UberGuy

Ooh, lets set up a completely unprovable assertion about my gaming experience and then lay out how I am in a worse position than you because your unprovable assertion. Awesome!

Who's in a worse position now? I'm sorry, before I give you a milligram of further consideration, I'd like you to produce quantified evidence of this assertion. How early in the game? What healing powers compared to what shileds/buffs? Are you claiming that healing is better mitigation before other powers are available? Or are you claiming that weakly slotted healing is better than weakly slotted shields?

Even if you manage to clarify the above questions and show strong evidence that healing is actually the better survival over some useful level range, are you arguing that people don't learn to use better tools when they become available?

Oh, so you are arguing that. But wait, doesn't that support my position? Is that really helping your position that they will jump on the Vengeance bandwagon?

You can't have it both ways here. Either this is going to be a power shift because no one uses this stuff today, but they're all going to start tomorrow, or it's not going to be a power shift, because lots of people are already running around softcapped today, and Vengeance becomes a +toHit and +damage buff.

I'm talking about the conditions under which you can use the power. A Cold or FF user on a team doesn't have any preconditions on buffing their teammates. Vengeance requires a teammate to die. I can promise you that non-veteran people look at that and think "why would I pick that when I can use other stuff to keep them alive?" I'm not arguing about what knowledgeable people will do here. We're talking about the mythical casual gamer will do - the people who make up a big chunk of PuGs. You're claiming that so many of these people are going to figure out that they should now snag Vengeance that it's going to be a shift in overall power.

I don't think you're selling that very well.

Really? Hmm.

You declare massive team power creep, which you implicitly tie to increased access to Vengeance by reduction in demand for other power picks. You state, directly, that Vengeance is currently "balanced" by its scarcity. You imply strongly, by using the statement "the team power creep is through the roof" that this is going to change.

They can now take the leadership pool, slot a perception unique, a +to hit unique, and have vengeance all for 0 cost to performance.

Team wipes for that character have just become a thing of the past.

And if you don't think this is big thing go take a look at the shield builds in the scrapper forums. There are many builds that can't squeeze in hasten and now they get it. Or you can just go take a look at the Perma Dom builds in the Dominator forum.

You might notice I didn't make any claim about its frequency. I stated what it would do to my play experience.

PuGs are PuGs are PuGs. The powers and builds that allow people to softcap their teams are common and readily accessible, but people still run around looking for "healers". I think the notion that some vast greater percentage of teams will be running around like demi-gods because of it is silly, because if it were going to happen, it already would happen a lot more today at later levels. "Typical" players tend to shun most conditional powers, even ones as good as Vengeance. Will more people pick up Vengeance? Yes, almost certainly. Might that have a network effect and raise the percentage of users even higher? Probably. Is it going to be a game-balance changing transition? I seriously doubt it.

The defense is the vastly more helpful and content-rolling aspect of the power. Everything else it does is nice, but I find it of distant secondary benefit most of the time. Yes, sometimes the +toHit comes in real handy. Having high mez resistance is handy, but usually being nearly unhittable covers that, too. The damage buff is pretty nice, but comparable with a lot of other team buffs that may well already be present (which reduces the final % increase in team DPS it provides, like any damage buff). I don't ever remember the heal being a pivotal event.

There are only two pieces of content I regularly see Vengeance used for where I think it makes a big different almost without question: the STF and the RSF last mission AV/Hero fights. Even in those situations, it's usually but not always primarily being used to buff summoned pets such as Shivans, who benefit far more from the +toHit and +damage aspects of the power than most player character builds, having no accuracy slotting and no damage slotting as players do. I can tell you though that with the advent of Villain epic ATs, the number of RSFs I went on that didn't use Vengeance at all went up noticeably.

I'm really not seeing that. I mean, yeah, OK, it's clearly technically possible, but ... I am really struggling to see it as something we can point to and say it's a big deal.

While I agree that this example is mechanically valid, again, it seems like you're reaching here. I just haven't seen situations like that come up that much.

I'll agree completely that if you've got a sterotypical PuG team in the 20+ range, with fairly mundane, non-Set IO builds, low to moderate experience with the game, and no one providing large-scale defense buffs, adding Vengeance to the team can make a tremendous difference. I just don't think there's going to be such an increase in the number of people using it, that these teams see a measurable uplift in performance. Time will tell.

I gave parlance examples of how the term is typically used to imply something negative. For example, saying "times are tight" is practically never used to imply good things. Ignoring how words are used is dumb. I will agree that the actual mechanical outcome we're talking about in the game is hardly a bad thing.