Obitus

All of what you said is true, in my experience.

But to be fair, unreserved agreement doesn't tend to lead anywhere interesting in real life, either. At best, you get into a long conversation about just how much you agree with each other, which can be cathartic, but it can also lead to the deceptively dangerous commiseration spiral.

As long as it's not Pandora's cake.



Cause that'd be a major buzzkill.

Don't see a whole lot of people complaining about the buff to Devices. From where I'm sitting, the fact that the Snipe buff gives Devices extra benefit is perhaps the one good thing about the whole deal.

The fact that Defenders and Corrupters also get Devices' extra benefit? Not so much. I notice you dropped your but-Defenders-don't-get-Build-Up argument after people pointed out the obvious flaw in your reasoning.

Now you're accusing your opponents of being selfish for supposedly begrudging Devices its moment in the sun. Nice.

As to why the issue is important? Because Blasters have been bottom of the barrel pretty much continuously for eight years (the Smoke Grenade hiccough at the beginning notwithstanding). It'd be nice if the buffs that are rightfully targeted at Blasters actually reach Blasters, instead of arbitrarily buffing two support ATs that were already just fine. Personally, I don't give a rat's furry rear end whether any Snipe buff goes through to the live servers; what's important here is that the AT(s) that is slated for upward balance tweaking receives its due attention. Cause, you know, eight years.

Whether that due attention includes a buff to Snipe powers is unimportant.

Ah. So basically it's working as intended, then?

That's disappointing.

Concur. On my own builds, that's the plan, to minimize downtime on Aim and Build Up -- but again, now we're pitting a Blaster's ability to leverage a whole build's worth of IO bonuses against a Defender or a Corrupter's ability to (over-)slot Tactics and equip a single Kismet.

Siphon Power, Sleet, Freezing Rain, Enervating Field, Fulcrum Shift, Tar Patch, Melt Armor, Slowed Response, Acid Mortar, Acid Arrow, Disruption Arrow -- just to name a few powers that leap to mind.

Support ATs lack Build Up? That's a shame.

Seems to me that characterizing the subject of this thread as a matter of fairness is, well, unfair.

Fairness implies that there's some sort of moral or ethical component to this discussion, when in fact the issue is balance, not fairness. The question isn't whether the developers are unfairly penalizing or uplifting certain ATs or power sets; the question is whether the developers are hitting the targets they most need to hit with a buff, rather than simply carpet bombing a bunch of different builds, which may or may merit a buff, with an unequal selection of goodies.

Given what the developers have said in the past, I find it highly unlikely that they truly intend to give Defenders and Corrupters a bigger across-the-board buff with the snipe changes than they're giving Blasters. Or, if you prefer, a less conditional buff. Whatever wording you want to use, I question what's going on here.

If the developers truly do intend to give support ATs the lion's share of the buff -- keeping in mind also that Defenders and Corrupters are in a better position to avoid situational ToHit debuffs than Blasters are, due to their generally superior control/debuff/mitigation -- then I'm happy to be corrected on the matter.

Anime characters are fine. Anthropomorphic wolf creatures, on the other hand ...

That sums it up for me, FWIW. I've been away for awhile, but before I left I spent countless hours and countless billions messing with my INV/SS Tanker build (a version of which is posted here), comparing every iteration to an analogous Brute build. My goal was to figure out whether it would be worthwhile to reroll, given the conventional wisdom that Brutes are simply better at the high end.

My conclusion? Not only would it have been a waste of time to reroll my Tanker as a Brute (which is a subjective statement, and therefore not terribly surprising or revealing); the Brute would have been unreservedly inferior for my purposes. The offensive dropoff on the Tanker, which was basically confined to AoE (thanks to Bruising), just wasn't a big deal.

And even after I spent significantly more resources on the Brute's defenses, the Tanker still won the survivability comparison rather handily. (Granted, some things may have changed since I made my comparison; perhaps the introduction of ATOs and Hybrid, combined with the nerf to Enzyme enhancements, changes the picture somewhat, but I doubt the broad strokes are any different.)

Now none of the above is to say that the conventional wisdom is unambiguously false; the Brute certainly wins in a high-end teaming scenario, and there are powerset combinations for which I'd probably prefer the Brute even solo. Not everyone shares my general build strategy, either; I'm more interested in using IOs and Incarnate powers to smooth a build's performance curve, to make each of my characters as capable as possible over the widest range of situations rather than to make them specialists in any one area.

