Flux_Vector

This is false. The default NPC type is actually Archvillain. Elite Bosses didn't exist as an enemy type when many of the original story arcs were written. They were introduced later and the difficulty option to 'downgrade' AVs to EBs was an addition to the game.

Back in the olden days, if you were solo and you got into a storyarc with an AV in it, you would probably have to recruit a team to help you finish that mission. There was no EB option.

The conversion the game makes in storyarcs is thus from AV down to EB, not from EB up to AV. There's no difference in the powers available to them, either, only a difference in their hitpoints and rank modifiers for combat. EBs who are downgraded from AVs also tend to retain the "purple triangles of doom" that render them nigh immune to crowd control, just like full AVs.

My nightwidow can solo most AVs. I often "off tank" the current target of the Freedom Phalanx in the LRSF, too, while the "main tank" is occupying most of them, simply because my DPS tends to outpace most of my teammates, thus grabbing me aggro over time unless one of them's a brute.

Some luck is involved in AV-soloing (it tends to hinge on being defense softcapped and then not getting hit twice in short timeframes), and it can be time consuming, but it isn't difficult for an offense-centric AT to put out over 150 DPS, which is about the amount needed to take down an AV's hitpoint bar.

It's more difficult to be able to generate 150 DPS while keeping your survivability and having enough endurance recovery. I19's inherent fitness and alpha slot though, trivialized those problems for my NW - I can now have every power I want in my build including Aidself to back up my softcapped defense, and the Cardiac boost alpha slot means I can ignore my end bar anymore.

No. We never "have" to stop complaining about anything. But it's especially unrealistic to expect people to stop pointing out what anyone who applies unbiased qualitative -or- quantitative analysis will show is an absolutely awful situation, especially in an AT as cool-looking as Peacebringers are.

If you can afford to drop out of dwarf to use buildup, you might as well then stay human or shift into nova, either of which has better attacks. If you have a mez on you when you drop out of dwarf, you'll immediately be mezzed. Re-dwarfing also costs 2.25 seconds of animation time during which you deal zero damage and lose 1/5 of your buildup's duration. 2.25 seconds is also about the animation speed of a medium-long attack (shorter than total focus or shadow maul, longer than blaze or bitter ice blast, and around the same speed as midnight grasp or headsplitter).

So... if there's a worse tactical move than leaving dwarf form to hit BU and then re-dwarf in a combat, short of things I'd say fall under 'intentionally trying to lose on purpose,' I'm not sure I know what it is. It's a pretty big risk (mez) for very limited benefit (2-3 attacks worth of +72% damage buff). If you don't have to worry about mez, why did you dwarf to start with?

A +damage build is unlikely to yield more than +25-30% damage buffing... and as they say, a billion times zero is still zero. Or a house is only as good as its foundation. White dwarf's DPS has a terrible foundation.

Which is great for warshades, and warshades have always been great. I don't see how this is relevant to a thread about Peacebringers in general or a point regarding White Dwarf in particular.

"Leave PBs alone because my WS is fine" has never been an appropriate, valid, or useful response to anything.

While it's true that some ATs have a very wide variance in performance from set to set (the buff/debuff ATs, at least, do), a lot of ATs actually don't. Mainly, any AT without significant buff/debuff capacity has their performance rooted in personal offense and defense - dark melee performs differently from fire melee, and both are different from dual pistols or super strength or ice blast - but they're all fundamentally offense sets and intended to be used in the overall manner of "hit things until they fall over."

Ditto for personal defense sets. Whatever the mechanic, they achieve the same result in the end - keeping you from falling over.

That applies to PB and the forms - nova form is an offensive buff power that inflicts a defensive debuff on you (loss of access to anything but blast powers). White dwarf is a defensive buff power that inflicts an offensive debuff on you (pathetic attack chain). The problem and what causes PBs to lag in my opinion is the fact that they need to accept a 'debuff' to their defense in order to realize their best offense potential, or a debuff to their offense in order to realize their best defensive potential. It doesn't help that dwarf's defenses are subpar by modern-game standards, and it really especially doesn't help that warshades - along with most other ATs except blasters - get to have it both ways to a much higher degree than PBs do, and realize much of their best offense and much of their best defense potentials both at once.

