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1. PvP is not built around 1v1 battles, so your blaster will have a good number of opportunities to defeat Melee types (mostly Scrappers and Brutes) with the right buffs/debuffs from your teammates.
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Yes, why do melee players forget that if they have the same buffs that they will stomp a blaster into squishy paste? I take those buffs with my Brute and stomp blasters whenever I go to PvP, what is stopping the rest of the melee players out there?
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2. YOU decided to make your blaster to go into melee. YOU had choices among your powers and decided, I suppose, to focus on picking more from your secondary powers than your primary powers, which are probably mostly made up of range attacks.
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Blaster primary attacks are not balanced the same way that melee primary attacks are. Most of the blaster primary sets do not have a ranged attack chain. That is ignoreing how easy it is to catch a blaster attacking from range.
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Now, there is this little nice tool call a respec, which I think we all are getting once i7 goes live.
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There is a nice little phrase "Talking out of your [censored]" that applies to your advice.
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He, he, he...I guess you're really hurting then. No worries, I won't take your comments too personal.
Cheers!
Are /fire and /ice defeating you in the same mannor?
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Maybe because, in a team context (you know, the way the devs want you to play) it was positively impossible to keep any toggles up.
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Hyperbole. It is also completely untrue. Unless, for some reason only known to the lord himself I have just never suffered like you have. I run 5-6 toggles on my Stone/EA brute and the most I have had dropped is three. I have had EM come up to me and knock off three toggles, and I wasn't mezzed. Does that contradict everything that you believe? Well, it is normal gameplay experience for me since I do PvP regularly. Maybe if more melee types got out there with a team and fought they would have similar experiences.
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Because of their by-design inherent toughness, I utterly fail to see how it is a problem of any sort that Tankers in particular should require multiple damage dealers or a damage dealer and a buffer/debuffer to defeat.
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Because you end up with a team of Tankers + various support casters if you go down that balance road. It is what ended up happening in PvE. The Tankers have the damage to kill anything. If it takes multiple people to defeat them, then why in the world would a team want to take less of them?
Here is the other flipside of the equation, since we are talking about team PvP we can ignore all 1v1 situations. So, taking a tank or brute and pairing them off against a blaster with both sides having the same support, is it an = fight. From what I have seen with toggle droppers the way they are NOW, it is if you are comparing comparable sets of Tanks, Brutes to Blasters. EM VS. EM for instance. Throughout various leveling stages this balance is thrown off by power acquisition. The only way to balance that would be for everyone to have all their powers whenever they go into a PvP zone, or in other words, the zones are not balanced.
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You can't tell me that it's reasonable that they have powers that simply never come into meaningful effect. In contrast Blasters do not have any such powers (barring EPP armor toggles, which they should also be able to use).
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Except that if you PvPed at all, you would know that the armors do come into effect since you are not only being attacked by blasters 24/7. Your entire fight is not against a blaster. There is this team out there, and your armor helps you against most of them. If nothing else, it helps you against the initial melee attack of a blaster or any of the blasters attacks from range.
So it comes down to the issue of melee not wanting to be weak against anything. I can back that up with statements from melee players concerning the new electric set. The set has built in weaknesses and the players are complaining up a storm about how it is retarded for any melee set to have a weakness.
HAY, has anyone tested the toggle dropping changes?
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So it comes down to the issue of melee not wanting to be weak against anything. I can back that up with statements from melee players concerning the new electric set. The set has built in weaknesses and the players are complaining up a storm about how it is retarded for any melee set to have a weakness.
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you realize that most of the complaints are due to the fact not that the set is weak but it forces them in SJ just like fiery aura. that is the complaint
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So it comes down to the issue of melee not wanting to be weak against anything. I can back that up with statements from melee players concerning the new electric set. The set has built in weaknesses and the players are complaining up a storm about how it is retarded for any melee set to have a weakness.
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you realize that most of the complaints are due to the fact not that the set is weak but it forces them in SJ just like fiery aura. that is the complaint
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Look past that and see the root of the problem. The melee player does not want to have the weakness of knockback or immobilization and thus feels compelled to eliminate the weakness. Otherwise, what is forceing them to get SJ? If they accepted the weakness then they could pick any travel pool they wanted, but melee players don't want any weakness. They can't handle it.
