Rage's crash was changed to 'milder' because the 10 seconds of Only Affecting Self could be nasty for keeping agro on a tank, and it eliminated and bonuses from auras such as RTTC or Invincibility; Rage is getting looked at again sometime 'soon' because the Defense crash is unfair towards some armor sets; though, one could say that so is the Endurance Crash due to WP having QR. Lol WP. Rumor has it it's also gonna become non-stackable; though, if you ask me, that's more of a Tanker nerf than a Brute nerf, because Fury makes +Damage buffs have a less significant impact to overall damage output. You notice Double Rage more on a Tanker. Still, it's a pretty sick power, I'll admit that.
Now Foot Stomp is as broken as Psychic Shockwave in terms of silly tier 9 PBAoEs, yes... Kill either the radius or damage? I dunno. Super Strength has only one PBAoE, yet deals more AoE DPS than Electric Melee, go figure.
Knockout Blow is actually weaker than Seismic Smash; though that's not saying much, heh.
WP is a master of all trades, Jack of none... Except in PvP these days, heh. Could use a kick down a peg or two, but they really ought to remove the -ToHit in RTTC in PvP to make up for it, if they do.
Having played both of these sets up to 50 I can pretty much agree on everything you said about WP. The lvl 50 MA/WP I have has 0 debt badges at 50. Or at maximum the first one. I think I could count with 1 hand the amount of times I was defeated in the course of 50 levels.
SS on the other hand... Might just be due to the nature of an ice/SS tank I felt using rage (without +rech bonuses anyway) needed to be thought out business. -25% DEF is fatal to an un-IO'd ice tank. I do see your point though, when SS is combined with a set that does not lean almost 100% on defense.
- @DSorrow - alts on Union and Freedom mostly -
Currently playing as Castigation on Freedom
My Katana/Inv Guide
Anyone who doesn't take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either. -Einstein
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-25% DEF is fatal
[/ QUOTE ]Nit-picky reply: It's -20%.
Less nit-picky reply: Turning Rage back on cancels out the self defense debuff to my knowledge; With 3 SOs you'll have a downtime of 4.27 seconds, which isn't really that long.. Well, in my personal opinion it isn't, anyway.
Well I have to add in here, and you will know Blitz from our arena matches..the RttC drop is still a major bugbear, ive got a really decent build on war yet any hit whatsoever that can knock it of...does...so even tho i may get -to hit its only when RttC stays on...which is rare in pvp
Art of War Co-Leader - Union *Global@Warscythe*
"The box said Windows Vista or better - so I installed Linux"
That's exactly why I suggested they remove the -ToHit from it in PvP. So it won't count as a hostile toggle, and thus will not detoggle upon being mezzed.
ahhh I see your point now...I stand corrected me ol' mucka 
Art of War Co-Leader - Union *Global@Warscythe*
"The box said Windows Vista or better - so I installed Linux"
Yes /WP seems really overpowered at times. Though as my level 50 brute is a War Mace /Will Power I feel like I need it at times 
I have experienced a fast and brutal death several times at the hands of vanguard rangers, actuarially every time I have fought vanguard rangers. I assume that the many other times I have died have been from the elemental damage as well.
And anything with -regain -recharge powers really hurts as well. So arachnoids and cold based mobs can be though as well.
If we compare it to fire aura that is a far more offensive set, with a aoe damage in Blazing aura, Burn and rice of the Phonix, and a self +damage power in Firey Embrace.
FA still have the same S/L resist and far more resistance to F/I/E/N/T only leaving Psy with a lower resist. While loosing minor defenses to the elementals and moderate defenses to Psy. To top it off it has Debuff Resistence to recharge and runspeed.
Invulnerability in comparison to WP have about the same resistence to S/L and defense to F/I/E/N but far better resistance F/I/E/N/T and far better Debuff Resistence to: recharge, run speed, and endurance.
In short: You could say the big weakness of WP is debuffing.
Mind you the only secondary brute power I have experience with is WP. Just used mids to look up the other sets.
Many times I've watched /WP completely collapse in the face of a heavy attack. It is not overpowered, it is merely like Regen, it will always look completely indomitable at all times until something goes wrong, when it will go from awesome to dead in the blink of an eye. Other sets are quite capable of going up and down their health bar as part of their normal operations; Willpower shouldn't, because once the enemies manage to make enough stick to you to actually make your health start going steadily down there isn't really anything you can do to stop it.
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Invulnerability in comparison to WP have about the same resistence to S/L
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By which you mean of course, "Willpower has to get Tough just to reach the same level of S/L invuln gets without it". There's no 'almost' about it, Invulnerability dumps all over S/L damage compared to Willpower. It's much bigger S/L resist is backed up by good defense, since Willpower deliberately gives very little S/L defense while Inv does, the gap gets even wider.
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Prophet of the Creamy Truth; "If it's empty, fill it with cream."
It's not that WP is overpowered in the traditional sense of the word (unlike SS), it's that it's just plain "good" at everything and isn't "bad" at anything.
Just checked my numbers again, must have written something down wrong while I was comparing the sets.
So yes, WP give only 22.5% S/L resist (un enhanced) as opposed to Invulnerables 33.8%.
Clicky.
We'll assume that both Brutes are level 50, no accolades or set bonuses. Only powers that are on "all the time" and help against physical damage are used. For Invuln this means that Dull Pain is left out of the equation, and godmodes are left out as well. There are 3 enemies to fuel Invincibility/RttC.