Warshades get to do it cause of mire and eclipse, everyone else gets to do it because they don't lose access to most of their powers depending on if they're in "attack form" or "defense form"

Tanks don't need a ranged component (nor does anyone). Range is a convenience, not a defense, for any character without a means of preventing NPCs from closing on them. The enemy AI is eager to close in on you, and in fact, most melees generally -want- the enemy to close in on them for defensive purposes as well as offensive ones. Invincibility, Rise to the Challenge, Dark Regeneration, Soul Drain, Dark Consumption, Consume, Blazing Aura, Quills, and on and on represent a paradigm where melee characters are able to be safer and/or more damaging exactly because things are next to them, compared to if they kept at a distance.

Most characters do have some form of control, meanwhile. Melee sets are full of knockdown, knockup, stun, and hold as side effects of their attacks; indeed most of the control available to a PB is copied over from the melee attacks the devs ripped off to give us. And Pulsar, while a key power for the PB, is a power practically anyone else but a PB or maybe a blaster would laugh at the stats for and skip in favor of their other, better powers.

Photon seekers aren't pets anymore than rain of fire or blizzard is a pet. It's an attack that's delivered via a pseudo-pet mechanic. It shouldn't take pet sets, it should take ranged AOE damage sets, like its actual peers. It should also be rebalanced to recharge, damage, and radius numbers to match. Or else it should be made an actual pet, which would be a much superior power performance-wise for a PB, just like extracted essence is for a WS.

But yes, in your terms you do have the "flexibility" of using several methods of defense to stay alive as a PB. But every method of defense is still just defense. Whether you stay alive by using control or stay alive by using a defensive secondary, or whether you use both, all that matters is that you stay alive.

In my terms, I abstract "methods" out to their purpose - offense, defense, and downtime reduction/recovery. And downtime reduction/recovery (which is where things like resurrect powers or travel powers lie) is a much smaller category than the first two.

I'm not really just looking at 50, I am looking at 'whole journey' too. But to me 'whole journey' includes 'post-50' play as a large part of the journey. I assume characters don't level to 50 then delete or get shelved, they level to 50 then IO and (in the next issue) work on incarnate powers and continue to play.

Most of my characters are 50 for far longer than they're 1-49. I don't think I'm unique in this, and especially not in the context of forum posters who are mentioning their heavily IO'd characters like the other people in this thread.

Well, this is a point where we need to agree to disagree because now you're talking about personal preference. My personal preferences are separate from my views on performance. I would like city to be more complex and allow more variety and flexibility. I play plenty of characters who are 'substandard' performance wise and enjoy them immensely.

I don't let my wishes for the game color my perception of its reality, nor my enjoyment of those characters skew my view of their performance, though. And the way the game is, rather than how I'd like it to be, is a common experience to all players that can be checked just by logging in; the way ATs perform can be measured and compared mathematically, independent of opinion.

That's why I speak in the terms I do about those subjects, and try to leave preference out of it as much as possible, because you can't argue opinions and likes. Some people will like anything, they aren't wrong to like it.

That was Castle, actually. And as he says there:
Stalkers have nearly the same defensive potential as scrappers. And since the fixes Castle already made to them, they don't need to use hide and AS to equal or even exceed the single-target damage of scrappers or brutes under many conditions.

In fact like white dwarf is a trap for PBs, I'd posit hide/AS are a trap for stalkers. Given their actual survivability (two or more times better than a squishy's) and their high offense without hide/AS, many are better off using a faster-animating attack out of hide for the guaranteed critical, then staying in the fight and scrapping it out rather than trying to re-hide mid battle and AS more.