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Are /fire and /ice defeating you in the same mannor?
[/ QUOTE ]You know, I don't recall ever seeing a /Fire or an /Ice Blaster in PvP.
I know I haven't seen any of those secondary's used against me. Well, at least not the melee attacks.
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So it comes down to the issue of melee not wanting to be weak against anything. I can back that up with statements from melee players concerning the new electric set. The set has built in weaknesses and the players are complaining up a storm about how it is retarded for any melee set to have a weakness.
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you realize that most of the complaints are due to the fact not that the set is weak but it forces them in SJ just like fiery aura. that is the complaint
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Look past that and see the root of the problem. The melee player does not want to have the weakness of knockback or immobilization and thus feels compelled to eliminate the weakness. Otherwise, what is forceing them to get SJ? If they accepted the weakness then they could pick any travel pool they wanted, but melee players don't want any weakness. They can't handle it.
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i rarely play villians so i cant say what its like for brutes. but when playing my tank i am expected to take teh aggro. its hard to keep the aggro on myself when i am getting chain knockdowned. thats what happens more often than not to fire tanks that don't take leaping.
that is the problem, without taking leaping its hard to do the job that the devs have stated for us
and also are you not complaining vehemently about blaster weakness of no mez protection, and low hp? what is the difference in them whining and your whining?
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Maybe because, in a team context (you know, the way the devs want you to play) it was positively impossible to keep any toggles up.
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Hyperbole. It is also completely untrue. Unless, for some reason only known to the lord himself I have just never suffered like you have. I run 5-6 toggles on my Stone/EA brute and the most I have had dropped is three. I have had EM come up to me and knock off three toggles, and I wasn't mezzed. Does that contradict everything that you believe? Well, it is normal gameplay experience for me since I do PvP regularly. Maybe if more melee types got out there with a team and fought they would have similar experiences.
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You can call it hyperbole till the cows come home. If you have three people who hit you with 100% 1 toggle drop powers and then secondary chances for more toggles to drop, and you have 5 toggles, odds are exceptional that you lose your mez shield. Toggle dropping was so effective that it was the entire basis of the smart Blaster's strategy. Smack the armored guys with toggle droppers as much as you can, working for that mez shield - once that's down everything else goes with it. In one-one one play, to be honest, this wasn't that bad, although the odds of multiple toggle drops were high enough that it was frustrating to me when I tried it. But when engaging a team of heroes it was regularly the first thing that would happen to our Brute. I wasn't the guy running toggles here - I was supporting him. He would run in and, if there were two or three Blasters they would gang up on him and repeatedly toss out 50%+ of his toggles. It was frustrating for him.
Binary effectivenss is not enjoyable. And please don't tell me that without toggle drops Blasters are binary ineffective. I don't buy it because my Blaster did well and can't drop any toggles.
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Because you end up with a team of Tankers + various support casters if you go down that balance road. It is what ended up happening in PvE. The Tankers have the damage to kill anything. If it takes multiple people to defeat them, then why in the world would a team want to take less of them?
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You must be playing some other game than I am. What I see are posts all the time about how it makes more sense in PvE to grab a Defender and a Scrapper than to take a Tanker, since the Tanker needs a Defender anyway, and the Scrapper does more damage. Funny how only the perspectivew that support the current discussion come into play.
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Here is the other flipside of the equation, since we are talking about team PvP we can ignore all 1v1 situations. So, taking a tank or brute and pairing them off against a blaster with both sides having the same support, is it an = fight. From what I have seen with toggle droppers the way they are NOW, it is if you are comparing comparable sets of Tanks, Brutes to Blasters. EM VS. EM for instance. Throughout various leveling stages this balance is thrown off by power acquisition. The only way to balance that would be for everyone to have all their powers whenever they go into a PvP zone, or in other words, the zones are not balanced.
