Captain Fabulous

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Quicksand still "splats" and halves my performance. I have all the newest drivers, which I downloaded from the ATI site when I8 went up on Training Room. The usage of many Kheld powers hammers performance as well.

Last night we were doing many Portal missions in Peregrine IsIand. In PI itself performance was normal, typically 20-30 fps. After exiting the last mission, however, the framerate plummeted to 5 fps in PI. This was in the portal room, with no one present except our team. Poor performance continued all the way to the base portal. Once in the base the framerate returned to normal. This was on Pinnacle about 10:20 CST, 30 November.

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I've noticed that splatting and/or framerate killing powers only need to be active in the vincinity of you, even if you can't see them. For example, when Force Fields had their splatting issues I could be running mine inside ICON in Steel Canyon and it would affect the performance of people outside of ICON on the street. They couldn't see me or the bubble, but they sure felt the effects.

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I always wondered do you have to have a special Video Card to download PhysX are is just software that works with most Video cards?

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People have said that installing the software even though you don't have the hardware does give a boost in physics performance. But honestly, I'm not sure I notice a difference myself.

But I don't think it's hurting either, so you have nothing to lose by trying.

I wonder tho if the game is designed to use a particular version of the PhysX software? There have been a few updates over the last couple of months, and I don't know if that helps or hurts things.

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I agree it MAY be a sound issue as I too tried turning off the sound (slider down to 0) and the FPS went up a bit in normal and stopped the "Slide show" effect during big team battles (although still not on par with I7)

Shader setting also effects more FPS than they did pre I8. Turning it down from high to Low gained a good 10 FPS flying around in Steel, again still not up to what I had Pre I8.

Tech support had me load Aquamark benchmark and send them my score (34,147 if you are interested) which I thought was a bit odd. Then they closed my issue without a reply, I reopened it of course.

AMD 64 +3400
ATI 9500 Pro 128M
1 Gig Consair Ram (1 one Gig stick)
1208X1024 (LCD monitor native Res)
250(X2)WD SATA Hard drives
Asus KV8 SE Mobo
VIA Chipset

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When you turn off the sound you get better framerates cause the CPU now has a few more cycles to use towards the visuals. You'll see a much larger improvement in FPS when you turn off sound if you use onboard or a low-end add-in card (where all the sound processing is done in software via the driver).

The same is true of the network. Using onboard or low-end network cards (again where all the work is being done in the driver) will give you lower game performance than if you had a dedicated hardware-based network adapter.

A general rule of thumb is to look at the size of the basic driver package (not the full package that often contains control panels, utilities, etc.) Very small driver sets, say 1 MB or smaller, usually indicates the chip/card is doing most of the work. Driver sets that are 5 MBs or more (as are most onboard sound and network drivers) usually means all the work is done in software by your CPU.

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I agree and will try an old SB Audigy 1 card I have somewhere around here. But this still does not explain why I wasn't having a problem pre I8 or why people with Uber systems (unlike mine) are seeing issues too.

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Turning off your sound pre I8 would have yielded a similar increase in performance. This isn't something new to I8.

But I understand your point. I8 is having performance issues, hence the reason we have this thread.

One other thing I forgot to mention here is that the renderthread switch is now off again by default. If you have a dual core or hyperthreaded CPU you need to add it back into the target box in the updater's shortcut like this:

"I:\City of Heroes\CohUpdater.exe" -renderthread 1

This should have little to no effect on single core, non-HT processors.

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I agree it MAY be a sound issue as I too tried turning off the sound (slider down to 0) and the FPS went up a bit in normal and stopped the "Slide show" effect during big team battles (although still not on par with I7)

Shader setting also effects more FPS than they did pre I8. Turning it down from high to Low gained a good 10 FPS flying around in Steel, again still not up to what I had Pre I8.

Tech support had me load Aquamark benchmark and send them my score (34,147 if you are interested) which I thought was a bit odd. Then they closed my issue without a reply, I reopened it of course.

