Thorizdin_LotD

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He wasn't saying Blasters and Corruptors teaming up. He was saying that while those points can be applied to those two ATs, Blasters bring supreme damage and higher HP, while Corruptors seperately bring very impressive damage and the ability to self heal or self buff.

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As I said, Doms bring the most reliable Toggle drops in the game (64% on the high attack). They are 2% shy of being 3 times as effective as an /EM Blapper now. In addition, many of the skills are good san Domination. Domination doesn't make the AT, its the boost in overall performance that really makes it shine. Doms contribute when they don't have Domination, they basically take over when they do

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Second point: What other AT is only useful 45% of the time? If the only thing we bring to a team is the use of Domination, then we are indeed only useful 45% of the time in optimal conditions.

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I'd answer quite well, since that is the, somewhat less obvious, situation for Blasters. Blasters have devestating alpha strikes because of 2 powers, Aim and Buildup. These powers are what enables a Blaster to 2 shot squishies and you can have both them going about 40% of the time.

Damage from the turrets < resistance buffs

Its really quite manageable to take the turrets with an all squishy team, it just takes a bit longer than a Fury'ed Brute. The turret damage looks like its all S/L so its not really a problem.

That's one of the strategies we're thinking about, it just means that someone else has to give up a power.

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All of the complaints you've made about Doms can be applied to Blasters and to most Cor's. Most can't give them selves mez protection. Doms, like most of the AT's, need the support of a team.

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True, but Blasters and Corrupters bring heavy damage and heavy buffage to a team.

What exactly do we bring?

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And better HPs or self healing....

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I'm not sure I understand this argument at all. Blasters and Corruptors can only team in the arena so while it would be interesting to try that out, I don't think its a wide spread occurance.

If the question is why would a team of Cors invite Doms to their team, then that one is pretty easy. Dom's reduce the time it takes to down a target. In many ways a Dom is more effective debuffer than anything in the game. Their ability to penetrate mez protection when they have Domination up is incredible. In addition, there are some scary combos, Domination used in conjunction with Power Boost will let you do some amazing things. In short, almost anything a PvP team of 8 Cor's can do can be done more efficiently with 6 Cors and 2 Doms now. Does this mean that Dom's will replace Cors or out number them, I doubt it very much. Until the day comes that buffs have less of an impact you will have continued reliance on Cors for team PvP since MM's (the only other "buff" AT on the villain side) is subpar as a buffer.

I played a Fire/Fire Dom up to 35 in the CoV Beta and my first character, though not my first to 40, on live was my Ice/En Dom. I stopped leveling him until they got the problems with Dom's and PvP fixed. Cors are going to form the basis of any good PvP team simply because they have the best buffs and heals on the villain side. I wish this were more spread around, but the devs probably fear making MM buffs too strong and turning them into tank mages. I think any team that doesn't want a Dom as they stand on test is making a rather large mistake. You don't need a team of Dom's, though it probably could work if you brought 2 /Thermals and a /Sonic Cor, but thats really overkill. It takes 3 holds to get past most Scrapper/Stalker mez protection. If you have 2 Dom's on a team alternating triggering their Domination you get that in one wave of st holds. Add in an Ice Cor to lower mez protection and things get really interesting.

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Targetting the mezzer first is a valid and smart tactic, so that is not what I have a problem with. My problems is that four out of the five hero AT's can two shot us with utter impunity, and that charging through an entire team of villains just to take out the Dom poses almost no risk.

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Mez protection is best gained from a team buff IMO so that one is easy. Dom's get pretty significant resistance based shields in most of the PPP's (all but BS ) which makes my Dom the _only_ AT that I will probably not get BS as a patron on. In addition, the resistances stack with the shields from a /Thermal and/or /Sonic very nicely.

All of the complaints you've made about Doms can be applied to Blasters and to most Cor's. Most can't give them selves mez protection. Doms, like most of the AT's, need the support of a team.

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So the MMs and Brutes cut bait while the Corruptors and Doms do the fishing. For some reason, this still doesn't sound appealing... or like PvP to me. Sounds oddly enough like PvE.

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Ok, let me clarify, Brutes have problems in PvP because of a known bug, they gain Fury much more slowly than was intended and _Castle_ is working to find a solution.

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Will Brutes' Fury not building properly in PVP get fixed?


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I've not figured out a way to get it working yet. It's possible I *can't* get it to work as described...


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Because of this, Brutes are relegated to "cutting bait". MM's on the other hand have one challenge to being in the assault team, they are dependent on their minions for both damage resistance and damage output, and pets don't move as well as players do. We are going to do some testing with MM's and I think we will work out some strategies that get around the problem of getting from one battle to the next. If we can get that worked out I would see the assault team adding an MM and possibly even 2 depending on the secondaries.

