Psiphon

Originally Posted by Siolfir

As a minor aside... I logged onto beta with the live build on my EM/Elec Brute and had +21% S/L resistance, +18% F/C resistance, and +9% E/N resistance in set bonuses while mostly building for recharge with some procs thrown in once the attack chain was saturated.

In other, completely unrelated news, Bio Armor and its Offensive adaptation (which carries -7.5% resistance to all) just got a lot more interesting to me.

Originally Posted by planet_J

The caps are fine...get off of it...nobody runs around hard capped out. That is your own private delusion. A few others share your lunacy...but your argument holds no water.

Why should tanks do more damage?

Stop dodging the question.




Brutes have the smallest base damage modifier, they HAVE to have larger ranges because you're modifying a much smaller number.






With a Warshade being able to cap all resists at 85% and not being designed specifically to manage aggro? No thanks, 90% is fine...Brutes can't hit scrapper damage realistically...you CAN'T get full fury sustained...so how can you really ever cap damage??





Why should brutes do less damage? They don't hit scrapper numbers because of the nature of fury...it's like a carrot out in front of you that will never be eaten. Damage caps are there to allow outside buffs to get you closer to scrapper damage...but you won't get there without full fury.






Then you should know first hand that a well built dom or scrappers or stalkers ROUTINELY do more damage? Should we nerf them?



Parity for who? No AT is broken as they sit...you have failed to produce any proof otherwise and that burden lies squarely on your shoulders...not mine. Also, the devs have said that brutes are off the table, and will no be adjusted even if they look at tanks...so stop trying to find a solution that is not acceptable.



Not normally, I am extremely helpful, but I am so tired of people asking for a nerf to brutes based on strawman arguments that my patience has long ago worn thin.



It is balanced...so why on earth does it need adjusting?



If 2nd/3rd place is premier, then you are spot on...but I refuse to allow them to fall to last.





They don't deal scrapper level damage, except in a vacuum with full fury and that doesn't happen in reality.

Tanks are not broken, brutes are not broken, find something with proof.





Brutes are out of whack according to who? All but about 5 or 6 people on the forums either don't care, or think they're fine...so who has the burden proof? You...have you provided anything to prove they are out of whack? No. So because 5 or 6 people out of 5-6K think something is off that makes it true?? We are likely 2% of all players on the game too...

Your perception is skewed.

Originally Posted by planet_J

You're dodging the question...why should tanks do any more damage...they perform their role as they were designed by the game designers to do. The fact that you don't like the role they were intended to play speaks more to the fact that you are not a tank player, than it says anything about tanks being broken or needing a buff...or something else needing a buff/nerf for that matter.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

That wasn't really a question. That was a statement essentially asserting that such a consideration was not meaningful.

Originally Posted by Erratic

Would he scream "over powered". . .what's your basis for that claim?
.

Originally Posted by Erratic

You didn't answer the question, you evaded it. I asked what SCRAPPER wanted the attention a taunt aura draws. Precious few in my experience because they are not designed to withstand it. Rerolling as a Brute means getting the taunt aura but also the tools to survive it presumably. However there are tradeoffs for this.
.

Originally Posted by SpyralPegacyon

Well, there's your problem. 'When required' is not always 'when available'. As I've been trying to say, support and inspirations are not always there when you need them.

Originally Posted by Erratic

You were the one to off the comparison and ask why it was fair. All I did was look at the packages in detail.



I have an ElM Stalker. ElM/Nin in fact. I would take my Spines/ElA Stalker over it. . .she's sturdier, recovers endurances as needed, is immune to energy attacks and endurance drains, and gets a boost which allows here to not too far from perma-Hasten on just SOs (depends on what you consider far I admit). She churns out AE damage consistently like nobody's business.



Not saying I agree, but go on. . . .



At best you might be arguing that SS or perhaps just SS/FA performs incredibly well. Were you really trying to make a comparison between the two ATs you would choose sets they have in common. . .say DM/ElA.

Originally Posted by Erratic

What scapper wants to draw that type of attention?

Originally Posted by Garent

We can nerf brutes.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

But only for the games you personally balance.