I'd like to say that it's not the AT's fault if people are trying to play it the wrong way, but actually, stalkers strongly encourage you to play them the wrong way with their design, so -that- might be a serious problem with the AT. If you adapt to the reality of the gameplay, though, their numerical performance potential is far higher than most people want to believe and while it does lag a bit behind scrappers and brutes, that's like saying a corvette lags behind a ferrari.

AOE damage is very important, if not the "king of damage" in City. Stalkers do have too little AOE on an AT-wide basis, but it does still exist in their sets and APPs/PPPs. It's not great, you won't be a super farming stalker, but you can get enough to contribute to a team fairly well.

As for teams... teams don't like stalkers, in my experience, because stalkers don't play like teammates. If stalkers stopped stealthing to the objectives and completing them without telling anyone or waiting for the team to play the mission, teams might like stalkers better

The only complaints I hear about stalker teammates ingame, in short, are about how they act, not how they perform.

It's more than just a couple of builds, though... you can reach quite high defensive performance with little offensive tradeoff on many melee characters. Like I've got a dark melee/fire armor brute who, with no purples, has 35% defense to smashing/lethal and to melee, 50% smash/lethal resist, and a 14 second recycle on healing flames. My old triformer PB's white dwarf is looking at that, crying, from over in the corner.

[/quote]You can see that my post count is low and I can count the # of times I have posted in the Kheldians section on one hand so I'm not a die hard "I LOVE MY PB!!!" guy. With everything you have said though, I just can't get with the "its the worst AT in the game" concept.[/QUOTE]

People read "it's the worst AT" and see it as a statement that it's not viable against the content. But that's not what it means, what it means is less that PBs are weak (though in a number of ways they look stronger than they really are) and more that the other ATs are by and large, very, very strong and get even stronger with IOs.

PBs are perfectly good SUVs, but the other ATs are drag cars, porsches, ferraris, and so on.

In the context of "because I want to go on to IO the better of either a PB or a WS, but not both."

Actually, since the introduce of IO's I have noticed a very strong trend towards scrappers and brutes in the characters I see actually being played. In issue 9-10 when IOs were new I'd see TF teams getting together with multiple defenders/controllers/dominators. Now as I join TFs, alot of the time people are looking around at an AT list that's like 1 VEAT, 3 scrappers, and 2 brutes and going "eh, if nobody joins with one I guess I can alt to my (buff/debuff char) so we have some support, but we probably don't actually need it."

Numerically - I forget the exact numbers, but the trend over time going by what I recall of some posts BAB made a while ago, has been away from tankers, defenders, stalkers, and dominators, and towards brutes, scrappers, and controllers.

I can't remember the last time I TF'd with a tanker, in fact, that wasn't the STF. I don't at all think that any of this is a coincidence with how IOs operate on the other ATs.

No, I defined them as "worst" in terms of relative numerical performance: out of the 14 ATs, they have the poorest numerical performance.

Blasters are probably the second-to-last on the AT level, because of their atrocious survivability (they aren't actually shut down by mezzes - a mezzed blaster still outdamages white dwarf, with SOs!), but their offense is really quite powerful and makes up for a lot, too. In the car race, they'd be the drag racer - it goes fast, it accelerates fast, but it doesn't turn very well or have much of a suspension and uses very volatile fuel so if you encounter a bump or a curve, you're probably going to die a flashy, fiery death.

The lack of variation in the AT does not make it a more powerful performer or better in any way in comparisons to others, especially because some of the apparent variation inside peacebringers is illusory because white dwarf is absolutely terrible in the modern game. If anything this point counts against the AT because we're broadening the basis of comparison, such that I could say that blasters allow you real choices between extra offense (fire blast/fire manipulation) or extra survivability (ice blast/devices), or controllers the same (fire/kin vs earth/FF).

