BellaStrega

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It's a dead issue at this point, because the Devs agree with our side. Toggle Dropping WILL be curtailed. The only question is, by how much?

Lower the percentage possibilities of TD proportionally to what melee toons lost after I5 and GDR...Boom! Problem solved.

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I don't think anyone out of scrappers or tanks had their defenses divided by 8 or more. Going from two guaranteed toggle-drops and possibility of more, to 1:20 and 1:4.8 or so is a much more profound change than anything that came from the global defense nerf. You did see the percentages Castle posted earlier in the thread? There isn't any question about it, it's as good as done.

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Reducing the chance of toggle-drops to 1/8 of the former chance (using the 1/8 number you pulled out) is not the same as reducing defenses by 1/8, or reducing offense by 1/8.

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All I can say is - yuck. Making snipes that optimal still wouldn't do that much for blasters vs. non-squishies, but would make them so attractive that you'd see a hell of a lot more stealthed blasters sniping from their max range, which imo is the AT at its worst. Certainly it's the least pleasant way for a melee to be engaged by a blaster.

People will drop their loads if blasters are given more damage, I don't think that will fly too well either.

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You know, I'd believe the damage thing if ED hadn't happened. With ED in place, there's room to buff damage a bit. If the devs buffed blaster damage, that'd also make room to buff other ATs that could use the damage love - like Defenders and Dominators.

As for the snipe thing, it's really easy to get +Perception, as many Stalkers will complain about at length. It's also worth noting that blaster damage is already 30% unresistable, so giving snipes a boost on that isn't as huge a thing as it might appear.

Anyway, I don't see how it'd be that big a problem, as stalkers will already be doing the "snipe from stealth" trick with their PPPs.

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It may have been confirmed in a PM, thus Statesman addressing the question of whether they'd be getting rid of melee attacks.

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He also said they'd be giving Tankers what Brutes ended up getting, Fury. Blaster secondaries are pretty fun and please many paying customers, if they do anything profound it'll involve adding NEW sets rather than taking away the melee attacks in nearly all the secondaries. They do goofy things sometimes but they're not stupid.

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He said they would, then tested it and said "This is too powerful for tankers."

I don't know what happened to the discussion, but there was talk of letting people keep the old sets or respec into the new ones, and explicit referencing of bringing all of the secondaries in line with each other. Unlike the Fury thing, I haven't seen any later statements changing that.

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However, far be it from me to take away from your blaster pityfest.

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You said "I saw Statesman come out and say several months ago that the blaster secondaries will be reworked. Not thinking about, but that it will happen.". I asked you for a cite because I had no recollection of Statesman having made any such statement. In what way is that a "pityfest"?

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The extreme readiness to say "nuh uh, Statesman did not say they were going to fix blasters."

There was also that monosyllabic "Cite." You might as well grunt your displeasure.

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Fix Defiance. Fix Blaster secondaries. Add more powers to primaries and secondaries. Fix ED. Adding additional powersets.

We’re happy with Defiance.

We will look at Blaster secondaries; we know some need attention.

We’d like to add more power sets and powers; it’s just that they take a LONG time. A single new power set can take as long as a month to finish; that isn’t a man month in terms of manpower. That’s a real month. Adding individual powers to sets take longer, because an artist needs to change styles to match each set.

We’re happy with ED.

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I saw Statesman come out and say several months ago that the blaster secondaries will be reworked. Not thinking about, but that it will happen.

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Cite please.

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Do a search for Statesman's posts in the blaster forum for the past two years.

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Searched. Found this and this and this . Nothing like a guarantee. So, cite please.

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It may have been confirmed in a PM, thus Statesman addressing the question of whether they'd be getting rid of melee attacks.

However, far be it from me to take away from your blaster pityfest.

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I saw Statesman come out and say several months ago that the blaster secondaries will be reworked. Not thinking about, but that it will happen.

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Cite please.

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Do a search for Statesman's posts in the blaster forum for the past two years.

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CLAP, CLAP, CLAP.

Thx Kali! Couldn't agree with you more!

It's a dead issue at this point, because the Devs agree with our side. Toggle Dropping WILL be curtailed. The only question is, by how much?

Lower the percentage possibilities of TD proportionally to what melee toons lost after I5 and GDR...Boom! Problem solved.

