Brute's ATOs need a Revamp

[Infinitum]

Ok, since nobody else would, I will take the hit.

 

The Brute ATO while having great set bonuses has severely limited ATO procs when compared to the rest of the melee classes.

 

Please discuss options - suggestions or tell me I am wrong even.  😀

[PeregrineFalcon]

In my opinion they should replace the special bonuses from the Brute ATO's with the same exact bonuses the Tanker ATO's have.

 

So instead of bonues to Fury generation they'd have the same bonus to resistance and chance to absorb that the Tanker ATO's provide.

[Spaghetti Betty]

I have a few radical ideas.

 

Brute's Fury

-Increase damage bonus gained from Fury by 1%. Since Fury hovers around 90, this would equate to a 270% damage bonus. I personally don't see that as a game breaker.

 

Or

 

-Chance for Build Up. Obviously the PPM would have to be changed slightly for it to be viable. I just want Brutes to do moar damage.

 

Unrelenting Fury

-Chance for stacking +Recharge and +Run Speed. I'm the Juggernaut, b*tch!

 

 

It's always been my viewpoint that Brutes are the offensive cousins to Tanks and not "Tanks that do more damage". They can already be off-Tanks thanks to team buffs and higher caps and it should stay that way.

[Vanden]

I really like the endurance discount in the Unrelenting Fury proc. It's a big help.

[Snarky]

Have a stacking damage proc similar to the weird Kinetic Melee power set.  This would fit neatly into the classic “Brutes are most effective when in the midst of a big fight” theme.  While I like the idea of the Tanker bonuses (at least it is a real bonus instead of a shiz whizzle) I am not looking to horn into Tanks territory.  I wish the Devs would stop changing Tanks so that they are situationally better than Brutes (AoE fights).

 

Say I am negative, but I do not believe there will be a positive outcome for Brutes.  They were never envisioned to do what they did and every Dev team that has done anything with them since they came out as taken a large or small nerf bat to them.  Anyone sense a theme?

Edited September 7, 2022 by Snarky

[PeregrineFalcon]

1 minute ago, Snarky said:

Say I am negative, but I do not believe there will be a positive outcome for Brutes.  They were never envisioned to do what they did and every Dev team that has done anything with them since they came out as taken a large or small nerf bat to them.  Anyone sense a theme?

I don't think you're being negative, I think you're just stating the truth.

 

However, I think the problem is that the devs don't know what to do with Brutes. They know there's a problem but don't know how to fix it.

 

Tankers and Scrappers are easy, they both have defined roles. But what's the Brute's role? To be a tank or a melee DPS? Brutes were specifically designed to be a bit of both, so now that the AT's are no longer trapped on their respective sides the devs can either try to balance them on the razor's edge by making them a bit of both, but not better than the specific AT at either, or completely remake them with a different role altogether.

 

It's not an easy problem to solve.

[Infinitum]

Good stuff all around keep the discourse going.

[The_Warpact]

When you think of a brute what do you think of? I think Abomination, the Thing, Solomon Grundy, some raging unstoppable destroyer.

Damage, rage, fury, the keys to it all.

 

So take those ideas and run with it. Personally seeing a "Rage" type effect as a proc would be interesting, not a buildup per se.

 

So more ideas and I'll leave the numbers up to the nerds to figure out.

[Infinitum]

1 hour ago, Spaghetti Betty said:

Unrelenting Fury

-Chance for stacking +Recharge and +Run Speed. I'm the Juggernaut, b*tch!

 

Love this idea

[Infinitum]

My idea - I would tie both to the HP bar.

 

For one the lower your health gets the more def and res you get - pick the categories to make it balanced and sort out the specifics.

 

For the other the lower your health gets the more dmg you do.

 

That's like hulk get mad... Smash.

 

I do like the idea of bringing recharge and run speed in like @Spaghetti Betty mentioned - that is unique fresh and cool.

[Snarky]

2 hours ago, Infinitum said:

My idea - I would tie both to the HP bar.

 

For one the lower your health gets the more def and res you get - pick the categories to make it balanced and sort out the specifics.

 

For the other the lower your health gets the more dmg you do.

 

That's like hulk get mad... Smash.

 

I do like the idea of bringing recharge and run speed in like @Spaghetti Betty mentioned - that is unique fresh and cool.

