Empathy power set in the modern City of Heroes

[JJDrakken]

1 hour ago, NeedleChoko said:

Empathy is obviously the worst support set and it is really bad in any comparison to any other support set but support sets are OP so its still not that bad if you don't compare it to other support sets.  The best power in Empathy is Fortitude.  The heals are not very good compared to other sets heals ime.

 

What heals are you comparing it to?  It's one better heals out there that doesn't require you to hit a mob.

 

While Dark/Kinetics are two strongest heals in the game.  It requires you to hit the mob and thus you can miss.

 

Dark heals is PBAOE off you

Kin Heal is PBAOE off mob

 

Both are situational, either you and everyone crowds a mob or they crowd you which may require you to crowd a mob cuz you got more melee's one the team.

[NeedleChoko]

Kinetics, Nature, Marine, Time.  They all feel much better (at healing) to me than Empathy, perhaps because their buffs are much better so the incoming damage is much lower, maybe some other reason.

[tidge]

2 hours ago, JJDrakken said:

TLDR: Empathy and Pain are still very viable.  From 1-50. 

 

Folks who say that is isn't, probably have set teams with decked out friends or other 50s who recipe up and have incarnates.   Thing is that's still the minority of our server player base, NO ONE EVER THINKS OF THAT.

 

I think something else was forgotten, because no level 50 is using Incarnates on content below level 45.

 

Writing only for myself (a minority of the player base, because math) the element of the game that mostly makes Empathy not necessary as a teammate are Inspirations. The "recipe ups" are partially alleviating the need to use inspirations, but for the most part it is a power choice that limits the need for Empathy, e.g. Rune of Protection. A level 50 has more inspiration slots of course, but even on the earliest TFs players can have plenty of Inspirations for use against even-level content.

[JJDrakken]

1 hour ago, NeedleChoko said:

Kinetics, Nature, Marine, Time.  They all feel much better (at healing) to me than Empathy, perhaps because their buffs are much better so the incoming damage is much lower, maybe some other reason.

 

Lets compare numbers here bud: I already covered Kinetics & Dark's heals.  They are strongest, but they have ability to miss.  You could hit streak of missing 2-4 heals in a row with those(I've had that happen before).

 

All these are Unslotted & going off Defender Values.

 

Empathy: PABOE Healing Aura: 133.86 -- Direct Heal Other: 262.37 -- Direct Absorb Pain: (Varies, but strongest of the 3, but requires you to use HP for it).

Pain Domination:  Same values as Empathy

Marine Affinity: Cone Healing: 133.86

Nature Affinity: Cone Healing: 100.4 & self: 20.06, but it's not direct but a HoT.

Electrical Affinity: Rejuvenation Circruit: Chain Heal: 207.49 spreading out the heal between allies. Meaning that 207 is divided between you & two other allies.

Poison: Direct Heal: 231.56

Radiation Emission: PABOE Radiant Aura: 133.86

Storm Summoning: 02 Boost: Mid's doesn't have it listed, but it's like 60 I think at best as a Direct Heal

Thermal Radiation: PBAOE Warmth: 133.86. Direct Cauterize: 262.37

Time Manipulation: PABOE Temporal Mending: +Regen and H.o.T. Again Mid's didn't list it. But memory serves it's about 100-130 HoT.

 

So taking out the Accurate Heals.  Empathy and Pain are winning.  They come with Buffs & Debuffs.

Edited Friday at 07:09 PM by JJDrakken

[NeedleChoko]

I am aware of the numbers lol.  Good call on Elec Affinity, it is also better than Empathy at healing ime.  I think most of the sets that feel better at healing to me feel that way because they have good absorb + good +Res powers, but Kinetics feels better because it just is better at healing (in addition having the best non-healing support set package).

[JJDrakken]

Elec Heal is spread out between you & 2 others so that's like 69 hp unslotted for 3 people(you counted). 

 

While 133 is PBAOE hits everyone in the PBAOE radius for that ... Nor does it not have chance to miss. 😛

 

But I get it your going off feelings and not logic.  😛  Comes down to what works for you I guess.