AMD 64 +3400
ATI 9500 Pro 128M
1 Gig Consair Ram (1 one Gig stick)
1208X1024 (LCD monitor native Res)
250(X2)WD SATA Hard drives
Asus KV8 SE Mobo
VIA Chipset

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When you turn off the sound you get better framerates cause the CPU now has a few more cycles to use towards the visuals. You'll see a much larger improvement in FPS when you turn off sound if you use onboard or a low-end add-in card (where all the sound processing is done in software via the driver).

The same is true of the network. Using onboard or low-end network cards (again where all the work is being done in the driver) will give you lower game performance than if you had a dedicated hardware-based network adapter.

A general rule of thumb is to look at the size of the basic driver package (not the full package that often contains control panels, utilities, etc.) Very small driver sets, say 1 MB or smaller, usually indicates the chip/card is doing most of the work. Driver sets that are 5 MBs or more (as are most onboard sound and network drivers) usually means all the work is done in software by your CPU.

Another little addon to my previous post. I was playing around with my fire/thermal corruptor and noticed that Warmth has a big performance hit, as much as 15 FPS. And this was SOLO. It didn't look like it was splatting anymore tho.

And I'm going to reiterate about all the fire splatter. DAMN, with physics on low there is just fire splatter EVERYWHERE. I mean, yes it's pretty, but it's just eye candy, and the performance hit is astronomical. And this has been a problem since the splatter was first introduced, it's not new. But it's definitely worse now than it's ever been. I don't even want to know what it's like with physics on high.

Ok, a short laundry list of things I've noticed (some previously reported in other threads)

Many many powers still have splats of one kind or another, including fire cages, ring of fire, snow storm, ice slick, and glue arrow. I was fighting Tsoo last night and I'm pretty sure their whirling hands attack is splatting too.

Alot of AOE powers that seem to work OK by themselves or in small combinations will totally crash framerates when heavily layered. I was on a team of 8 the other night and we were laying down glue arrow, poison gas arrow, ice slick, arctic air, frostbite, fire cages, freezing rain and snow storm. FPS nosedived from 60 to 8 by the time snow storm kicked in. I don't know which powers in which combinations, but like I said, just laying down glue arrow and ice slick was okay, poison gas arrow and snow storm was ok, but all of them together was murder.

Poison Gas Arrow and Stone Cages are funky all on their own. They don't seem to splat that I can see, but if you get more than 3 or 4 mobs in them performance starts to drop quickly.

Orbiting Death is now the defacto FPS killer. I was just standing on the IP train station platform while a warshade ran by in the street below with it running and FPS hit the toilet. And yes, it did look like it was splatting. And most warshade powers cause FPS issues anyway. I also have to turn off physics and turn down the particle count whenever there is a WS on the team (but not a PB).

I've also noticed that all of the new indoor mission layouts have some kind of studdering issue. The old ones are just fine, but the new ones aren't. FPS stay high and doesn't fluctuate much, but panning with the mouse is not smooth like it normally is, it's jumpy. I don't know how else to explain it. And I've only seen it on these new layout maps.

Fire powers still produce so much splatter that I need to turn off physics anytime a fire blaster/corruptor is on the team. And even with it off there is a lot of splatter. Tho it seems the splatter blobs themselves have been reduced in size/detail there are just as many of them as before, and still causes a big hit when physics is turned on and particle count is high.

Like I said before, most of these problems you just don't see while solo or on small groups, but really become a problem on large teams. This was always true to some extent in previous issues, but has gotten significantly worse with I8.

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Did you know...

There used to be some nearly impossible to find mission doors due to a navigation bug? One such door was underneath a basketball court in the SW corner of Brickstown (/loc of 367.2 -30.6 2280.1, if you'd like to check it out). The bug was that for some reason, perhaps because it was located below some minimum terrain threshhold, it produced no beacon to follow in your navigation window, and by guesstimating using your map, it lead you to an empty basketball court. Only by noticing the narrow, fenced-in ramp adjacent to the court could you find the mission. Occasionally, you could find several toons just meandering about this basketball court unable to find their mission . I'm pretty sure this was fixed (or that door is no longer used, perhaps), although I can't recall the specifics of how or when.