But I disagree, in that I can certainly justify making the blanket statement of "defeat enemies and survive." The game doesn't care if you survive by control-locking the enemy until they're mostly defeated, or if you survive by having high damage resistance and soaking their attacks, or even if you survive by just killing them a lot faster. It doesn't assign you extra points for the first or assign you extra debt if you fail for the second.

Them's the rules. I didn't make them. I don't even agree with them, but that's outside the purview of this topic. What is in the purview of this topic is that when you log in, regardless of what character you choose to play it with, you are still playing the same game.

Some characters are better at that game than others, not unlike any game where you can choose different characters. Why else do so many people choose Ryu and Chun Li in competitive Street Fighter?

Scrapper melee attacks have remarkably similar stats - damage, recharge, endurance, and except for fire and ice blast, animation speed - compared to blaster ranged attacks if you look at them tier-by-tier. Meaning that a scrapper is going to be remarkably close to a blaster's damage if the blaster stays at range and doesn't use their extra high-tier melee attacks to increase their damage (especially if they aren't fire blast, with its brokenly good Flares power). And scrappers will have three or more times the survivability of blasters pre-APP (and between 2 and 3 times with an APP armor, depending on the damage type in question), and that's on SOs and without accounting for the survivability advantage of mez protection.

Now, I actually think that's an atrocity of game balance. And like I said above, I definitely have seen a shift towards damage-based melee characters (ie, brutes and scrappers) since the introduction of IOs. (And I already mentioned blasters above, the drag car thing would repeat here).

As far as peacebringers not being a melee AT: go try and put together an all-ranged attack chain that doesn't suck in comparison with a melee-ranged combo one, and doesn't rely on a procspammed gleaming bolt. The truth is you don't have enough attacks - especially on SOs - to have a seamless attack chain of all melee or all range unless you're using gleaming bolt every 2nd attack. Which actually is less bad than it sounds because gleaming bolt and glinting eye have the same DPA (meaning a ranged attack chain of say bolt/blast/bolt/eye/bolt/blast/bolt is 5/7 comprised of tier 1 attacks... in english, that means its damage is gonna be pretty awful*).

* - procs can increase it a lot, mostly because PBs can take -def sets in their attacks.

But realistically you have to use both the ranged and melee attacks. However since you can use ranged attack in melee but can't use melee attack at range, guess where you'll be standing when you fire those ranged attacks?

White dwarf is something I'd love to forget exists, but you seem to see it as a positive. In fact, it's a trap! </mon motha> White dwarf doesn't have the survivability to handle modern tanking situations (which tend to require debuff resistance) and it doesn't have the aggro control to protect teammates very well either. Willpower tankers can struggle to keep aggro, and that's just with a 'weaker' taunt aura, not with 'no' taunt aura.

White dwarf's damage is ridiculously bad. It's like granite armor with a way higher offensive penalty, that doesn't let you refresh earth's embrace, and that only gives about 1/2 the survivability increase. And when was the last time you actually saw someone playing granite? I think the last one I teamed with was like in issue 12. IOs have closed the survivability gap and widened the offensive gap, between a non-granite and a granite meatshield.

The warshade is more of a hybrid AT than the peacebringer, IMO. The warshade relies on close-range powers for survivability, and improved offense, not delivery of offense. Ie, for self-buffing, not for attacking. The warshade gains the most by using eclipse and mire to buff themselves at point range, then move to long range and use nova form's powerful blasting attacks to deliver their buffed offense while enjoying buffed survivability that keeps them from crashing and exploding like a drag car.

Meanwhile their pets are ranged/independent sources of damage and their preemptive area control is a ranged power. Black dwarf is much more viable than white dwarf because of dwarf mire, but the warshade is also much sturdier in nova form thanks to eclipse so in terms of pure performance strategy, the WS would want to avoid dwarfing just as much as a peacebringer would - and is better able to.