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I won't make any claims that PvP in this game is balanced. My oft-stated opinion is that this game should never, ever have had PvP based on its pure PvE origins. All its power designs, acquistions, improvements and implementations are forever stamped with the fact that they were conceived in a pure PvE setting. I don't care if PvP was on the whiteboard; what the implemented at release was a PvE game with PvE balance and PvE considerations. And now they've shoehorned PvP into it. The only way it will ever be "balanced" for PvP is by totally unmaking the PvE game that I happen to love dearly and remaking it to fit PvP concepts. Honestly, PvP is enjoyable to me as a casual side-bar, and I would rather that it remain a stinking morass of imbalance than have the changes I see needed to make it "balanced" come into PvE.
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You can't tell me that it's reasonable that they have powers that simply never come into meaningful effect. In contrast Blasters do not have any such powers (barring EPP armor toggles, which they should also be able to use).
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Except that if you PvPed at all, you would know that the armors do come into effect since you are not only being attacked by blasters 24/7. Your entire fight is not against a blaster. There is this team out there, and your armor helps you against most of them. If nothing else, it helps you against the initial melee attack of a blaster or any of the blasters attacks from range.
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So it comes down to the issue of melee not wanting to be weak against anything.
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Where's our invincibility to Defender unresistable debuffs? Our invincibility to stacked mezzes from control characters? Where's our invncibility to slows, recharge and regen debuffs? Where's our invincibility to toHit debuffs? To Fear? How invincible are we to that 30% unresistable damage?
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I can back that up with statements from melee players concerning the new electric set. The set has built in weaknesses and the players are complaining up a storm about how it is retarded for any melee set to have a weakness.
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You're twisting that argument, and if you can't see that then you and I really don't have anything more to discuss. That perspective you are twisting exists because in PvE we face hundreds, maybe thousands of opponents in a multi-hour play session, and those foes have incredibly ubiquitous knockback. I take either Hover or Acrobatics on my non-melee characters to protect myself from this annoying and frustrating aspect of the game. The devs take every weakness and instead of making it interesting by exploiting it occasionally they instead exploit it constantly. This is the complaint about Fire, Dark and Electric Armor - their lack of knockback protection is not some occasional weakness but rather a constant source of irritation and reduced efffectiveness.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
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But when engaging a team of heroes it was regularly the first thing that would happen to our Brute. I wasn't the guy running toggles here - I was supporting him. He would run in and, if there were two or three Blasters they would gang up on him and repeatedly toss out 50%+ of his toggles. It was frustrating for him.
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Tactics for the win. Again, it took multiple players to take down an armored player and those multiple players had support. That is exactly the balance that you say that you want. Multiple players being needed to take down a single armored foe. What? Did you want to him to be able to stand there and take it?
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If you have three people who hit you with 100% 1 toggle drop powers and then secondary chances for more toggles to drop, and you have 5 toggles, odds are exceptional that you lose your mez shield.
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Why yes, if three people are attacking me with toggle droppers then I do expect to be defeated. Why wouldn't I?
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Where's our invincibility to Defender unresistable debuffs? Our invincibility to stacked mezzes from control characters? Where's our invncibility to slows, recharge and regen debuffs? Where's our invincibility to toHit debuffs? To Fear? How invincible are we to that 30% unresistable damage?
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Here is a comment with some meat on it. I never said you had invincibilty. You have defense. You do not have defense against everything. In regards to specifics, count the number of debuffs that a defender has that are not resisted. You'll find that you are down to just to-hit debuffs and negative damage debuffs. Everything else either by mechanics or by their nature of being a controll and not a debuff is resisted. Negative resistance is resisted for instance and that is because of how negative resistance is applied.
There are melee classes that get defense against a variety of the debuffs that you mentioned. Ice Tanks get resistances to a majority of them includeing slows. Focused Accuracy will give you defense to to-hit debuffs on the Hero side and that is available to any melee hero.
The best comment though is stacked mezzes. Uhm, why didn't the mez work the first time? Right, because you have those nifty defenses that you said were negated upon entering combat.
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This is the complaint about Fire, Dark and Electric Armor - their lack of knockback protection is not some occasional weakness but rather a constant source of irritation and reduced efffectiveness.
