What's the deal with Controllers at 50?

[ryokoryu]

I main an el/rad troller.  Back in live it was an ice/kin troller, I got her to 50 back then not yet there with the el/rad.  On most groups I was doing today I didn't even bother casting my rad debuffs.  Why you may ask would you not cast some of the best debuffs in the game? the boss melted in the animation ofthe first one and there was nothing left to anchor it to.  I mostly felt like an AM bot and  then we hit it.  the end of the mission arch and an av to take 2 minutes to kill.  2 minutes mind you because I was there and 5 minutes without me.  I know because I got stunned by 1 and he almost stopped taking damage at all while I waited for my debuffs to recharge.  our team was taking a lot of damage when the ff guy left but while he was there it felt like he was doing jack but bubbling us.  I knew he was keeping us from taking the damage but it still felt like he was taking up space but he was making it so I didn't need to use my heal except in very rare instances and I really was the centerpiece of the team when we hit those AV's.  Just remember a hit avoided is a hit not noticed and you make the hit get avoided more.  you notice when you get hit for half your life.  By the way I have been on teams with 2 other rands before and the only thing we really did was keep AM on perma.  With three of us we could re-cast it just before it dropped but because we were there nobody ran low on end.  I have been the tank and the blaster and corruptor when those 3 am's kept me blasting and I didn't notice because I was too busy blasting or tanking.  every support except heals is going to feel this way.  We notice when the bad stuff happens and we don't notice that it didn't unless we were anticipating the problem with significant attention.  I think back to an episode of Futurama where Bender meets a satelite that collided with God.  The advice he gave for being a good diety is advice that applies here for supports.  if you do it right they won't be sure you did anything at all.  This includes you.

[blazingcoconut]

As someone who mained controller's on live and has a ice/storm, plant/kin, Earth/Dark, Fire/storm and a few others that I can't think about now, I would totally agree that of all the ATs controller is the least needed at endgame short of a few missions.

 

The trend started with IOs and continued with crashless nukes and incarnate powers.  When live was a thing, and ITF was still hard, controllers had a definitive role; handle adds and help alphas.  Even in endgame that role was pretty clear.

 

Now the things we do are just not important when the issue is not if you will succeed but how fast.  At that point a controller becomes a liability to a team since the don't contribute what the team needs, kill speed.  Yes, Kin and a couple others help, but even Rad takes longer to set up their toggles than most mobs live.

 

With that said, my endgame for controllers is solo farming which I find enjoyable because it's challenging again.  When I can do +3/8 and be survivable enough to do so why would anyone NEED a controller to keep them safe.

 

Yes, you can contribute to kill speed, yes, controllers can be fun, be but at the end of the day we're not that useful to most end game content.  If you want that, brute, scrapper, corruptor, or blaster is what you want.  Anything else is mostly a liability to some degree or other.

[eiynp]

tbh if you wanna spend a lot of time playing at endgame/50, you should just roll a dps/buff character (blaster, ruptor, fort/widow, scrapper, etc) and embrace the faceroll. On a team full of built out 50s stuff dies too fast in the furball of nukes and judgment powers for controllers, tanks and even sometimes brutes to feel very useful, and in incarnate content a lot of things are resistant or functionally immune to most controls.

 

If you wanna play a 'traditional' sort of controller imo the best thing is to tune an IO build for the 20-40 range, and just exemplar within that. At those levels the buff/control gameplay that was popular on live remains quite useful. I have a fire/time that I like quite a bit, but I learned after a couple frustrating level 50 TFs that there's just no reason to play it in that environment, other than to be a buffbot with the secondary. It kinda sucks, but that's just what the game is.

[Auroxis]

Fortunata is definitely a faceroll alternative for those who wanna CC. To go along with your CC tools you have a nuke, solid AoE, good DPS, excellent team buffs that can softcap your defense much like FF, and even some -res available in a patron power pool.

[Maxzero]

 

Its funny how Doms and MMs have the same concerns at 50. About the only one who don't are Brute and Scrappers. Pity I don't like melee.

