I am done with Brutes

[tidge]

24 minutes ago, aethereal said:

Your gloss that I proposed "nerfing the Scrapper ATOs so that Scrappers don't outperform Brutes" is a misreading, however -- what I proposed was that the power budget of Scrappers be redistributed from the ATO2 into the ATO1 and the base inherent, primarily for reasons of intra-Scrapper-set balance.  Lower the ceiling on the very best Scrapper builds (which are extremely high DPS) in service of increasing the floor on most Scrapper builds.

 

I gotcha... I don't think that we shouldn't be trying to 'balance' performance (of primaries/secondaries within an AT, or between different ATs) based on an ATO. Especially not with tests like Ston did. I don't really think Ston could have approached things differently (except possibly to get rid of all incarnates) but it necessarily made his results a lot more narrow than the hype around them.

[Thraxen]

I swear if they nerf scrappers im gonna demand a refund. 

[Erratic1]

40 minutes ago, Thraxen said:

I swear if they nerf scrappers im gonna demand a refund. 

 

Heaven help us if the game goes the Shadowbane route where each class that got nerfed spawned a chorus for the next class to get nerfed, and around and around it went.

[Thraxen]

6 hours ago, Erratic1 said:

 

Heaven help us if the game goes the Shadowbane route where each class that got nerfed spawned a chorus for the next class to get nerfed, and around and around it went.

 I was, of course, just kidding. Can’t get a refund for a free game. 

[Crysis]

On 7/10/2025 at 6:06 AM, tricon said:

Well maybe theHC devs should take a balancing pass for the underperforming ATO sets. Brutes would be on the list but so are others like the Fiery Orb for Dominators is still something that I consider insulting.

 

No need to nerf Scappers/Stalkers ATO sets but the others should be brought up to the same lvl.

 

While I agree no need to nerf Scrap/Stalker ATO’s, experience teaches us it’s generally easier to tone something existing down than to create something totally new.  Thus, nerfs likely to those ATO’s to bring them “in line” with all others.  

 

Playing a bunch of Stalkers and Scrappers, however, at least when it comes to +DEF builds, Stalkers “Crit on Demand” ATO’s are obscenely powerful, making many +DEF builds a no brainer to take Stalker vs. Scrapper.  I’ve a DB/Energy Aura and Elec/Shield Stalker that can in most content outperform almost identically slotted scrappers because of the ATO differences.  Neither are lacking in damage, but with +DEF (minus massive -DEF debuffs) superior DPS makes up for lack of durability.  Killing stuff faster than they can land hits on you has always been the motivating mechanic for this game.

 

I’ve been waiting for years now for Procs to get globally nerfed.  Seems to me they create more imbalance than they should.  Maybe just damage procs.  I’m not advocating it, as I’ve entire AT’s I likely won’t ever play again if procs got nerfed, but they allow for some imbalance issues all by themselves.

[aethereal]

14 hours ago, tidge said:

 

I gotcha... I don't think that we shouldn't be trying to 'balance' performance (of primaries/secondaries within an AT, or between different ATs) based on an ATO. Especially not with tests like Ston did. I don't really think Ston could have approached things differently (except possibly to get rid of all incarnates) but it necessarily made his results a lot more narrow than the hype around them.

 

I don't want to get too sidetracked into this -- there seems like there's absolutely no appetite from the dev team to do anything with the ATOs, including even just "make the claimed PPM accurate on the Scrapper ATO," which is wild to me.  But just to be clear:

 

In a well-optimized build for a level 50 scrapper, the ATO2 is worth at least as much as the base inherent + the ATO1 combined.  Probably more.  Like, if you dropped the base rate of criticals to zero, and removed the effect of the ATO1, (but kept the ATO2 as it is, so increasing crit rate by 50 percentage points) you'd remove less than half of the criticals that Scrappers would get.  That being the case, I think it's really impossible to address Scrapper balance without going through the ATO2.  The entire class hinges on it.  Which is exactly what I think is nuts -- I think it'd be way more healthy to have a higher base rate of criticals and the ATO2 is a noticeable improvement on top of that to reward good builds, not have it be so incredibly dominant.

[Wavicle]

4 hours ago, Crysis said:

 

While I agree no need to nerf Scrap/Stalker ATO’s, experience teaches us it’s generally easier to tone something existing down than to create something totally new.  Thus, nerfs likely to those ATO’s to bring them “in line” with all others.  