Originally Posted by Erratic

Because my Brute can not walk into a group and guarantee his first hit will be a critical hit with a fairly good chance that if that first hit is an area attack it will hit critically. Moreover that first hit, even were it critical, would be of considerably smaller value than what my Stalker routinely puts outs. And on top of that, so long as I am willing to go three hits between usage, my Stalker's Assassin's Strike will most likely crit (and with recharge times being what they are, I am likely to be using two or three strikes between uses of the Assassin's Strike).



I have what I consider to be a pretty darned good built on my signature Brute (the one I give most attention to) and he does deal a nice load of damage. He rarely one-shots things whereas my Stalker routinely does. . .several times in any given fight. . .yellow and orange con, sometimes higher.

Originally Posted by planet_J

So, here's a question nobody can answer to my satisfaction...

Why should tanks do more damage? They are WAI, how are they broken?

Why should scrappers have more survivability? They are WAI and do more sustained damage than anyone...

Originally Posted by Hopeling

Only if you consider farms to be a balancing point for some reason. There are vanishingly few real missions where a /FA or /Elec Brute won't face attacks against their non-capped resists. The only other sets that can reach 90% resist to *anything* without insps are Invuln (and only during Unstoppable) and Stone (and only against S/L, and Stone isn't winning many damage competitions).

Originally Posted by Mad Grim

Well Scrappers have no need to chase Fury, and they start the fight with much more damage.

Originally Posted by planet_J

No, they pick farms that use a damage type their resists are already capped to...hence FA toons do fire farms...nobody eats 5 oranges and 20 reds before they run a farm...who do base this on?



Brute farmers DO NOT eat pez to cap resists, they run FA and do fire farms...anyone who lied to you and said otherwise is talking out a hole other than their mouth.

My observation in game is that I can maintain somewhere around 70-80% Fury sustained in normal play...farming you can get higher...but that's not normal play.

Tanks can do all that too...a Tank at the damage cap is like a Brute @15% Fury with 100% enhancement in the power and 300% damage buff...where's the issue?

Scrappers can't do it, but no one deals damage like stalkers and scrappers...

Originally Posted by SpyralPegacyon

Let me phrase it this way then: How often do you actually see anyone chugging through insps to keep their brutes at the cap?

Originally Posted by Aett_Thorn

Psiphon,

Which Brutes can cap their resistance solo on SOs? Maybe to one damage type, but they can hardly do that to many damage types like Tankers can. Not that I think that Brute resistance cap couldn't be lowered to 85%, but to say that Brutes (especially as a whole) can cap their resistances solo on SOs is just wrong. Unless you're counting in Tier 9s, which are hardly perma, especially on SOs.

Invulns: With Tough can get to 70.2% S/L Resistance, 23.4% to elements and energies

Fire: 52.65 to S/L, 35.1 to E/NE, over cap to Fire, 23.4 to Cold

Electric: 58.5 to S/L/F/C, over cap to Energy, 40.95 to Psy, 35.1 to Neg Energy

...etc. Basically, they can sometimes get to the cap against certain damage types only, but fighting anything that doesn't use that damage type they are definitely worse off than Tankers.

Originally Posted by SpyralPegacyon

That means either:
a.) Said brute is fumbling with right-clicking on their insp window which means they're not killing anything.
b.) Said brute already has macros at the ready, at which point you've already entered Hardcoreville or its farming villages and nobody's balancing our ATs around that.

Originally Posted by MrLiberty

If you can't understand how sitting at or near the 90% hardcap for res for a majority of damage types in the game backed with some layered defense and a near 1000 point heal every 12 seconds... well then, I question your defintion of the phrase? Put simply, I can't remember the last time my Fire Tank died where as my brute can still run into trouble on a regular basis.

And sorry to say, your point is moot because unless you are a permadom locking down the spawn pre alpha? Things are going to attack you. Making things dead faster is better.... buuuuut say it takes my brute 30 seconds to kill a full spawn that puts out 10,000 points of S/L damage over that time and a tank kills the same spawn in 60 seconds.