This idea punishes certain armor types and rewards others.  Not on a good way either.  A tanky set like Invul will do even less damage and a Fore set that does the most damage will do more damage.  While dipping into Tank realm to do it.  Thumbs down.  Keep swinging

[Infinitum]

4 hours ago, Snarky said:

This idea punishes certain armor types and rewards others.  Not on a good way either.  A tanky set like Invul will do even less damage and a Fore set that does the most damage will do more damage.  While dipping into Tank realm to do it.  Thumbs down.  Keep swinging

 

But if you think about it deconstructed - that's the beauty of it - since Brutes can't directly reach tanker mitigation levels, they do have the cap to do so.  So in theory a brute pushing the envelope will always take more damage than a tanker until these procs kick in - and the strength of the set will not matter because say it's fiery aura - you already have more dmg capability than Invul so you can push that envelope faster because you will take more damage than an invul brute by design the result being you need to kill faster as a force of dmg being mitigation at that point.

 

The invul on the other hand would have more of a tanky approach and gradual curve towards the ramped up dmg and mitigation.  You also could drop a shield to allow an invul - or any set allow more dmg in - or even design your build in a way to target the sweet spot of balancing your health around hitting the increased dmg and survivability curve 

 

But either way the outcome is the same the brute matches tanker survivability at that point with increased damage to boot - it is organic based on which set you play which is the deconstructed beauty of it - all ending up at the same place.

 

Not trying to sell you on my idea either - just explaining how it would address the concern of brutes not matching tanker mitigation levels while also giving any brute unmatched dmg output but at a price for both so it would be balanced - kinda like how SR works with it's scaling res which is where my idea stemmed from.

[Rudra]

2 minutes ago, Infinitum said:

The invul on the other hand would have more of a tanky approach and gradual curve towards the ramped up dmg and mitigation.  You also could drop a shield to allow an invul - or any set allow more dmg in - or even design your build in a way to target the sweet spot of balancing your health around hitting the increased dmg and survivability curve 

I think that is @Snarky's point. The fact you would have to underdevelop some sets to make use of the proposed change while other sets would greatly benefit from it with no change in build required.

[Rudra]

9 hours ago, Spaghetti Betty said:

I have a few radical ideas.

 

Brute's Fury

-Increase damage bonus gained from Fury by 1%. Since Fury hovers around 90, this would equate to a 270% damage bonus. I personally don't see that as a game breaker.

Or maybe adjust Fury so that it doesn't have an effective cap of 90% no matter how many enemies you surround yourself with? If a scale goes from 0-100% and damage is figured and balanced on that curve, then why is Fury so insanely hard to build up? Why has every Brute I've played or seen others play cap at 90% of their scale while buried under a sea of enemies attacking the Brute? With that Brute also spamming attacks as fast as he/she can. If the scale goes to 100%, then Brutes should somehow be able to reach that limit.

 

(If someone can reach that limit? Please enlighten me as to how. Thanks.)

[Indystruck]

11 hours ago, Infinitum said:

Ok, since nobody else would, I will take the hit.

 

*looks over at my topic on the same page about ATOs*

 

But, I digress.

 

My last post in that topic was a global proc for their primary power set that applies energy damage proportional to the amount of Fury currently held. 

Alternatively since I imagine people want something more imaginative than a damage proc, a unique ATO that supplies a flat 5% def/5% res at low fury, which decays as fury rises and an inversely proportional +regen/+recharge buff which decays as fury falls. So you take the alpha with the defense buff, then you get the tools to regain health and deal out attacks faster to thin the herd when fury is built.

 

[Snarky]

14 hours ago, Spaghetti Betty said:

I have a few radical ideas.

 

Brute's Fury

-Increase damage bonus gained from Fury by 1%. Since Fury hovers around 90, this would equate to a 270% damage bonus. I personally don't see that as a game breaker.

 

Or

 

-Chance for Build Up. Obviously the PPM would have to be changed slightly for it to be viable. I just want Brutes to do moar damage.

 

Unrelenting Fury

-Chance for stacking +Recharge and +Run Speed. I'm the Juggernaut, b*tch!

 

 

It's always been my viewpoint that Brutes are the offensive cousins to Tanks and not "Tanks that do more damage". They can already be off-Tanks thanks to team buffs and higher caps and it should stay that way.

I love the Unrelenting Fury idea.  This pushes performance in an understandable and thematic fashion.  Without jumping on Tankers toes or drastically increased damage

 

Not sure about the numbers.  To me the Brutes Fury looks low but I avoid mathematical analyses of these things.  But low or high any attempt to push Brutes damage back up will hit the wall of players and devs with nerf bats aready.

