Jabbrwock

Blizzard does more damage than other nukes. Well, except Geyser from Water Blast, and I don't know enough about Water Blast to guess what the justification for that is. Blizzard at 500 does more damage than Inferno by about 35 points, and is 195 points ahead of the other pbaoe crashing nukes. Thunderous Blast is ahead of the crashless nukes, and the crashless nukes are quite varied. Leaving aside Geyser, they range from 150 to about 220.

All number are approximate because I'm too lazy to use decimals or even take notes. Taken from the game's character creator for a level 50 Blaster.

Make it just like the Mastermind version, where you cast it on a teammate to give them a bomb to hand deliver to the enemy. Nothing can possibly go wrong with this plan!

I'd like to see Tanker damage cap adjusted so they come within 10% of Brute damage when both are fully buffed. Since the thread linked at the start of this thread is full of people intentionally misinterpreting things to set up strawman arguments, that does not mean Tankers should get the same or only 10% less damage cap than Brutes, because Tankers have a higher damage scale than Brutes. It means that, adjusted for their higher damage scale, the actual damage output should end up 10% less than Brutes when fully buffed, just as Brutes are only 10% less durable than Tankers when both are fully buffed.

I've yet to be convinced that Tanker damage scale itself needs a buff. In ordinary solo play, Tankers do damage that is reasonably proportional to Brute damage, barring outside buffs. That is, they are about 75% of Brute damage, just as Brutes are about 75% of Tanker durability. In ordinary solo play, and even in teams with limited buff and debuff users, the two AT's aren't horribly out of whack, although an argument can be made that content does not demand or reward Tanker level survivability these days.

It's only when fully buffed that the two AT's show drastically different performance levels, and that's why I personally feel that the Tanker AT should have its damage cap raised. Lowering the Brute resistance cap seems a poor idea - it would hit resistance based Brute secondaries hard, others almost not at all, and just generally be a mess. In fact, I haven't seen any evidence that Brutes need an actual nerf at all. If content does not reward higher Tanker survivability, that's a content problem, not an AT problem, and should be adjusted by changing what content is produced.

Anybody can have fun with a set that works well and is properly balanced and effective.

Only people who don't care about performance can enjoy a set that does not and is not.

That's what happened to playing the game and having fun - the devs decided that the Blaster AT and nukes in blast sets in particular were not enjoyable to enough people, and so decided to spread the fun around, so that MORE PEOPLE COULD PLAY THE GAME AND HAVE FUN.

Do they? I was under the impression that, when fully buffed, Brutes and Tankers had the same max HP. Less than fully buffed, Tankers win because they have higher base HP. That said, I've been only erratically in touch with the CoH community for quite a long time now, so lots has changed without me noticing.

Personally, since the two AT's were inspired by pretty much the same comic book characters anyway - bricks - I'd say just eliminate the differences entirely. Give Brutes Bruising and Gauntlet, lower their damage cap slightly to compensate for Bruising. Give Tankers Fury, lower their damage, defense, and resistance scales to match Brutes, and give them the same caps as modified Brutes. Make the only difference between the AT's be which set is primary and which is secondary, and thus what levels you get to take which powers.

[Edit] snipped some stupid rambling, as opposed to the rest of my post which may be stupid, but I think is at least somewhat to the point.

Yes, I feel safe making this suggestion because I believe there is absolutely no chance of it being followed. Heck, my *REAL* suggestion would be to literally merge them into a single Brick AT. That would annoy more players and take more work, though, so I moderated it.

Likewise, if Tankers had their damage cap raised to the point where it would be approximately equal to Brute damage (given that Tankers have higher base damage, the actual cap would be lower for the same output when capped), Tankers would still not be as damaging as Brutes.

Except in the edge cases where they would be buffed by other players, at which point the Brutes would likewise be as survivable as tanks.

While I don't think a damage cap increase is enough, or even should be the highest priority, it has the advantage of being (I would presume, anyway, not being familiar with the code base) relatively easy to code and test, and would address a long standing and, at least by some, resented asymmetry between the Brute and Tanker AT designs. Who would it hurt to allow Tankers to deal the same damage as Brutes under the same circumstances that allow Brutes to survive the same damage as Tankers?

He doesn't want to play in a way that leads to top performance. That would have him playing AR or Fire after the snipe changes. He wants to play the shiny new set and still be promised top performance.

There are a lot more sets competing for the top 3 slots among blast sets than just the top 3, even before Water Blast comes out. Some of them have serious mechanical flaws that make it profoundly unlikely that they will represent any threat to a fundamentally well designed set like Water Blast, fastsnipe or not. I don't see any real chance that Water Blast will be the worst set, and the OP says that's what he's really worried about. If we are going to do him the honor of believing what he says, he's panicking about nothing. WB may not be top 3. It will almost certainly not be top 3 after the changes. It will also almost certainly not be bottom 3. That's a sign of a properly designed set.