 

Basically you can go two routes: support through being a ghetto Defender running Kinetics or go damage running Storm and such.

 

Honestly if I wanted to play a Defender I would just play a Corrupter (Defenders feel insecure at 50 too). I have always liked control/CC based characters so Controller for me.

[Extor Prime]

Melee is so far ahead of everyone else that comparing to it will always bring up the feeling of inadequacy. Them's the breaks; it has always been like that and always will be in CoH.

 

It's not that you are "useless", it's that they produce a much more tangible impact. A dead enemy is very much a "controlled" enemy after all. However, it all adds up. I.e. like people said, Phantom Army is about the only thing that can reliably "control" an AV. Buffs and debuffs make things easier (often by orders of magnitude). But as far as turning live enemies into dead enemies, you'll always feel inadequate standing next to a brute or a scrapper.

[blazingcoconut]

It was not always like that.

 

At the release of IOs things were still in a pretty good spot.  Damage was not through the roof, +4/8 content was still quite hard and teams did fail things.  As a controller, I felt pretty good during that era of the game.  Then the following happened:

 

1) Defense IOs/Incarnates made everyone into a mini scrapper/tanker

When that happened, who needs a lot of control?  If I am very durable there is no worry if the team draws more aggro.  Sure, a person might die, but the team will just roll on.  Damage becomes king because we're going to be successful no matter what happens.

 

2) Crashless nukes upped the alpha game

When blasters can wipe an entire group before they can respond, then your damage as a controller pales in comparison.  Many of them with IO recharge can have that up every or every other mob. 

 

Damage is the only real thing needed in most groups now and Controllers don't really bring much to the 50 game.  There are some missions where it's needed, but in general, not so much.  So... I find I farm +3/8 content with mine and am happy enough and don't have to worry about how much faster x class can do it than I.  Someone else said just exemp and do 20-40 content and that's true as well. 

 

[Sovera]

Though I am all over the game with alts my new blaster outshines my controller by a lot. Pines says I do 1170 damage with my archery nuke, with Aim and Upshot, with the nuke up every 15 seconds and the other two up every 23 seconds. My AoE hold is up every 23 seconds as well. So I'm laying a huge nuke, then I'm holding the letfovers, then I'm spamming my AoEs. And I can cycle it endlessly every 23 seconds. Control what? Everything is dead.

[eiynp]

IMO at least, the real issue is judgment powers. I wasn’t really playing much anymore by the time they came out on live so I dunno how common they were, but on HC they’re basically free and an 8 man team can fire one per spawn pretty easily, usually along with some nuke power, elec/shield, etc.

[Frosticus]

I'll mirror the sentiment that they are in good shape during the 30-45 game and can often make a tremendous contribution.

They indeed get overshadowed post incarnates as damage is paramount

 

That said, I still personally play more trollers than anything else because imo they are still the strongest AT with the overall strongest powerset combinations for what I enjoy doing which is solo'ing hard content and teaming when interested.

 

They have at least 7 secondaries that can tackle AV's and even GMs and they are one of the best situated for solo'ing TF's with a large number of combinations.

Yes corrs and defs have those same sets available , but the blast sets don't afford you the same opportunities as the control sets for such tasks.

 

I'm still rebuilding my stable of characters, but an example would be my fire/cold and ice/rad corruptors, while awesome and heavily invested in, could never complete the same content as my ill/cold, or grav/rad trollers. The fire/cold corruptor had s/l softcap, but still struggled to take down s/l AV's and had no chance vs psy AV's. Whereas the ill/cold was literally taking down multiple AV's at the same time.

 

So I dunno, I agree about not making much contribution post 50, but at the same time even if I jumped on my blaster the spawns are still dying as fast or faster than I can click sometimes haha. So while I  may see more "you  defeated" in the chat log I'm still not really needed and the team could prob drop a few players and still blaze through the content without issue.

