't benefit the archetype at all, and 2% chance below 50% HP doesn't benefit the archetype where it needs it the most, against the most common foes.  A 1:1 Scourge chance to enemy health ratio would be better, less likely to divide the community and go a very long way toward improving corruptor damage output without making it so reliable that it begins overshadowing scrapper, brute and blaster damage.

That number was with scourge. Anyways, nobody says that a corruptor using full -resist debuff + hitting enemy below 50% should do less than an unbuffed blaster vs non debuffed enemies... 

[Luminara]

31 minutes ago, Vanden said:

So help me understand. A crux of the issue people have is that Scourge isn't useful against minions or lieutenants. But minions and lieutenants are basically just trash mobs that evaporate in the face of a typical team anyway. So why is it a problem that the inherent doesn't really help Corruptors kill them even faster?

 

As I said earlier, effectively, corruptors don't have an inherent unless a target is below 50% health.  Lieutenants and below emphasize the visibility of this, but the issue isn't that the inherent isn't useful on "trash mobs", rather than it's too limited in general.  Fury or Domination aren't restricted to only building up when attacking certain critter classes, or critters below an arbitrary stat threshold, to make an example.  Cosmic Balance or the endurance reduction of Vigilance require the player to be part of a team, but that's still a less stringent conditional requirement than Scourge's conditional restriction.

 

An inherent which can only be leveraged when using the slowest method of combat (DoTs), or on low health hard targets, isn't broadly applicable and useful in the same way all of the other inherents are.  It needs to do more for the player, rather than making the player work hard to get anything out of it.

[siolfir]

6 hours ago, Omega-202 said:

there are sets like Kinetics that allow a Corruptor to permanently cruise at 500% damage cap, with a heal, an endurance drain and a bunch of  +recharge from 2x Siphon Speed, as well as a better shield modifier on Tough/Weave/APP armor. 

There's a lot of animation time overhead to keep that 500% damage cap, stacked Siphon Speeds, and keep up with the heals - the Blaster is still probably going to do more damage over time just because their job isn't to maintain all of those buffs but just shoot things until they fall over. It's not like Kinetics is keeping those buffs up between spawns, they all require enemies. It's the same complaint you have about debuff sets being useless (wasted animation time when you could be killing) only on a buff set.

 

24 minutes ago, Luminara said:

An inherent which can only be leveraged when using the slowest method of combat (DoTs), or on low health hard targets, isn't broadly applicable and useful in the same way all of the other inherents are.  It needs to do more for the player, rather than making the player work hard to get anything out of it.

DoTs are bad for Scourge because it checks the hit points of the target at power activation, so following a DoT attack before it's done ticking off will have the target's health higher than another attack that hits all at once. If Scourge was checked on each tick of damage in DoTs then it would be more reliable using them, but as it is only Rain/patch powers are set up that way since they activate every 0.2 to 0.5 seconds.

[Luminara]

3 minutes ago, siolfir said:

Rain/patch powers

 

Are DoTs.  Damage over time.

[aethereal]

18 minutes ago, Luminara said:

 

Are DoTs.  Damage over time.

I mean, sort of.  They look like DoTs, but they're actually set up as pseudopets, and they actually are doing a separate power activation for each pulse of damage.  As opposed to other DoT powers (like say ball lightning), which actually only have one power effect and apply an actual DoT effect and check scourge only once.

[Solarverse]

11 hours ago, srmalloy said:

Perhaps implementing something like the Blaster inherent, where your damage rises as you keep attacking, except that you get a boost to the 'scourge point' with repeated attacks.

That's not actually a bad idea if implemented correctly.

[Solarverse]

4 hours ago, Vanden said:

So help me understand. A crux of the issue people have is that Scourge isn't useful against minions or lieutenants. But minions and lieutenants are basically just trash mobs that evaporate in the face of a typical team anyway. So why is it a problem that the inherent doesn't really help Corruptors kill them even faster?

They only die fast on teams. Solo on the other hand...

[Vanden]

23 minutes ago, Solarverse said:

They only die fast on teams. Solo on the other hand...

Solo they'll live long enough for Scourge to have a chance to kick in.

[Bill Z Bubba]

23 minutes ago, Solarverse said:

They only die fast on teams. Solo on the other hand...

Especially solo at high difficulty.