macskull

This sounds suspiciously like a "bring back I12 PvP" post.

A disruption-based team (usually centered around an MM or two for all the extra targets they present), especially with a few Stormies, can work on smaller maps but it's still relying on the Emps for healing and Blasters or Stalkers (or both) for damage. On larger maps, the jump-style team (Emps, Blasters, Rad) will win against a disruption-based team because of the mez changes particularly (a case could be made for bringing Brutes to counter their Blasters, but then when the other team brings Brutes you're essentially turning an 8v8 into a 7v7 or 6v6 because they'll spend a lot of the match taunted onto each other).

You can't evade anymore, that's the thing. Travel suppression means you get slowed when you're attacked. Mez changes mean you're held for 2-4 (and god help you if you get tagged with a stun) seconds without being able to do anything, during which time you could - and likely will - be killed.

Prior to I13, a person who was aware of their surroundings could get themselves out of a bad situation by breaking line of sight or by getting out of range, and then deciding the best route to get back to their support before the other team could get to them. Even today in travel suppression-off team arena matches, you'll find some Blasters are targeted more often than others simply because they're not good at evasion. The point is to make yourself a difficult target, and the travel suppression/mez changes remove much of that ability. If you're outnumbered on a squishy and phase/Hibernate isn't up, you probably will die unless you get lucky.

One of the biggest complaints about the changes was that it took several strategies which required critical thinking skills or teaming to counter and simply made them un-counterable (mezzes are the best example of this - anyone who thinks the I13 mez system is fair has probably not been tagged with a random hold and been killed before it wears off).

Uhhh, no they didn't.

I'll try and pick out the questions in your post and answer them. I'm not trying to be rude here, so I apologize in advance if I come across as such. Much of what I'm going to list here isn't nearly as applicable as it was before I13, but it's still there for you to consider.

You've got to find your target first. Tab targeting seems like easymode until you've suddenly got a dozen players plus a bunch of NPCs in your field of view (talking about a zone scenario here; in a team arena match you'd have potentially 8+ targets as well). When the goal is to get all of your damage dealers locked onto the same target as quickly as possible (you're not going to get kills if you can't lock and spike quickly), you need to get good at picking out where your target is and rotating your camera to minimize the number of targets in your field of view, so you have fewer targets to tab through. There's a huge difference between a Blaster who is able to pull off kills on random targets in zones because of heal decay and travel suppression, and a Blaster who is able to consistently lock onto targets quickly in an arena match.

Staying out of melee range of a melee character wasn't particularly hard before I13, and it's not that hard now (travel suppression, mez changes, and -range on taunt make it a bit harder, but the point stands). Let's say you're presented with a large number of targets. Who do you target first? Do you target the damage dealers? Do you target the Emps? The disruption? How much HP does the target have? Is the target going to be good at evasion, or will you be able to get away with a sloppy spike and still get the kill? What sort of resistance am I expecting, and what inspirations should I bring (inspiration management isn't nearly as important as it used to be as mez and DR changes made most inspirations other than reds, greens, and sometimes blues worthless)? Now, let's say you're the target. Do you try to break line of sight and hope your Emp is paying attention and can get there, or do you high-tail it to that Emp? Can you potentially stay in the fight and try to get a kill because the incoming damage isn't a lot, or would it be better to be defensive and phase/evade? If you gave an experienced PvPer and a random player the exact same build and said "fight each other," the PvPer would win almost every time. If there were no skill involved, as you say, this result would be far more random. The PvPer should win almost every time, because he's the one who's familiar with the system, how his character is built, what powers to use when, what inspirations to use when, and what his own limits are.

You do mention that you don't play Stalkers much, which seems to be the common thread between all the people that either complain about them in zones or call them "easymode" characters (not saying you are, just making a point). Getting an AS off is much easier now than it was prior to I13 thanks to the mez and travel suppression changes, but if there's no one around that can mez a target you need to get pretty good at trailing a target until they stand still for even a tiny amount of time, or predict where they'll land when they get locked into an animation mid-jump. Try playing a Stalker and consistently being able to AS a target that is aware you're there and is taking steps to counter you (i.e. moving) - it's not that easy even now.

Simply put, if a player was good at inspiration management, evasion, and target prioritization, they could potentially survive against larger numbers of players who weren't good at those things. For example, you hear all this crap about Emp/Blaster duos ruling zones pre-I13. However, once a few players showed up that knew what they were doing (i.e. running the Emp out of Breakfrees or just sticking on them long enough to get the kill, and then making short work of the unbuffed Blaster), those players would be in for a rough time. These days, if the other side has more people, regardless of whether they're good, and you don't have phase/Hibernate up, you'll probably die because you'll get slowed and won't be able to heal. Essentially they changed the focus from skill to build and numbers.

The Panacea proc is ridiculously overrated - I have no idea why people pay as much as they do for a proc that is worse than the Performance Shifter proc.

75%? More? Less?

I like the idea of AS scaling based on your HP as it means low-HP builds wouldn't get worked over quite so quickly (by AS at least, but that that point it might be more efficient to just throw 2 or 3 sharks) but it would take away some of the advantages that having higher HP has.

I think 80% would turn into something around 50% (my Fire's 90% fire resist gets DR'd to about 55%).

You're comparing rock/paper/scissors in an FPS to rock/paper/scissors in an MMO (and yes, the second exists). It's a bit more confusing when you realize all these things are being added into the equation, but you could usually say "these builds are good counters to this build," which might mean you've found the scissors to someone's paper. At the same time, there are other builds that might counter that build, which means you've found the rock to that scissors. It's not as cut-and-dry as that, obviously, but that's the idea.

