Adeon Hawkwood

Yuo are really underestimating the value of +Rech. Yes, Blasters will have a decent attack chain, but it will be mostly composed of single target attacks. Even Assault Rifle (the premier AoE blast set finds it hard to do only AoE attacks. Having more +Recharge means the Defenders are dealing more AoE damage faster than the blasters will. They also have their 3rd blast up more frequently which further increases their damage output.

For an IO'd character yes, for an SO'd character without any to hit buffs or -def... not so much. You need 97% accuracy to get a 95% hit chance against +3s. Unless the Blasters are /Dev, heavily IO'd or have a couple of people running Tactics they aren't going to be hitting +3s anywhere near as well as the defenders.

And downtime means less speed. If the Blasters are stopping to rest after every X spawns then they need to be moving through the spawns faster than the defenders to compensate.

Actually it was assuming 95% damage slotting. As for Aim and BU they only really serve to front load the damage somewha. That is useful but they aren't a consistent damage boost. If combined with a nuke power they can be used to wipe most of a spawn but even with 8 Blasters it's hard to do that every spawn.


You are makign two assumptions here that I disagree with:
1. That the overall damage output of a blaster is better than the buffed defenders (I disagree due to the +recharge fo the defender)
2. That there is no downtime for any of these teams

But it is also perfectly possible to buff defenders in a way that makes the solo and duo defenders more fun without increasing the potential of the defender team.

CD is mostly useful if you either want to be able to ghost mission (especially if you take recall friend) or as an IO mule (either a Red fortune set if you have spare slots or a Luck of the Gambler 7.5% in the base slot).

If you want more AoE damage Electrical is probably the way to go (it also has Energy resistance which is nice).

Thunderstrikes are cheap and very effective
Positron's Blast is a nice set for your AoEs, it's more expensive but if you're patient it's not two bad (just watch out on how much you pay for salvage)
If you take Gun Drone then Expedient Reinforcement is a VERY nice set, the recipes are normally very cheap as well, it does require rare salvage though so factor that in
Red Fortune is a cheap set with nice bonuses, the downside is that on a blaster you only really get the set bonuses, the defense powers you have (CD, Hover, CJ etc) aren't really worth enhancing for defense.
Trap of the Hunter is a nice set for Web Grenade if you have spare slots.

The same goes for damage buffs provided from an outside source (and some other types, but damage buffs are the most common). Since they are all based off of the character's base values a damage buff will increase a Blaster's actual damage more than a Defenders (assuming same level and slotting).

I'm sorry, but you are completely ignoring reality. A team of 8 Empaths means that you have (approximately) 3x fortitude, and at least 2x regen aura on you at all times. You also have AB on you 90% of the time (100% of the time if the Empath's have hasten or ~40% global recharge).

Yes the blasters will do about 17% more damage (assuming 95% damage slotting for both groups). But the Defenders will have softcapped defense, +100% recharge (90% of the time), mez protection, a huge to hit bonus (useful if you want to go up against +3s or +4s and aren't a /Devices Blaster), a huge regen bonus and healing. So the Defender team is several orders of magnitude tougher than the blasters and has the capability to go against +3s and +4s without needing to worry about hitting. They barely take any damage and the little they do take gets restored pretty quickly just from the regen buffs (or a quick heal other if necessary). Add in the fact that the recharge bonus means that the Defenders are probably actually out-damaging the blasters since they can use their AoEs a lot more often.

So yeah, a team of 8 Blasters has slightly higher damage, but the team of 8 empaths is significantly more powerful.

Oh and increasing Defender damage modifier to 0.8? The Empath team gets a 5% damage bonus over Blasters. So they'd be dealing more damage, hitting more often, and significantly tougher.

Yes, but not because it's a primary versus a secondary. All characters have attribute modifiers that impact how powerful their abilities are. For example take Dual Pistols. Three ATs have access to the sets: Defenders, Blaster and Corruptors. Their Ranged Damage Modifiers (at level 50) are as follows:
Blaster: 1.125
Corruptor: 0.75
Defender: 0.65

So Blasters will do about 73% more damage with their pistols than Defenders. However even though corruptors have it as their primary they deal less damage than blasters and only slightly more than defenders (ignoring scourge).

However the pistol attacks also deal various other effects depending on the specific power and the ammo type. Most attacks deal Knockback (regular ammo), Slow (cryo ammo) or damage reduction (toxic ammo). Additionally Suppressive Fire does either a stun or a hold. The different AT have different modifiers for these as well, for example the modifiers for damage debuff are as follows:
Blaster: 0.07
Corruptor: 0.1
Defender: 0.125

These vary a little bit for different debuffs but the basic point is the same. Defenders get the best ones, and blasters the worst with corruptors in between.

If you want a full list of attribute modifiers the wiki has them in the various AT pages or you can find them at redtomax.
http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Main_Page
http://tomax.cohtitan.com/data/modifiers.php

They don't because they don't want to. What you are proposing essentially turns the market into a store. They implemented a market becuase they wanted set IOs to be obtained through combat/merits/tickets rather than being purchased for inf from a vendor.