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Yes, things that are irritating should never be used for balance. Man, my blasters and defenders sure get irritated by mez and that mez completely negates my ability to perform my job, but I have the ability to realize that it is a balanceing factor. Like I said, you don't want any weakness. Anything that irritates you must go away.
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You must be playing some other game than I am. What I see are posts all the time about how it makes more sense in PvE to grab a Defender and a Scrapper than to take a Tanker, since the Tanker needs a Defender anyway, and the Scrapper does more damage. Funny how only the perspectivew that support the current discussion come into play.
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Before the Global defense nerf, there was pretty much no reason to take anything other than a couple of defenders and grab a load of Tanks, although you didn't even really need any defenders. Melee was adjusted so that the rest of the team could support the Tank in the battle against the enemy NPCs. Now, the tank was pretty much the focus of the NPCs. Hence, he needed his team and his defenses to support him against basicaly an entire team.
This is not the same as PvP. The entire team is not trying to kill the tank. Ergo, the tank should not be balanced around trying to fight an entire team with team support. He should be balanced around fighting single opponents with team support just like everyone else. If you don't do that, then it becomes support + Melee VS. anything. You think that range is going to mean anything with all the negative travel powers in the game? I just took my TA defender out for a spin, No one is going to be at range for very long or airborne for that matter.
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So it comes down to the issue of melee not wanting to be weak against anything. I can back that up with statements from melee players concerning the new electric set. The set has built in weaknesses and the players are complaining up a storm about how it is retarded for any melee set to have a weakness.
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you realize that most of the complaints are due to the fact not that the set is weak but it forces them in SJ just like fiery aura. that is the complaint
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Look past that and see the root of the problem. The melee player does not want to have the weakness of knockback or immobilization and thus feels compelled to eliminate the weakness. Otherwise, what is forceing them to get SJ? If they accepted the weakness then they could pick any travel pool they wanted, but melee players don't want any weakness. They can't handle it.
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The isue of being forces into certain powers for some melee ATs, if the nature of status effects in the game. It's too binary. It's either too much or nothing. The same for Knockback. I think the current Knockback mechanics are borked. Certain AT power sets have too damned much KB, and most other sets don't have any at all. And this is totally genre breaking as well. Super Heroes who are primarily melee do get knocked backed occasionaly. A hugely power attack, they got caught off guard, the bad guy tosses oil under the hero, etc. Having it happen occasionally (some melee ATs more often than other melee ATs) is definately in genre. It can make fights fun, exciting, and unpredictable. As it stands now, it being KB'ed at a sneeze for some and getting a specific pool for some defense, or its not in a million years for the rest.
And so there is no mistake, I am in favor of ALL melee ATs be vulnerable to Knockback. Not all of the time, but occasionally. Some less likely to be knockback than others. Tankers > Brutes > Scrappers,Stalkers is how I would see it. And maybe some variable win the AT power sets as well. For Tankers possibly - Stone, Ice > Invuln > Fire.
And to at least to keep on topic. My stand on TD at the old levels is that is was a kludge, a bad ideal to try to balance overpowered defenses. The old levels TD leves after the Global Defense Reducation moved into the realm of totally broken game mechanic. It was totally outside of the games genre. (And for me and others, the games genre is just as important as anything else). TD dropping at much reduced levels is acceptable. It's very much in genre, The underdog always have a chance of gettting a bit of an edge or winning.
Toggle Dropping turned me off of PvP fights in general. But not for the reasons you think. It was because it was an 'I Win' button in my fights. It didn't seem fair to me when it was a factor in my wins. With the TD reductions, I can start having fun and fair fights again. If I win, I want it to be cause I kicked their tails, not because I got lucky. Although I don't mind winning a knock down, dragged out, knuckle fights by getting lucky.
The thing is that it did not take 3 people to drop 4+ toggles it took 1 player 2 hits
EP ---> BS then you have 100 % chance to drop 2 toggles, 75% chance to drop a 3rd, another 75% chance to drop a forth, and then a 33% chance to drop a 5th.
Roughly the odds work out to 2 hits dropping atleast 3 toggles and usually 4 toggles.
The change is good, it takes what was once dependable... and makes it undependable as it should be.