 

The Unrelenting Fury idea is the most intriguing in the thread so far in my opinion 

[InvaderStych]

17 hours ago, Spaghetti Betty said:

Unrelenting Fury

-Chance for stacking +Recharge and +Run Speed. I'm the Juggernaut, b*tch!

 

This.

 

All Day.

 

Every Day.

 

As to the other one, dunno.  But if what we are seeking is a way to differentiate Brutes from their melee cousins, and in keeping with the "Unstoppable Force" theme of the AT (where as Tanks are the proverbial "Immovable Object") then +rech/+spd is an excellent start.

 

[Uun]

I am largely OK with Unrelenting Fury as it currently exists (6/7 PPM proc for stacking 10-second 15%/20% regen increase and 5%/6.65% end discount). On the other hand, Brute's Fury is decidedly unimpressive (4/5 PPM proc for non-stacking 5/7 Fury increase). At the very least, Brute's Fury should be allowed to stack with itself (the tanker resist proc can stack 3x and the absorb proc has a 20-second duration).

[SeraphimKensai]

I would adjust the procs to interact with each other a bit while focusing on the Fury aspect of a brute which would allow it to increase it's damage and resilience.

 

Brute's Fury: increase the max Fury cap to 200% of it's normal level, and increase fury rate gain by 33%.

 

Unrelenting Fury: Each point of fury above it's normal 100% increase the Brute's Resistance and Defense to all by 0.5%.

 

Anyone that's played a Brute knows it's difficult to keep your fury up, so just theory crafting this I feel it could be a nice boost to Brutes as increasing the fury cap will allow them to continue to scale up their damage, and the other proc will allow them to shore up resilience issues. Brute's are difficult to get past 90% fury, so that's why the 33% fury generation rate increase would be useful to push their fury higher to make use of these unique Brute procs.

 

This is balanced by the fact that it takes time to build up the fury bar, and to maintain the benefits you have to have endurance to attack, mobs to hot, and ideally not get your recharge slowed to a crawl.

Edited September 8, 2022 by SeraphimKensai

[PeregrineFalcon]

19 hours ago, Spaghetti Betty said:

Unrelenting Fury

 

-Chance for stacking +Recharge and +Run Speed. I'm the Juggernaut, b*tch!

Add in a -Endurance Cost or +Recovery and I'll sign off on it.

[roleki]

18 hours ago, The_Warpact said:

When you think of a brute what do you think of? I think Abomination, the Thing, Solomon Grundy, some raging unstoppable destroyer.

Damage, rage, fury, the keys to it all.

 

So take those ideas and run with it. Personally seeing a "Rage" type effect as a proc would be interesting, not a buildup per se.

 

So more ideas and I'll leave the numbers up to the nerds to figure out.

Slight derail, con permiso. 

 

I was thinking about the question, what well-known characters would I consider to be Brutes, and it occurred to me that there is a quasi-official quantification of a slew of these folks in the Gamers Handbooks of the Marvel Universe.  After being sidetracked for a couple hours with those, I realized that old-school Marvel had a Brute problem as well. 

 

I'm not going to get into FASERIP or anything, but it was kind of an interesting experiment to think of a character as a Scrapper or a Tank/Brute/Stalker, then go look at the numbers to see if they thought of them as such, too.  Like, say you think of Captain America as a Scrapper; his Strength and Health are 30/150.  Spider-Man, another Scrapper right?  He's at 40/160.  On the other end of the spectrum there's Rhino at 75/175, and the Thing/Thor at 75/200; these would be Tanks in my CoH brain.  I figured Luke Cage, not being as strong as Thing or Thor, but tougher than Captain America or Spider-Man, would be the prototypical Brute, but his stats are 40/130 - as strong as Spider-Man, but not as many "HP" as Spider-Man or CA.   

 

The closest I could find to what I would classify as a Brute in those rankings (made nearly 40 years ago!) were Loki (50/150) and The Wrecker at 50/160.  Everything else that has a huge pile of Health also tends to have an outsized Strength ranking to go with it.  In fact, what I did NOT find was a huge pile of Health with mediocre Strength.   Closest I came on that front was Machine Man at 30/170.

Is it possible that Brutes are actually "Tanks" and Tanks as they exist in CoH just do not have a counterpart in the comic-book world?  

[PeregrineFalcon]

5 minutes ago, roleki said:

Is it possible that Brutes are actually "Tanks" and Tanks as they exist in CoH just do not have a counterpart in the comic-book world?  

Are you serious?

