Willpower is Butts

[FupDup]

We recently got several armor set revamps, but Willpower was conspicuously absent. I think that is unfortunate, because the set is pretty ancient numbers-wise with a ton of glaring weaknesses with very few strengths. Even Regen is now pretty much outright better than it now. WP needs some serious buffing action, but of course it should still retain its iconic "toggle and forget" playstyle that people like it for. This is just a straight number increase for the most part, not a gameplay change. 

 

Let's look at each power individually, and I'll say what I think should be done (if applicable). The power order is a little messed up on Stalkers so I'll go with the standard structure. 

 

T1: High Pain Tolerance

>I think this one pretty much does what it ought to do and doesn't need adjustments. Maybe higher resists to the non-S/L damage types would be nice because those are currently pretty minimal. 

 

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T2: Mind Over Body

>This one is also mostly fine. Adding other resist types to it would be nice but I might be asking for too much. 

 

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T3: Fast Healing

>This is the start of where I'll ask for changes. WP is a highly regeneration-dependent set, so I think it could use some regen debuff resistance on this power. It shouldn't be anywhere near what you get from the proper Regeneration armor set, but it definitely needs some more. 

>Additionally, for Stalkers only, I'd suggest adding a bit of recovery to it like how Stalker Regen got that too. WP is supposed to be very good at endurance management. 

 

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T4: Indomitable Will

>The change I'd like to see here is to add some Toxic defense equal to the Psionic, with the reason being that the set has almost a complete lack of Toxic protection (and Toxic def is also super rare in general). WP is often described as a "jack of all trades" but it's hard to live up to that when there's such a glaring hole. If Invuln can be allowed to have Psi protection, WP has no justification for this crater-sized hole. 

 

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T5: Rise To The Challenge / Up To The Challenge (Sentinel) / Reconstruction (Stalker T3)

>RTTC is probably fine, I think. The Stalker and Sentinel versions however are up for debate...

 

>UTTC: This power currently trades the scaling regen effect for a high static effect. I think this trade is pretty fair considering that Sents will generally have fewer enemies within 8ft of themselves than the 3 melee ATs who get RTTC. What isn't so fair is that RTTC also comes with a small To-Hit debuff, but UTTC gets nothing to replace that. I think that UTTC should get some kind of extra effect to bring it up to parity, with the most direct translation being a small defense buff (debuffing enemy To-Hit is functionally equivalent to increasing your defenses). Alternatively, it could give something else like a small continuous absorb shield like what Sentinel Regen used to have but lost in the NuRegen revamp, or something else entirely. I'm not married to any one idea, but it definitely needs a second effect of SOME sort considering how RTTC has 2 effects while UTTC only has 1 effect. Sentinels don't need any further handicaps than they've already got to deal with. 

 

>Reconstruction is very weird, being a clicky power in a normally toggle/auto heavy set, and not to mention the totally borked power order. I kind of think that Stalkers would make sense to have UTTC proliferated to them as a branching mutually exclusive choice, and reordering the power tiers to more closely match the other ATs. Stalker Invuln does already do a similar thing with the Invincible power (static effect instead of scaling like the 3 other melee ATs get), so there's a precedent. 

 

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T6: Quick Recovery

>I'd just give this power a bit of resistance to end drain and recovery debuff effects, like what NuRegen got. Maybe add a small amount of slow resistance too, going off of the athleticism theme and making it a bit easier to build. 

 

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T7: Heightened Senses

>The defense debuff resistance could stand to be a little bit higher. The set isn't supposed to depend on defenses, but the fact remains that the F/C/E/N damage types all currently have extremely low resistance values on this set, which makes the set feel like an S/L specialist like Invuln instead of an all-rounder like it's billed as. A bit higher defense values would help with this, perhaps subtracting a little from S/L because you can easily cap resistance to those two types so they don't rely on defense anyways. 

 

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T8: Resurgence

>The main thing that needs to happen here is removing the damage and to-hit crashes from it. I'm pretty sure this is the only self-rez in the game with self crash effects? 

>There's also a side debate about trying to make self-rez powers useful even when you aren't dead. One option would be to have this power become a click heal that has a popup self-rez option if you die, trying to get the best of both worlds. But that might be seen as adding a clicky to a set that shouldn't have any, so we might have to think up something different or just deal with it. Since it does already come with some self-buffs (before the crash), maybe let people use it while alive for those buffs. 

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T9: Strength of Will

>The crash on this power is actually pretty fine IMO. It's only 50% instead of the usual 100%, and there's no recovery debuff that most come with. Factoring in Quick Recovery, this is fairly easy to deal with. 

 

>The part that sucks about it is the distribution of resistances. It currently gives very high values to S/L, but very low to the other types. The problem here is that WP's native S/L resists are already quite high, but everything else is very low, so you end up overcapped to S/L and wide open to everything else. I would suggest heavily cutting down the S/L in exchange for heavily bumping up everything else, to further iron out any holes in the set. Again, the set is currently designed like an S/L specialist stat-wise instead of the mythical all-rounder. 