And yeah, I agree that Bruising is a little clunky. It'd be nice if Tier 1 Tanker attacks were more attractive in general. It'd be nice if players could apply Bruising without losing DPS if they fail to time their attack chain in ten-second increments. It'd also be nice if Tankers had a higher ceiling in group content, on their damage if not on their survivability, which is already sky-high.

Eureka! That explains why he kept inviting all those annoying kids to his team; he needed filler members to create his own supergroup.

It all makes sense now

Assumes facts not in evidence. Define the following:

"Justified,"
"Abused,"
And most importantly, define "Resulting."

I like the way you try to play the uber-rational, even-handed card by asserting that the emotional argument is irrelevant -- and then in the very next sentence you take sides in the emotional debate, assigning victim status to returning Freemium players.

But hey, I sure am glad to be subjected to Mazey's aggressive-nitpicky arbiter-of-truth schtick upon my return to the forums. Feels like I'm picking up just where I left off.

Sure, you can be forgiven for a little knee-jerk emotionalism. You're one of those unfortunate 'tweeners who has enough experience with the game to have certain high expectations, to have invested in various parts of the game that aren't free -- but who also doesn't have enough Vet time to get most of the Paragon Rewards' perks for free.

I understand how you feel. And I genuinely hope you'll decide to stick around, either as a free player or as a paying player. Your presence enriches the community; don't let anyone tell you differently.

It's just that the sheer volume of threads about how this-or-that feature should be free wears on you, after awhile. None of my previous rant was addressed to you in particular; it was meant to address the accusation (by another poster) that many formerly cool, old-timey forumites have turned into miserly curmudgeons since the F2P model launched. And maybe that's true, but if it is true, then it's understandable -- at least as understandable as your emotional reaction to the gating of the Invention system in City of Heroes Freedom.

Well said. A lot of us also paid full price for the game, for years, before most of the currently gated stuff even existed. (Note: by "us," I don't mean to imply that I'm a "big name on the forums;" I'm just making a generalization about people who've been around for a long time.)

To put it another way, the free version of City of Heroes, today, is arguably a better game than the full priced version was for the first handful of years of its existence. The Premium version of the game (which costs a whopping $5, last I checked) is definitely better than the full priced version was for the first few years.

If long-time forum posters have developed a bit of an attitude in response to certain free players' insistence that the game isn't free enough, then those long-time forum posters can be forgiven. Personally, I get annoyed not as a long-time forum poster or even a long-time CoH player; I get annoyed as a working adult: the people at Paragon Studios are no less entitled to make a living than you or I am. If you truly believe that you have an idea that will improve the Freemium model, both for players (free and paid alike) and by extension, for the long-term health of Paragon's business, then that's great; fire away.

But please, don't argue -- don't even imply -- that the developers are morally wrong for requiring payment for their services. If you (generically "you") have a job, then just imagine having some random snot-nosed stranger burst into your office to demand free stuff every hour or so. Think about how long you'd be willing to do your job for free. Unless your name is Mother Teresa Jr, I'm guessing the answer to that question is somewhere between, "Not at all," and, "Maybe a week or two."

Or maybe you're independently wealthy, in which case there's no pressure on you to earn a paycheck, and so any job you undertake is purely a matter of amusement/self-improvement/satisfaction. If so, that's great, but waitasec; shouldn't you also have $2 a month to spend on a game?

City of Heroes:

Noun:
An MMORPG developed by Paragon Studios and owned by NCSoft; a service offered for profit by a private business; not yours: "NCSoft can choose to charge you for whatever aspect of City of Heroes they darn well please."

Sorry, couldn't resist. I understand your frustration, but them's the breaks. The free model is actually quite generous when you take a step back.

As someone who occasionally makes (puerile) gifs for another site, I hear ya.

Anyway, your crawl deserves to be shared, but I'm not sure whether our forum overlords would approve my posting a 5 MB gif.

(Edit: After consulting with the forum FAQ, I see that apparently the file size is good. Cool.)

Don't agree with the reasoning, but FWIW, I mostly agree with the conclusion. Tankers don't warrant much, if any, developer attention.

The bit about Tankers' higher damage modifier, relative to Brutes, is overblown, though. (And by that I don't mean to single out Sylph's post; I'm addressing what seems to be a general theme among various posts in this thread.)