 

Playing a bunch of Stalkers and Scrappers, however, at least when it comes to +DEF builds, Stalkers “Crit on Demand” ATO’s are obscenely powerful, making many +DEF builds a no brainer to take Stalker vs. Scrapper.  I’ve a DB/Energy Aura and Elec/Shield Stalker that can in most content outperform almost identically slotted scrappers because of the ATO differences.  Neither are lacking in damage, but with +DEF (minus massive -DEF debuffs) superior DPS makes up for lack of durability.  Killing stuff faster than they can land hits on you has always been the motivating mechanic for this game.

 

I’ve been waiting for years now for Procs to get globally nerfed.  Seems to me they create more imbalance than they should.  Maybe just damage procs.  I’m not advocating it, as I’ve entire AT’s I likely won’t ever play again if procs got nerfed, but they allow for some imbalance issues all by themselves.

With recent changes to the way placate works, I don’t think it’s that important whether you have defense or damage resistance on a stalker anymore. They do just fine either way.

[venetiasilver]

I think my general feelings is we need to be forward thinking.

Tanker and Brute need to be fused into one Archetype.
Give the VEAT Treatment.

Level 1-24 is the Brute Leveling Path, but at 24 they are given a Respec to either be granted Tanker stat profile via a Boost to the Secondary.
Staying Brute does change a bit from original Brute, Damage profile is improved by the going from .75 Damage Scale to .85 to reward staying as a Brute.

We're already Close to not needing one or the other AT however I think merging both would be good. 
I'm sure we can fit Fury into the primary power of attack, however gauntlet would fill for a regeneration boost. 
Punchvoke is native to the "New Merged AT"
 

[Ukase]

It's no secret I'm not the smartest person when it comes to these nebulous terms like "balance". 

One person might play these ATs in a way where they appear balanced. Another would have a different experience. So many of us lay out these comments as if they're true for everyone. 

The ATOs are what they are.

The ATs are what they are...until we change a few things. 

Is it time to change the ATOs, instead of changing the ATs? Who am I to say? 

What's clear to me is there might be 5-10 folks who post in these forums who can articulate why something should be done a certain way, and they'd have the knowledge and experience to back up their premise. The rest of us...I'm not saying we're clueless, but the articulation is lacking. For me, I know there's a lot that I don't know. I've been playing blasters since I started this game, and I still learn new stuff. There's a lot of layers to this game. 

I just want to try to have more fun with it, and argue/debate less.  

 

[Maelwys]

2 hours ago, Ukase said:

Is it time to change the ATOs, instead of changing the ATs?

 

It was time to change the ATOs years ago.

 

Baseline Scrappers, Stalkers and Brutes are fine balancewise. Tankers were very much an outlier (at least whenever you were engaging a sufficiently high quantity of enemies to keep your attacks saturated!) and the recent changes have addressed that... however they are now lagging a little behind and so frankly could do with the Overcap damage reduction being lessened a bit (e.g. to at most a ~50% flat reduction instead of the current -67% flat reduction) and/or their aggro cap being raised by ~50% or so.

 

The ATOs are to blame for the very large performance disparity between a min-maxed Scrapper or Stalker (with their utterly fantastic ATOs) and a min-maxed Brute (with their utterly dogturd ATOs). And whilst the Tanker ATOs don't directly increase damage, they do directly increase survivability (via a constant 13.4%-20.1% damage resistance plus a decent chunk of Absorb) which can allow a min-maxed Tanker to forego slotting for any additional survivability via set bonuses and instead concentrate on slotting for global recharge and damage procs.

AFAIK the only reason that some players aren't observing a major performance disparity between those ATs in game is that fully leveraging the Scrapper ATOs requires a very detailed knowledge of your attack timings (ideally you want to place the ATO2 proc itself in an attack with high Animation Time Before Effect and high PPM activation chance, then follow that attack up with a few low Arcanatime but high damage attacks, plus a final attack with a sufficiently low ATBE that it can just sneak in before the very end of the ATO2 proc's actual buff duration window). Getting the most out of the Stalker ATOs is much more straightforward, since all it really requires is sticking a Gaussian proc in Build Up and having a big heavy crit-from-hidden wallop that isn't Assassin's Strike... but Stalkers don't get any taunt auras and tend to be rather lacking in the AoE dept, which means they end up with considerably more ground to make up on team/+Nx8 content.

[Ukase]

29 minutes ago, Maelwys said:

It was time to change the ATOs years ago.

