Tanks and Brutes question

[ZekeStenzland]

On 8/30/2023 at 7:37 AM, liveevil2000 said:

Is there a way to directly import my build to Mids or do I have to do it step by step in the program?

Yes.

1. Log into your character in CoH
2. Type /buildsave in the chat window. It will save a build.txt file in the builds folder where CoH is installed. 
3. In Mids, File >> Import Build. Navigate to your builds folder. Be sure to pick all files (“*.*”) to see .txt files. Open your build.txt file.
4. Profit!

This works in the latest version of Mids. Never tried it on earlier versions. And providing the steps by memory, so it may not be strictly correct. But it is possible. 

[ZekeStenzland]

Also, CoH always saves your build as build.txt, overwriting any previous build file. I recommend renaming the build file so you don’t accidentally lose it, or have a permanent record. 
 

[WumpusRat]

On 8/29/2023 at 2:47 PM, drbuzzard said:

Sentinels raise their hands and ask "Really?"

 

Hey now, the proc for Sentinel's Ward isn't bad.

The other one we don't talk about because it's poop.

[ZekeStenzland]

I probably would have voted for controllers getting the worst ATO. Who doesn’t want to slot their damage dealing powers with a set that doesn’t enhance damage?

 

Or the orb pet proc… Just like a %dam proc, except can’t proc more than once in an aoe. 
 

/smh

 

[Heatstroke]

On 8/29/2023 at 5:47 PM, drbuzzard said:

Sentinels raise their hands and ask "Really?"

 

 

Defenders arent much better IMO

[Heatstroke]

45 minutes ago, WumpusRat said:

 

Hey now, the proc for Sentinel's Ward isn't bad.

The other one we don't talk about because it's poop.

 

 

it used to be good. They changed it now it sucks .

[Heatstroke]

6 hours ago, catsi563 said:

This is a long held debate that started back when brutes were first introduced 

the key is that brutes were not actually intended to be the tanks of the villain side that was actually the job of Masterminds who would use their expandable pets to take the alpha strike and use their healing and area control abilities to either heal their pets or slow and debuff the enemy
 

 

 

everyone forgets this fact. Well done. 

[Without_Pause]

1 hour ago, ZekeStenzland said:

I probably would have voted for controllers getting the worst ATO. Who doesn’t want to slot their damage dealing powers with a set that doesn’t enhance damage?

They are meant to be slotted in their controls and enhance that very aspect. I think slotting a damage proc in an AoE control you know will proc isn't exactly that terrible. 

[ZekeStenzland]

The issue is that controllers have powers that typically control and damage. And unless you reeeeally need that 6th set bonus, the control sets themselves typically have much better damage procs to choose from (hold, immob, slow, fear, kb), that can proc multiple times in an aoe.

 

Well, the sleep and confuse sets don’t. But slotting the orb will break sleep if it procs, and will otherwise agro in a (typically) non-aggroing power.

 

And you can’t slot them n the pet powers. 
 

All in all, they seem worse in almost every aspect than a purple set. 
 

IMO. 

[Without_Pause]

22 minutes ago, ZekeStenzland said:

The issue is that controllers have powers that typically control and damage. And unless you reeeeally need that 6th set bonus, the control sets themselves typically have much better damage procs to choose from (hold, immob, slow, fear, kb), that can proc multiple times in an aoe.

 

Well, the sleep and confuse sets don’t. But slotting the orb will break sleep if it procs, and will otherwise agro in a (typically) non-aggroing power.

 

And you can’t slot them n the pet powers. 
 

All in all, they seem worse in almost every aspect than a purple set. 
 

IMO. 

Except, for Holds you can only do 1 purple set for the ST and AoE Holds. One of the Controller sets gives you 10% Recharge and those 6th slots combine for 7.5% Ranged and E/N Def along with other aspects. Unless I'm chasing Recharge, I honestly don't slot purples at all. Also, I started to look up some of the damage that other mezzes do. Surprise, a number of the AoE Holds don't do damage. In terms of the faster charging AoE mezzes, again, a number of them don't do damage. The ST Holds do damage. The other mezzes a Controller gets typically don't do damage.

[Zect]

When both are fully geared, tanks generally have the potential for better dps (as measured by clear times, they are still somewhat lower on a pylon) than brutes, though it does require some familiarity with build design skills. Tanks have better defensive stats out of the box, so tanks should trade-off their defenses for offensive power; that is to say, they should invest less in mitigations (since they already have that in excess), in order to invest in offensive options like procs instead. On my brutes I still have to putz about softcapping and hardcapping and whatnot. On my tanks they are all defense softcapped and nearly res hardcapped out of the gate and most build capacity goes into procbombing.

