Improving Alignment Powers

[CaptainMarvelous]

Hello again HC forum!

Today, I wanted to pitch minor changes to the alignment power in the game. Now before anything, I do want to say that this is not to make alignment powers mandatory or to force "meta" picks. Alignment powers are nice little occasional bonuses and making one of them so good that you're encouraged to always be that alignment is hazardous to game health. Consider any numbers in the pitch potential.

 

In addition, alignment powers are just a nice little bonus. I don't believe they should be the case where you design a whole build around something you get as a little bonus to your alignment.

 

With that out of the way, let's look at what the alignment powers currently are:

 

• Hero: PBAoE, large bonus to self+ally damage, bonus to hit
• Vigilante: PBAoE, Minor fear to low level enemies (Minions or lower), lower to hit
• Rogue: PBAoE, Minor confuse to low level enemeis (Minions or lower), lower damage
• Villain: PBAoE, self-recharge bonus, bonus based on class (Brutes get fury, Dominators get dom, etc.)

 

From this glance, it's easy to see that certain powers are just flat-out better. "Pure" alignments are the clear winners when it comes to these powers, granting sizeable bonuses to the entire team for a short time. On the other hand, intermediary alignments are...bad. For a few reasons:

 

• The magnitude of the CC is extremely low at mag 2. These aren't going to be hitting everyone often.
• They only affect extremely low-level enemies. (Minions and below) Most enemies you encounter will completely ignore this.
• The numbers for the lowering damage and to-hit are only about 10% each.
• Vigilante/Rogue powers require you to be near enemies vs. Hero/Villain require you being near allies.

 

Now there IS the benefit that these powers have half the cooldown of the other alignments (3 min. for intermediates vs. 6 min. for pure), but this further exacerbates the balance discrepency. Putting the cooldown at 6 minutes vs. 3 means you have to adjust appropriate levels of power to these skills: The vigilante/rogue skills can never be too good as they are due to only being 3 minutes.

 

So what can we do to improve these skills? There's a handful of ideas, not all of which should be done, but potential ways to improve the powers as seen fit:

 

• Push the Rogue/Vigilante powers to be at 6 minutes like the hero/villain powers, buff them accordingly to affect stronger foes/have greater debuffs.
• Rework these powers to be the "selfish" variants of the hero/villain types as Rogues are concerned only for themselves lore-wise and vigilantes put their quest for justice above all else. 
• Further push other alignment powers to be more varied based on your alignment. 

 

I'd love to hear what others have in mind!

[Blastit]

I think part of the idea behind the hero and villain powers being much better is to compensate for rogues and vigilantes getting access to both Paragon City and the Rogue Isles. They're not meant to be weighed against each other in a vaccuum. There was a bit more population and more appeal to being able to cross over to do whatever back then so maybe something else can work now.

[Luminara]

7 hours ago, CaptainMarvelous said:

• The magnitude of the CC is extremely low at mag 2. These aren't going to be hitting everyone often.
• They only affect extremely low-level enemies. (Minions and below) Most enemies you encounter will completely ignore this.

 

These are redundant.  Mag doesn't affect hit chance, only how strong the status effect is.  You can remove the first point entirely and fold the mention of Mag 2 into the second.

 

7 hours ago, CaptainMarvelous said:

The numbers for the lowering damage and to-hit are only about 10% each.

 

10% -Damage isn't much, but also it's not subject to +Res caps.  And even if you're not capped, it's valuable damage mitigation.

 

-ToHit is almost equivalent to 10% +Defense (purple patch applies to -ToHit, but not +Def, thus there's always a slightly lower value when fighting anything above +0).  10% is damn good, and by itself makes Fear Incarnate worth having.