[ninja surprise]

We were mostly Scrappers and Brutes and they would just wade right through groups of enemies without taking any damage at all.

 

And you say you were /FF? Sounds to me like the bubbles were working.

 

If any enemy even glanced at me I had to immediately use Personal Force Field or I would just get destroyed in 3 hits. Eventually all I was doing was sitting in invis and using Deceive but for some reason they even started attacking me after that. The only time I felt like I was contributing...

 

Sometimes you have a bad mission or a bad TF, or an oddball team. Brutes should have kept the aggro off you.

Maybe you can get sets to boost your own defense to the soft-cap and be less squishy. Your personal bubbles + sets should make you fairly difficult to hit, and mezz-resistant.

 

Mind has Terrify and Mass Hypnosis - both useless in your example situation. Total Domination is cool but takes forever to recharge. That leaves some weak single-target attacks plus mass confuse. I've never gotten far with Mind before giving up.

 

Earth / Time has tons of controls but squat for damage, but I love to play it on teams.

 

You might get more mileage out of Ice Control. Jack isn't so hot but slows and knockdowns are excellent. Ice/Time would slow big groups to a crawl, /Storm would rock. It would be funny with /Trick Arrow to flop a spawn on an Ice Patch, shoot it with an Oil Slick, then light it on fire with your inherent Taser or bonus Fire blast.

 

Just remember - the cost's the same regardless of how many alts you have! Try another, maybe a different AT entirely. Maybe scrape the bottom and roll a Sentinel.

 

 

 

[ninja surprise]

2) Crashless nukes upped the alpha game

When blasters can wipe an entire group before they can respond, then your damage as a controller pales in comparison.  Many of them with IO recharge can have that up every or every other mob.

 

The other day I was one of three /Kin controllers on a team and we had the Blaster nuking constantly. It was a riot.

Did I care that I didn't have enough time to use slow-as-molasses Propel? Not one bit.

[blazingcoconut]

That's not the point.  The point is that the 50+ game is all about damage.  Somewhere in there the emphasis on survivability goes away and once that happens a troller is just not as useful as someone who can bring a nuke.  I have seen post 50 blaster nuke a job and kill everything with maybe one follow up power.  So then why would you want a troller at that point?

 

I do agree they are the bees knees door soloing... Just not for team content

[Coyote]

A high-level team can max out the spawn difficulty with 1-4 characters, depending on the character mission difficulties. This does not occur too much at lower levels, as characters usually turn up the difficulty to the highest level that they can handle only at 50.

 

Once you have the spawn maxed out, adding any additional characters does not increase the difficulty of the mobs, but increases the abilities of the team.

 

Therefore, large teams at high levels face easier play since they can stack more power than the mob spawns, and so adding defense-oriented characters like Controllers and Tanks is not as useful as adding damage-oriented characters.

 

The problem will be less apparent as the team size gets smaller, down to the case of soloing, where we can see that Controllers are still excellent characters. Teaming up at sizes 2-5 is a lot more interesting at level 50 than 6-8, because you limit the team's ability to judge & nuke each spawn, and so you have to provide some ability to face retaliation.

 

[Sir Myshkin]

Saw this thread and read through it (mostly) a few days ago, kind of brushed it off, but last night resulted in a story worth telling.

 

So my first character back in the game was a Dark/Sonic, got it to 50 fairly quickly and then moved on to working other characters. Spent a lot of time primarily on a Scrapper (I realized I miss playing Melee Blender Mode). Decided to finally invest the remaining Influence into the Controller about the same time I saw this thread, and finished Attuning the build. In a desire to try out the fully-specced abilities I started picking up teams where I could, doing an MSR for some extra Converters (market got sparse on some key items), and then landed on a PUG last night that began a series of interesting events.