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I believe they have fixed the bug and made it so you see that the mission is below the ground a significant amount. There are actually 2 locations in Bricks. The one you noted and one on the north side near the middle.

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I remember there being a mish like this in Skyway. The arrow would lead you to a stretch of roadway with no obvious doorways. The mission door was actually at the end of a drainage tunnel underneath the city, and the entrance to that tunnel was on the other side of the map. No way you'd ever be able to find that door without help or prior knowledge.

I don't remember exactly the details of the problem, but the crux is that these powers are driven off of enemies, so there is a lot of complex stuff going on behind the scenes that gets this to work. I seem to recall something about how the power creates something akin to a "pet" that does the work. As Castle said, it's a timing issue, along the lines of 1.) cast power, do accuracy check, 2.) successful check, create pet, 3.) pet then acts upon the initial target to apply power effect.

There is a short period of time, between when the power is activated and the pet tries to apply the buff. If the initial target dies during this period, the pet has nothing to work off of and the power fails.

The solution requires finding a way to either speed up this process, or find another way currently not within the game engine to accomplish the same thing.

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I believe the "mob can't die during the activation" issue is well known, but was determined to be very difficult to fix given the limitations of the game engine. In other words, I think it's been looked at, and was given a "ouch, sorry, can't help ya"

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Huh... Twilight Grasp works while the target is Dying.

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Twilight Grasp is not foe-centered. And Kinetics is not the only set with a foe-centered AoE that has this problem. I suspect that all foe-centered AoE's have this problem, but I won't say that I have a complete list.

I do know that ILL>Blind (small cone "sleep" in addition to ST hold) suffers from it. It's much harder to catch because of the faster animation of Blind, and the far more subtle effect of sleep (as well as the fact that it's easily broken by an AoE'ing team mate). But it is there, I've seen it.

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The Thug Mastermind power Gang War also suffers from this problem.

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Kin is an extremely good set as-is, throughout its career. It needs no changes. Do not draw the developer eye to Kin.

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QFE odds are if the Devs actually take notice of posts like this and take a look at Kin, its gonna get nerfed.

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I've looked at Kinetics a lot. There are no plans to change it at this time.

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Castle, any chance of revisiting the "bug" that causes transfusion to fail if the target dies? I remember awhile back this was explained in detail, and I think it basically wound up as "there isn't anything we can do about it". Is this still an accurate assessment? Any chance that transfusion can be adjusted to compensate for this; such as a greater heal, lower end cost, or shorter recharge? Having just started playing a kinetics controller I've come to see just how often this problem really happens -- and it's alot, sometimes as much as half the time. Even when one is aware of it, it's still sometimes very difficult to pick a good target, especially on a large team.

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Did you know... that the PARAGON DANCE PARTY has returned in Atlas Park in the form of a lvl3-5 mission?

Although not "labeled" the PDP, the Raver music, the strobe lighting, couches, and fenced in dance floor have returned as well as the bars and stools.

The main Dance Room is the same as the last version of the Paragon Dance Party, however the entrance to the mission is a bit different.

Pics + video to follow.

(PS, I'm on my alt account and I REFUSE to finish this mission because I can NOT give up the Map because I love the PDP better than Pocket D. If you want an invite to see the return of the PDP, look up my alt char " Freedom Corps Coyote " ***a tribute to a friend of all, Kiyotee, from the forums here*** on the VIRTUE server.)

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That mish has been around a very long time. Still, it is a good reminder of the old PDP.

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*sniff*

You guys.... shucks.

Yes - I am still going to PAX - someone organize a meetup Friday night after the con - somewhere near to the place they are holding it and I'll be there. Just tell me where and when.

Yes - we should have an in-game party! I am working on the details - stay tuned!

Thanks for all the love and kind words. I'll miss you all tons.