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I don't think it's a dead issue. I think it's an issue that's getting tested. The devs at least agree that it's worthwhile to see how things play out with a lower chance to drop toggles. I also think that there are real balance issues that need to be addressed. I'd rather they weren't covered up with a bandaid like toggle-dropping. I'd like to see boosts for various ATs so that they're more competitive in PVP - like a higher percentage of unresistable damage from snipes (75%-85%) than other blaster attacks, and blasters might need a damage boost in the post-ED world.

Also, the drop in defenses was not consistent across all sets, so it'd be difficult to standardize TD that way.

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BTW, what the heck is schadenfreude?

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Taking pleasure in another's misfortune. It's a mean thing to feel.

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Take a chill pill Kali, if you look it was a comment made in regards to the new Elec set which as far as I can tell we still don't have all the numbers for.

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If you can cut the "whiny melee" crap, maybe. It's not doing any good.

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Also, even in the elec debates I stated that one of the reasons that I supported knockback protection being added to /Dark was because of the mechanics behind Dark Regeneration. Hell, I even [censored] about it on the scrapper forums. Don't come at me suggesting that I am throwing balance to the wind or that I am suddenly changeing my stance on issues. It won't fly.

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I missed that post, but I am not saying you're suddenly changing your stance on issues. I am saying that you will reliably support squishy over melee, even if squishy ATs are benefiting from an unbalanced mechanic. Case in point: This thread.

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Hyperbole? Not at all. When dueling other melee characters, I found it very easy to constantly knock toggles off with just brawl. I mean, only a 33% chance, but since I was spamming it like crazy, I could whittle a DA scrapper's defenses down to the minimum and then smack him around with all my knockdown/up and mez powers (yay stone melee).

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Is it really 33%, because I recently went to see how good brawl was at dropping toggles and we got something closer to 20%?

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Whichever it was, I was able to detoggle melee opponents fairly easily with just brawl.

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If I could, in two seconds, knock out two toggles, with a very high chance to get three, a moderate chance to get four, and a low chance to get five on top of probably stacking a stun that might land through knocked out mez shield, I don't see how any melee character could retoggle in any decent amount of time.


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If you are fighting a squishy, I don't see why any melee character would need to re-toggle.

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Bonesmasher - Energy Punch - Total Focus - attack - attack - attack

That is mathematically likely to leave the melee target unable to react due to having the hell stunned out of him and the number of toggles the first two attacks will drop. So this melee character who has a mez shield and probably has defense or resistance against the incoming damage loses those advantages in two hits.

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Absolutely; you don't see the developers shedding a tear over it do you? You didn't see them come out and say that perhaps some of the other blaster secondary sets will be getting a change soon did you? I didn't. I know they are thinking about re-working them, but that is pie in the sky.

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I saw Statesman come out and say several months ago that the blaster secondaries will be reworked. Not thinking about, but that it will happen.

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Well, I admit that the math from Blueeyed and my own personal experiences is probably not enough of arguement for the melee proponents in this game but that is all I have. Just the numbers and my own experiences to back me up. What have you got?

*looks back at the pro-nerf arguements*

Oh, it seems alot of whine. Here, the developers handed you your cheese, I hope you enjoy it while it lasts.

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First, I don't recall much beyond a hell of a lot of emotional appeals from you and Blueeyed in the older threads or in the I7 threads. I remember arguments that defenders would suck if the two sets that had reliable toggle-droppers lost them, and perhaps some pie-in-the-sky reasoning that the devs might add toggle-droppers to the less advantaged in PVP sets like Dark Miasma...

But math? I recall very little beyond the TA/A vs. Regen test.

Second, there's more to the argument against toggle-dropping than whining. You've acknowledged as much when you admitted that TD isn't a fun mechanic. Unfortunately you're so tied up in the idea that this mechanic is necessary for balance that you're not really willing to entertain that there are valid arguments to remove it.

After all:

- On live, there's a have/have-not dichotomy where some powersets get a lot of toggle-dropping potential, often with good mezzing to back it up. Not only do you have a good chance to drop toggles, you can leverage that by mezzing your target if you knock off the right shields. This makes balancing these sets more difficult as well as encourages FotM PVP builds

- The fact is that a significant portion of every melee character's build is tied up in toggle defenses. By including a mechanic that renders those toggles pointless much of the time, you're effectively cheating those players out of those power choices. As _Castle_ has reportedly said, melee should play PVP as if they don't have shields.

