Vermain

Remember the good old days of RoF + Caltrops?

Ah, to return to innocence.

I can live with it on Radiant Strike and all of the other bits, but it needs to go on Solar Flare. It is completely counterproductive to every kind of playstyle, since it's highly inaccurate for herding (or even just pushing dudes towards your team) and scatters like mad (making it harder for you, a person with a lot of decent melee attacks, to melee). There's pretty literally no effective tactical advantage it provides.

I can sometimes use Radiant Strike to knock dudes towards my team, which is nice, but knocking an entire group around does nothing except frustrate the people on my team. Let me put it another way: I want to be able to use my powers without causing excessive frustration to the other people on my team. I shouldn't have to sit there and carefully weigh the advantages and disadvantages of using Solar Flare in a big group of people, because this is a superhero MMO about beating up people, and doing a cost/benefit analysis every time I want to do some PBAoE damage is goofy.

He means they're the only melee AT that can heal others.

...which still isn't quite true, since you can always just grab Aid Other, but the new 80-yard range on Glowing Touch makes it vastly superior.

Why not simply turn it into an inherent power and replace its spot on the roster with a useful team buff?

Group Energy Flight is a fundamentally bad power in the day and age of i20. Sure, back when the game was first released, it was kind of a fun power, and it had some limited benefit in being able to move teammates around a map much more easily, but it is now possible for everyone in the game, regardless of AT or side, to either buy a Raptor Pack or simply make one from a recipe (they were somewhere in the range of 50 Inf per recipe, last I checked). There's no point for it, aside from roleplaying.

Giving it some kind of useful team buff would help to make Peacebringers more desirable to teams. Right now, you're much better off bringing along a Widow or Soldier, as they give more dependable team buffs and can pump out extremely good damage. Pulsar, Glowing Touch, and some kind of team buff would help to form the core of Human Form's utility.

Just listing some potential possibilities, how about:

-World of Pain-esque buff with an increase to resistances and damage for a short duration.

-Team buff that provides a bonus to maximum health for a short duration.

-Team buff that provides resistances to various debuffs (Defense, Regen, ToHit, etc.).

-Copy of the Corruptor version of Soothing Aura.

It's also a terribly flawed assumption, anyways, since access to perfect information is impossible. In a scenario like this, it's not merely the perfect information of how the system works, but what effects your particular actions will have on the social system you're involved in. If you were a Controller and just spammed the heck out of your AoE immobilize and did nothing else to maximize rewards, this would potentially have a detrimental effect to your standing in the social setting of the server... or it might potentially not, depending on how perceptive the people you play with are. Without perfect information for how others might react, a rational actor might then make a decision based around marginal benefit: is the marginal benefit (more rewards) greater than the marginal cost (people on my server dislike me)?

I can only speak for myself, but, in the absence of perfect information, I'd much rather just do my job and then provide suggestions for how the system could be altered to accomodate me doing my job, rather than being overtly greedy. Even if I did have perfect information and was certain I would not get caught, that doesn't necessarily mean I wouldn't do what I considered to be the "right thing," in any case, since I, perhaps, enjoy doing my job of controlling things and watching them beat eachother up than hitting the AoE immobilize button and watching reruns of The Sopranos.

Basically what I'm saying here is that the rational actor model is horse dollop and the argument of "but that's what everyone else would do!" is equally silly.

My problem with PBs as they stand is that almost everything they can do can be replicated by another class fairly easily, and the PB doesn't bring anything along that compensates for this. I simply don't think an average heal (that can be easily outclassed by Aid Other in most circumstances) and a possibly-Mag 3 AoE Stun, combined with above-average survivability, is really worth the severe damage deficit they suffer, and their heavy reliance on outside buffing, Clarion, endless trays of Break Frees or Controllers/Dominators to not get held in most fights.

See, this is the really big, bad problem with a Peacebringer as it now stands: their whole "highly versatile" shtick has been completely thrown out the window with the introduction of classes like the Brute and IOs. Even without IOs, your average Super Strength/Willpower Brute will be able to survive just as well as a PB and deal considerably more damage in the process of doing so. The big thing is that they don't need to switch into a giant glowy crab form to do tanking if they need to, but they continue to deal really goofy damage even while tanking, whereas crab will do Defender-level DPS and have far fewer aggro-management tools than a Brute does.

Warshades still have a decent shtick with their ghost pets + tank-mage abilities when facing large groups. Peacebringers ain't got one. They've got Tanker-level DPS without the perks of actually being a Tanker (namely, mez resist and a taunt aura).

What they really need:

*Higher damage in Nova Form, since they don't have Mire like Warshades do to compensate for their innately low damage. Other potential options: give the Nova blasts useful secondary effects, such as some kind of AoE heal for allies on Detonation, as an example.

*Adjustment to damage/recharge times on some of the Human abilities. EvilGeko posted some good suggestions on the Peacebringer forums for this. Ideally, Nova should be the high damage/low survivability form, Human should be the middle-of-the-road utility/damage/survivability guy, and Dwarf should be the high survivability/low damage form.

*Make Pulsar a guaranteed Mag 3 stun, or up the chance for a Mag 3 to 75%/85% instead. It's a theoretically great ability, but it's way too random for something that's supposed to hold an entire group of weak things down. Right now, it's slightly better than Oppressive Gloom, and that's not saying much.

*Increase the range on Glowing Touch to 60 and up the healing to 20%-25% base.

*Make Dwarf Form have an automatic Taunt aura. Remove the Accuracy check on Antagonize.

*Move the KB down to .67 on Solar Flare. If people really want to knock things back, they can slot it with KB enhancements, or grab Luminous Detonation. I really cannot stress enough how detrimental this currently is to the gameplay of a Peacebringer in Human Form. It's a significant form of self and team mitigation, combined with one of your only good sources of AoE damage as a Human, but you simply cannot use it half of the time because it's incredibly disruptive to a team, since it scatters enemies far and wide (preventing effective AoEing and forcing melee targets to close to their targets again).

Basically, just higher damage and better utility on what they already have. I don't want them to have Brute-level damage, because that would be rather superfluous. What they need to have is competitive damage for the amount of utility they have. This is a difficult metric to hit, understandably, but, as it stands, they simply do not produce enough damage for the minor amount of utility they bring to a party. Your average melee Fortunata will pretty handily outdamage your average Peacebringer, but they also bring 31% Defense to the whole team (with the potential for Vengeance straight after), up to 30% increased damage, +ToHit increases, and very solid single-target controls. I'm not proposing Peacebringers need all of that to bring them up to the same level, because they have the ability to take on any form the group needs, but they need to actually be able to do that role at just mildly under the same level of efficiency as one of the "pure" classes, especially considering that they can only take on one of these roles at a time.

Since Dominators were in the game. It's one of the big reasons to get permadom.

That's because I didn't slot in two LotGs. The build I posted will hit 152.5% with them in. Softcapping is superfluous once you get perma-Mind Link (since that + double Maneuvers will easily throw you over the softcap).