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A party is a MUST, it's not an option. "Official" or otherwise. You deserve much more, and my only regret is that we can't give you such.

That the game used to be a whole lot more fun to play than it is now, before nerfing became the dev solution to every single problem?

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I'm not responsible for misinterpretation ;p

Powerset balance means internal powerset balance and balance between powersets, as opposed to the -def being intended to balance Invuln considering pre-ED/nerf levels of invuln uberness, which is the assumption made by many, many posts in this thread.

If you want to talk equations

a = b
and ED+Global Defense nerfs gets
(a/2) = (b/2)

or

invuln = dark armor
invuln-ED/Nerf = dark armor-ED/Nerf

But what people are SAYING is

invuln-DEF = Dark Armor
invuln-DEF-ED/Nerf != Dark Armor-ED/Nerf

Yes there are problems with powerset balance. Noone has to demonstrate this with Unyielding except through their pieholes.
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If it's impossible to finish a fight with a reasonable team, QA should notice.


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But the fights were never impossible to finish with a reasonable team. Just very difficult. (Afore-mentioned damage insp huffing included) And it's not their job to make balance calls. The overriding priority of QA is making sure the frigging thing works. Cryptic takes care of balance and stuff, Thats why they have an internal test server.

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And God help us, if this is true it fully explains the state of the game today. If developers don't LISTEN to their playtesters when they tell them something feels "too hard" or "imbalanced" (regardles of how peachy it looks on paper), then you basically wind up with the frankenstein game we have now -- grossly imbalanced; frustrating, not fun; much too difficult for the casual or semi-casual player, especially at higher levels; too much reliance upon certain powersets to accomplish simple tasks; etc.

I gotta say that I really try to resist demonizing the developers, cause I don't really think they set out to make us miserable. But at the same time I think they really need to be smacked around a little, step back (WAY back), and try to take an unbiased view of what they have wrought. And frankly, it ain't pretty.

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Its the northernmost green badgy looking icon marked 5 on this map. Mouse over for the /loc coordinates.

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I went looking for it last week, and couldn't find it. I was at the location listed in the Prima Guide, and it's just not there. When I went to a website (I don't remember which) it said where the badge was supposed to be (the exact same place), but that it's bugged.

According to the link you posted, the location is -220, 0, -2136. The Prima Guide lists -456.1, -.5, -2159.17. So I guess I'll take another looksee.

Thanks

What is up with Sweet Tooth? Was it moved? Does it even exist?

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I will rephrase: People [censored] about what QA isn't catching. They have no idea what they are catching. My view is that complaining about QA not catching balance errors is like complaining about QA not catching errors in the spellcheck dictionary. It's irritating and intereferes with the product. But it does not warrant the comments being made in this thread.

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No, QA's history does warrant the comments made in this thread. Not the really nasty comments, but definitely the criticism.

There's no way QA should have missed: AV regen, 50% defense debuff on Unyielding, or reintroduction of legacy bugs (like the inability to hit moving targets with AoEs). Yet they did. QA should have also noticed the discrepancies in the scrapper vs. +8s tests, but they didn't.

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The reason the global defense nerfs don't warrant a removal of the DEF penalty is, because, um... they were global nerfs. They had relatively minor effects on power balance.

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The fact that they were global does not change the fact that the Unyielding penalty is too much for Invulnerability's current state, as opposed to issue 4 and earlier. To put it another way: If the debuff was balanced for Invuln in issues 3 and 4, then it's most certainly not balanced after issues 5 and 6.

Also, your above statement is circular.

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Well, one *could* say that if we had the option of being able to actually see the numbers that these issues, and many more like them still floating out there, would never be. But that would ruin the "illusion" I guess

And was the AV regen thing actually attributed to a goof? I missed that proclamation. I just wrote it off as yet another stealth nerf -- y'know, they nerf something to the nth degree, people complain, and then they swoop in and "adjust" it back down, assuring the player base that all is well and that they're oh so attentive. Until you realize that what they un-nerfed is STILL more nerfed than it was before. So all the while they're sucking up praise, they're secretly laughing at us cause they got their nerf in nonetheless.