[GlaziusF]

Empathy is strong buffs on long timers. You do have to keep them actively applied, but the window of time you have between active applications is tremendous, so it pairs well with a blast or control set that rewards close attention. I've got a lot of mileage out of a seismic/empathy corruptor for pretty much that reason - I can spend a lot of time planning how to cash in my seismic force when it arrives, because I don't have to spend a lot of time worrying about position and timing to keep the buffs and, when necessary, heals going. 

 

From my perspective as a certified altaholic, it's fine for different support sets to have different levels of involvement and payoff, because the support set is only one piece of the total character, and you have some leeway to sculpt the other elements of your character to be more or less demanding depending on how much attention you have to pay to playing your support set well.

[Koopak]

Overfocusing on healing is just putting the board entirely in Emp's favor though. The set struggles to have impact and always has, the only thing that makes Empathy seem like it was better back in the day is the lack of game knowledge at that time. Since then IOs, Incarnates, and player knowledge has left it in the dust.

I say this as someone who LIKEs Empathy, but its not good compared to its compatriots because what it offers isn't as valuable. Purple Patch swings things such that the harder the content you are doing, the less useful Empathy is outside of tailored engagements like specific boss fights, and i do mean specific. This is because healing, at its core, is about undoing damage. This means it has to be reactive, you can try to preempt the cast time some sure, but now you are expecting an awful lot of a game that has poor communication to the player and a playerbase that gets overwhelmed any time more than 4 characters hit their buttons at the same time. (One is partly the product of the other)

A casual trawl through health and damage values with purple patch in mind will show you that in MANY cases, anything besides a Tanker or Brute is going to have their health evicerated in mere moments if they don't have high defense and resistance, and it can still happen with just high defense, leaving the Emp player no time to react. At lower difficulties this isn't an issue, but that same perusal will show those same values aren't even close to threatening.

This is exacerbated by every AT having different max, and maxmax hp values, often by ridiculous amounts. A Tanker quite literally can have 3x the health of another member of your team, and remember regeneration scales with maxhp. Meaning this threat profile is inconsistent. Inconsistent in a way that means if things are moving smoothly at high difficulty your Tanker is keeping aggro and probably needs little if any healing, but if he loses aggro, your other teammates are likely to die before you can react unless you are a very above average player for this game. This can be resolved by lowering the difficulty sure, but now you are artificially handicapping your rewards because the Tanker is BAD, which is fine, but feels shit to a lot of people. This prevents you from finding a middle ground, say +2, +3, whatever it is for you, because what that middle ground is is different for every AT.

The exceptions are those specific encounters I mentioned, things like Romulous, especially on hardmode runs, create a scenario where you are likely to have spill over threat and even if you don't expecting the Tank to hold all of that threat and survive is unreasonable. Rommy has slow recharge, heavy hitting attacks to slap a Tank down to low health in a few attacks but not finish them, and the aggro packs are scaled similarly. Or atleast they are after you add a full set of team buffs.

And theres the rub. The one time Empathy is unequivocally good at something, that something presumes that the team is already rocking 3 other support sets which are more important to team survival than the Empathy is. This is less an issue with Empath persay, and more an issue with the game at a core level. A dedicated healing set, no matter how good at healing, will always be underwhelming, because this game rewards preventing damage FAR more than reversing damage. Empathy has other things, but they don't come close to competing with the competition in value, and when multiple other support sets can heal almost as well? Its a nail in the coffin.

Empathy is nice to have, it FEELs nice to have the auras and adrenaline and fortitude. But it wont be the difference between you clearing content or not, living through a fight or not even a fraction as often as the others. Again, this is as much a core game design issue dating back to beta, as it is a modern issue. Modern situations just make it worse.

[lemming]

I remember in the early days being booted from a team because I was not an Empathy Defender.   I was a Kinetics.

[Seed22]

1 hour ago, JJDrakken said:

Elec Heal is spread out between you & 2 others so that's like 69 hp unslotted for 3 people(you counted). 

 

While 133 is PBAOE hits everyone in the PBAOE radius for that ... Nor does it not have chance to miss. 😛

 

But I get it your going off feelings and not logic.  😛  Comes down to what works for you I guess.

Feelings make you say empathy is better than kin nature elec.

 

Logic is knowing it's not.

 

I don't expect logic on the forums though.

 

Comparing base numbers even show that Dark and Kin are better. Can they miss? Sure. Will they in any situation where it's needed like HM? No. 