- Despite protests to the contrary, the core of the pro-toggle dropping argument is that 1v1 PVP is unfair between squishies and melee, to the point of claiming that squishies simply cannot defeat melee characters without having toggle-dropping available. One of the older threads was repeatedly marked with insistence that a blaster can't solo a tanker is unfair, but followed with "if a tanker has problems taking on buld X, get a team to help." Apparently, squishies shouldn't ever need teams to accomplish their PVP goals.

- Toggle-dropping is not in genre. I mean, do you remember that time when Starfire blasted Superman and suddenly he fell out of the sky? Yeah, neither do I.

- Toggle-dropping was introduced in issue 4, when invuln and stone tankers could cap their resists without outside help, and invuln could also reach very high defense with bugged invincibility. Ice Armor was still able to reach a very high defense with Energy Absorption. In conditions like that, toggle-dropping is an end run around those powers to enable characters to overcome those defenses. In issue 5, defenses were reduced across the board. No defense primary or secondary was able to match the numbers they'd reached before. In issue 6, ED reduced those numbers further, compounding the GDR in issue 5. I realize that many would counter that damage also suffered from ED - and this is true. However, damage was not reduced in issue 5 before being reduced again in issue 6. The simple fact is that defenses were hit twice, and the first hit magnifies the result of the second. If toggle-dropping was balanced in issue 4, it is most assuredly not balanced now.

- The most common argument pro-TD posters produce is "I hate those damned dirty melee characters for whining and getting us all nerfed."

I admit that the last gives me a certain amount of schadenfreude given all the ungracious gloating that flooded the forum after various melee nerfs. It's funny how quick the tune changes when the shoes on the other foot and all.

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*screams in frustration*

For the love of whatever deity you people hold dear, can we stop beating the "lack of KB protection" dead horse with the stick yet?

Lack of KB protection is -not-, I repeat NOT a major issue in a set with this much utility. Hell, there's a lot more utility here than /fire tanks get, and the lack of KB protection hasn't stopped them. Either way, however, you're beating a dead horse. The devs are fully aware that no KB protection is a hole in this set. Odds are, they intended it to be.

The entire argument is like receiving a free mansion to live in, and [censored] about the color of the tile in the bathroom. It's an excellent set, with good utility that makes it stand out above the other sets, who friggin' cares about one dinky hole that's easily filled with something else?

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Wow, it's good you're here to tell us what we're supposed to like or dislike about new powersets. Without that guidance, we'd all be lost.

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Look past that and see the root of the problem. The melee player does not want to have the weakness of knockback or immobilization and thus feels compelled to eliminate the weakness. Otherwise, what is forceing them to get SJ? If they accepted the weakness then they could pick any travel pool they wanted, but melee players don't want any weakness. They can't handle it.

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No. In Dark's case, Dark Armor relies on being near or in a crowd of enemies to function to its full potential (Dark Regeneration, Cloak of Fear, Death Shroud, Oppressive Gloom), never mind that with only a few exceptions, melee ATs generally don't have ranged attacks. Knockback minimizes those strengths and can negate them entirely depending upon how much KB there is. For brutes who have taunt inherent to their attacks and auras, it's even worse because the brute takes more fire than a scrapper or stalker.

There's also the fact that most melee defenses have KB protection, with only three on live giving it up for (according to Statesman) protection from a relatively rare damage type, or for damage that has been nerfed several times.

However, since you are unable or unwilling to imagine that anyone might have a valid complaint about melee ATs that doesn't parse down to "melee is overpowered," every complaint must be unjustified and characterized as petty. This happens every single time balance discussions about melee characters come up.

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Maybe because, in a team context (you know, the way the devs want you to play) it was positively impossible to keep any toggles up.

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Hyperbole. It is also completely untrue. Unless, for some reason only known to the lord himself I have just never suffered like you have. I run 5-6 toggles on my Stone/EA brute and the most I have had dropped is three. I have had EM come up to me and knock off three toggles, and I wasn't mezzed. Does that contradict everything that you believe? Well, it is normal gameplay experience for me since I do PvP regularly. Maybe if more melee types got out there with a team and fought they would have similar experiences.

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Hyperbole? Not at all. When dueling other melee characters, I found it very easy to constantly knock toggles off with just brawl. I mean, only a 33% chance, but since I was spamming it like crazy, I could whittle a DA scrapper's defenses down to the minimum and then smack him around with all my knockdown/up and mez powers (yay stone melee). He had trouble keeping his toggles up even though i was only knocking one down every third hit. If I could, in two seconds, knock out two toggles, with a very high chance to get three, a moderate chance to get four, and a low chance to get five on top of probably stacking a stun that might land through knocked out mez shield, I don't see how any melee character could retoggle in any decent amount of time.