But I'm derailing -- was the AV regen thing a goof and not a stealth nerf?

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Me too......

Capped RES + Bugged Invince= Standing in the middle of a bunch of +7 Freaks and laughing at them.

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Stop! I'm getting misty...

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They should redesign invulnerable to follow it's name, "INVULNERABLE". If they would just crank up our DR to a lot and they can get rid of all this extra +def, then we can die like true invulnerables. Death by a thousand cuts. Instead of being an offspring of the super reflexes set. We are invulnerable ...we should not be hard to hit, but hard to hurt.

It should be ... hit me all you want, I might be bruised, broken, and bleeding, but I'm not dead yet.

Before the whole nerfing the DR cap and stupid ED, I use to test out how much punishment my INV could take by turning invinci off. It was GREAT! I took a beating before I dropped dead.

When UY first came out it was awesome!!! We were easier to hit but we didn't mind cause we were INVULNERABLE!

But then they decided to nerf the DR cap and now we are just an SR crossbreed. Further more ED. I wonder who's brilliant idea that was. It only forced us to enhance our powers to look exactly like the next person. OOooo look at me.. I'm a cookie cutter hero!

If my hide is tough... I think it would equal to being harder to hurt. Not harder to hit.

Invincibility should increase DR cap or something, but the more mobs around me then I am easier to hit. I am surrounded after all.

It's like superman =) you can hit him all you want. He is not hard to hit. But he is hard to hurt =)

So my opinion is stop making us part super reflexes and make us invulnerable already.

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I agree with the spirit of this post. Invulnerable isn't anything near what someone would picture as Invulnerable. Removing Defense from the set and making it pure Resistance would go a long way toward making this set like it's namesake.

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NO. It wouldn't. It may sound good on paper, but in reality running on pure resistances makes you LESS hearty than a blend of resistances and defense does. If you can actually sit down and do the math (and I really can't, it gives me a supersize headache) you'll find that adding resistances and defense together gives you a kind of multiplicative protection, far greater than you could ever get on resistances alone.

I did this experiment a long time back, about 14-15 months ago, before all the defense/resist cuts and ED. I was farming a dreck mish with my lvl 50 inv/ss tank, who, thanks to good slotting and a few HOs basically was at the 90% cap for all damage types except toxic and psi. I would typically herd together 20-30 at a time (not a lot by herding standards of the day, mind you), and with invincibility up I would barely take any damage at all. Now just this once I decided to turn off invincibility to see what happened. I dropped like a stone. The resistance was not enough by itself to keep me alive, even tho I was only taking 10%.

Now this is somewhat of an exaggerated experience, and not something you can realistically do today. And I'm sure there is a "point of dimishing returns", a point at which having only high resistances would be more effective than having low resistances and low defense. But in general, you're much better off with both. The exceptionally high resistances isn't what made the invulnerability set uber (compared to other sets), it was the defense.

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Age of a QA dept shouldn't be an excuse.

Poor employment choices would be the only excuse.

And neither is really an acceptable excuse.

BTW, I'm the one who found the Invincibility bug, so believe me I don't have high expectations of their QA, but either they're doing they're job and keep it, or they're not and get let go and replaced. That is how you run a business.

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Yes, I remember you found the bug. Sadly, I expected teh bug to get fixed, even if invincibility was 'good as it is', and thus be a nerf. *sigh* such is life.

Not excusing their QA. I just feel the devs feel test server is their 'free QA', along with the players on the boards.


My biggest problem (back to unyielding) is the ever changing answers. I remember a brute asked why do we have 5% penalty, if we have less resistances? dev answer was, working as expected.

burn with fear, yet it did have fear before, was removed, because it wastn fun, now its fun with fear, while other damage auras, and that monster with a battle axe, do NOT cause fear ...

As for running a business, sadly, this is the ONLY hero (didnt say super) MMO (for now). I left, tried wow (bored of clone characters and hunting rats), tried another, and do you know why I came back?

