Jabbrwock

Fiery Aura is, intentionally, a squishy set compared to the sets it competes with. It brings substantial offensive firepower to bear to compensate for this weakness - the most damaging damage aura in the game, a now *VERY* nice aoe attack in Burn, a solid endurance recovery tool whose only flaw is that it's not Power Sink in Consume, and Fiery Embrace, a damage buff like no other, which completely eclipses the standard Build Up. The i18 changes have been very kind to Fiery Aura.

The biggest flaws with the set are not intrinsic to the set, but rather a result of the defense meta-game that currently dominates City of Heroes across the board. If it were as easy to improve your resistance as it is your defense, Fiery Aura would be in shouting distance of Shield Defense, falling short only because of poor status protection.

Don't sell Fiery Aura too short when it comes to survivability. If you're facing Fire or Toxic damage, Fiery Aura is pretty darned rugged, and since Smashing/Lethal damage is the only resistance you can get from a power pool, the Smashing/Lethal weakness isn't as weak as it looks. That just leaves Cold (lol), Energy, and Negative damage as poor resistances, with Psionic being an intentional complete hole. It's not a rugged set by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not a complete basket case either. Its biggest problem is that it loses by comparison to Shield Defense, which is kind of like losing an arm wrestling match against the Incredible Hulk. Name a defensive set and odds are you'll find complaints about how Shield Defense outperforms it somewhere in the Brute, Scrapper, Tanker, or general Powers forums in recent memory.

That brings up another thing that's nice about Invuln. It benefits from the best/most stackable IO set bonuses. It benefits from +recharge with perma Dull Pain, and from defense with Invincibility providing meaningful defense to build on, allowing you to soft cap without sacrificing everything else. Since these seem to be the most potent IO set bonus types, Invuln taking advantage of both of them gets quite a kick in the pants. Compare to a set like Electric Armor, which has no base defense to build on, or Willpower, which gains nothing at all from recharge, and you can see another reason why Invuln is popular.

If Brutes can have a stealth power, Scrappers can get a modded version of Ninjutsu. Hide is right out, but nothing against a more conventional stealth power. Caltrops is an issue, but so was Conserve Power in /Elec, and the devs managed to both improve the set *AND* port it to Scrappers when they changed it. Not that Ninjutsu needs a lot of improvement, I'm just saying.

Because of the implication that they can kill you even once, which is once more than you should be aiming for.

Maybe.

Castle confirmed in a thread on the Scrapper forum that Shield Charge is not doing what he intended it to do (and what he thought it was doing). Specifically, it's dealing way more damage than he thought. He hasn't said exactly what he is going to do about it, instead saying that whatever he does, it's going to take time and careful consideration.

It would take a truly unprecedented nerf to make Shield Charge a bad power. It would take more than the complete removal of Shield Charge to make Shield Defense a bad set. I wouldn't worry about it.

Tanker Fiery Melee has 2 PBAOE attacks, Combustion and Fire Sword Circle. Take Shield Defense and you have a third from Shield Charge, and even if that's on the chopping board, it would take a nerf beyond previous dreams of nerfdom to make Shield Charge an actually bad power. Tanker Fiery Melee isn't too bad single target either, with Incinerate and Greater Fire Sword.

If you *REALLY* want PBAOE attacks, take Fiery Aura. I don't recommend it with the current state of the set, but it does offer a few more PBAOE options. Put together they still don't add up to Shield Charge, though.

This may be the best summary of the situation I've read.

Ultimately, Brutes are probably better on uberteams where everybody can get buffed to the hilt. They are arguably better solo, but it's *REALLY* close here. In a more modest team environment, where Brutes aren't getting buffed to the damage cap but are getting buffed, Scrappers pull ahead.

I'm not convinced this is particularly "fair." I am convinced that there are far more important things for the devs to worry about, and after (and if) it actually starts to be a problem is plenty soon enough for any issue of comparative Brute and Scrapper performance to be addressed.

This whole thread strikes me as much ado about nothing. There are AT's that are far more likely to suffer population depletion with Going Rogue than Scrappers or Brutes, and there has yet to be a case made for even *THEM* to be a real issue. This is like worrying about a mild cold when you also have bubonic plague, and further when you have hypochondria so you may not even have any real disease at all and instead just be imagining it.

It happens to almost every game, though. Once the bulk of the playerbase has access to a clear understanding of how the game works, a focus on efficiency will naturally develop. Trying to hide the data, as EverQuest and the original CoH devs tried, doesn't help, it just forces a reliance on outside tools. Ultimately, once players know their goals and know how the game works, they will eventually reach a concensus on how to play to reach those goals efficiently, and everything else will be categorized as "bad play." It's sad, yes, but pretty much inevitable.

All pseudo-pets have the same damage cap, and my understanding is that it would be a substantial difficulty for the devs to change this. They may go back and nerf non-Blaster versions of the Rain powers to support the AT specific damage scales for Defenders and Corrupters, but I seriously doubt they'll ever even try to alter the damage cap. It's one of those little things that's probably not ever going to change until somebody invents a time machine and goes back to when it was actually practical to change the game at such a low level.