We're talking a difference of about 6%; to say (or to imply) that Brutes have to work to maintain Tanker-equivalent levels of Fury-enhanced offense is to ignore reality. Yes, a Brute has to work to maintain his peak offense, but his peak offense is significantly higher than a Tanker's. A Brute player can maintain a meaningful damage advantage while practically sleeping at the keyboard.

But yeah, in general I'd say Tankers are underrated on the forums. Their damage is better than (seemingly) most people think, and their survivability is insane. Perhaps a higher buff ceiling for Tankers is warranted for the sake of high-end-team play, but as self-contained entities Tankers really aren't bad even compared with Brutes.

That arc was awesome. More of that sort of thing, pls thx.

Excellent satire.

I am humbled by the intellectual rigor of your game-balance analysis. Thank you, sir, for enlightening all of us.

Oh, wait. Everything you said is irrelevant. Still, it wouldn't be the Blaster forum if there weren't somebody making the fatuous, and vaguely insulting, mechanics-don't-matter argument. So you got that going for you.

All of that is fair. It's not my intention to argue for any specific changes to Drain Psyche; I just wanted to toss in my 2 cents, to make it clear that there's at least one more Mental player who isn't married to the old Drain Psyche, who won't whine if the power's peak performance is reduced in return for more consistent performance at the low end -- preferably a low end that doesn't require you to close to melee range.

If, in other words, the developers believe that a nerf to best-case DP isn't worth the outcry from so-called min/maxers, I want the devs to understand that although those so-called min/maxers may be most vocal, they aren't the only faction with a strong opinion on the matter.

I also don't subscribe to the notion that high-end Mental builds must take full advantage of DP, for a host of reasons that probably aren't relevant to the topic at hand. Suffice to say that there are many ways to skin a cat, and the min/maxy approach of building a strength and then playing to it isn't necessarily better than investing billions to smooth a build's performance curve, as much as possible without undue sacrifice, across the full spectrum of the game's content. And given the distribution of available IO DEF bonuses combined with the layout of Blaster Ancillary pools, I don't believe it's unambiguously true that building around Drain Psyche is the best way to smooth a Mental Blaster's performance curve.

None of the above is directed at you, by the way; I'm just noting for the room, if you will, that the presumed build superiority of current-DP proponents isn't a given. I've been around here long enough that the ability to farm doesn't impress me. I suspect a lot of power gamers are with me on that. If you'll forgive my saying so, I suspect you're with me on that.

This isn't a matter of partisanship; it's a matter of mechanics. Drain Psyche is a short-duration regeneration buff that scales with spawn size and requires melee range to activate. By definition, DP is a heavily context-dependent power, given that it appears on an AT whose best defense, up til this point, was supposed to be range.

What is the weakness of regeneration as a mitigation mechanism? Time, or if you prefer, damage spikes; regeneration needs time to work. What is it that DP doesn't give you, unless you have near-absurd amounts of IO-derived recharge bonuses? Time -- or more accurately, consistent uptime. The fact that Drain Psyche scales to crazy levels of regen at the high end can compensate for that short-coming, but it is an inherent short-coming in the power, a short-coming that is in direct opposition to Arbiter Hawk's stated intentions vis-a-vis his proposed Blaster survivability buffs in I-24 (see Arcanaville previous post, quoted below).

The developers have already stated that DP's peak values are too high. The developers have also implicitly acknowledged that Blasters deserve an across the board survivability buff, a survivability buff that is consistently available -- and by extension, a survivability buff that is (largely) context or playstyle-independent. In other words, Drain Psyche was already broken at the high end; after I-24, it'll also be broken on the opposite end of the spectrum and for every point in between.

You can talk all you like about how the developers are catering to the players who "like the way Mental works," but the entire AT is undergoing a paradigm shift in I-24. It was fine that DP was heavily situational, of very little consistent use to ranged Blasters, back before every other Blaster Secondary had a consistently available defensive power -- but now the game is changed.

I'm not asking the developers to screw a certain segment of the Mental Blaster player base arbitrarily. This isn't the my-preference-versus-yours game. I'm just asking the developers to follow through on what they've said, both about Drain Psyche's existing design, and about the proposed design of the post-I-24 Blaster in general. Your personal preferences are irrelevant.