Friends. Good people. Not this stupid 'vision' crap. Give me a good game, and I will draw my friends there.

sorry, ranting.

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/agree

Problem is, you just can't really ever believe the rationale we're given when changes are made. 9 out of 10 times it's total BS. I would love to find out why the recharge of powers weren't reduced to take ED into account. We were told over and over again that perma-hasten and perma-dull pain weren't bad things, but ED basically made them impossible and no adjustments making them possible were ever made. Same with Unstoppable, Elude, etc. Their recharge rates were dramatically increased to ensure they could never be made perma (heaven forbid!), but post-ED those recharge rates were never reduced, making those powers even more useless than they already were.

The -5% in unyielding was back when the power all by itself could give you 44% resistance to everything but psi. Now it's what? 7.75% smashing/lethal; 15.5 everything else but psi?

And it's also back when Invincibility could give you over 100% defense -- 5% really wasn't that much to lose, especially considering you could essentially negate it with combat jumping, hover, hasten, stealth, etc. and tough hide more than covered it and left some +def to spare. But lessee now, CJ, hover, and stealth won't fully negate it, and hasten doesn't have a +def anymore. Also factor in that Invincibility gives you a max def buff of something like a whopping 15%, and then you realize you're losing A THIRD of it to Unyielding. I mean, really, it's so pathetic that our toons have fallen so far we're here arguing over 5% defense. What does that really say about the state of the game?

I also agree about CoX being the only game in town. I tried WoW, I tried Guild Wars, I just wasnt' able to get into them. But with DCO on the horizon, even if it's half as good as CoH was at release, it'll still be 5x better than the lame duck we have now. But I continue to play because it's better than playing nothing.

You know what I would love to see? A "classic CoH" server, kinda like the test server, that pushes the game back to I2 or I3 and left it there forever. It would be interesting to see how many people decide to play there instead of in the "live" world.

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On thug mastermind pets, the costume upgrades given with 2nd equip, blink from the original to the upgraded one randoml., I have noticed that if you equip with the lvl 32 equip first, then with the first, the costumes stay stabilized.

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What pet type please?

I'll have a SG friend check his thugs as we've not noticed this on them at all and my MM is shy of the second upgrade by a few levels. Also didn't seem to do that on the zombies.

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I saw this happening on test during the lvl 40 RV test, and I bugged it at the time. I haven't ever seen it happen on live, but that's just my experience.

Now don't get me wrong, I like the new V belt, but there's a problem. You can see it here.

The old belt covered the seam between tops and bottoms, but the new one doesn't. If the top and bottoms aren't seamless, you can't really use the new V belt. I've had to switch a number of costumes to the peak belt for this very reason.

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What's the point of Phase Shift? When I first saw it, I thought it might be cool to play a character with Phase Shift, but it just sounds like it's not very useful. It sounds like it's hard to get active and then doesn't stay active very long.

Is it useful for something I'm not thinking of? What do those of you who have it use it for?

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Before it was nerfed into complete uselessness it used to be a pretty cool power. You could basically go anywhere and not worry about ever being attacked. Of course the downside is that you can't do much either. With the advent of PvP it got time capped and supressed, blah blah blah, so now, yeah it's pretty useless as anything other than an "oh crap" power -- provided you can get it running before all the queued attacks kill you, AND you can get away in less than 30 seconds.

In the 2 years I've been playing this game I think I've only had PS on one toon out of dozens I've made -- and that was quantum flight on my Peacebringer. And I dumped it fast after they nerfed it. Why would I want a fly/phase power I can only use for about 1 minute at a time? How far can you actually get in a minute??

But this is pretty par for the course. Just about every power that was once "cool" has been nerfed into uselessness.

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If you gain all of that.... AND controller level holds.... That will NEVER happen. NEVER! Think about it, you would be able to hold just as much as a controller... and do 500000x the damage. I'd be pretty mad, even though I have a dominator, that just goes WAY too far.