As Aggelakis and GATE-keeper said fixed prices cause problems unless they are either set significantly higher than the natural market price OR there is an unlimited supply. If you put unlimited supply on the market then it becomes a store and the devs don't want that.

That seems reasonable to me. If they delay it any longer than that then either the open beta will be the shortest in CoX history (which seems like a bad idea to me given the size of the issue), or they will miss the stated time frame for the release of Demon Summoning. I guess they could release Demon Summoning separately with no open beta though.

It might be that they are just starting the pre-download early. I mean the Ultra Mode is probably going to be a large download and plenty of the art assets and such for it aren't going to change between now and when I17 goes live anyway since they aren't the sort of place you find bugs anyway. So starting the pre-download early means people spread out more and there is less load on the server.

That's a fair point. I tend to view AR in terms of it's AoE damage since that's how both of mine are built (I have Ignite, but I really only use it for killing bosses).

Not going to happen. People who want to farm will farm (and IMHO there is nothing wrong with that). What the devs are doing is pruning back the exploitative farming methods not attempting to eliminate farming entirely.

I can definitely see the problem for story tellers, it really does discourage the use of allies for story reasons. At the same time the nerf was needed (due to the farms with 10+ buff bots) so hopefully the XP loss isn't to great if you only have one or two allies.

That is kinda annoying. I can see the argument for why to do it but having to re-target resurrecting enemies is a bit irritating (especially against Rommy where you have to break LoS while he rezzes). Oh well, it's not the end of the world.

I don't think it would ruin everything, however I don't see an easy way to do it. There was a suggestion a few pages back about allowing defenders to use ally buffs on themselves. Some variation on that is probably the only practical way to change things so that all Defenders get equal usage from their primary but the standard code rant applies as to why it's unlikely to be implemented as a solution.

If Defenders are just fine on teams then there is no need to raise their base damage, adding something that raises damage when solo would be sufficient.

I don't think Defenders need any more encouragement to shoot (some players might, but that's their problem). Personally I'm perfectly happy with the damage output of my defenders in team situations. The only time I feel their damage is lacking is when I'm soloing.

Come again? Corruptors have only slightly higher damage than defenders (0.75 modifier plus scourge) and yet defender buffs are substantially stronger (up to 30% stronger for the good ones, less on weaker buffs like healing). Controllers are technically 1.1 with containment but they have a very limited selection of attack powers and most of the ones they do have have low damage scales compared to powers with equivalent area and recharge (for example the Controller version of fireball has twice the recharge of the defender/corruptor/blaster version but the same damage scale). Masterminds I can't really comment on (I've never played one and the math is less obvious due to the pets) although I'll point out that their buffs/debuffs are mostly weaker than corruptor ones AND have higher endurance costs.

I disagree. With the way the game is balanced now increasing defender/corruptor base damage would be detrimental to the balance unless substantial changes were made to the effectiveness of buffs/debuffs (I'm talking ED/GDN level changes here).

I think at this point in the thread though we might as well go our separate ways and agree to disagree.

Not at all, a team of 8 characters who are damage multipliers (i.e. any character with a buff/debuff set) is overpowered. It doesn't even need to be a team of 8, stacking 3 or 4 of them tends to make a joke of most content. Conversly a team of 8 non-damage multipliers will generally be weaker than a mixed team. Given this increasing their base damage is something that needs to be approached VERY carefully. Personally I think the current damage values are about right in a team setting although I would like to see some sort of damage buff when solo.

It's simple mathematics. Buffs and debuffs act as damage multipliers. Lets say for the sake an argument that a team of 8 defenders is 16 times as powerful as a single defender (i.e. in a team each defender is twice as powerful as they are solo). This number is made up, but I suspect it actually underestimates the power of a team of defenders. If you increase their base damage by 23% then they will still be 16 times as powerful as a single defender but will become 46% more powerful than they currently are, or 23 times as powerful as single current defender.

Now the numbers are made up but it illustrates my point. If you increase the base damage of a single defender then the power of a group of defenders goes up by considerably more than the amount you increased the damage by. If you believe that a team of defenders is currently underpowered then this isn't a problem. However if you believe, as I do, that a team of Defenders (or any other AT with a buff/debuff set) is overpowered then increasing thier base damage while on a team is a bad change.

7 Defenders and 1 Tanker or 7 Defenders and 1 Blaster are overpowered but not because of the Tanker or Blaster. Defenders are force multipliers, they increase the power of everyone else on the team. Tankers and Blasters are not force multipliers (ok, the first Tanker on a team is a weak force multiplier). Because of the way buffs and debuffs work in this game characters that are force multipliers (Defenders, Corruptors, Controllers and Masterminds) stack together a LOT better than anyone else. To some extent this is limited by their lower base damage. Even with their current damage they are pretty overpowered, increasing the base damage makes that even worse.

TL;DR version: Defenders do not need to be made more powerful on a team, they could use some help solo though.

I actually agree with the sentiment. However I don't think that it can be done within the current framework of the game. The game is already horribly imbalanced in favor of buffs and debuffs over damage. In order to make increasing defender damage practical then either the game needs to be completely rebalanced around less powerful buffs or the ATs that don't have buffs/debuffs need to be re-imagined so that they do.