Well, when I stated there were probably 5-10 players that could articulate...you're one of them. At least in my book. 

So, based your insight - why do you think things remain as they are instead of different? Just a lack of desire on the part of the dev team, or are there opposing views? 

In all transparency, the reason I don't play stalkers and scrappers is because I lack that detailed knowledge you mention, and frankly, melee is just more difficult for me than ranged. Ranged is easy street, especially on a blaster, because if I want to go in to melee, I can. And if I want to play it safer, I can do that too. 

[Maelwys]

2 minutes ago, Ukase said:

why do you think things remain as they are instead of different? Just a lack of desire on the part of the dev team, or are there opposing views? 

 

Being perfectly honest, I don't know...

 

...but I very much suspect that it's a case of other things taking priority. HC has a dedicated but small and voluntary group of developers; and an even smaller proportion of them are on the powers team. So the amount of manhours available to do any work on powers stuff is comparatively tiny.

 

I've personally logged multiple bugs in powers that to me would appear to be a very easy and straightforward fix (we're talking five minutes tops to remove an incorrectly set flag, such as a regeneration buff that has "affected by enemy level" set) and yet they're still present years later because they're just not a priority for the powers team.

 

That said, there are many things that irk me when it comes to powers in CoX, and Brute (and Sentinel) ATO underperformance is just one of them. Lore pets - most of these are utter rubbish, and the Radial BP pets should not be doing damage whilst invulnerable. Kinetic Melee - by far the worst performing melee powerset. Kheldians and their attack animation time cancelling exploit bug. PPM Proc mechanics (more local recharge aspect being bad for you is completely insane). And many more.

So frankly I'm not holding my breath for any one particular change. I am however glad that they've just spent a big chunk of effort attempting to address Tanker AoEs (even if it's not quite fully there just yet!!)

[Sovera]

5 hours ago, venetiasilver said:

I think my general feelings is we need to be forward thinking.

Tanker and Brute need to be fused into one Archetype.
Give the VEAT Treatment.

Level 1-24 is the Brute Leveling Path, but at 24 they are given a Respec to either be granted Tanker stat profile via a Boost to the Secondary.
Staying Brute does change a bit from original Brute, Damage profile is improved by the going from .75 Damage Scale to .85 to reward staying as a Brute.

We're already Close to not needing one or the other AT however I think merging both would be good. 
I'm sure we can fit Fury into the primary power of attack, however gauntlet would fill for a regeneration boost. 
Punchvoke is native to the "New Merged AT"
 

 

I like it. I've been sotto voce advocating for the removal of Brutes, but, I can imagine the meltdown, the nuclear crisis, if simply having Tankers be closer to them in damage spawned a multi year long quite vocal feud.

 

But, Brutes muddy the water. Blasters are the undisputed kings of ranged damage. Sentinels don't get close but are there for someone who wants to be ranged Scrapper. Defenders the kings of buffs and debuff. Corruptors do close but are more focused on damage. Controllers focus on CC and buffs/debuffs, but Dominators don't step on their toes since they focus on CC and damage. Scrappers are masters of melee damage and Stalkers are pretty close but maybe not as much due to the Stealth tax that allows them to cheese part of the game (in theory). Tankers are the kings of tanking.

 

What about Brutes? Can't be too tanky, can't be too damaging, can't have ATOs touched because it might tilt that tanky/damaging balance.

 

There's a third option for Brutes which is dropping their extra tanky and have their caps be the same as Scrappers. NOW their damage can be upped so all three are on the same ballpark and their gimmick is the steamroll approach without variable damage where a crit will waste itself on a low HP minion and then not go off during a whole boss fight (until 50 when Superior ATOs come in).

 

 

But I predict another complete meltdown.

[skoryy]

5 hours ago, venetiasilver said:

Tanker and Brute need to be fused into one Archetype.
Give the VEAT Treatment.

 

I think suggestions should be grounded in practicality, capability of the dev team, the fact that never in the history of MMOs have classes been outright deleted, and that there is more to the game than just speed clears.

[skoryy]

42 minutes ago, Ukase said:

So, based your insight - why do you think things remain as they are instead of different? Just a lack of desire on the part of the dev team, or are there opposing views? 

 

Any ATO revision would have to go over all the ATOs, not just brutes. Defenders, doms, 'trollers, VEATs, etc. Now you're looking at a much bigger undertaking, not to mention just how would you balance them.