My brute at 69% res to S/L takes 3,100 points of damage, my Fire tank takes 2,000 points of damage (90% res - 1000 pts x 2 30 sec intervals). Higher damage is a form of mitigation, but even assuming the brute puts out twice as much damage the tank comes out ahead from a survivability standpoint while doing less damage.

Originally Posted by Rylas

The only thing I can think of is he has to be talking about ATOs. 10% S/L defense from 4 slots (2 already come with the powers you slotted in) is a pretty nice step up. But in a straight up SO situation (which he claims is his perspective), this is just plain silly to say.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU

What other reason is needed?

Originally Posted by Rylas

The only thing I can think of is he has to be talking about ATOs. 10% S/L defense from 4 slots (2 already come with the powers you slotted in) is a pretty nice step up. But in a straight up SO situation (which he claims is his perspective), this is just plain silly to say.

Originally Posted by Werner

Let's try an example with nice round numbers.

Your Brute has 2000 hit points, 40% resistance to everything, 45% defense to everything, and heals 30 HP/S.

So your Tanker has 2500 hit points, 60% resistance to everything, 45% defense to everything, and heals 37.5 HP/S.

You're being attacked with 2000 HP/S of damage.

On the Brute, defense drops that to 100 HP/S. Resistance drops that to 60 HP/S. Healing drops that to 30 HP/S.

On the Tanker, defense drops that to 100 HP/S. Resistance drops that to 40 HP/S. Healing drops that to 2.5 HP/S.

Now, in a sense, yes, the difference that resistance makes is only 20 HP/S on incoming damage of 2000 HP/S, so a 1% difference. True. But can you see that 2000 HP/S is an unhelpful thing to compare to, and 1% an unhelpful result? The difference that really matters to us is between 40 HP/S and 60 HP/S, and that's a lot more significant that 1% would imply.

And of course your health is only applied to the damage that gets through all of that. So in that sense, your 25% higher health is only absorbing a tiny fraction of the damage. But that tiny fraction is still an arguably significant 40 or 60 HP/S. All told, it's the difference between taking 30 HP/S and 2.5 HP/S, the difference between surviving about 1 minute and about 17 minutes. That's probably not going to make any difference in the outcome of this particular fight. So people are generally satisfied with Brutes.

Now let's say you want to know how much incoming damage each can take indefinitely. The number you come up with is generally referred to as "survivability". Your Brute can indefinitely survive 1000 HP/S of incoming damage: 1000 * 5% = 50, 50 * 60% = 30, 30 - 30 = 0. Your Tanker can indefinitely survive 1875 HP/S of incoming damage: 1875 * 5% = 93.75, 93.75 * 40% = 37.5, 37.5 - 37.5 = 0.

Now, I have defined survivability a little differently than standard. We normally define "incoming damage" as what you'd have been actually hit with if you had no mitigation, so we'd want to including the 50% to-hit already. I kept it as what I'd call "output damage", since you were using the 95% figure rather than the more commonly-accepted 90% figure for the mitigation provided by 45% defense. I personally have always used "output damage" when crunching numbers. But the two are equivalent for comparisons. All survivability numbers would just be cut in half for the more common definition, and thus the comparison would still show the same % difference.

So based on this generally-accepted definition, most of us would say that the Tanker has 87.5% better survivability than the Brute. It won't make much practical difference in most fights. But sometimes, that huge raw survivability difference does come into play.

Originally Posted by Hopeling

No, 25% more health means you can take 25% more damage, no matter how much defense you have. If both characters build for the regular softcap, the Tanker's higher defensive numbers don't confer so much advantage (you have more wiggle room in the build, since you need far fewer set bonuses, but both characters will be softcapped). However, a SD/ tanker can plausibly choose to build to or near the Incarnate softcap instead, while a /SD brute has a much harder time doing that. A SD/ tanker also gets better DDR, and better resists (potentially MUCH better once you count their ATO proc).

The question isn't whether the Tanker really is significantly tougher. Tankers are indeed significantly tougher. No contest. It's just a question of whether you value the ability to stay alive in the (not very common) situations where a Brute isn't tough enough above or below the ability to deal more damage in every situation.