In addition, its important to remember that the turret team will be fighting players almost as much as the assault team will. In fact, in military terms the turret team is actually the line unit, who is taking and holding ground, with what we have termed the assault team supporting them.



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I thought villains were supposed to be more offensive fighters, while heroes are on the defensive? Where is this damage/accuracy thing supposed to be? How is it that the healers/buffers/debuffers/ranged attacks are the ones that are the only capable fighters in RV? The only good set to play is the most defensive?

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What you're pointing out is actually a key piece of how the game operates, but not neccesarily how I think it should operate. In CoX buffs >>>>>>debuffs and because of this the only way to counter a buffed team is not by debuffing them, though some of that is useful, its more by buffing up your team mates so that they are on equal footing. I don't really like that mechanic, but that's how it works right now.

I personally think that the devs have made big strides in terms of villain AT balance, but certainly there are still problems. Cors are going to form the backbone of any villain PvP team simply because buffing is so important and MM's buff's are less effective for the most part. MM's also have problems with very fluid battlefields since they depend on their pets. However, if you can get past the movement issue or in smaller venues, MM's are very good. Doms quite simply kick [censored] now. They need the support of a team for mez protection and healing, though a */Energy Dom with Power Boost and Aid Self does pretty well in that dept. The Domination change and their ability to drop toggles with their melee attacks (64% to drop one is the highest percentage except for MM & Cor Trip Mine) makes PvP Doms very happy.

I may try and write some of this up in a more coherent format, but in short things look better for villain team PvP than they ever have. Brutes have the most legit complaint right now IMO.

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So... get vent, roll a corruptor, team with other corrupters and a dominator = win RV. Gotcha.

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That's pretty much what I'm getting out of this as well. If you aren't a corrupter or dominator don't bother showing up to RV.

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This is just the first thing thats worked. I think there is a high likelyhood that MM's can and will contribute in this zone, we just don't have enough high level MM's that aren't playing other critical characters right now. Brutes can actually do well focusing on destroying turrets, but because the Fury bug in PvP they don't do well against other players in "straight up" combat. Stalkers are the ones that lose some ground. They don't have the team synergy and solo they are more challenging here than in the other zones. This isn't to say they don't have uses or can't be good, but they are countered pretty thoroughly by current common hero builds.

In short the best way I see a VG taking the zone is by having a two teams. One a roving assault team to engage hero groups and the second (or more) is a turret capture team. The assault team will have mostly Cor's and Dom's while the turret works well with more MM's and Brutes with a Thermal Cor or two.

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I'm with Jdos on this one LOTD.
You had an organized pvp sg vs disorganized heroes.
That doesn't seem like an equal comparison.


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There is certainly some truth to this, over the last few days we have run into members and small groups of some of the PvP SG's/VG's but we haven't seen a full team AFAIK, we certainly ran into full teams of heroes but its hard to recognize everyone since many haven't set up SG's on test. I want to see what happens when the competition level increases, but I think we can safely say that whatever differences exit between the factions balance wise can be overcome. I do think there are some areas where Heroes > Villains, but they can be overcome with tactics. When both sides have equally good tactics then even small differences have an impact.

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I really hope the devs look at ppp's and high end pvp balance.


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The PPP's, on paper, are worse than the hero APP's and that will have an impact. I hope we see some level boosts on test so we can look at every thing on equal ground and see how the various PPP's work in action.


The current state looks like more of a tuning situation than large changes. The buffs to MM's and Dom's has made a big difference in overall factional balance. BTW, our team make up was 7 Cor's and 1 Dom. Last night we ran 6 Cors and 2 Dom's with the same level of effectiveness. We'd like to test the MM's more, but the people with high level MM's play Cor roles we need

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My understanding was that dominators already had mini-containment. Do they not have X2 base damage on held foes in pvp and pve?


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Dominators do not get Containment.

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i was in beta for a while and hated it and from all the recent stuff ive seen about it you can cahnge from one complete build to another and its target group of gamers is the people who have very little time to play which means everythign must be dumbed down

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I'll just be polite and say that you are way off base. The tactical depth and competitiveness of GW PvP exceeds what is in CoX by several orders of magnitude. The only thing that CoX has going for it over GW is the speed and freedom of movement.

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you're trying to make the game like guild wars, dumbed down basic fighting.

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[censored]? Did you mean to say what you posted? If so, you have no clue about high level PvP in GW.

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Actually, the only thing I really wanted to change in this mess was the ability for Repel Fields to effectively trap a player against geometry in Base Raids.

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Then why not add repel resistance to break frees? Seems like a more elegant solution.

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There already is, it takes 4 small purples to walk through TK. I believe that Hurricane was the same, but probably is much less now. I wish they would have added a fast surpression timer for Repel rather than modifying the powers.

/em wonders when the devs are gonna realize that Force Bubble has the same "problem" that convinced em to zap Hurricane.