 

The tank melee damage scalar is now 0.95, in addition to having increased area of effect on area attacks (applies to epic aoes as well). If you think 95% of blaster melee damage and 22.5 ft radius dark oblits are weak, well...

[Gobbledigook]

A non procced Tanker is a different animal to a procced out Tanker.

 

Procs probably need looking at for each AT.

 

Maybe the procs should be based on the AT damage scalar with possible Fury affecting them or crits etc?.

 

[tidge]

4 minutes ago, Gobbledigook said:

Maybe the procs should be based on the AT damage scalar with possible Fury affecting them or crits etc?.

 

Absolutely not: %proc damage is pretty much the ONLY thing that allows solo ATs with relatively poor damage scales (e.g. Controllers) to get clearing-defeat-all-mission-times within the an order of magnitude of the DPS-oriented ATs. The game's rewards... Influence, Drops (not counting Prismatics or Brainstorms), and Merits... fundamentally come from defeating as many enemies as possible in as short amount of time.

 

My perspective is that some folks often want to tweak %proc based on some second-order consideration of a couple of ATs (or even more narrowly: a couple of different primary/secondaries in the same AT) while ignore the zeroth-order effects of just how poorly entire ATs perform without a potential boost from %damage... should the player of such an AT choose to make slotting compromises.

 

AFAIK: Damage scales already come into play for Temporary (attack) powers... if you want to experience a difference in mission complete times run a level 5 (or 10) Blaster and a level 5 (or 10) Controller through content using only P2W temporary attacks.

[Gobbledigook]

51 minutes ago, tidge said:

 

Absolutely not: %proc damage is pretty much the ONLY thing that allows solo ATs with relatively poor damage scales (e.g. Controllers) to get clearing-defeat-all-mission-times within the an order of magnitude of the DPS-oriented ATs. The game's rewards... Influence, Drops (not counting Prismatics or Brainstorms), and Merits... fundamentally come from defeating as many enemies as possible in as short amount of time.

 

My perspective is that some folks often want to tweak %proc based on some second-order consideration of a couple of ATs (or even more narrowly: a couple of different primary/secondaries in the same AT) while ignore the zeroth-order effects of just how poorly entire ATs perform without a potential boost from %damage... should the player of such an AT choose to make slotting compromises.

 

AFAIK: Damage scales already come into play for Temporary (attack) powers... if you want to experience a difference in mission complete times run a level 5 (or 10) Blaster and a level 5 (or 10) Controller through content using only P2W temporary attacks.

Controllers could get double procs on contained mobs as a rough example.

 

I am happy proccing my Tankers though, they have the toughness to do so. Controllers have mob lockdown also i guess, making procs nice for them also.

 

Procs do allow certain AT's to reach near dps clear times solo, with all the benefits of the AT also. As a Tanker i am ok wih that but many think they are a problem.

 

Edited September 1, 2023 by Gobbledigook

[tidge]

I'm doubling down: Every proposed change to %procs appears to me to be either:

• An overhaul to address some marginal part of the game, or
• A solution in search of a problem

Furthermore: any attempt to build a complete overhaul to %procs that has its origin in a single perceived problem with %procs (e.g. "IMO, that Tanker cleared a x8 spawn too fast!") is NOT approaching this issue in a holistic manner.

 

The Homecoming game is at a VERY good place: pretty much every AT can solo play a HUGE amount of the game's content at roughly an equivalent pace (i.e. order of magnitude completion times) for a commensurate level of  rewards. The current %procs make this possible.

[ZemX]

21 hours ago, catsi563 said:

the key is that brutes were not actually intended to be the tanks of the villain side that was actually the job of Masterminds who would use their expandable pets to take the alpha strike and use their healing and area control abilities to either heal their pets or slow and debuff the enemy

 

This isn't a key to anything.  It is an anecdote.  Allegedly some live dev once said this.  The game design says otherwise and always has.  Brutes got the higher hit points, literally the same armor powersets as Tankers, the autohit AoE taunt, taunt auras, highest redside threat modifier, mez protection.  When punch-voke came along it went to Tankers and Brutes, not to MM pets.  The evidence that they are just more offensive Tankers, which you later point out yourself, is right there in front of us.   