Also, read the thread in the Blaster forum about how sets are expected to perform after the fastsnipe change. There is a massive gap between the bad sets and the good sets. Note that most of the bad sets (in this case meaning merely poor single target damage, not actually bad as in underpowered or mis-designed) actually have snipes to benefit from fastsnipe. If a set has poor damage potential, fastsnipe is not going to rescue it.

Not all power sets are for all players. Energy Blast is OK as it stands. It certainly does not stand out as direly needing dev attention. I would never ever play the set in a thousand years. I tend to avoid teaming with Energy Blast users as well, because more than any other power set in the game, they tend to interfere with my enjoyment. That's my choice. Playing Energy Blast was theirs. The set is not broken, it doesn't need fixed. The set is, however, rather specialized. Much as the lack of a pet does not break Mind Control, so does the presence of knockback not break Energy Blast.

I agree that it sucks that the most generic of blast sets has the most situational of secondary effects, though. WTB Light Blast or something, which looks like Energy Blast (ie, lacks the specific theme animations of Dark Blast and Radiation Blast) but doesn't knockback. Until then, I'll just play something else.

Don't forget ". . . and has some of the best endurance management tools you'll find in an armor set."

EA has flaws. Not a few of them. Endurance issues are not included in that list, though.

I have to wonder if you understood what I was saying.

I at no point meant to suggest that excluding all but the min-maxed teams was a good idea. I think it's a terrible idea. But if they put enough challenge into the content, they absolutely *CAN* exclude everything else. Or maybe I should have said "If they put too much challenge in the content. . ."

Regardless, I can't believe you honestly believe it is impossible for the devs to make content so hard that it requires a min-maxed team to complete. You may doubt their ability to do so accidentally, or their willingness to do so intentionally. I doubt those things too. The devs will almost certainly not *WANT* to make their new content that exclusive, and they shouldn't. It's not what the game is or has ever been about.

We'll have to see how serious the devs are about making incarnate content challenging. If they make it challenging enough, those anal teams will be the only ones capable of actually doing the content.

But I don't see that happening. It would be too direct a blow against the core constituency that has kept CoX alive to date.

Unless they get clever somehow, I'd bet it works like Fury for a Brute - the buff is very short duration, constantly refreshed, so for a pseudo-pet like Burn, the Fury damage only lasts for a few ticks before it expires from the pseudo-pet. I'd imagine Vigilance 2.0 will work like that for Defender pseudo-pets, affecting maybe the first few ticks, but then expiring very quickly.

You said the powerset sucks for survivability. Many people - myself included - have no difficulty staying a live playing Electric Armor tankers in a variety of tanker-stressing environments. Either you were lying, and do not believe that Electric Armor actually sucks for survivability, or you are incapable of playing an Electric Armor tanker as well as the many people who are able to survive perfectly well with it. Or, I suppose, you have a bizarrely inflated belief of how survivable a tanker needs to be to not be rubbish - if you consider Granite to be the minimum baseline, I suppose Electric Armor does suck for survivability. But by any rational standard, Electric Armor is fine for survivability.

You're all being too kind. Those people should be consigned to group with people who want to group with people like that. I can hardly think of a worse (or more appropriate) fate. Nothing involving a cannon can compare.

Trust me, Test Rat. Just because you're denied a slot in those teams doesn't mean they're good. In this case, the forbidden fruit happens to be disgusting. And rotten. And poisonous.

I seem to recall a similar thread where Arcanaville (I think) said that most -regen debuffs were variable duration rather than variable magnitude. Thus, regeneration debuff resistance just reduces the duration, and they were given super huge magnitudes to make sure that during that duration they really truly blocked regeneration. I don't suppose it makes any difference to a set like /Regen which, bizarrely, lacks any regeneration debuff resistance, but it sounds like you'd get flatlined by most of the regen debuffs out there even with it - just for a shorter period.

I think the real question is whether /Regen's complete lack of debuff resistance of any kind is justified based on its performance compared to other sets. Does it really out-do the rest so much in the absence of debuffs that it has to be a sitting duck for anything that happens to have some debuffing power to throw around? It's certainly a subject worth examining anyway.

The big difference here is that your food and water didn't have a cooldown. If Rest had been similarly blessed when the game came out, and Stamina had not existed, the devs would have a much more tractable balance problem on their hands.