 

I jump in to a mission that's already moving, the lead goes in one direction ahead of the team so I figure they're leading and I follow. We end up in a room with a ton of Werewolves, I don't think much of it and just lay down some control before I realize that the lead, and one other that followed are faceplanted and the rest of the team went in an entirely different direction. I look at counts and what's aggoring on me and start breaking 20 before there's just too many. Dark is primarily cone based, so I'm bouncing around the corners of the area reapplying constant max-coverage cones with absolutely no threat to myself. My Direwolf and Tiny the Tarantula are chomping away between a swarm of Haunts and the room is slowly dwindling down. We get down to the last few and the rest of the team finally swings over. The team lead is finally able to get up after the last five minutes of crazy and is just left going "I think I need to roll a Dark Controller."

 

That team disbanded shortly after and I moved on to a new PUG... Full of Controllers!

 

So the first mission I make the joke, "So how are we going to decide who gets to show off when? Draw lots?"

 

We all laughed, but I was serious. The first room we entered was a classic Council with the upper ring around a platform and about six groups spread around. We collected the whole lot and mowed it down. I'd gotten pretty brazen in my last few missions and started running ahead and locking spawns down before the team could get into them. Collecting the mobs up on my own and doing what I could to try and herd while dropping mass fear and immobs onto huge patches of targets. Missions melted under us.

 

 

Then I moved on to an ITF and was alongside a Dark/Kin Controller. We stacked Possess on Rommy so heavily that he spent the majority of the fight attacking his own Nictus rather than anyone else. You're not going to find a Melee class pulling that off.

 

Every team and every engagement I was a part of last night, had the Controllers been removed from the scenario, would've been dramatically different. Would it have been worse? Not necessarily, but I know for a fact it couldn't have been "better" because the speed we moved at was already blindingly quick. I do know we were safer, buffed to the gills, and had far more debuff options by being a Controller focused group in certain situations, and otherwise having a larger trade off in Support roles across the board.

[Maxzero]

 

Sorta touches on my feelings as well. Melee probably has the highest baseline of all archetypes but thats on the proviso that everything goes according to plan.

 

Assuming enemies are tightly grouped up and debuffed then things are great but when something goes wrong you basically run or die. You can't really don't do anything different.

 

Add to that when something does go wrong it tends to go wrong extremely fast. I remember a thread before shutdown where melee were complaining about the Mask of Vitalization from Dark Ring Mistresses. Basically if they got hit they would just die with no counter play and the best option was to complain on the forum.

 

[oedipus_tex]

I think part of the issue is we don't have end game content that addresses the powers that arrive at level 51 and beyond. Incarnate abilities have pushed us to the extremes, where level 50 radio missions that used to be very challenging are actually easier than stuff in the 30-40 range. 

 

iTrials partially address this. The buff sets are very very very very useful there. Controllers are still a liability due to low damage, but not like in the ITF or Summer Blockbuster where a low damage Controller, particularly one with an unideal secondary set, could cause a team fail. The much maligned Force Field set is actually among the best secondaries for an iTrial for example.

 

But as for 8-man teams, those aren't currently in a great place at the end of the game. I imagine if the game had continued, the developers would have added more stuff to it.

 

FWIW one thing I always thought was kind of a shame about CoX is that the levels are mostly devoid of interesting obstacles. I mean like the stuff you see in Beat Em Up games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Freeze Rays that block the way, lazers, chainsaws, etc, that you have to avoid but can also toss enemies into. With more of that the game would be a lot more fun IMO. We get a few portions like that in the Apex Task Force and a few other places, but I wish there was more of it.

 

I wonder how the current dev team feels about current content and whether we'll ever see 'ultra challenge' modes. Accelerated challenge versions of the existing Task Forces seem like they would be a good bet.

[krj12]

I don't think this is really an issue with the AT - rather they made the incarnate abilities far more powerful than they should have been.

 

I wish they had made them very moderate powers that buffed your character, and had made them consistent with what your archtype is supposed to be.

I don't think everyone should get a nuke, that was a mistake on the design team.  Same thing with pets.   Melee should have received powers consistent with melee dps, tanks

should have received powers that made them more tanky, and so on.