Clearly, the blast-set improvements in I-24 are not aimed solely at Blasters. By definition, any buff to blast sets in general cannot be targeted solely at a particular AT.

But it's also clear that of the relevant ATs, Blasters are most in need of improvement. The proposed Snipe buff arbitrarily benefits Defenders and Corruptors most, with Blasters coming in third place, and Dominators in a distant last place. It is appropriate that Dominators should receive the least amount of positive attention, IMO; it is also appropriate that Devices should receive the most benefit, relative to other Blaster Secondary sets -- but otherwise the buff has no obvious rudder.

Or, if I simply fail to see the rudder, then I welcome correction.

It's fine that you enjoy the situational nature of Snipes, but make no mistake: the proposed Snipe changes in I-24 are not expressly designed to preserve that aspect of Snipes. Some builds are given an almost pathetically easy path to perma-fast Snipes, while others have to struggle, and still others are simply incapable of achieving perma-fast Snipes without outside intervention.

There is, in other words, nothing intrinsically situational or context-dependent about I-24 Snipes. I-24 Snipes will remain situational, and will incur a high opportunity cost for some builds, but only because those builds are not equipped as well as others to buy the arbitrary requirements of fast Snipes, either on a permanent or temporary basis.

It's as if the developers decided one day to tie Scrapper criticals to regeneration rate. Great idea if Willpower and Regeneration are supposed to be the most direct beneficiaries of the buff, but it's a terrible idea if the Scrapper AT is supposed to benefit, roughly evenly and as a whole.

Therein lies the problem. Either the snipe buff is, as many of us presume, intended to be a significant and generalized buff to ranged blast sets' single-target damage potential -- a much-belated acknowledgement that blast sets have been saddled with too many disadvantages relative to their melee counterparts -- or it's an inconsequential buff in the grand scheme, designed simply for the sake of making Snipe powers more attractive.

Personally, I don't give a rat's furry rear end about how attractive Snipe powers are, in and of themselves. I'm much more interested in the holistic balance of AT capabilities. But sure, if the developers (and you, presumably) believe it's worthwhile to make Snipe powers more attractive just to enrich the already massive selection of build options, then that's great. More power to them, and to you.

There ain't a whole lot of middle ground, though. If the developers favor your approach, if they favor improving Snipes just for flavor, then they ought to say so, rather than allowing us to assume that the Snipe changes are the single-target-damage buff for which Blasters in particular, and blast sets in general, have waited. And waited. And waited.

Whether it's fair to the current crop of developers or not, there's a lot of expectation wrapped up in any proposed Blaster revamp. Based on the game's history, we have no reasonable expectation that there'll be another pass anytime soon.

Or Blasters could just be given perma-fast-snipes across the board.

KISS is overrated. As they stand now (or as far as I've heard up til this moment), the proposed I-24 Snipe changes arbitrarily reward certain builds and certain ATs -- and of the latter, the ATs that benefit most are arguably not the direct targets of the buff, or at least their performance probably isn't a direct cause for the buff.

Devices is perhaps the only set for which a disproportionately high buff makes intuitive sense.

As far as grouping goes, I don't see a whole lot of people getting excited over the prospect of changing their attack chains on the fly. My Dominator, for instance, will not take the Snipe even after I-24, because she doesn't have access to 22+% ToHit on even a temporary basis. My Blaster will probably take the Snipe, but only because I can muster enough recharge to alternate Aim and Build Up with only about 6 seconds of downtime per cycle. Even at that, using the snipe will be an exercise in annoyance, an annoyance I really shouldn't need to endure, given that Melee attack sets are apparently entitled to comparable if not superior DPS with much less fuss.

Don't get me wrong; I love the nuke changes and I appreciate the spirit if not the letter of the snipe changes. Blasters ought to be more competitive as a whole class after I-24. But the Blaster buffs in I-24 have been a long time coming, and I think some of the hand wringing on the forums over the context-dependent snipe buff for Blasters (and blast sets in general) is kinda preposterous when you take a step back and look at the over-arching design of the game. It wouldn't be a balance problem if Blasters were simply handed fast snipes, for free.

Hah, yeah I guess it is a pretty awful premise when you put it that way. Spider-Man 2 still managed to be one of the best super hero movies I ever saw, though. Molina played a big part in that; whatever your opinion of the writing, he did a great job with what he was given.