Adeon Hawkwood

I have several Offenders. The idea that Defenders are delicate flowers that shouldn't have to worry about using half of their powers is frankly ludicrous. There are times when a Defender needs to focus on their buffs/debuffs in order to keep the team alive. In other situations nothing is needed and the Defender should focus on blasting. Most of the time the situation is somewhere in the middle and the Defender can blast in between buffing and debuffing as required. The point as it regards this thread is that in all of these cases the Defender needs to HAVE his blasts available so that he can use them. Defenders aren't Blasters and shouldn't focus on blasting to the exclusion of all else but conversely they do have blasts and should use them when their other abilities are unneeded or still recharging.

And yeah, thread necromancy is bad m'kay?

You drew the short straw I take it? Seriously though hello and welcome .

Realistically, if an RP SG is tight knit enough to go to the trouble they probably trust each other not to need proof.

Yeah, at this point we might as well give up on it since we obviously aren't going to change our minds. At the end of the day only the devs know what constitutes a manipulation set but I really do not see them making a Blaster manipulation set with 7 melee attacks that are primarily damage based when currently only one set has 4 and most have 3 or fewer.

Even so there's a big difference between "able to choose any two powersets" and "able to make ranged/defense characters". Part of the reason for having ATs with fixed powerset types is that it allows them to fine tune the AT modifiers to a greater degree than in a free-form system. In a free-form system a Ranged/Defense characters and a Ranged/Manipulation character (i.e. a Blaster) would do the same damage with their attacks. Similarly a Ranged/Defense character and a Melee/Defense character (i.e. a Scrapper) would have the same defensive numbers. With the AT system a Ranged/Defense character can be made to do less damage than a Blaster and/or have weaker defenses than a Scrapper.

Side note: This shouldn't be construed as supporting a Ranged/Defense AT, I used it since it was used in the post I quoted. I like the idea of an Assault/Defense AT and think it would be balanced but I don't care for the idea of a Ranged/Defense AT. My concern is not balance since in the mechanical sense I think it could be balanced but because I think it's a poor pairing given the current design of both Ranged sets and Defense sets. A Ranged/Defense AT would IMHO require significant redesign of the Defense sets to support it.

Ummm.... yes it is necessary. Martial Arts is a Melee Set. Blaster secondaries (mostly) include melee abilities but they are not melee sets. They are a mix of melee and control powers with some self buffs or weak debuffs and maybe a damage aura. They don't have 6 melee attacks and they certainly don't have Confront.

Additionally you'll notice that the Tier 1 is always a power to keep enemies out of melee range (generally a single target ranged immobilize) this is deliberate to help Blasters solo (especially at low levels).

Realistically making a Martial Arts based Blaster secondary would require putting in at least two new powers. Assume that Crane Kick is changed to the same stats as Power Thrust and made the T1 (i.e. lower damage and recharge than the scrapper version). Then add Cobra Strike, Focus Chi and 3-4 of the damaging melee attacks from MA. That still leaves 2-3 new powers required and a set that, frankly, looks like a weaker version of Energy Manipulation.

And since someone will bring it up, Blasters were Ranged/Melee in the original alpha version of the game. This was changed because they just didn't have the survivability.

I just tested it myself. Against a level 54 Chief Soldier the -to hit of Flash Arrow was reduced from 8.93% to 4.29%.

That is completely and utterly illogical. The fact that something is not in the game does not automatically imply that it is imbalanced. It simply means that the devs have not implemented it. An inability to balance it is only one possible reason for them to not include it. They could equally well decide that it's doable but not worth the time and effort required or simply that it will take the game in a direction they don't want to go or any one of a number of good reasons.

The devs haven't implemented Carp Melee. It's not inherently imbalanced, it's just silly.

I think the issue is that the difference in time between a speed run and a non-speed run is much larger for the Hero TFs than the villain ones (due to the larger percentage of missions which are glowie hunts or boss kills). This means that the distribution of times is less linear for hero TFs so the merit rewards are inflated.

That being said I agree with the sentiment, basing merit rewards on time was a poor decision, it encourages speed runs and in the long run merit rewards trend downward. That being said, I'm not sure there's a better option.

The short answer is that merits are based solely on average completion time and the CoV SFs are designed around a shorter completion time since frankly that makes them less of a grind.

Are you sure about that? My understanding was that unresistable powers do ignore AV resistance but are still reduced in effectiveness against higher con enemies.

That was never entirely correct. Activation time is not a part of the equation used for damage, it's based on recharge time, area and AT. Blaster melee attacks use the same equation as the melee attacks for other classes but universally have higher recharge times.

Because it would allow for a lot more variety in the available powers. With EATs we have a very limited selection of powerset combos (8 max, depecding on how you count them). A new AT would have 49 combos right off the bat (7 assault sets and 7 of the 8 scrapper defensive sets).

I will point out that he's not proposing generating new purples through arcs he's basically proposing using arcs as a way to give other people purples as gifts. It's still a poor idea but not quite for the reasons you're stating.

It's interesting, I agree with you on skipping rezzes but for different reasons. For me it doesn't come down to personal benefit versus team benefit it's a matter of utility. I have no problems with taking powers solely to benefit teammates the issue is how they benefit teammates. To use Empathy as an example there are six powers that only benefit teammates but Resurrect is the one I consider the most skippable. The other 5 all help to keep a team alive, healthy and moving. The only time Resurrect does that is in the uncommon situation where one person dies and the rest of the team can't finish the current spawn without their help. To me the same applies to Mutation and Conduit of Pain. Despite the nice buffs they provide the simple fact is that they are unlikely to change the tide of battle on their own. Chances are that one extra teammate living won't make the difference between the team wiping or finishing the spawn off.

Powers like Fallout, Power of the Phoenix and Vengeance are more borderline. The damage and debuffs the first two apply and team buff the last one applies do have the potential to turn the tide of battle in a way that simply rezzing one ally doesn't.

Now this isn't meant to imply that a power needs to change the tide of battle on it's own for me to consider it useful but in the case of powers that require a dead teammate I'm giving up a power choice that I can use all the time (like another attack, something from the Leadership pool or Recall Friend) which will make a difference in every battle while the rez will only be used occasionally and probably won't actually make a difference when it is.

I agree but for a different reason. Allowing us to import existing characters would basically force the devs to give CoX2 exactly the same powers engine and powersets as CoX1 or people's characters would break.

In order to allow for character import CoX2 would have to be nothing more than a new graphics engine wrapped around a basically identical game.

If the devs make CoX2 they are almost certain to want to redo the power setup from scratch to incorporate the experience they've amassed from CoX1 (things like the Hamidon Enhancements bugs, various issues with defense versus resistance, the fact that buffs and debuffs are horribly overpowered, the general movement away from the healer/tank/DPS trinity etc.). Allowing character import would effectively force CoX2 to replicate all of the power design decisions made in CoX1.