Empathy power set in the modern City of Heroes

[Seed22]

Empathy was my favorite set. My first blueside 50 was an emp/energy fender long before side switching was a thing

 

I remade my emp to emp/sonic with perma AB and being able to keep fort on 7 people.

 

Then I made actually good sets. That emp toon has been sitting on my primary account unplayed for the last 3 years. Empathy is heinously bad as it is.

 

It's a reactionary set with no supporting mitigation to pad the blows that come in. And it's literally a way for WoW refugees to pretend to be h3al0rz still.

 

99.9% of emp players I've dealt with do not use the buffs of Empathy, meaning the set in their hands is even WORSE.

[Shin Magmus]

     Every time we get a new powerset instead of revitalizing buffs to Empathy, with merged RAs and a new power, I cry inside.  Non-terrible Empathy would be the best "new" powerset ever, and statistically it would benefit a huge % of the playerbase.  Instead, we get FlerpDerp Control.

[MoonSheep]

2 hours ago, Shin Magmus said:

     These points are both correct but the gentle wording belies the... "severity" of the issue in-game.  Almost all (98%) of Empathy teammates will play in a way that may or may not inflict mental damage... on you.  This is why I think proposed buffs to the set should also make it easier to play, more "set-and-forget" if you will.

 

you mean putting healing aura on auto, applying unslotted fort on 1 team member only and instead hovering at the back of the team firing off mostly ineffective blasts at completely random and un-strategic enemies in the mob isn’t the best way to play an empath?

[MoonSheep]

2 hours ago, Seed22 said:

It's a reactionary set with no supporting mitigation to pad the blows that come in.

 

great perspective, this articulates the issue with empathy really succinctly - hadn’t thought about its pitfalls in this way before

[catsi563]

Not really

 

the healing IS the mitigation you literally can bring someone back from the cusp of defeat with a single power usage. And can turn them into a beast with a couple of buffs

 

theres very few things outside of 4-5 avs beating on someone an empath playing smart cant out heal

[JJDrakken]

3 hours ago, arcane said:

I’m not sure why you took the time to write all of this like it isn’t common knowledge. Nobody is “sleeping on Sonic” just because we acknowledge that it is good but nearly every other set is a little bit better. 

 

It's not as common as you think.  Again a lot folks don't come to forums or just parooze.  Even many more do not have Mid's.  What is common knowledge here is not common knowledge as a whole for our community.

 

As I've stated: Folks that live on these boards are a small percentage of the small percentage that look at these boards.  Most our community do not come here on average or at all.  So if someone pokes their nose in here, see's that goes oh ok cool.

 

Our forums is mostly same faces (which isn't a lot of faces) all the time in most the various places. It's same Echo Chamber pointing fingers at each over the same shit, but trying spin it a different way or just flat out misinformation being presented with such confident bravado. lol

 

Heck one person replied saying thank you, cuz they were not sure about something in that set to begin with.  Literally right above your post, thus defeating that comment in the first place.

Edited 17 hours ago by JJDrakken

[Maelwys]

3 hours ago, catsi563 said:

Not really

 

the healing IS the mitigation you literally can bring someone back from the cusp of defeat with a single power usage. And can turn them into a beast with a couple of buffs

 

theres very few things outside of 4-5 avs beating on someone an empath playing smart cant out heal

Healing isn't mitigation.
Heals don't absorb or avoid or otherwise reduce the damage that a character takes from an incoming attack.
Instead they just RESTORE (some of) that character's Hitpoints after the (full) damage has already been taken.

There are some very niche interactions with the anti-one-shot code; but by and large if a character has 1000 Current HP and an attack hits them for 1001 damage then no amount of healing is going to "mitigate" that and save them from faceplanting. And likewise; if a character can heal an average of 50 HP/Second and is taking an average of 49 HP/Sec then they'll be fine indefinitely (outside of the aforementioned high spike damage)... but if they're instead taking 51 HP/Second then eventually they are going to faceplant (see /Regen Scrappers of old; aside from that whole meme about constant nerfs there's another one about them being either at 100% health or Dead but never in between!)

Realistically if you're fighting something that can deal noteworthy damage then DEFENSE or RESISTANCE is what is going to save you; rather than high levels of healing.
Healing will certainly keep you topped up... but you need far; far less of it if your target has noteworthy amounts of Resistance and/or Defence.
Read up on some old threads about the Immortality Line and you'll see this in action.

Due to this it's not any of Empathy's Heals but instead Fortitude that is the most powerful tool in Empathy's belt. Unfortunately Fortitude is drastically limited in effectiveness until you get sufficient +Recharge to keep it up on most/all of your team (and Power Boost/Radial Clarion to increase its Defense values!)
Making Fortitude AoE would at least reduce the need for every single good Empath out there to hyperfocus on global +Recharge; and adding some +ABSORB to Empathy's other abilities would give some extra headroom whenever your team are suffering from occasional extreme spikes of damage. 

[ShardWarrior]

Something I like about Empathy is that it does not bury you under layer upon layer of VFX vomit, unlike sets like Ice and Thermal.  That has always been a plus for me. 

 

3 hours ago, Maelwys said:

Making Fortitude AoE would at least reduce the need for every single good Empath out there to hyperfocus on global +Recharge; and adding some +ABSORB to Empathy's other abilities would give some extra headroom whenever your team are suffering from occasional extreme spikes of damage. 

 

I like this suggestion.  Most other sets require a good amount of +Recharge too.  Nature has some truly ludicrous recharge on some of the powers.