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Because you end up with a team of Tankers + various support casters if you go down that balance road. It is what ended up happening in PvE. The Tankers have the damage to kill anything. If it takes multiple people to defeat them, then why in the world would a team want to take less of them?

Here is the other flipside of the equation, since we are talking about team PvP we can ignore all 1v1 situations. So, taking a tank or brute and pairing them off against a blaster with both sides having the same support, is it an = fight. From what I have seen with toggle droppers the way they are NOW, it is if you are comparing comparable sets of Tanks, Brutes to Blasters. EM VS. EM for instance. Throughout various leveling stages this balance is thrown off by power acquisition. The only way to balance that would be for everyone to have all their powers whenever they go into a PvP zone, or in other words, the zones are not balanced.

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PVP is not balanced on live right now. The only thing propping some blaster secondaries up is a cheap trick that flies in the face of genre and fun - and you have admitted repeatedly that it's not fun.

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So it comes down to the issue of melee not wanting to be weak against anything. I can back that up with statements from melee players concerning the new electric set. The set has built in weaknesses and the players are complaining up a storm about how it is retarded for any melee set to have a weakness.

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So it comes down to Concern making swipes against other players because he doesn't really have a strong argument? You're whining like a regen scrapper with a small tweak in his finger.

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I hope it didn't appear that I was saying the heavies needed to be nerfed. No, I think they got that part right.

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I don't know. I mean, a heavy hit my tanker for 1700 points in one shot today. I definitely felt the pain of playing a defense-oriented set when heavies were around.

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I believe that hevies, even though they are pets, will be treated as critters for the purpose of "accuracy scaling"...but this is non-confirmed, and should be looked into.

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"pain of defense-oriented set" = getting hit for full damage when hit at all

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I hope it didn't appear that I was saying the heavies needed to be nerfed. No, I think they got that part right.

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I don't know. I mean, a heavy hit my tanker for 1700 points in one shot today. I definitely felt the pain of playing a defense-oriented set when heavies were around.

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Not many hero archetypes can, either. A scrapper has a chance, so does a blaster, but neither is guaranteed. Also, can a Tank defeat a Brute? Tanker damage is weak, and they don't have the benefit of Fury.

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Uh, until they patch it, BRUTES don't even have the benefit of fury.

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That's tragic, but it doesn't really have anything to do with my question.

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You're question doesn't make sense - tankers don't do "weak damage."

For the record, though, I did finish off a brute or two with my ice/stone in RV earlier.

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FA renders every defense power and acc debuff useless EXCEPT the few lvl 38 super defense powers, and even then it still makes a big dent in their effectiveness

that's crazy overpowered, not to mention any scrapper or tank can get it, while villains can not

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You're exaggerating by a lot.

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How can you guys even call for a nerf when you don't have your FPO's yet and aren't level 50... level out, get your enhancements, then if you still feel its needed cry nerf. But don't cry because you get owned when your fighting peopel that have had a longer time to get to where you will be soon enough.

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They don't want to admit how good Elude, etc is for them, which can and does offset FA's accuracy bonus...and for some reason, they think "Hide" = "Should never ever be spotted."

I don't think the "FA renders Stalkers useless" argument has yet been demonstrated to be true.

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Ever stop to think WHY you haven't seen too many Tanks in Arena and in PvP????????????


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Honestly, it is because alot of tanks are used to playing in PvE and suck balls in PvP. There are good PvP tanks playing in PvP now. Not everyone is a good PvP player and I think some of the people that play Tanks are a little upset about it. They did whine their way to victory though.

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Give it a day or two, and you guys will be reenacting the great regen threads of I3.

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Heaven forbid the AT that is described as the squishy damage AT actually have some delusions of a damage advantage!

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Heaven forbid the AT described as high defense actually have some delusions of a defense advantage?

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I wasn't talking about your exchanges, which are pretty clearly on-topic, but rather the very personal and blatantly ad hominem post I was responding to. I don't see anything much to do with toggle dropping in that large recycled collection of quotes, bruised ego, and defenses of minutiae no one cares about except perhaps the person who posted it.

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Sorry, then, was on a hair-trigger.