 

But hey because they can miss once in every 100 cast yeah emp is better I guess.

 

You emp lovers will literally outdo Olympic level gymnast with the level of contorting you do to lie about empathy being good.

Edited Friday at 09:12 PM by Seed22

[Koopak]

bruh, no need to be that hostile, goddamn

[lemming]

38 minutes ago, Seed22 said:

But hey because they can miss once in every 100 cast yeah emp is better I guess

Geez.

 

Anyway, yes it can miss, or move or something that makes it miss the one you are trying to heal.   Takes slightly more work than hitting heal other, so I can see where some people would prefer it.

 

Play styles and abilities are all over the map and throwing out shade isn't very helpful.    Instead of just pissing on forum users, you could attempt elevating the conversation instead of just going for the low hanging fruit.

[Milk Sheik]

Got an emp def with 1634 badges. My 2 cents --

Healing Aura and Heal Other get a workout *all the time* even in endgame content. In Incarnate trials or Apex/Tin Mage there's always some non-tank who gets hit hard, and in Hami raids there's always some poor sap who ran out of EoE between mito dropping or forgot to click. Heal Other is *much* nicer than the Nature heal which can miss based on position, and with allies superspeeding around that's a serious concern.

 

Resurrect could use a buff like an absorb shield. At the moment, there's no reason to give it more that 2 slots of 50+5 recharge IOs. An absorb shield would be great for survivability when the rezzed person is in the middle of a mob. 

 

Absorb Pain -- I've never needed it in its current form. Even when keeping a tank alive when he's tanking the buffed LR in the Ms. Liberty TF, I can keep flinging Heal Other with a ton of recharge and he'll stay up. If the damage is on a squishy in the middle of a monster wall in Hami, *any* heal isn't going to be fast enough to keep them alive. Reworking AP to be an AoE +absorb or something would be awesome.

 

As for the need for a debuff... I play an emp/rad who slots Achilles Heel and Fury of the Gladiator, so I can dish out -20-40% res debuff even with rad blast's not-very-impressive damage numbers. Not sure what you'd modify to dish out more, since the theme is keeping toons alive rather than tearing enemies apart... maybe a base +dmg added to AB or Regen Aura or something. Modifying Regen Aura would be lovely for me, since it'd add a little oomph to the few powers that buff the empath. 

[Techwright]

6 hours ago, lemming said:

I remember in the early days being booted from a team because I was not an Empathy Defender.   I was a Kinetics.

 

Well, you did say it was the early days.  I'm sure you've learned better since then.  😛

 

 

Just a small note to be clear, as one or two comments had me wondering if I'd been misunderstood:  my OP comments are not meant to imply that I only run my empathy character on high level content or with an exclusive group.  I run all my 50s on PUG content all the way down to the Synapse TF or the Frostfire mission.  It probably accounts for 95% of my gaming experience.  About the only thing I'll avoid is Death From Below, and even then I've stepped in once or twice when I realize a team lead is having a bad recruiting night.

 

 

Edited Saturday at 03:55 AM by Techwright
added content

[lemming]

2 hours ago, Techwright said:

Well, you did say it was the early days.  I'm sure you've learned better since then.  😛

At some point, the same character would get pinged the second I logged in, so people learned.

[Maelwys]

12 hours ago, Koopak said:

 healing, at its core, is about undoing damage.

 

This.

 

Heals are a Cure, and Prevention is better than Cure.

 

Other than Fortitude, the Empathy powerset is all about reacting to damage that has already been taken. Fortitude is an excellent buff but is limited by being Single Target. Even with the best recharge slotting (something only available at Lv50) you're going to struggle to keep the entire team Fort'ed up... and you'll have to pick and choose who gets their Fortitudes buffed by Power Boost (and Clarion Radial).

 

Empathy's heals are very noticeable to other players because they make your green bar go up. But performancewise unless your entire team is already at the Resistance and Defense caps bringing a different support powerset will always outperform Empathy. And often Marine or Nature will beat it there too.

 

I have a lot of nostalgia love for Empathy, but these days the set's real world performance is pants and it absolutely needs a buff.

[Maelwys]

12 hours ago, Seed22 said:

But hey because they can miss once in every 100 cast yeah emp is better I guess.