 

 

All in all, I think these changes would keep the spirit of a toggle-and-forget easymode set, but with bigger numbers so it sucks less. It just gets better at what it already does, so you can keep playing like you were before. 

Edited Saturday at 12:48 AM by FupDup

[MTeague]

36 minutes ago, FupDup said:

The change I'd like to see here is to add some Toxic defense equal to the Psionic, with the reason being that the set has almost a complete lack of Toxic protection (and Toxic def is also super rare in general). WP is often described as a "jack of all trades" but it's hard to live up to that when there's such a glaring hole.

I don't think Any armor set should have no holes whatsoever.  Even Super Reflexes gets a nasty surprise when it's hit with non-positional attacks. 

 

Adding Toxic Resist, AND End Resist, AND Regen Debuff Resist, is much too much of an ask in my book. 

The devs of course, are entirely free to ignore my feedback and decide they agree with you. But that is my $0.02, take it for what it is, flame it if you wish. 

[FupDup]

15 minutes ago, MTeague said:

I don't think Any armor set should have no holes whatsoever.  Even Super Reflexes gets a nasty surprise when it's hit with non-positional attacks. 

 

Adding Toxic Resist, AND End Resist, AND Regen Debuff Resist, is much too much of an ask in my book. 

The devs of course, are entirely free to ignore my feedback and decide they agree with you. But that is my $0.02, take it for what it is, flame it if you wish. 

I think you're really overestimating the size of the proposed buffs, and also really underestimating the power of other competing armor sets like the newly revamped Electric and Dark armors (or even NuRegen). 

[lemming]

4 hours ago, FupDup said:

Additionally, for Stalkers only, I'd suggest adding a bit of recovery to it like how Stalker Regen got that too. WP is supposed to be very good at endurance management.

Definitely this.   Will have to read the rest when my brain hasn't been fried by a long day

[Uun]

14 hours ago, FupDup said:

T3: Fast Healing

>This is the start of where I'll ask for changes. WP is a highly regeneration-dependent set, so I think it could use some regen debuff resistance on this power. It shouldn't be anywhere near what you get from the proper Regeneration armor set, but it definitely needs some more. 

Willpower/Fast Healing currently has more regen debuff resistance than Regeneration/Fast Healing (the only power in either set that provides it). The set which currently has the highest regen debuff resistance is Radiation. This needs to be addressed.

 

14 hours ago, FupDup said:

T6: Quick Recovery

>I'd just give this power a bit of resistance to end drain and recovery debuff effects, like what NuRegen got.

I support this, but note that Regeneration/Quick Recovery only got resistance to recovery debuffs. Both should get resistance to end drain as well. Invulnerability has 25% resistance to both, which is still far less than what most armor sets get.

 

14 hours ago, FupDup said:

T9: Strength of Will

>The crash on this power is actually pretty fine IMO. It's only 50% instead of the usual 100%, and there's no recovery debuff that most come with. Factoring in Quick Recovery, this is fairly easy to deal with. 

 

>The part that sucks about it is the distribution of resistances. It currently gives very high values to S/L, but very low to the other types. The problem here is that WP's native S/L resists are already quite high, but everything else is very low, so you end up overcapped to S/L and wide open to everything else. I would suggest heavily cutting down the S/L in exchange for heavily bumping up everything else, to further iron out any holes in the set. Again, the set is currently designed like an S/L specialist stat-wise instead of the mythical all-rounder. 

While the resist issue is real, I would rather see SoW get +HP (similar to One with the Shield).

[FupDup]

7 minutes ago, Uun said:

Willpower/Fast Healing currently has more regen debuff resistance than Regeneration/Fast Healing (the only power in either set that provides it). The set which currently has the highest regen debuff resistance is Radiation. This needs to be addressed.

Looking at Scrapper values, they're passively sitting at 45.95% regen resistance before any stacks of RR are added in (which will add a lot more and can potentially hit the 100% cap). The WP Scrapper is sitting at just 25.95%. 

Maybe one could argue for the extra protection to be added to different powers instead of all stacked into one, similar to how NuRegen does it or how most defense sets work with DDR. But certainly, the total regen resistance is pretty low for how dependent on it that the set is. 

[Uun]

1 minute ago, FupDup said:

Looking at Scrapper values, they're passively sitting at 45.95% regen resistance before any stacks of RR are added in (which will add a lot more and can potentially hit the 100% cap). The WP Scrapper is sitting at just 25.95%. 

Maybe one could argue for the extra protection to be added to different powers instead of all stacked into one, similar to how NuRegen does it or how most defense sets work with DDR. But certainly, the total regen resistance is pretty low for how dependent on it that the set is. 

You are correct, I forgot they added regen resistance in RR. That said, a /Rad scrapper sits at 43.25% regen resistance unslotted and can get as high as 67.9% slotted (the regen resistance in Radiation Therapy can be enhanced). I don't disagree that the regen resistance in WP should be increased.