As it stands, Rest is largely irrelevant to most players once they get Stamina, and the player base has become sufficiently accustomed to the performance level of Stamina that removing it would likely be suicide for the game. Since the devs wanted to remove Stamina from its position as a nearly mandatory power pick, they did it in the way that would provoke the least outrage while limiting the power creep problem. There's still some power creep associated with getting 3 extra power picks, but at least there's no more slots (beyond the default slots we assume we're getting in the inherent Fitness powers), and slots are tighter on most of my characters than powers.

The only character I've ever felt more constrained by limited power choices than by limited slots with was my SS/Elec Brute, and that was mostly fixed when Conserve Power became Energize and freed me from any urge to take the Medicine pool.

Just out of curiosity, what is it about Ice Armor that makes it deserve to have more than 75% of its Tanker numbers for defense if ported to Brutes?

75% of 17% defense is 12.75% defense. That's the standard Tanker -> Brute conversion. I'm not aware of any other armor set that has been allowed to violate this ratio - why Ice Armor?

More to the point, why *ONLY* Ice Armor? Is Ice Armor too weak on Tankers, so 75% of its numbers on Brutes won't work as well as 75% of a more rugged set like Willpower does? Is 75% simply inadequate across the board, and Brutes need to be tougher in the general case? I'm seriously wondering here. I'm not a huge fan of Ice Armor even on Tankers, so I don't really have a horse in this race - I can't see myself playing an Ice Armor Brute no matter what they do to the set.

The Cottage Rule is very strong. Castle will not violate the Cottage Rule without overwhelming and compelling reasons that cannot be addressed in any other way. By contrast, power animations are changed. . . well, not quite on a whim, but for reasons that do not equate to "This powerset is completely non-functional and only changing the animations can possibly fix it."

There are sets out there that desperately need to be fixed because they seriously under-perform compared to other sets in the same general category. They are left intact largely because fixing them would violate the Cottage Rule. That's my objection to using the term "Cottage Rule" so loosely. "Don't change stuff without good reason," is just common sense. "Don't change stuff in certain very particular ways even *WITH* good reason unless there is absolutely no other way to address the problem you're trying to fix and the problem absolutely has to be fixed," is a much stronger charge, and is no more than a mild exaggeration of how seriously the devs appear to take the Cottage Rule.

If you are ever on a team with somebody and you are not glad you have a debuff that increases their damage and are able to help them survive to dish out that damage, you're a terrible player. Period. There are no exceptions. You have no business teaming with somebody you personally hate enough to not want to help, and you have no business teaming period if you don't want to help your teammates in general.

So I'm sincerely hoping that the sarcasm I'm pretty sure I detected in what you posted wasn't actually there.

I always figured the biggest swing that most threatened an existing AT was from Tankers to Brutes, because no existing content really needs as much tanking prowess as a Tanker can bring, while more damage almost always makes things go faster. While it's always dangerous to assume you understand anybody else's thoughts, it seems that the devs were thinking somewhat along the same lines, given that GR also buffed Tanker damage and peak survivability and slightly nerfed Brute sustained damage and potential damage in most practical situations.

I'll give it a few months to see how the Defender/Corruptor thing works out over time. I'm personally highly unlikely to ever make another Defender, but I long ago learned the hazards of ascribing my personal preferences to the populace at large.

I think the point everybody is missing is that if the sets are close enough that good (not great, not awesome, just good) FF beats average (not bad, terrible, or clueless) Cold, then the problem isn't all that huge after all.

By contrast, back in the dawn of time when the game first released, a terrible /Regen Scrapper was orders of magnitude harder to kill than an awesome /Super Reflexes Scrapper. The sets were just completely out of balance with each other.

Given that perfect balance is impossible in a game as diverse as CoX, and that a stated design goal is to have a game that appeals to widely divergent play styles, getting two sets that, despite the similarity of some of their powers really are quite different, close enough that you only have to be good with the poorer one to beat an average player of the stronger one is an acceptable balance point. Assuming that the assertion that FF really is poorer than Cold is correct, which I only grant for the sake of argument. I like mez protection, and no amount of skill with Cold will grant mez protection. Not having to manage my inspirations to make sure I've always got a break-free for that errant mez that manages to hit is very valuable to me. Lets me save my inspiration tray for other stuff.

Close to zero. Just look at the top builds for almost any AT - they include tons of IO sets and Stamina, with very few exceptions. There's nearly always something for your character to do with more endurance, whether it comes from recovering more or spending less.

Well, technically it does hurt those who think the game is too easy and avoid Stamina in order to create more challenge. Still, there's plenty of other ways to handicap your build if that's what you want, so it doesn't hurt them much.

Pretty sure you're right. Which makes Axe Wielding Psycho, my most recent Brute, very sad.