[venetiasilver]

13 minutes ago, skoryy said:

 

I think suggestions should be grounded in practicality, capability of the dev team, the fact that never in the history of MMOs have classes been outright deleted, and that there is more to the game than just speed clears.

I think it is mildly practical and it wouldn't take too much effort they already made Sentinels once.

The main goal is to end this revolving door argumentation I've seen for a while now.

At the end of the day if Tanker and Brute are merged and we keep all 4 ATOS for them to use, it may solve some glaring Heated debate.

[skoryy]

14 minutes ago, venetiasilver said:

I think it is mildly practical and it wouldn't take too much effort they already made Sentinels once.

 

 

[tidge]

1 hour ago, Maelwys said:

AFAIK the only reason that some players aren't observing a major performance disparity between those ATs in game is that fully leveraging the Scrapper ATOs requires a very detailed knowledge of your attack timings (ideally you want to place the ATO2 proc itself in an attack with high Animation Time Before Effect and high PPM activation chance, then follow that attack up with a few low Arcanatime but high damage attacks, plus a final attack with a sufficiently low ATBE that it can just sneak in before the very end of the ATO2 proc's actual buff duration window). Getting the most out of the Stalker ATOs is much more straightforward, since all it really requires is sticking a Gaussian proc in Build Up and having a big heavy crit-from-hidden wallop that isn't Assassin's Strike... but Stalkers don't get any taunt auras and tend to be rather lacking in the AoE dept, which means they end up with considerably more ground to make up on team/+Nx8 content.

 

The post-graduate level of analysis to leverage a Scrapper ATO (plus, ya know, actually having and slotting the ATO) just to exceed performance of Brutes with pretty meh ATO is the best reason to touch neither the Scrapper nor the Brute ATOs. Looking across different %ATO, it is probably more likely that a reworked Brute ATO would be %Energy Font or %Fiery Orb as it would be something like the Scrapper or Tanker ATO.... that is, if Brutes are already in the top 1% of damage and clear times... why would they get ATO that improve that performance?

 

[skoryy]

5 minutes ago, tidge said:

The post-graduate level of analysis to leverage a Scrapper ATO (plus, ya know, actually having and slotting the ATO) just to exceed performance of Brutes with pretty meh ATO is the best reason to touch neither the Scrapper nor the Brute ATOs.

 

Or Brute gets its own spreadsheet ATO.

[Maelwys]

46 minutes ago, tidge said:

The post-graduate level of analysis to leverage a Scrapper ATO (plus, ya know, actually having and slotting the ATO) just to exceed performance of Brutes with pretty meh ATO is the best reason to touch neither the Scrapper nor the Brute ATOs. Looking across different %ATO, it is probably more likely that a reworked Brute ATO would be %Energy Font or %Fiery Orb as it would be something like the Scrapper or Tanker ATO.... that is, if Brutes are already in the top 1% of damage and clear times... why would they get ATO that improve that performance?

 

Because if the assumption is that a Scrapper with ATOs just about outperforms a Brute with ATOs then the only way that assumption holds any water is if it is a very mediocre Scrapper build.

 

A min-maxed Scrapper will deal an additional ~30% or more average damage compared to a min-maxed Brute, with ATOs.

Without ATOs the Brute will be roughly on par with the Scrapper - Scrappers will be miles better at spike damage hit and runs but Brutes will typically edge them out in prolonged combat (providing that neither is getting an obscenely high amount of constant damage buffs, like endless red insps or fulcrum shift). The only other thing that can potentially vastly skew the numbers in favour of the Brute is if the Scrapper doesn't happen to possess a decent duration Taunt Aura (eg anything other than Willpower) and they're doing a Kill All at x8.

 

And regarding Fiery Orb/Energy Font... most PPM effects are going to be very hard to balance without nuking Proc mechanics from orbit, but the aforementioned two ATOs solved that issue by summoning an incredibly fragile uncontrollable pet with short duration and crap AI in entirely the wrong place for it to do any good. IIRC best case it adds less than half the damage of a regular 3.5PPM damage Proc. Hard pass.

 

Edited 17 hours ago by Maelwys

[tidge]

36 minutes ago, Maelwys said:

And regarding Fiery Orb/Energy Font... most PPM effects are going to be very hard to balance without nuking Proc mechanics from orbit, but the aforementioned two ATOs solved that issue by summoning an incredibly fragile uncontrollable pet with short duration and crap AI in entirely the wrong place for it to do any good. IIRC best case it adds less than half the damage of a regular 3.5PPM damage Proc. Hard pass.