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Why would you be mad, this makes no sense? We already have poor damage. Controllers have superior hold times and awsome secondaries to fall back on if control fails. What do we have if control fails? Absolutely nothing. This is why we should have superior controls compared to controllers. Our domination power should have just been icing on the cake and not just a power we live and die by. Honestly would it have really hurt anything if we had controller length holds, critical mez and domination? No it would not, it would make us a little more wanted on teams. We would have reason to finally take those area holds since now we can get them to last a bit longer. Now I would say we would have a huge problem if they gave us containment, along with the before mentioned stuff. That would be going over board.

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And you don't have awesome secondaries to fall back on? Dominators can hold an enemy, making it unable to act, THEN use some blaster powers to quickly take the enemy down. BUT NOW you want the same holds as controllers, MORE damage, and still have domination to raise your damage AND controls up even higher! Oh and I have heard that "dominators need more hp" So now you want controls that could challenge a CONTROLLER's controls, damage that could eventually challenge a blaster, AND more HP than both of them. Sounds pretty selfish

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Umm, dude, have you ever played a dominator past, say, level 20?

And I see you have 2 high-level controllers in your sig, but let me ask you, are those pre or post-containment trollers? If pre, do you remember what it was like back then playing a sub level 32 troller? I do, and it wasn't fun. Trollers were squishy, did little damage, and their defender secondaries were of little use in taking out bosses they couldn't hold for more than a few seconds at best. It was very hard to solo a troller back then, so you were pretty much relegated to teams till you got your pets.

Now with containment trollers can do significantly more damage (at the expense of control) which makes them a lot more soloable. Add in the defender secondaries and now they rock on teams too. What they lack in control they make up with double damage and buffs/healing/debuffs.

But dominators aren't so lucky. The can't control as well as controllers (whose controls now suck as it is), meaning it's just not feasible to "hold" a boss, let alone an EB/AV/GM. Domination helps alot in getting that inital boss hold to stick, but in reality it just doesn't last long enough to be overly useful. If you slot your hold for holds, then they last longer, but do less damage, making it more difficult to actually defeat the boss you're holding. If you slot damage into your holds then you can't hold them as long and you're going to take more damage over time. It's a lose-lose situation, IMO.

Couple in the fact you don't have defender secondaries, but blaster secondaries (perhaps the most reviled sets in the entire game) that don't do anywhere near blaster-level damage, and it's an all around "meh". I mean, most of those secondary attacks are MELEE attacks -- on a toon with sub-par damage, no defenses, and no buffs/debuffs. And the devs wonder why so few people play them and no one wants them on teams?

IMO I think dominators should have BETTER control ability than controllers to make up for their lacking in everything else. As it is now their control is worse, their damage is perhaps on par (due to their secondaries), but they have none of the benefits of the defender secondaries.

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QFT

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If you're QFT then I really wonder if you have ever really played a dominator before. You can't hold bosses? This is some weird new symptom


ANYWAY...

enough of the derail. Who is working on the numbers for the recharge discount of am and sb etc to find out how much it would take to stack domination?

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Base recharge of domination: 200 secs
Duration of domination: 90 secs

(200/90) - 1 = 1.22 this is the amount of recharge necessary

hasten: .7 for 120 secs
speed boost: .5 for 120 secs
accelerated metabolism: .3 for 120 secs

Any combination of hasten, SB, and AM that will give you 1.22 will, in theory, accomplish this.

Example: Hasten + SB + AM = 1.5; will give you 10 seconds of "double domination" (200 / (1 + .7 + .5 +.3))

Two SBs and AM would do it (.5 +.5 +.3)

4 AMs would come thaaaat close, but probably be enough (4 x .3)

Get the idea?

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If you gain all of that.... AND controller level holds.... That will NEVER happen. NEVER! Think about it, you would be able to hold just as much as a controller... and do 500000x the damage. I'd be pretty mad, even though I have a dominator, that just goes WAY too far.