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So it comes down to the issue of melee not wanting to be weak against anything. I can back that up with statements from melee players concerning the new electric set. The set has built in weaknesses and the players are complaining up a storm about how it is retarded for any melee set to have a weakness.
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you realize that most of the complaints are due to the fact not that the set is weak but it forces them in SJ just like fiery aura. that is the complaint
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Look past that and see the root of the problem. The melee player does not want to have the weakness of knockback or immobilization and thus feels compelled to eliminate the weakness. Otherwise, what is forceing them to get SJ? If they accepted the weakness then they could pick any travel pool they wanted, but melee players don't want any weakness. They can't handle it.
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Which is why most of us with any sense are willing to accept the weaknesses of set if they're justified. Many of us don't feel that the current numbers and situational protections do that. It's a much different argument than what you're making it out to be, at least from my view.
As someone that plays Blasters and Tankers almost exclusively in PvP, I'd have to say that you're exaggerating your position immensely. Toggle Dropping was too much and yes, it did render certain Tanker Primary's useless in many situations against certain Blasters. The problem is, it wasn't a universal issue. Not for Granite Tanks and not from non-/Elec and /EM Blasters.
It did need to get reduced, maybe not by this much, but it did need to be hauled in. I remember your "compromise" from the Tanker forums as well. I thought it was horrible idea then and I doubt my opinion will change now. Just becuase you and a few of your forum followers thought it was great doesn't mean that it was a good idea. Compromises have to be agreed upon by both sides. A 'compromise' isn't created by one side and shoved into the face of the other side and told that it's the greatest solution ever. Doesn't work that way.
On the other hand, this current change does little to encourage non/Elec and /EM Blasters to PvP, which creates more powerset imbalance. That is not a good thing.
EDIT to add:
For a few Blaster-side anecdotes. I play a lvl 50 Elec/Elec Blaster as my primary Blaster in PvP. I've done a load of 1v1 fights under Issue 7 rules now and I gotta tell you, the toggle dropper situation makes the fights much more interesting. I can't rely on them like I used to, which means smarter tactics need to be used. I've beaten an SS/Invul Brue, Katan/Regen Scrapper, Claws/DA Scrapper, EM/DA Brute and a Fire/Stone Tank. Yes, I kept a list. I lost quite a few matches as well (all against EM Tanks/Brutes, go figure), but hey... rock, meet paper.
these fights were MUCh harder to win than they were before. Many of those guys I beat would not have stood a chance under the Live rules.
How does it discourage.
If you did not depend on TD to get the win, then little will change.
Which was the problem is was so powerfull that it did more then give a reason to fight in melee, it made melee your best position. Because of this blaster become blappers... and even more specific appers.
Think about the stalkers and their snipe, if it becomes so great that they can tag team and one shot every opponent (not saying this will or will not happen)... Or if say claws can kill without ever being in melee, it makes an AT something it was not designed to be.
I am not saying blaster were not designed to be effective in melee... but they were not designed to have a melee effect so good they have little to no reason to use their range, or that their ideal position was melee. A blasters weakness should be if a players is in melee range (expecially a melee toon,) not their strength.
Well, having never played a non-/Elec or non-/EM Blaster, I'm only going off of what I read here and what others have told me.
I'm thinking it further discourages them because toggle dropping was all they really had to go on with their melee powers. Elec and EM had massive damage and mezz effects to accompany that.
So now, Elem and EM still have great melee damage and mezzeffects, but /Ice, /Fire, (to a lesser extent) /Devices don't even have toggle dropping to look forward to.
Again, I'm assuming here as I've never played these sets.
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But when engaging a team of heroes it was regularly the first thing that would happen to our Brute. I wasn't the guy running toggles here - I was supporting him. He would run in and, if there were two or three Blasters they would gang up on him and repeatedly toss out 50%+ of his toggles. It was frustrating for him.
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Tactics for the win. Again, it took multiple players to take down an armored player and those multiple players had support. That is exactly the balance that you say that you want. Multiple players being needed to take down a single armored foe. What? Did you want to him to be able to stand there and take it?
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No, and this is, in fact, quite the crux of my point.
