Mekhazzio

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It falls out of line with the "normal" Defender sets. It isn't a buff set, its a debuff set. Its really a different playstyle than Defenders have had before.

[/ QUOTE ]Errr....what? Where have you been? Half the existing defender sets revolve around their potent debuffs, and one more of the others is the king of debuffing single targets. Debuffs are very much a well-established defender function and, in many scenarios, already the most effective way to defend a team (unquestionably so in issue 5). The variety and sheer strength of debuffing is one of the aspects that sets COH apart from standard MMOs. There are many fully viable (and often, superior) ways to deal with enemies aside from the bog-standard Tank & Heal.

The issue with trick arrow is not that it debuffs, it's that it debuffs poorly. With just Tar Patch and Darkest Night, for instance, a dark defender can outperform nearly the entire powerset of Trick Arrow stacked at once, every fight, indefinitely, with less slotting, less vulnerability to enemy alpha, and less hassle with super-slow recharges. Many of us defenders are quite used to being able to debuff enemies to the point where healing is nearly useless, and Trick Arrow, supposedly The debuff set, is very far from being able to achieve that. The state it initially arrived to Test in was only barely on that par, and even then only against near-level enemies since nearly all its prime mitigation methods are unenhanceable. After the brutal nerfing it received it is, to sum up, not only a set limited to one role, but also greatly outperformed in that one role by sets with many more capabilities besides.

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Here's the real numbers (that's what I get for doing stuff from memory).

17.71% Max Defence from Energy Absorbtion (not what I had earlier).

[/ QUOTE ]Awesome. The core power in a tanker primary, six-slotted with SOs, leeched off of a tight clump of fourteen enemies provides substantially less defense than a basic luck inspiration. Let's not forget that in real play, even on an eight man team (and thus huge spawns) it's rare to get more than four to six enemies in EA's radius, which at those numbers will provide just enough def to maybe have a noticeable impact on green minions.

That makes a whole lot of sense. Especially when you consider that one power is pretty much the sum total of the tank's fire protection. Flamethrowers and fire-breathing demons are more than a little bit frequent in Paragon.

I like my ice tank. Right now she kicks major butt and needs nerfing, no question about it. But with EA destroyed that much, it's looking like my blasters and defenders will be able to handle bigger and nastier spawns than my ice tank will, while at the same time dealing more damage. This is really going too far.

COH gameplay is 95% combat-oriented. This is a fighting game. It was bad enough when you arbitrarily took the travel powers out of combat (a change that -still- annoys me greatly) but now you're taking combat powers out of combat. Nonsensical. There is little point to even taking (much less using) a power like Stealth when it does not, in fact, provide any Stealth when you actually have a use for it. It goes from being a limited niche power with a steep cost (movement slow, end cost) to being just a power with a steep cost. It's what, the blinkie-sneaking power now? Yeah, sure, sign me up for that.

Most of the I5 changes are understandable, players did need toning down, but this one can't really be seen as anything except removing tactical variety from the game for no apparent reason. Stealthiness was very far from an uber ability.

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Wet Ice provides a base defense of +.5%;

Wet Ice - six slotted with Defense SO's - provides about 3% defense.

[/ QUOTE ]And where, pray tell, does a player purchase the +83% enhancements you're using? In the City of Heroes game the rest of us are playing, turning an 0.5 base into 3.0 would require not six defense SOs, but twenty-five defense SOs.

Congratulations on once again being totally unaware of one of the most basic game mechanics. This seems to happen frequently.

Yet another voice chiming in to protest the slap-dash teleporter idea. Not only do they look half-baked and out of place, especially on the remote ends, but it flies in the face of the existing material set out in the mole points. The hidden bases buried in the heart of the Shard, secret, well-protected links to move men and supplies around, these made sense. They encouraged exploration, as to open up the mole point you had to get there the hard way first, making you feel like you were really breaking new ground and being rewarded for it. They even had a bit of a plot behind them, as there were originally more mole points that had fallen to one disaster or another, and new, deeper mole points were planned for the future. An interesting part of a unique zone and a bleedingly obvious way to facilitate speedy travel deeper into the zone for whenever the devs revisited it. You could almost see the train-style destination selection waiting to show up on a portal click. But no, we get this 30 minute cut and paste job instead. What a waste.