 

 

In most non-incarnate content, the controller reigns supreme.

 

[Mercurias]

There’s going to be a meta in any MMO, no matter what. That’s really just a fact of life.

 

Many of the IO and Incarnate boosts benefit Controllers and Defenders as much as Brutes or Scrappers. I’d recommend forming an all-troller team to bash through content. Honestly with eight controllers acting in coordination, you’ll probably find the kill speed is perfectly acceptable. Trollers have a whole lot of AoE to throw around, as well as each person bringing along their own pet/s.

 

Sometimes rather than being mad at what is, you just have to take it in hand and make something you enjoy from it.

[oedipus_tex]

I personally think it would be a good move for the development team to change the current level unlocks for powers by one tier, which would make Controller pets unlock at 26 instead of 32 (and make stuff like Wormhole unlock at 18 instead of 26, so a Grav troller would actually have AoE Controls prior to the mid 20s). The order of power unlocks in each set is mostly random and untied to any particular balance structure. Witness blast sets like Energy Blast where the second AoE unlocks at level 26 (outrageously, level 35 for Defenders). Barring re-ordering all the powers this would be a wise move to fix many of the more frustrating sets. Bonus points if doing this provided 3 powers choices from the primary pool at level 1 and 2 choices from the secondary pool.

Edited August 3, 2019 by oedipus_tex

[Redlynne]

17 minutes ago, oedipus_tex said:

I personally think it would be a good move for the development team to change the current level unlocks for powers by one tier

Easy to say/post.

Stupidly absurd in difficulty to try to implement as a developer/programmer without breaking something/EVERYTHING.

 

[oedipus_tex]

1 hour ago, Redlynne said:

Easy to say/post.

Stupidly absurd in difficulty to try to implement as a developer/programmer without breaking something/EVERYTHING.

 

 

 

 

I have no idea if it would be difficult or easy. I just know they've changed the level of other powers in the game in the past with seemingly little impact, and also that there are sets with multiple powers that unlock at the same level (e.g. Dual Pistols). 

[Sovera]

One of the new servers made it so controllers had their pets at level 1. When I saw that I was blown away. SO level IOs and pets both at starting at level 1 would make the low levels so much smoother. We just slog through the first 22 levels without any slots because why bother when they give almost nothing. Imagine not waiting until level 22 to actually slot stuff. Even a no inf lowbie can slowly buy stuff to at least improve their accuracy.

 

No need to tell someone to 'bear with it' and 'just grit your teeth' to reach level 32/38. The low levels are not hard, just not much fun. I feel the fun factor would grow geometrically when the slow controllers are actually helping with the damage or soloing from the straight go.

[Mercurias]

17 hours ago, 5099y_74c05 said:

In one of the postmortem interviews, one of the big "mistakes" the dev being interviewed identified was Controller solo-ability. The post ED era made the chasm between the haves (Fire/ and Ill/ at the time) and have-nots (everyone else) worse. The implementation of Containment disadvantaged sets like Mind/ even more. Despite what the old Controller "purists" thought about the AT, it was certainly an issue the devs had considered revisiting at somepoint.

I don’t know how on earth they would have done so. I’m not saying a change like that would’ve been unwelcome, but I just don’t know how they could have done it without either completely reworking the order at which you get powers in each primary to let you get pets at level 6-ish or by trying to slap an attack in somewhere.

[Coyote]

1 hour ago, Mercurias said:

I don’t know how on earth they would have done so. I’m not saying a change like that would’ve been unwelcome, but I just don’t know how they could have done it without either completely reworking the order at which you get powers in each primary to let you get pets at level 6-ish or by trying to slap an attack in somewhere.

 

They could have just worked on the powersets that weren't leveling up at a decent rate pre-pets. Liking giving Mind something to boost damage... maybe extra damage boost on Terrify if the mobs are also Slept or Confused, etc. And then revisited the damage done by the Immobs for Earth and Ice, which seem like they could also use a damage boost. It didn't have to be an AT-wide reorganization.