Toggle dropping in that scenario was overkill. He should have been able to take it briefly. Instead it regularly devolved into "well, there went my mez toggle" followed by a little skull in the team list.
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If you have three people who hit you with 100% 1 toggle drop powers and then secondary chances for more toggles to drop, and you have 5 toggles, odds are exceptional that you lose your mez shield.
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Why yes, if three people are attacking me with toggle droppers then I do expect to be defeated. Why wouldn't I?
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Because it becomes a matter of binary behavior. It becomes an AT that can take that pounding (if only for 5-10 seconds) by design being virtually automatically stripped of those capabilities.
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The best comment though is stacked mezzes. Uhm, why didn't the mez work the first time? Right, because you have those nifty defenses that you said were negated upon entering combat.
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And here is the problem.
You see, you seem hell-bent on deprivng other non-Blaster ATs of features that they posess. You don't have them, and you therefore seem perfectly content that it's fair that no one else have them either. Thus, toggle dropping is OK. You don't have mez resistance, so what's unreasonable that you be able to strip it from those that do?
Simple. These ATs have it by design. I would argue just as firmly that it would be unfair to strip the EPP DR toggle from a 41+ Blaster. It's part of your character's capabilities, and I have a problem with anything that reliably, fully nullifies that.
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This is the complaint about Fire, Dark and Electric rmor - their lack of knockback protection is not some occasional weakness but rather a constant source of irritation and reduced efffectiveness.
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Yes, things that are irritating should never be used for balance. Man, my blasters and defenders sure get irritated by mez and that mez completely negates my ability to perform my job, but I have the ability to realize that it is a balanceing factor. Like I said, you don't want any weakness. Anything that irritates you must go away.
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Constant irritation should never be used for balance. Two points about that.
First, a Tanker and sometimes Brute often has no choice but to be the focus of a majority share of the attacks (and secondary effects) flying in PvE. Those effects are thick with knockback. The frequency of knockback is absolutely preposterous. You are knocked back by pistols and crossbows, backhands and kicks, let alone more visually meaningful effects like hurled boulders, energy blasts and explosions. The Tanker, in particular, by design, gets more than their share of these effects. It's actually a much more valid argument, in my opinion, for Tankers than for Scrappers, though I feel for them too. Like I said, I work on avoiding it on my Blasters, Defenders, and so on.
Second, look, you won't really get disagreement from me about the overuse of mezzing in all aspects of this game, PvE and PvP both. Because they have to close to melee to do their best damage, Blasters have some of the worst of all worlds among all the ATs here, and I know it. The devs painted themselves into a PvP corner here - they made whole ATs that depend on mezzing, and if everyone has a baseline immunity to it then it has no point. So we have the joyous situation that the Controllers and Dominators get whole ATs that they can pick on. We have lots of secondary mez powers on our melee attacks (across all ATs that get such things) because it's great mitigation/control/immersion in PvE. That creates a very non-excellent world of everyone without a mez toggle sucking down Break Frees at every turn, and that in turn annoying the control characters.
Again, this is a PvE game with PvP shoehorned in. Your complaint is that you don't like your AT's design point compared to the other ATs. I say that's an awfully old complaint originating in the PvE world, and it hasn't changed much.
I'll say here that the Blaster's lot in life in PvP is not balanced. It's not. The answer to that is not to design in mechanics that let them completely destroy the base functionality of other ATs. Maybe they need more irresistable damage - while that bypasses other AT features, it doesn't so do fully and those ATs are still tougher via more HP. Maybe melee attacks should mez less well in PvP, since that's another problem for the blaster who charges into melee. I don't know - there are a ton of variables here, and every change has domino effects on balance I am sure I can't even see - including this one on Toggle Dropping. But I am dead certain that removing TD was the right first step, whatever else comes later.
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This is not the same as PvP. The entire team is not trying to kill the tank. Ergo, the tank should not be balanced around trying to fight an entire team with team support. He should be balanced around fighting single opponents with team support just like everyone else.
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First, I think that's going to be changing, because Taunt is actively being changed to affect more people in PvP.