 

This is why you get threads like this comparing the two.  The ATs have gone through a lot of changes, but it's still true that Brutes and Tankers are closer to each other than to any other ATs in the game.  And while MMs *can* tank, so can other ATs given some build choices and pool power picks.  But that doesn't make them "designed to tank".

 

The redside ATs weren't meant to be 1:1 comparisons to blueside ATs anyway.  Brutes do sit somewhere between Tanks and Scrappers.  Stalkers somewhere between Scrappers and Blasters maybe, in terms of role at least.  Etc.  It SHOULD be the case that choosing a Brute over a Tanker means being a bit less survivable but doing more damage.   Plenty of other changes to game since, however, have blurred those lines considerably and it's not necessarily true that Brutes do more damage than Tankers in all cases... even though they really should.

[Solarverse]

On 8/29/2023 at 11:55 AM, arcane said:

Tankers are better.

 

I remember when the Devs first released the information that Heroes and Villains would be swapping roles; that they were allowing for Heroes to be Villains and vice-versa. I remember emphatically expressing how that would be a very bad idea, that it would create balance issues beyond belief to a game that was just starting to feel balanced and that no matter what, it would be a constant struggle battle between Tanks and Brutes, all to appease a crowd that quite frankly, doesn't know their ass from a hole in the ground. I remember telling them it would be completely chaotic and that all these instant gratification players would no longer have a driving reason to play Villain side. (Looks around) I wish they had listened to me.

 

[Zect]

12 hours ago, tidge said:

I'm doubling down: Every proposed change to %procs appears to me to be either:

• An overhaul to address some marginal part of the game, or
• A solution in search of a problem

Furthermore: any attempt to build a complete overhaul to %procs that has its origin in a single perceived problem with %procs (e.g. "IMO, that Tanker cleared a x8 spawn too fast!") is NOT approaching this issue in a holistic manner.

 

The Homecoming game is at a VERY good place: pretty much every AT can solo play a HUGE amount of the game's content at roughly an equivalent pace (i.e. order of magnitude completion times) for a commensurate level of  rewards. The current %procs make this possible.

 

Your post is so wrapped up in your own little bubble of self-interest it's hilarious, but you do get one thing correct, which is that issues with procs and tankers (since we're on the subject) are multifactorial in nature.

 

Firstly, damage procs need to be work differently from other procs, such as self-buff or possibly even debuff procs. The PPM system as-is is reasonably fair for damage procs with exceptions I will discuss next. However, when you can manipulate the system in order to keep certain self-buffs perma (tanker ATIO) or make them nearly guaranteed (gaussian) that contradicts the design goal of a probability-based event in the first place. I think we should be more open to the fact that different categories of procs can and should have different rulesets, with certain specific powerful procs having their own unique firing conditions - see preventive medicine for an example currently live.

 

Secondly, the interactions of all procs with aoes and especially rech buffs need looking at. All the ways that procbombing builds currently cheat the system and end up with higher procrates than intended should be addressed. This includes using aoes to effectively roll multiple times to fire a buff proc, and sourcing rech from set bonuses and permanent buffs to avoid taking a hit to procrates.

 

Thirdly, there need to be greater trade-offs in the game. I am personally a fervent advocate of the idea that an appropriately geared defender should be able to do the same damage as a scrapper, or even more. This adds valuable build diversity and replayability to the game - if I want a high damage character, you can tell me "just go play a scrapper", but finding ways to build for high damage on other AT's presents a build challenge, and that's the essence of a game.

 

However, to me, there must be a trade-off for your strengths. If the defender wants to deal the same damage as the scrapper in the same safety, that's fine - but it had better have zero support capacity, including zero ability to magnify damage for other players through -res or +dmg. Problematically, this is not the case in coh, because in coh procs are only bonuses and never maluses or even sidegrades. The current situation is imbalanced not so much because tankers can have great damage, but because the tanker can clear as fast as the ostensibly DPS AT's while still keeping most of their tanker scalar HP, armor toggles, debuff resists, sustain and aggro control.

 

This brings me to my final point, which is:

 

Fourthly, the way that def and res operate in this game is dysfunctional. Both def and res scale hyperbolically until the soft/hardcap, where each additional point is more valuable than the last. If you have 0% res, and get +10% res, you live about +11% longer against X incoming dps. But if you already have 80% res, and get +10% res, you live +100%, or twice as long against the same incoming dps. In fact, the reverse should be true and there should be diminishing, not accelerating, returns on investment. This is a little-recognized but very major reason why tankers are stronger than brutes: since they are closer to the caps out of the gate they are exponentially tougher, so they have vastly more build capacity to invest in offense. More broadly, this is what actually makes IO builds immensely stronger than SO's and why there will always be difficulties providing a satisfactory game experience whenever both are playing together.