My other beef with the zone are the task forces. These are the only real chance you get to see the story of the zone, but for me they're functionally unplayable. An eight-man requirement to begin them is prohibitive. It's difficult in the first place just to assemble an eight man team of 40+ characters to do something other than powerlevel. It's extremely difficult to then get that team out in the Shard and willing to fight what are by far the hardest enemies in the game. It's nearly impossible to have all that and then get them to stick together for six hours. Four or five people I can manage, but eight? Way too high. Even offering to pay people just to come out to the Shard for a few minutes just so we can start the TF has been unsuccessful. I've been wanting to do the Shard task forces since the zone first arrived, and so far, because of the minimum team requirement, I've only been able to do one.

And it needs saying that one TF was possibly the least fun experience I've had in COH. The Quaterfield task force needs major revision. Not only is 3/4ths of it spent fighting Crey, enemies who are no challenge and majorly overplayed by level 40+, but most of the missions are flat-out clones of each other, and the TF done with a quality team at a fast pace is STILL a seven hour endeavor. Most of the missions in this TF can be outright deleted without impacting the (very dull) story at all, and they need to be deleted just to rein this in from the boring, repetitive slog that it is. It doesn't have any unique content, nearly no backstory into the Shard, and no sense of finale at all. You just defeat the portal base boss and his linked glowies, all in the same rooms on the same maps, for a few hours and then, oh look, it's over (thank god). None of the group I was in would have done it had we known what it would be like, and we feel it's our duty to warn everyone else about it as well. It's the worst content in the game.

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But I'm not sure about removing/reducing the debuffs on several of the arrows. Let's face it: Trick Arrows is a one-trick pony as far as standard defender roles. It doesn't buff allies, and it doesn't heal. It debuffs. If it's going to only have that role, it really needs to be the best debuffing set available, in my opinion.

[/ QUOTE ]Agreed. As it is now, not only can you not keep any single debuff permanent until very late into the game, they're all individually extremely weak now without their recharge slows. Instead of stacking several mild debuffs for a great sum total, now you're forced to pick and choose between one of several weak debuffs at a time. This is pretty ridiculous considering that the other debuff defender sets get awesome debuffs that can be maintained all the time from the moment you get those powers (which is as early at level 1 or 2) and yet also have a far more flexible toolkit overall than Trick Arrow. They not only do more, they do it all better, and they generally don't have the alpha strike problem that Arrow does (takes time to stack all those debuffs).

I don't see how an arrow defender is supposed to actually defend a team with such mediocre tools. You can't keep them up all the time, they don't do much anyway, and even the Hold, a mere single-target power, can't take an enemy permanently out of a fight. There are blaster builds that put out better team damage mitigation than that, much less every other AT. Trick Arrow is just pretty pointless in its current form.

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Many times in the teams I've been on people have asked for a Rad Controller. When I've said how about a Rad Defender, you know because they DeBuff more, they've said they'd rather have someone who can do actual damage. It's mind boggling but it happens.

[/ QUOTE ]It's not mind-boggling at all. This is the natural consequence of so very many defenders choosing to totally neglect their secondary powerset. You simply cannot count on the average defender being able to do any damage whatsoever. Anecdotal case in point, I picked up two high-30s defenders off LFT last night and between the two of them they had seven slots in offense. Total. The potential for defenders to do damage is there, far more damage (and more intelligently directed) than any controller pet can hope to deal, but very rarely is that potential met.

There's not much you can do design-wise when the root of the problem is that the players are intentionally neutering themselves instead of taking the tools available. (IMO, this is also the problem Blasters have, as a whole they ignore their control and high damage powers and then wonder why they're fragile and deal lackluster damage)

'course I'll be the first to agree that storm, FF and empathy could use some basic improvement (storm needs BUG FIXES more than redesign) to actually meet the goal of full team defense + force multiplication, but that's more a sideline rather than the main issue.

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And, of course, there's the complaint that some Secondaries have too many melee attacks - something that the Blaster avoids at all costs.

[/ QUOTE ]Says who? It's not something that this blaster avoids. The melee attacks easily offer enough reward (in enormous damage) to outweigh their risk (which can be zero even against Monsters) of short range. The entire risk/reward scheme of short-ranged controls and attack powers is what makes my blasters interesting for me to play in the first place.

The first one is probably longer than the others. We were making extremely good time through the missions and it was still 7 hours due to the quantity of missions. It also has about six of those "four simultaneous blinky" missions towards the end, so you need at least half the team for that point. The story was dull and the lack of archvillain was disappointing, as was the fact that half the TF was done fighting Crey (which we were all sick of by the low 40s) instead of Rularuu.

I recommend skipping it and going straight to the others which, by all rights, sound better.

If you're going with the dead-guy theme, get the rad primary in on the fun too.

A chain ripple of 7 Fallouts would be HILARIOUS.