Second, I maintain that, as implemented on the powersets it was given to, with the chances that it has, toggle dropping went vastly beyond making Tankers fight single targets with team support. For the powersets that made TD notorious it was frequently just plain neutralization. It was over powered
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If you don't do that, then it becomes support + Melee VS. anything. You think that range is going to mean anything with all the negative travel powers in the game? I just took my TA defender out for a spin, No one is going to be at range for very long or airborne for that matter.
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How often have you seen -movement applied to a character that does most of their damage in melee? It's a great way to completely castrate their damage output and make them an easy target. Those kinds of debuffs work both ways.
Edited that last paragraph, I said something strange there that wasn't what I meant.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
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Maybe because, in a team context (you know, the way the devs want you to play) it was positively impossible to keep any toggles up.
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Hyperbole. It is also completely untrue. Unless, for some reason only known to the lord himself I have just never suffered like you have. I run 5-6 toggles on my Stone/EA brute and the most I have had dropped is three. I have had EM come up to me and knock off three toggles, and I wasn't mezzed. Does that contradict everything that you believe? Well, it is normal gameplay experience for me since I do PvP regularly. Maybe if more melee types got out there with a team and fought they would have similar experiences.
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Hyperbole? Not at all. When dueling other melee characters, I found it very easy to constantly knock toggles off with just brawl. I mean, only a 33% chance, but since I was spamming it like crazy, I could whittle a DA scrapper's defenses down to the minimum and then smack him around with all my knockdown/up and mez powers (yay stone melee). He had trouble keeping his toggles up even though i was only knocking one down every third hit. If I could, in two seconds, knock out two toggles, with a very high chance to get three, a moderate chance to get four, and a low chance to get five on top of probably stacking a stun that might land through knocked out mez shield, I don't see how any melee character could retoggle in any decent amount of time.
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Because you end up with a team of Tankers + various support casters if you go down that balance road. It is what ended up happening in PvE. The Tankers have the damage to kill anything. If it takes multiple people to defeat them, then why in the world would a team want to take less of them?
Here is the other flipside of the equation, since we are talking about team PvP we can ignore all 1v1 situations. So, taking a tank or brute and pairing them off against a blaster with both sides having the same support, is it an = fight. From what I have seen with toggle droppers the way they are NOW, it is if you are comparing comparable sets of Tanks, Brutes to Blasters. EM VS. EM for instance. Throughout various leveling stages this balance is thrown off by power acquisition. The only way to balance that would be for everyone to have all their powers whenever they go into a PvP zone, or in other words, the zones are not balanced.
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PVP is not balanced on live right now. The only thing propping some blaster secondaries up is a cheap trick that flies in the face of genre and fun - and you have admitted repeatedly that it's not fun.
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So it comes down to the issue of melee not wanting to be weak against anything. I can back that up with statements from melee players concerning the new electric set. The set has built in weaknesses and the players are complaining up a storm about how it is retarded for any melee set to have a weakness.
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So it comes down to Concern making swipes against other players because he doesn't really have a strong argument? You're whining like a regen scrapper with a small tweak in his finger.
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Look past that and see the root of the problem. The melee player does not want to have the weakness of knockback or immobilization and thus feels compelled to eliminate the weakness. Otherwise, what is forceing them to get SJ? If they accepted the weakness then they could pick any travel pool they wanted, but melee players don't want any weakness. They can't handle it.
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No. In Dark's case, Dark Armor relies on being near or in a crowd of enemies to function to its full potential (Dark Regeneration, Cloak of Fear, Death Shroud, Oppressive Gloom), never mind that with only a few exceptions, melee ATs generally don't have ranged attacks. Knockback minimizes those strengths and can negate them entirely depending upon how much KB there is. For brutes who have taunt inherent to their attacks and auras, it's even worse because the brute takes more fire than a scrapper or stalker.
There's also the fact that most melee defenses have KB protection, with only three on live giving it up for (according to Statesman) protection from a relatively rare damage type, or for damage that has been nerfed several times.
However, since you are unable or unwilling to imagine that anyone might have a valid complaint about melee ATs that doesn't parse down to "melee is overpowered," every complaint must be unjustified and characterized as petty. This happens every single time balance discussions about melee characters come up.