 

Will these problems be fixed? I think in our lifetime we will see some attempt to address #1 and #2. I am personally very eager to see the Aprocalypse (TM) when it happens. When looking at Homecoming team's past changes, both ones that are considered buffs and nerfs, such as the changes to resistance set bonuses, the typed defense overhaul, etc. I think it's pretty obvious that these changes have rejuvenated the build design scene and been highly beneficial for the metagame. I have great hopes for what Homecoming can achieve on this front, and look forward to a new era of procbombing.

 

I think #3 will always persist because attempts to fix it will be viewed, not just as nerfs, but as very significant changes to the game/powersets/gear and those are not politically acceptable to the broader community, especially one as staid and set in its ways as this one. It should be addressed, but I would be satisfied merely with the issue not getting worse than it already is. We saw attempts to band-aid #4 from both Paragon and Homecoming, the former by giving incarnate mobs bonus tohit, the latter by instituting "hard" mode. Given the changes to typed defense, however, I think it's fair to say "never say never" to some possible overhaul of the way mitigation works in this game far down the line.

Edited September 2, 2023 by Zect

[tidge]

Just so I understand... is the proposal that Homecoming has to have radical changes to %procs (and seemingly most everything else about game mechanics) because somebody imagines that in this wonderfully fun game (for all players and playstyle choices) some hypothetical person is maybe having (exponentially) more fun than somebody else?

[Snarky]

On 8/31/2023 at 10:22 AM, catsi563 said:

the key is that brutes were not actually intended to be the tanks of the villain side that was actually the job of Masterminds who would use their expandable pets to take the alpha strike and use their healing and area control abilities to either heal their pets or slow and debuff the enemy
 

Brutes were designed to be bulldozers bigger tougher scrapper who the longer the fight went on would hit harder and harder 

 

As someone else pointed out this fact is a keystone to current game mechanics regarding Brutes.

 

Because the Devs envisioned Redside Tank (Mastermind...) tactics were somewhat slow....  Leroy Jenkins style Brutes rushed forward and just figured it out on the fly.

 

This rewarded Brutes with a huge amount of Fury.  Which decayed quite rapidly in the old days....before the "FU Nerf"  Changing the Brutes Fury decay was a reach around for screwing them so hard with a Fury cap.  The only problem was it was another nail in the Brute Coffin.  Because Brute players now had endless Fury even if they stood around scratching their butts.  Leading to (if you can imagine) even worse Brute tactics and worse Brute players.  

 

Brutes are a sad shadow of what they once were.  And then you buff the Tank with extra AoE, increadibly good ATO procs and numerous gift bags for the stars and Brutes are just snowmen in a texas summer.  Not around for long.

 

[Yomo Kimyata]

The current damage to survivability meta strongly favors the tanker.  It is significantly easier for a tanker to add brute damage in the form of damage procs than it is for a brute to add tanker survivability.

[tidge]

50 minutes ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

The current damage to survivability meta strongly favors the tanker.  It is significantly easier for a tanker to add brute damage in the form of damage procs than it is for a brute to add tanker survivability.

 

No disagreement; I want to point out that Rewards (Inf, XP, Drops, Merits) come from defeating mobs, not surviving mobs.

[arcane]

11 minutes ago, tidge said:

 

No disagreement; I want to point out that Rewards (Inf, XP, Drops, Merits) come from defeating mobs, not surviving mobs.

I want to point out that you can't defeat anything if you can't survive it first.

[Yomo Kimyata]

1 minute ago, arcane said:

I want to point out that you can't defeat anything if you can't survive it first.

Conversely, you don’t need to survive anything if you defeat it first, which is why the devs’ most favorite ATs are blaster and tanker.

[tidge]

18 minutes ago, arcane said:

I want to point out that you can't defeat anything if you can't survive it first.

 

There is also a spectrum of 'the meta' favoring something, versus punishing something. Without %damage the spectrum for rewards is significantly wider between AT and play styles. without %damage, it's not as if a non-damage-dealing class can finish a -1x8 'defeat all' mission in anything like the time it take a Blaster to complete the same mission at +1x8.