 

What's Superman if not a Tank? He certainly isn't a Brute. A calm demeanor is his thing, not unbridled fury.

 

Anyway, it's a bad comparison. The Marvel Superheroes game (I remember FASERIP very well) wasn't set up around the Trinity, CoH was.

[Spaghetti Betty]

6 hours ago, Snarky said:

Not sure about the numbers.  To me the Brutes Fury looks low but I avoid mathematical analyses of these things.  But low or high any attempt to push Brutes damage back up will hit the wall of players and devs with nerf bats aready.

Fury currently boosts damage by 2% for each point of Fury.  I just wanna bump it up 1%. With Scrappers and Stalkers critting like crazy nowadays, it wouldn't step on their toes too much. Current Fury sitting at the 90 point softcap = 180%

 

And no, I have no idea why Fury sits at 90 instead of 100.

Edited September 8, 2022 by Spaghetti Betty

[Rudra]

1 hour ago, roleki said:

Slight derail, con permiso. 

 

I was thinking about the question, what well-known characters would I consider to be Brutes, and it occurred to me that there is a quasi-official quantification of a slew of these folks in the Gamers Handbooks of the Marvel Universe.  After being sidetracked for a couple hours with those, I realized that old-school Marvel had a Brute problem as well. 

 

I'm not going to get into FASERIP or anything, but it was kind of an interesting experiment to think of a character as a Scrapper or a Tank/Brute/Stalker, then go look at the numbers to see if they thought of them as such, too.  Like, say you think of Captain America as a Scrapper; his Strength and Health are 30/150.  Spider-Man, another Scrapper right?  He's at 40/160.  On the other end of the spectrum there's Rhino at 75/175, and the Thing/Thor at 75/200; these would be Tanks in my CoH brain.  I figured Luke Cage, not being as strong as Thing or Thor, but tougher than Captain America or Spider-Man, would be the prototypical Brute, but his stats are 40/130 - as strong as Spider-Man, but not as many "HP" as Spider-Man or CA.   

 

The closest I could find to what I would classify as a Brute in those rankings (made nearly 40 years ago!) were Loki (50/150) and The Wrecker at 50/160.  Everything else that has a huge pile of Health also tends to have an outsized Strength ranking to go with it.  In fact, what I did NOT find was a huge pile of Health with mediocre Strength.   Closest I came on that front was Machine Man at 30/170.

Is it possible that Brutes are actually "Tanks" and Tanks as they exist in CoH just do not have a counterpart in the comic-book world?  

Marvel's best known Brute: The Hulk.

Strength: Unearthly (100) - Shift Z (500)

Health: 250

[roleki]

26 minutes ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

Are you serious?

 

What's Superman if not a Tank? He certainly isn't a Brute. A calm demeanor is his thing, not unbridled fury.

 

Anyway, it's a bad comparison. The Marvel Superheroes game (I remember FASERIP very well) wasn't set up around the Trinity, CoH was.

 

As in all things, I'm rarely more than 65% serious. 

 

That said, this is me being serious: if people think of Superman as an example of a Tank, then that's our problem right there. 

 

Superman is singular; he isnt just a pile of hitpoints, some armor, and some mid-level offensive capability that is frequently outclassed by his less-hardy friends.  He's got every power in the book, many invented and subsequently retired between panels.  The normal rules that apply to everyone else don't apply to Superman, and the rules that DO apply to him are generally discarded whenever it's convenient. If anything, Superman is closer to an AV/GM than a Tank.  

 

Ben Grimm, he's a Tank... tough, strong, (almost) no weird mechanics that make him tougher or stronger in combat... no matter when he announces that it is time to clobber, it's the same punch that follows.  Along the same vein, Colossus is a Tank.  Rhino, a Tank.  Hercules, maybe a Tank, except it's established canon that he's got that Brute Fury mechanic going.

 

I went looking for characters who were inherently resilient/tough/strong who also got "stronger" at the height of combat, and that's where Wrecker comes in, moreso than Loki, but Loki does have a tendency to fight at the level of his opponent, plus or minus. Others like Sabertooth, Wolverine, Puma, Lizard, and so on, seem more like Scrappers in function, even though they do have that Fury mechanic written in, in some fashion.  

 

Anyway, what I was getting at is that it seems like, when thinking of existing characters in terms of CoH ATs, everything that I thought would be a Brute was actually more like a Scrapper, and everything I thought would be a Tank was more like an AV.  Made me think that perhaps the Tank doesn't exist in comics, just Scrappers, Brutes, Stalkers and Gods.