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But for an obligatory comment about toggle-dropping - it's now no more than a verrrry minor side-effect to various attacks. I think it's a painful nerf for Blasters, sure, but dominators REALLY did not need a nerf in this department. At least the blaster has pretty high damage to contribute. Dominators, I don't see why a nerf to their toggle drops was required at all. Rotten damage, primary negated by breakfrees - and now a greatly lessened potential for toggle drops.

To the brute complaining about getting 3-shotted by /EM blappers, that's not due to toggle drops and you'll pretty likely still get 3-shotted by the same guy if you don't change any of your tactics.

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I'm reminded of a poster who complained about the possibility...the Platonic Ideal of a blaster that could two-shot his brutes as evidence that blappers should be nerfed. He later said he never actually lost in PVP to blasters.

The change is a PVP nerf. Blasters very probably need some help in PVP, and Dominators even moreso. Tweaking the toggle drop percentages might be worthwhile.

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What a big, stupid bunch of he-said-she-said recap and backbiting. Who cares what you said, when you said it, why you said it, and what you really meant? Wasn't this topic about toggle-dropping and not your personal ego-fluffing?

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Ironically, you're perpetuating what you're complaining about. Wouldn't it be more productive for you to post about toggle dropping?

That exchange was on-topic, though. The point being that it's hypocritical to insist that the changes you personally like are justified, and the changes you hate are obviously the result of incompetence.

I'm not finding that shadow maul misses all that much, and it does a lot of damage. It crits fairly often (although not all the time). It's not a bad power.

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I'm sorry, Fanboy, but you know very well that there's no understanding what the hell goes on in these people's minds.

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I don't completely dispute that.

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Does that scream out to you "Nerf Defenders, Dominators, and non-EM Blasters heavily without giving them a single thing back?"

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if i were a dev, yes- it would. but only because my ears were muffled by my asscheeks. (i really hope asscheeks makes it through the filter)

as with everything else, they fixed one thing and introduced a whole bunch more. par for the course so far.

for the record, i think they do throughly test all of this stuff. shouts of incompetence make me want to slap people. I just think that their view of how we should perform and our view of it is radically different. I also think that it is perfectly acceptable to them to have a bunch of people be weaker than they should than to have a few people be stronger than they should. ""if those other people get run over by nerfs to the strongest, well then they'll just have for a better solution."" i don't like that line of thought, but i think it's a popular one in cryptic.

it perfectly fine to to yell about what you think is a bad decision. I'd be the worst hypocrit on these boards if I said otherwise. I strongly object to people calling them incompetent.

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Thank you.

Every decision is not automatically right, nor is it automatically wrong. It's also not automatically incompetent just because I don't like it.

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Yes, actually I do. I remember blasters insisting that scrappers spend a majority of their time at the 500% damage cap (not true), that broadsword scrappers were two-shotting +3 bosses (definitely not true), and so on. I've read blaster anti-melee whine-threads since issue 2 and the smoke grenade nerf, and I know I'm not the only poster who has seen this.

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I would consider the winner in the "Which AT has the stupidests complainers" too close to call myself.

For instance, blasters *and* scrappers were arguing for months over which one should get the higher damage cap, and no amount of logic could convince hardly anyone that who got the *higher* cap was a practically meaningless question. They were arguing over an issue comparable to which one should get the louder sound effects. But trying to argue that the issue was really whether each cap was appropriate to each set independently was something between Herculean and Quixotic, and I didn't have the energy to figure out which.

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I'm not arguing that blasters have more complainers than scrappers, Arcana. On the other hand, scrappers were by and large not starting multipage threads to nerf scrappers.

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<<Had the devs actually done any serious testing, and not just listened to complaining from blasters,>>

Wow do you know anything about complaining Blasters? Let me illuminate you.

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Yes, actually I do. I remember blasters insisting that scrappers spend a majority of their time at the 500% damage cap (not true), that broadsword scrappers were two-shotting +3 bosses (definitely not true), and so on. I've read blaster anti-melee whine-threads since issue 2 and the smoke grenade nerf, and I know I'm not the only poster who has seen this.

This does not mean that blasters don't have complaints about the AT itself, but for a long time those complaints were constantly framed in terms of what could be done to the melee ATs to make blasters work better.

But like Estrella, you missed my point completely. I don't think that blaster whining was the primary cause of melee defense nerfs any more than I think that melee complaints are the primary cause of reductions to toggle-dropping. At best, those complaints illuminated real issues. The devs looked at those issues, tested, and made changes based on that testing.

To claim that one set of nerfs is justified and another nerf is not based solely on your own advocacy isn't constructive.