No, you can attack all day long, but if you send all of your minions off you will lose their ability to protect you. I think it will start being much more common for people to control their minions in a more granular fashion so you always keep a few around you for Bodyguard to work.

I have a better one, time in the base or hospital doesn't count toward the badge.

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In terms of kills to death ratio, Blasters are slightly behind scrappers with EM, but competing with Defenders and Dominators for lowest value Note, that these are solo values! Things are very different in team play.

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To be honest, I wish you would release what the team numbers look like. 1v1 means very little in a rock, paper, scissors balanced game. Another factor that will result in /EM looking much better than the other Blaster secondaries is the fact most serious PvP players will be running it over all of the other secondaries. This doesn't mean that everyone running an /EM is an experienced PvP player, but there is a higher percentage of experienced PvP'ers using it than any of the other secondaries. The delta between /Em and /Elec is not that great, but because most PvP'ers are min/maxers /Em wins by a landslide despite not being that much better.

CB, the best PvP'ers in the game play on the test events. Even given the fact that not all high skill level PvP'ers are there, it is by far the highest concentration of skilled PvP players in the game. We don't even have to look at scores, we can look at team composition of the best teams an it becomes readily apparant that Blasters (specifically Blappers) _are_ the melee AT of choice. Scrappers are a distant second, ironically the "best" Scrapper set, Spines/Regen, depends on in part on its ranged attack to be effective. It is true that the recent change to Whirlwind and the coming change to toggle dropping may shift the balance, but currently Blappers are king of melee. If you disagree or think that the events on test don't represent the highest skill level PvP in the game, you really ought to check out the events being scheduled by Labrynth:
Test League

and Terpman:
1v1 Tourney

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Thorizdin_LotD:

Who's to say that _Castle_ hasn't "datamine[d] kills in the [A]rena" "to see what is and isn't true"?


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I would have expected something to be mentioned, but I will PM him. I try not to bother the staff, they are busy enough without having to deal with lots of player communication.

The other reason is that datamining has value, but doesn't represent what is possible. Looking at what happens to the average player does have value, since they need to enjoy the game, but you also have to look at what the above average player can do. In high skill level team PvP, Scrappers are not the AT that scores the most kills, blasters are by far. This may not be possible for the "average" or new team but its of critical importance when it comes to determining how to balance the game. The techniques that only the dedicated PvP SG's/VG's are using will filter down over time.

Its my belief, which I practice with my own business, if you aren't passionate about what you do you should probably look for something else to do. IMO, its like someone trying to design a cell phone when the designer doesn't regularly use one or a surf board manufacturer building boards with having any good surfers on staff. I don't know, maybe its just me but it would be pretty dumb for a company to make tennis rackets, without understanding how they actually work in high level play.

What's sad is that _Castle_ can be so incredibly wrong when he is the only dev that regularly posts on balance issues. Perhaps they should datamine kills in the arena, especiall the arena on Test to see what is and isn't true.

The problem with this is that the practical difference is very small. A scrapper effectively gains less from the same buffs than a Blaster does. Certainly the Scrapper is better protected, but he is still much less effective at killing than the Blaster is. As long as the Blaster can be buffed enough to stay survivable, who won't pick him? It doesn't matter if a Scrapper has 70% resists if 40% resists will give the healers enough time to keep a Blaster alive.

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Scrappers out damage blasters in melee. Blasters AT mod is 1, while scrappers is 1.125. Scrappers also get unresistable criticals of 2x damage 5% of the time, which can be compared to Blasters 33% unresistable damage.


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The mods don't matter. Blappers can do more damage in quick spikes than a Scrapper can hope to attain reliably. Certainly when Headsplitter crits its more, but that is unreliable. Blappers can do that level of damage in shots all the time, everytime. I'm not championing more changes, I want to see what happens with the WW and toggle dropping being toned down before more adjustments are made that hurt blapping.

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Energy Melee's Stuns coupled with toggle dropping pretty much make the damage a secondary effect. While the blasters (who have little or no mez protections) are used to functioning with break frees active, most scrappers are not, as they rely on their inherent protection powers to keep them safe.


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Since PvP is balanced around teams I don't understand this statement. A Blapper only needs to pop Break Frees proactively if he doesn't have decent buffing. The problem is that a Blapper buffed up has only slightly lower safety and greater killing power than a Scrapper with the same buffs.

I would advise that we wait on the toggle dropping change before making balance decisions based on 1v1 matches between Scrappers and Blasters. The disorients from EM may still be a bit much, but making small balance changes at a time is better than making several or making larger ones.

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A blaster's melee damage was lower than a scrappers, for the most part? So Blapper's dont out scrap, scrappers.

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The reason Blappers are the best melee class isn't because of their damage. Its because of how effectively team buffs can make a Blapper as tough (or nearly) as a Scrapper. To fix this, some caps on buffing need to be put in and/or the debuffing mechanic needs to be changed.

The answers you seek are Here