I actually disagree on the specialist/generalist AT design being hero vs villain. Only blasters are a particularly specialized AT in the game, in my opinion, and along with peacebringers represent the worst balance problem. Tankers still deal quite significant damage in many cases, and certainly are much closer to a blaster's damage than a blaster is to their survivability.

However, blasters are an "AT-level trade off" that puts what they're about right on the tin. If you play a blaster, stuff's gonna die. Some of that stuff's gonna be you.

Peacebringers want to pretend towards a versatility and hybridization that they fail to properly deliver, because of the horrid state of white dwarf and the lack of enough humanform mez protection to reliably employ their full attack chain. White nova helps, but if you're hanging out in nova form all the time, you're using the one subset of your powers that does work well... but that a warshade (or just a straight blaster) would do better.

The "SUV" peacebringer thus ends up finishing somewhat to slightly behind the drag car blaster, who zooms ahead and explodes, zooms ahead and explodes, etc etc while the PB slows down to shift on their four-wheel drive when the going gets rough and occasionally ends up in a rollover if they try and corner too sharply, but otherwise their way at "safe speeds" around the track.

Yeah, my point is that only gain any reward if the enemy is defeated, period. If you half-kill something and then it kills you or you have to run away (or it successfully runs away, and geez do I hate the "run all over the freaking place AI" - which also is a symptom of how good IOs can be, since what usually causes that is the AI thinking it can't hit you often enough...)

But what I was getting at is that a wounded enemy still has the same offensive and defensive capacity as a perfectly healthy one, less any debuffs applied by attacks. Just losing health doesn't impact performance (which is why "offense is a defense" only applies in the simplest and most direct manner - kill it to dead before it can do the same to you... going back to drag car blasters yet again.)

You can run through TF content on any character - including peacebringers - with just SOs with no problem. My peacebringer had all the TF badges available at the time when issue 9 came out and brought inventions to us. And that was several issues before the kheldian 'fix' too. No AT is so weak as to be literally unplayable unless the player intentionally mis-builds them, and I never claimed otherwise.

On the human form: you're focusing on "gimped" when the operative term is "gimped melee." Melee ATs are extraordinarily powerful in City right now, and an IO'd melee is going to both kill and survive circles around most other characters. The TF content a PB "can participate in," many IO'd melees can solo at +1x8 (in some edge cases, even higher), including the archvillain(s).

On mez protection, or more accurately, on breakfrees: Mez is the only place in the game people say "just pop a breakfree" about. Why don't blasters pop enrages to do damage, or tankers pop lucks to have defenses? Why don't brutes and scrappers use breakfrees for mez protection? Or VEATs or stalkers? It's because they aren't going to be functional if they did. Guess what? Neither are PBs.

What is the worst AT in COH if not PBs? That's a serious question. Think about it and answer - I don't mean worst powerset combo or worst intentionally-crippled build concept. I mean as an AT, if PBs aren't the worst one, what is?

I also don't think PBs realistically have all the flexibility you mentioned. Softcapping ranged defense is extremely build-intensive when you have no native +defense powers to stack with, and is broadly exclusive with the +recharge build required to make an attack chain that's not full of suck, and what's more, if you look at stats of the PB humanform ranged attacks vs the melee attacks, you'd probably realize that if you're going to go for +defense, you'd want to softcap your melee defense instead.

You're not a tank in dwarf form. You aren't even close to a tank in either survivability or aggro management, and your damage in dwarf form isn't great, an earth controller would laugh at it. Just like actual scrappers will laugh at the comparison of a PB to them in the performance arena.

I'm being a little harsh, but I'm pre-coffee, and well, this is the simple reality of the game. Look around you. Do the math if you want to - it's there in the math too - but really, all you have to do is look around you and see what everyone else is doing that your PB will not be able to even reasonably approach on a consistent basis and/or without the excessive use of inspirations.

Insps are powerful, but they're powerful for everyone. And every breakfree your PB has to pack into a mission is an enrage or a luck for someone else, adding actual longevity or increasing their damage over already-higher damage or longevity or both.