To be fair, it's 5 times out of every 100 casts.
('cause ignoring the Hit Chance formula would be illogical...) 😉

It's been pointed out that Pain Domination has everything you'd want from Empathy healingwise.
But Pain ALSO provides AoE +Resistance/ToHit/Dmg buffs and an AoE -Res debuff.
That should really make the performance disparity obvious by itself.

[Seed22]

17 hours ago, Koopak said:

bruh, no need to be that hostile, goddamn

Did you read what I was quoting? Tick for tat on that one. They were hostile so I was hostile back.

 

And it's true, emp players will do Olympic level gymnastics to convince themselves and everyone else emp is good but everyone already knows it isn't. 

 

Those same emp players also coincidentally do not use fort or clear mind. Very interesting indeed.

Edited Saturday at 03:18 PM by Seed22

[ScarySai]

18 hours ago, lemming said:

I remember in the early days being booted from a team because I was not an Empathy Defender.   I was a Kinetics.

 

Empathy was never better than kin.

[Shin Magmus]

     Empathy is the weakest available Support powerset among all choices.  It used to be possible to argue in favor of other sets, which have all been buffed or reworked since that point and the game has evolved to better "support" those Support sets.  A good example is old Force Field, which only provided Defense in a game where 45% was enough.  Now the powerset both provides other benefits, including -Res debuffs, but also the endgame has evolved to include challenges where enemies have hundreds of points higher chance tohit you so the need for Defense-stacking way beyond 45% is now a thing.  During the entire lifespan of the game, Empathy has never received a buff.  It's long overdue at this point, and I conveniently keep a link in my signature to my proposed Empathy buffs which hinge heavily on balancing it against Marine Affinity as a benchmark: the Homecoming Team's newest set.  This seems like a perfectly acceptable target to me.

[Shin Magmus]

     I will now combat the misinformation above about Elec Affinity's heal: Rejuvenating Circuit.  The heal/buff number is not "split" among the targets in range for chaining powers, instead it follows a predictable formula and only the primary target ever gets the full value, but the primary target always gets the full value regardless of Static Stacks or number of nearby targets.  The powers are balanced around most people getting the weaker number but you having the flexibility to pump out a much stronger Heal (and Absorb), on the primary target.  For reference on my level 50 Elec Affinity Corr, that would be a 368.6 Heal every 2.4 seconds and a 475.6 Absorb every 6.0 seconds.  The amount that this is reduced per-jump in the chain is always the same %, and can be looked up on CoD.  Here is a screenshot showing the values for the Heal specifically:

 

 

     As you can see, the Heal is reduced by 25%, then by 25% of the original value again (which is by 33% from the previous value: ouch), after which it stops decreasing.  This means the floor is 50% of the primary target's strength and listed numbers on the power.  The important takeaway here is that your targeting matters: you need to select the primary Tank who is taking the most incoming damage and direct the huge numbers at them, while unfortunately the rest of the team will only get literally half of that.  But the power keeps hitting more targets in range so it keeps tacking on more and more 184.29 Heals in this example build.  Elec Affinity's sustained output on a single chosen ally, both with reactive Healing and proactive Absorb, is incredibly high.

Edited Saturday at 03:58 PM by Shin Magmus

[arcane]

Fact: Empathy is the current worst support set in the game and should be first in line for buffs.

 

Also a fact: there are three Hard Mode TF’s in the game, and, if you’re just playing regular content and not trying to shoehorn every last powerset into the Hard Mode speed meta, the impact of Fact #1 on gameplay is going to be more or less negligible.

[VashNKnives]

In addition to fortitude being an AoE and adding some other empathy-like effect, Clearmind (also Enforced Morale from pain) needs to be Team/pet AoE. I like the concept of my empath MM but there are too many individual buffs. I'm ok... sort of... kind of... with the empath not able to get the buff-other buffs like clearmind, AB, and fort but at least make the short duration ones AoE.

[ScarySai]

I'd argue the empathy not sharing the buff sort of goes against the whole empath theming of the set.

[macskull]

On 2/3/2025 at 9:35 PM, Kaika said:

To add to this preventing damage in the game is currently much easier and far more effective, a single cold can negate the need for healing in the first place with 3 buttons (Powerboost + ice shield + Glacial shield) and brings far more to the table then Emp does offensively.

PB doesn’t work on Cold shields.