Elsegame: Champions Online: @BellaStrega ||| Battle.net: Ashleigh#1834 ||| Bioware Social Network: BellaStrega ||| EA Origin: Bella_Strega ||| Steam: BellaStrega ||| The first Guild Wars: Kali Magdalene ||| The Secret World: BelleStarr (Arcadia)
I dunno, people can whine all they want but PvP should be more about attacking for some classes and looking for the opening with others.
As it was, the opening would always come and the attacker couldn't attack because they had to put their defence back into place while taking a prison sexing.
The attack heavy characters should be just that. Tanks and Brutes should have to check their toggles 1/4th of the time since primarily they're looking to stay on target as much as possible.
So you're on an even playing field now. Deal with it punks.
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EDIT to add:
For a few Blaster-side anecdotes. I play a lvl 50 Elec/Elec Blaster as my primary Blaster in PvP. I've done a load of 1v1 fights under Issue 7 rules now and I gotta tell you, the toggle dropper situation makes the fights much more interesting. I can't rely on them like I used to, which means smarter tactics need to be used. I've beaten an SS/Invul Brue, Katan/Regen Scrapper, Claws/DA Scrapper, EM/DA Brute and a Fire/Stone Tank. Yes, I kept a list. I lost quite a few matches as well (all against EM Tanks/Brutes, go figure), but hey... rock, meet paper.
these fights were MUCh harder to win than they were before. Many of those guys I beat would not have stood a chance under the Live rules.
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OBVIOUSLY you are still too powerful and the melee propoganda machine needs to crank it back up to make sure you are nerfed into oblivion! Everyone knows that melee players should NEVER be defeated in 1v1. 
Hehe, I like the way you think PorkChopSandwiches
I jumped into SC to check out some changes against the NPCs and noticed a few heroes running around so I flew up and dropped down on them, with my built in +per from danger sense I never saw the stealthed Scrapper and the Blaster mysteriously threw something at me that detoggled everything I had on then again I was not sure if I had Kuji-in Rin running but I was able to immediately turn on fly and retoggle. There are still some temp powers that can detoggle your entire set of powers in one hit, I have seen villains using it too.
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I am not saying blaster were not designed to be effective in melee... but they were not designed to have a melee effect so good they have little to no reason to use their range, or that their ideal position was melee. A blasters weakness should be if a players is in melee range (expecially a melee toon,) not their strength.
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And now I lob yet another complexity grenade:
If the game was somehow engineered in such a way that blasters' optimal attack strategy is always to stay at range, and gains no advantage from entering melee range, then what would that mean for blaster vs melee fights, when the melee doesn't have range?
Kaboom.
/runs off
(Blasters should gain advantages *and* disadvantages at range, not strictly be at a disadvantage in melee, or that flapping sound you hear is a revival of the sport of kiting.)
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SnakeGandhi, with a good many Tankers stating that 'balance' is needing a team to kill them, with a good many Brutes saying that they'll go back to PvP now that they don't need to worry about Blasters anymore...
I can't see how you blame Concern.
[/ QUOTE ]And what about having an /EM Blaster kill me over a dozen times and laughing at me and my SR Scrapper? What about Castle telling Scrappers and Tanks they might as well not have secondary's in PvP? What about when a Blasters first shot drops my defenses, and I'm dead before they turn back on? What about being immoblized and taunted while a Blaster stands 10 feet away and blinks you to death? Charging into melee, what my supposed specialty is, and getting my [censored] kicked every time by an /Elec Blaster? And then being laughed at and told to make a Blaster if i want to PvP?
You want to talk about folks being [censored], you can look at both sides.
And where are these 'good many' Tanks saying it should take a team to kill them? The only Tanks I've seen in PvP have been Inv Tanks, and they where leading teams. They contributed by directing folks and taunting guys off the squishies, but when it came down to it they fell pretty damn quickly. I know my Inv/SS Tank only survives when Unstoppable is running.
But no, all the melee AT's are [censored] godmoders, all the Blasters are innocent respectful gentlefolks, and the overpowered Scrappers and Tanks rule this game with an iron fist.