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Why would you be mad, this makes no sense? We already have poor damage. Controllers have superior hold times and awsome secondaries to fall back on if control fails. What do we have if control fails? Absolutely nothing. This is why we should have superior controls compared to controllers. Our domination power should have just been icing on the cake and not just a power we live and die by. Honestly would it have really hurt anything if we had controller length holds, critical mez and domination? No it would not, it would make us a little more wanted on teams. We would have reason to finally take those area holds since now we can get them to last a bit longer. Now I would say we would have a huge problem if they gave us containment, along with the before mentioned stuff. That would be going over board.

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And you don't have awesome secondaries to fall back on? Dominators can hold an enemy, making it unable to act, THEN use some blaster powers to quickly take the enemy down. BUT NOW you want the same holds as controllers, MORE damage, and still have domination to raise your damage AND controls up even higher! Oh and I have heard that "dominators need more hp" So now you want controls that could challenge a CONTROLLER's controls, damage that could eventually challenge a blaster, AND more HP than both of them. Sounds pretty selfish

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Umm, dude, have you ever played a dominator past, say, level 20?

And I see you have 2 high-level controllers in your sig, but let me ask you, are those pre or post-containment trollers? If pre, do you remember what it was like back then playing a sub level 32 troller? I do, and it wasn't fun. Trollers were squishy, did little damage, and their defender secondaries were of little use in taking out bosses they couldn't hold for more than a few seconds at best. It was very hard to solo a troller back then, so you were pretty much relegated to teams till you got your pets.

Now with containment trollers can do significantly more damage (at the expense of control) which makes them a lot more soloable. Add in the defender secondaries and now they rock on teams too. What they lack in control they make up with double damage and buffs/healing/debuffs.

But dominators aren't so lucky. The can't control as well as controllers (whose controls now suck as it is), meaning it's just not feasible to "hold" a boss, let alone an EB/AV/GM. Domination helps alot in getting that inital boss hold to stick, but in reality it just doesn't last long enough to be overly useful. If you slot your hold for holds, then they last longer, but do less damage, making it more difficult to actually defeat the boss you're holding. If you slot damage into your holds then you can't hold them as long and you're going to take more damage over time. It's a lose-lose situation, IMO.

Couple in the fact you don't have defender secondaries, but blaster secondaries (perhaps the most reviled sets in the entire game) that don't do anywhere near blaster-level damage, and it's an all around "meh". I mean, most of those secondary attacks are MELEE attacks -- on a toon with sub-par damage, no defenses, and no buffs/debuffs. And the devs wonder why so few people play them and no one wants them on teams?

IMO I think dominators should have BETTER control ability than controllers to make up for their lacking in everything else. As it is now their control is worse, their damage is perhaps on par (due to their secondaries), but they have none of the benefits of the defender secondaries.

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Do you have any idea what you're talking about? We can't hold a boss? All it takes it 2 applications...thats the same for controllers, its about magnitude. The duration scale difference between controllers and dominators post 20 is nearly insignifigant.

The reason we don't have defender secondaries is .... WE ARE NOT CONTROLLERS. Get over that. We do not have blaster secondaries, we have assualt secondaries which are a combination of blaster primaries, and tank secondaries. There is some overlap in blaster secondaries but not a whole lot (ie fire blaster primary powers (flares, fire blast, fire breath, blazing bolt blaze) that leaves consume, fiery embrace (amazing power) and combustion. Three powers out of 8 gee.) Also since when is /nrg for blasters reviled?

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Ok, without domination, how long can you realistically hold a boss for? 5 seconds? 10 seconds? And that requires constantly spamming of your hold. What about any minions around the boss? If you're focusing on keeping the boss held, how are you going to have the end to defeat anything else that's beating you to a pulp?

Domination is nice, but my experience has been that it rarely comes up more than once per average solo mish. Ok, so you save it for the "boss", only to find out there is another boss in the next room. Then what? Go back to doing everything on the lowest difficulty setting?

But hey, if you like doms exactly the way they are, have fun. To each their own.