The problem with the "this counters this, that counters that" line of thinking is that teaming can (well, could) close many of the holes. Of course that led to relatively rigid team makeups, but that was almost always only the case in higher-end arena matches such as leagues on test or the various live servers. A hero jump team might have two Emps, a Rad, a Kin, a Sonic, and 3 Blasters, while a villain jump team might have two Therms, a Sonic, a Kin, a Stalker or two, an MM or two, and maybe a Dom for the extra damage and mezzes. The team compositions I just listed were what was preferred as a "standard" team, but there were many counters to such a lineup (Storm teams for example). These days the average arena team is 2 Emps, a Rad, 4-5 Blasters, and maybe one spot for disruption (Brute/TA/whatever). There's really no such thing as an "ideal team makeup" outside of arena, because most of what you find in zones will be Scrappers, Tankers, and Stalkers because the post-I13 ruleset heavily favors melee characters in terms of survivability.

The whole point of PvP was to go up against an intelligent opponent, which by its very nature meant you would not know what to expect (they'd be trying to defeat you, yes, but how?). One of the complaints about PvP pre-I13 was that there were certain builds that just weren't good. This was true, yes, but again teaming helped make up some lost ground there. These days the problem's only been exacerbated (see my previous paragraph). Part of losing meant learning from your mistakes (why did I die? what did they do right and what did I do wrong?). It wasn't always "my build is bad" because you could make just about anything work in zones. The issue again was the unpredictability (not knowing what you'd be facing, so not being able to grab the right inspirations or whatever). I'm not sure that's a problem, though.

No, but you could switch to your Scrapper, or if you didn't have one, invite a friend that did.

Lopsided, unfair, and unbalanced PvP (what we have now) isn't unpredictable. In zones, combat can be summarized as "I'm attacked so I'm slowed, I'm taking damage and can't heal it back, and now I'm dead." In team arena matches, combat can be summarized as "I think I'm the spike tar-- wait, I'm dead." In short, with rare exceptions, the side that has more damage, or more people, is going to win almost every time because the I13 ruleset heavily favors damage and numbers. It used to be that a one or two-person group could hold their own against a larger number provided they were good at the game and their opponents weren't, but that simply isn't the case anymore.

1. Two Breakfrees to get through the repel effect of TK, or a powerset that gave repel protection (Willpower, MoG in Regen, teaming with a Kin). In a 1v1 situation against a Controller or Dominator, you had to play it smart, and play aggressively, to rack up your kill count before the other player ran you out of Breakfrees.

2. You can still one-shot things in PvP under certain circumstances. The change so that a single packet of damage couldn't kill you was nice, yes, but avoiding an AS was usually as simple as moving and not getting locked into an attack chain in one spot, because that would mean a Stalker would be on you pretty damn fast (when I'm ASing, I pick targets that are locked into an animation, and AS them when they hit the ground because I know where they're going to land).

3. TK is arguably more broken than it was before, as you can't do anything about the hold anymore. It breaks when you take damage, but if the goal of the person using TK is to take you out of the fight (TK you so they can kill your teammate without you being able to heal them, for instance) there's nothing you can do except wait for the power to toggle off. Prior to I13, at least, you could do something about TK. Now, like many other things (mezzes, travel suppression, heal decay), you can't.

The fact that you don't even PvP makes this all the more laughable.

(see also: lol, you're terrible)

2 AS's will not kill a Tank unless they didn't build for HP or the Stalkers are running a ******** of reds or other +dam. You might get 1400-1500 off the crit portions of the AS (assuming you're running Build Up at the time, which will happen about 10 seconds out of every 30) but that still leaves probably another 1400 (and that's on a Fire or Elec without any Dull Pain-like power on top of their +HP bonuses/accolades) to make up through the rest of the damage and procs. Sure, you'll have them hurting, but two AS's won't drop a well-built Tanker.

Tanks are good in zones because Fossilize is ridiculously good (especially when paired with Rage) and they've got a huge amount of HP.

Funny thing is, those sorts of people don't even PvP.

But, but! This is a good change because it is going to stop the exploiting!

I think this was their design goal.

Statesman had said the intention was to always have PvP, but not at launch (and that's what happened, though one could argue we don't really have PvP anymore).

Or they're just the average joe player who wants some fast XP (ever notice how busy PI and Grandville were before I14?). I hardly think people farming the MA are a "small but visible" subgroup of players. Their "only punish the exploiters" plan kind of backfired on the last time they tried that - at least that's what you'd see if all the threads about "hey my level pacted character got deleted, wtf!?" threads hadn't been deleted as fast as they were being created. When all you see in broadcast in some zones is "looking for AE farm" or "AE farm forming PST," you really have to wonder what the people who think that's a "minority" are smoking.

Perhaps it is to the author themselves, but if they want anyone other than themselves or friends/SG mates to play it more than once or twice, they'll make sure it's got comparable rewards to other content, as it's fairly obvious that the majority of the playerbase prefers rewards over story.

Epsilon came up with something around 1 in 70, I came up with something around 1 in 60. Bear in mind though that those are off rep-valid kills, and not every kill you get in zone or arena will be a rep-valid kill (especially if there are only a few people in zone).

Funny thing: went from zero to 115 rep on a team of two with my Stalker in Virtue RV last night (yay, SOs + stealth IO + no Stamina) and got a Glad Strike piece off a kill. Switched to Freedom RV (also on a Stalker) and got a purple off a random mob kill. I seem to be breaking the RNG lately