 

So we agree that Brute ATOs aren't at the top of the list to be improved?

[SomeGuy]

7 hours ago, venetiasilver said:

Give the VEAT Treatment.
 

 

 

I don't like the combine brute/tanker idea, but that's just an opinion.

 

Now...give Brutes the VEAT treatment...I feel like this is going somewhere. The HEAT/VEAT treatment minus the BS voids. Like how defenders do more DMG solo then when teamed. Maybe more/less resistant and more/less damage as there are more members of the team? For each member boost their max HP AND give them full max HP? Whereas solo they have the current max HP and their HP hasn't moved past accolades/bonus etc.? And a noticeable DMG % difference when solo and it slides to less and less via each member on the team?

 

I like where your idea is at and I'm thinking it could go places. Or make the ATO2 not hot garbage and make it do that or something similar. My other idea for ATO2 to not be hot garbage is for it to have a chance to proc a shield that reflects all damage back for X amount of time. It would boost survivability AND damage. Obviously, this could very much favor resistance based sets, but when it procs on a defense based brute it would be god mode. 

[Erratic1]

1 hour ago, Sovera said:

I like it. I've been sotto voce advocating for the removal of Brutes, but, I can imagine the meltdown, the nuclear crisis, if simply having Tankers be closer to them in damage spawned a multi year long quite vocal feud.

 

Yeah, it might be as hysterical as the Tanker reaction after this last patch, with people asserting damager reductions in areas which were untouched. On the upside, it probably wouldn't reach the levels of removing Tankers--which if we're removing an AT seems to be an equally valid choice.

[SomeGuy]

39 minutes ago, Maelwys said:

 

Because if the assumption is that a Scrapper with ATOs just about outperforms a Brute with ATOs then the only way that assumption holds any water is if it is a very mediocre Scrapper build.

 

A min-maxed Scrapper will deal an additional ~30% or more average damage compared to a min-maxed Brute, with ATOs.

Without ATOs the Brute will be roughly on par with the Scrapper - Scrappers will be miles better at spike damage hit and runs but Brutes will typically edge them out in prolonged combat (providing that neither is getting an obscenely high amount of constant damage buffs, like endless red insps or fulcrum shift). The only other thing that can potentially vastly skew the numbers in favour of the Brute is if the Scrapper doesn't happen to possess a decent duration Taunt Aura (eg anything other than Willpower) and they're doing a Kill All at x8.

 

 

I am crap at articulating what I want to say. With that said, no. I have way to much collected data and more then two decades of play time to agree with this (yes, this includes when the live servers were down).

 

Scrappers do way more than just 30% compared to brutes when both are fully kitted out. Lets's use my fastest recorded average for scrapper and then brute for example.

 

61s vs 122s.

 

You don't even need to do the numbers to already know that'smore then a 30% difference. But for fun's sake...going to anyways.

 

I'll just keep it really simple and do

 

61 / 122 = 0.5

 

That's 50%.

 

No, a Brute will NOT do the same, or edge scrappers out in terms of DPS in long fights, without ATOs. This used to be the case. Hasn't been that way for a long long time.

[Yomo Kimyata]

6 hours ago, Ukase said:

The ATOs are what they are.

The ATs are what they are...until we change a few things. 

Is it time to change the ATOs, instead of changing the ATs? Who am I to say? 

 

Well, let's be honest, the problem isn't the ATOs, it's the ATO procs. 

 

Scrapper ATO procs make you do a bit more damage, or more than a bit more if you are able to apply some knowledge (that's one reason I really like scrappers).  Tanker ATO procs give you a significant amount of resistance and absorb, which enables you to skimp on your defenses and put slots towards damage procs.

 

Brute ATO procs aren't that good and the good that they are are not very noticeable.  The Fury one is nonsense -- if you play a brute for even five minutes total you are going to see that you are going to be running at about 80% fury consistently with or without this proc slotted.  It takes you seconds to reach 80%, and getting above that is difficult and marginally ineffective (which is why I would like to see fury be a slower builder and have a wider damage range, but I guess people used to exploit that so whatever).  And the regeneration/end reduction one isn't as noticeable -- if they switched it from rates of healing regeneration/endurance recovery to outright heals/endurance gains, people would probably notice it more.