Torrynt

No offense Enigma, but why shouldn't they try to convince you to buy the expansion? They hired a lot of extra people, they are developing new systems, and trying to inject more legs into an older engine.

They should try to maximize sales on the expansion.

Keep it in the paid expansion, make some money to keep those programmers so we can continue to get cool new stuff and perhaps even a CoH2.

Of course they are tolerated in business. Every day people screw up all the time. When it's a mistake that's fairly small, the person's supervisor will pull them aside and ask them to try and not repeat it. You do your best to make restitution to the customer if you can and you move on.

If you have never coded before, it's not as easy as just saying: "well just look for it". Small changes in one part of a program often times have far reaching impacts in areas you never anticipated... and that's on smaller scale programs. When dealing with the amount of data and changes that a typical MMO goes through, even the best change management won't catch every interaction.

That doesn't excuse the mistake, you should TRY to catch them all... however, that doesn't mean that as a game paying customer you should expect them to get everything.

What I look for is a company that does it's best to roll things out smoothly. Do they have a test server, check. Do they seem to take account for player input, check. Do they seem to have ideas that I enjoy, check. As I feel those things are met, I am certainly willing to excuse the same level of mistake as you get from a cashier, a sales man, a mechanic, or whatever.

Well I don't particularly hate kin/rad, I just realize that it's not very good at what it is supposed to do, when I played it, I did not feel all that team oriented nor was it a good soloer.

What I expected from a Kin/Rad was a character that would add a ton of damage to a team, both from AOEs, and from FS. I expected to do about the same damage as an unenhanced blaster with a focus on AOEs.

If you want the blow by blow, check the guide I wrote in my sig.

For a shorter recap:
(1) You need to be in melee with Kin and some of your Rad AOEs
(2) Even at capped damage, it takes 4-5 AOEs to drop a spawn (Not counting the nuke)
(3) Since all of your damage is AOE, you end up with a reasonable amount of aggro
(4) You have 0 credible methods of mitigation and only one reactive method of surviving (the heal)
(5) Even IOed to the gills, you still have a hard time getting credible defenses, the BoTZ nerf hits you even harder than most toons.
(6) Kin doesn't stack all that well since one Kin hits the damage cap pretty easily. So if there's a more survivable Kin on the team, you are a definite third wheel.

If you decide to not live in melee range, then your best AOE is worthless, you don't get capped damage, and your contribution drops significantly to that of a buff bot for SB.

If you do live in melee range, you get a short burst of damage that isn't enough to drop a mob (even the minions) and likely gets you more aggro than you can handle.

If there is no other kin on the team, then you add to team damage and can be fairly effective... not quite as much as another pairing, which can survive longer and has other secondary effects that are more desirable than -DEF. When I played mine, fire/kins were all the rage and this was not all that common.

That's my problem with kin/rad. Defender damage is really poor which hurts a toon that is really geared to only put out AOE damage. You can play a Rad blaster and get about the same level of survivability, do more damage, and if your luck was anything like mine, still have a Fire/Kin throwing the same FS off that you would have.

Again with all of that being said, it's a fun character to play. You run around a lot, have lots of (small) numbers to toss about, frantically try to survive every encounter, and generally have tons to do. However, when someone asks about effectiveness... well for me, it just isn't there.

Edit: Kin/Rad has never been the rage, meant to say Fire/Kin, marked edit in red

Believe me, I am waiting in line for GR to play that combination as I don't really enjoy Red side. Kin/Rad is fun, it's just not all that good. I expect Rad/Kin to have slightly better or equal to blaster output with some potential team love thrown in.

I like hearing about the s/l capped def. That would help a lot.

Again, just to reiterate, shields works fine enough on SOs. It's not awesomesauce, but then what build is without IOs? You should never expect a SO build to perform like an IO build, scrapper or otherwise. What you need to know is that it suffices for the content.

Shields does that just fine and is as friendly to SOs as any other set that I have used. Mine is sitting at just under 40 and has a total of one IO. Works fine and haven't had the urge to spend a ton leveling.

But but I even spelled incompetent wrong! It was perfect I tell you.

Also Stone Cages can take procs to make it a very very nice power indeed. I put in two damage and Gav Anchor and you have a nice damaging AOE power that helps to stack mag.

I'm with Local here, I wouldn't omit any of the AOE immobs, they are far too useful for too many things.

That is already in the game. Tankers out damage most/many defenders and have significantly higher survivability. They also have arguably an equally important role on a team.

As long as they don't tread on blaster/scrapper damage, how can they be stronger than they should be? At the moment, with the exception of stacking defenders they are not close. However, everyone (including other ATs) benefits equally from stacking defenders.

The fallacy in arguing that you can't buff defender damage since multiple defenders can boost performance is that unless you are going to neuter the buff mechanic, you already allow force multiplication. It doesn't matter that defenders in groups get better, since everyone gets better than defenders in groups.

As long as they trade some damage in each setting to offset their utility and survivability, then you have balance. Which is why I pointed out that 8 EMPs is likely eclipse by 4 EMPs and 4 DPSers.

If by buffing defender damage, those defenders outperform the members of their team, then yes, they are overpowered. However, even at .8 or .75 that is not too likely.

Tanks don't directly increase team damage, but they do allow teams to use their damage powers with relative impunity. Blasters can cut loose, scrappers can wade in (well they do that anyway usually) and so on. It's not to the same effect as defenders buff/de-buff but it is there.

Well if it isn't game breaking, and it doesn't obsolete other ATs that is what I would call balance. Giving defenders more damage (regardless of what bump and multiplier you are talking about) doesn't break the game and doesn't obsolete other ATs (except perhaps corruptors which could use a bump too). At the moment, there are plenty of times that players feel that defenders under perform. To me it seems like a pretty easy solution.

Sure but several primaries also suffer when team size is < 4. There's not enough team to make up for their lack of offensive contribution.

Noted and granted.

Well that will be an issue with GR certainly. I will be interested in seeing how many defenders vs. corrupters are rolled.

I have and had acknowledged that the defenders are far more survivable. That's not in real question. The contention was that giving defenders more damage makes blasters obsolete, which is ludicrous. It was not true when tankers got a buff and wouldn't be true here.

<snipped why defender team is better than blaster team>

I'd argue +3's for most toons, but that's nit picking and opinion. However, this was my point all along. Adding damage to defenders doesn't matter since you can pick the least survivable team and they will likely roll right along through most of the content. Add in any sort of mitigation tanker/defender/controller, and they will crush any content. The content itself is easy enough that differences in power are mitigated since anyone can complete it easily enough.

Now that we're finally back on topic, I would rather see a situation where the defender plays the same in all cases. Look how up in arms people got over the PvP changes. Many of the comments were that their characters did not play the same PvP to PvE. If you have some kind of tiered solution, you run into the same situation.

At least that's what I think would happen. I suppose a sliding damage scale could work. It'd be kudgy, but might address some concerns. So .8 solo, .75 with 1 team mate, .70 with 2-3, and .65 with 4+. That might work, I'd rather a flat damage increase... but at least this would address most of the major concerns.

All that would be left to address is what a defender is supposed to do on a team that is already destroying the content without their buffs? Like when you go to use RI or EF and the mob is dead long before the animation finishes. On a team like that, your .65 is glaringly bad and your role should be supporting offense. They don't need your buffs as the mobs are dying so fast anyway.

P.S. My Kin/Rad did not solo quickly... there was far too much faceplanting for soloing quickly.