Even single stacked, Rage would mean significantly more for Scrappers than for Brutes. Not only would it be buffing Scrappers' 1.125 AT damage scale instead of Brutes' 0.75 AT damage scale, but Scrappers also have a higher damage buff scale, so Scrappers would get a 100% damage buff instead of the 80% buff Brutes (and Tankers) get. The net result is that Scrappers would effectively get 1.125 extra damage from Rage for every 0.6 extra damage Brutes get.

Would the result be broken? Dunno, but the port would at least require some extra scrutiny beyond what most other power proliferations need, and the devs are strapped for time right now, so I'm not holding my breath. Hoping, yeah, holding my breath, no.

I don't even play Stalkers and I find that silly. You'd think that would be a (relatively) trivial fix to make. Is there a case to be made that allowing Stalkers to benefit from max HP buffs proportionally as much as most other AT's would make them overpowered? Or are we just looking at a consequence of overworked devs putting a problem that is not massively game-breaking on a back burner for a while so they can develop and test other, more important updates?

I believe it was hinted long ago that the ability of HO enhancements to enhance the defense debuff resistance in Active Defense was being looked at, but whether that's actually happened and been deemed acceptable or just has been put indefinitely on a back burner I don't know. Regardless, unless slotting Membranes into Active Defense to get extra defense debuff resistance is a key component of your build, that's not likely to make or break the set.

This is probably the core of it, yeah.

Heroes, by and large, are people who do what's right because it's right. It's a fairly straightforward motivation. It's hard to think of a heroic arc where you say "Wait, my guy wouldn't actually do that. That's not what he's about."

Villains are far more complicated. Some are utterly ruthless megalomaniacs. Others are greedy conscienceless mercenaries. Still others are well intentioned extremists whose visions happen to run outside the common norm (Lord Recluse arguably fits here). Some are simply psychotic sadists out to cause pain and suffering. There are so many variants of the standard villain that it's really hard to make "one size fits all" content for them.

Heroes are mostly defined by where they stand morally. Villains are defined by where they don't stand morally. You don't know where they stand, you just know where they don't. It covers a lot more territory.

IMHO, anyway.

The biggest restraint on your damage output with a budget build is going to be endurance issues, and Willpower will be a huge help there. Go with Fire/WP, IMHO. WP is an extremely rugged power set on just SO's or common IO's, and Fire is a versatile power set that can really dish out the pain single target or AoE.

Expecting Ultimo to change in response to the exact same forum venom that has consistently failed to change him since his very first post suggests that he's not the only one who cannot learn. I might lean more charitably to his detractors - I think he's seriously wrong nearly all the time too - if they would figure out that they cannot change Ultimo and just ignore his posts as containing nothing of merit. The fact that Ultimo consistently gets *EXACTLY THE SAME RESPONSES* from all his posts suggests that there's a deeply dysfunctional relationship between him and his detractors.

I forgot the Regen in Rooted. I can see Stone as the obvious top tier Hamidon tank now that you've reminded me. Then again, I consider the -SPD in Rooted to be an indirect but non-trivial hindrance to damage dealing, since time spent running between spawns slowly is time not spent killing them. Teleport sucks down the endurance enough to impose its own limit on killing speed. So I'll still put Ice as the fastest leveling of the top 3.

Those people will gimp themselves into uselessness whether they are allowed to spec out of their entire secondary or not. They will whine pointlessly about how terrible the game is for allowing them full scope to exercise their ineptitude regardless of how hard the devs try to force them to play adequate builds. Take away all player input into builds and stick everybody with a standard reference build, and they will *STILL* be sub-terrible players, they'll just exercise their incompetence in those areas where player input is allowed.

Since you can't stop bad players from being bad, how about we let the good players make informed choices about whether the first secondary power is worth taking in an earned respec? The real difficulty is that it makes freespecs, vetspecs, and iospecs relatively worthless if your preferred build needs to skip your first secondary power or otherwise to use this ability, which means over time, you'll end up running out of earned respecs and be forced into a build you don't like.

TA is the explicitly debuff/control based set in the buff/debuff power set group. As such, extending it to healing and/or buffing just isn't appropriate. What's appropriate is making it debuff and control better than sets that combine debuffs and controls with heals and/or buffs. Right now, it doesn't. Adding a healing arrow doesn't just violate the cottage rule, it violates the core power set concept.

I think you're looking at the wrong nutshell. The nutshell is you won't be as efficient a tank as Inv, period. Never. You will be squishier, no matter what you do.

The only reason Fiery Aura functions at all for tanking is that the game is really pretty easy. You can tank almost anything with any Tanker primary and secondary. You can tank absolutely anything with any Tanker primary and secondary if you use the right external buffs, inspirations, and/or properly chosen IO sets. Fiery Aura succeeds in spite of itself, because the devs put the tanking bar so very *VERY* low in this game.

That's my take on the issue, anyway.

Well, to be fair, Brutes had adequate tanking tools from day 1, to the point that you have to assume that they were intended to be at least backup tanks villain side. The only other conclusion I can reach looking at an AT with high health, solid defenses, an AoE taunt in its primary, a taunt aura in most of its secondaries, and a ST taunt in every attack. . . well, the only conclusion I can reach other than that this AT is intended to fulfill at least *SOME* tanking rolls is personally insuliting to the developers.