The powers are slotted with 3 level 50 basic IOs, hitting the ED cap. HPT, which can be slotted with both Heal and Resist, is only slotted for Heal. Same number of slots per side was used.
The way how Defense's contribution to mitigation is calculated, it's by the reason that 1% of defense will mitigate 2% of the incoming damage. Thus, doubled.
Over the red lines you will see the mitigation value of both sets against S/L. This is the "over time in a world without defense debuff" value, as it takes into account both resistance and defense and +HP. Having +HP means that you will 'feel' the hit by a smaller amount, but at the same time direct heals affect less % of your total health.
Baseline for S/L is roughly 7/10 for WP/Invuln base performance. Without regeneration, Willpower would die in 70% the time it would take an Invuln without DP to die.
But since Regen is the godsend of WP, WP can start regenerating fast as the fight starts, which means you will still have to beat a certain DPS to kill a WP( blue lines). Even though the overall protection is lower for WP, you still need more DPS to overcome the protection than Invuln who has not yet popped DP. DP is like a second chance button for Invuln that increases HP by a big deal.
Over the purple lines you will see how fast one can see to recover health back. For WP this is huge: you can start regenerating a lot more HP back while maintaining decent protection. Invuln who has not yet popped DP will go down faster than WP in most cases, and even then will have problems in extended fights.
This comparison was just against S/L damage, just FYI.
edit: wording
So in other words, we have to arbitrarily remove Invs massive self +HP and Heal Buff so that Willpower can just keep on regenerating and Inv can't. Colour me unimpressed. Why don't we try dishonest statistics with Regen as well...
Wow! By heavily stacking the conditions against it via the method of removing all its clicks, Regen comes out really bad! 
Chairman of the Charity of Pain; accepting donations of blood and guts.
Prophet of the Creamy Truth; "If it's empty, fill it with cream."
With DP the mitigation value would be 4.97.
Which would be then 9.98 hp per second.
The DPS line would then be 49.6 for Invuln with DP on.
Still less than WP.
I'm struggling to see what your point really is. Are you calling for a nerf to WP or a buff to other secondaries?
In my opinion all brutes are overpowered, hell that's what makes them fun. Even my EA brute, the worst of all the secondaries, has successfully played the only 'tank' on the itf, lgtf and lrsf.
How could a buff to any of the secondaries really be justified? That just leaves nerfing wp. How would you do this without breaking it for other ATs (or even for the brutes)?
Isn't the entire SS set balanced around Rage though? Without Rage the damage isn't all that great considering it's all Smashing damage and that's one of the most commonly resisted forms of damage along with Lethal among both NPCs and Players in PvP it's only with Rage that the damage boost really makes up for being resisted.
Even with RttC being knocked off every time I hit the WP/SS tanker with KO Blow, I couldn't do enough damage on my Invuln/SS to overcome the Regen anyway but this is a fight between Tankers and perhaps not applicable to Brutes.
SS is good, WP is good, together they make a godlike combination use them with any other sets and they're still merely good.
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A real showstopper!
[ QUOTE ]
EA brute, the worst of all the secondaries
[/ QUOTE ]Dark Armor would like to have a word with you.
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
EA brute, the worst of all the secondaries
[/ QUOTE ]Dark Armor would like to have a word with you.
[/ QUOTE ]
I'm EA's biggest fan
I don't think that table covers everything.
He will honor his words; he will definitely carry out his actions. What he promises he will fulfill. He does not care about his bodily self, putting his life and death aside to come forward for another's troubled besiegement. He does not boast about his ability, or shamelessly extol his own virtues. - Sima Qian.
It's 3 mobs around both to fuel RttC and Invincibility. The enemies would deal S/L damage. The DPS needed would show how big the "immortality" line is, that is, while a WP can go on through a mish without much HP dripping, an Invuln will wear down eventually.
What would you like it to cover?
By the way, I think I found a mistake in my math in the picture earlier. I added +HP as mitigation value (which I was quite suspicious of doing in the first place anyway).
I was doing a graph of WP vs. Invuln on how good they can survive different "pressures" like 100dps, 200dps and so on. The formula I used that determined the incoming DPS didn't have +HP added, and while figuring out what was the "immortality line" for WP I noticed that the figure was different from what I showed here.
I believe this'd be the more accurate mitigation value: 1,478x1,131=1,671618. Extra HP helps, but in a different way:
TotalHP/((DPS/Mitigation)-HPs)) = time until you die.
I can't believe nobody corrected me on that mistake.
Anyway, on that pressure survival here's the results:
<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
3 mobs
DPS WP Invuln InvDP
100 100s 57.87s 108s
200 24s 25,8s 44,1s
300 13s 16,6s 27s
400 9,8s 12,2s 20,2s
500 7,5s 9,7s 15,9s
600 6s 8s 13s
</pre><hr />
So what we see here is how each set performs in a vacuum in a mob of 3. WP has the advantage when the DPS count is fairly low, somewhere in between 100dps and 200dps. Invuln with DP against a mob of 3 does better in all cases shown here.
Most of the time, this reflects what happens in game. Invuln is better against smaller mobs but WP does better against bigger ones. In solo play the DPS count is all the time fairly low, so WP isn't so bad there. QR helps with endurance which is great for Brutes.
Even though, remember that 200DPS from 3 mobs is still pretty big. Say, all those mobs have 1 melee attack that deals 266,6 damage, animates in 1 second and recharged in 3 seconds. Three of these would equal that 200DPS. In this case as shown in the graph, WP and Inv w/o DP are pretty equal when it comes to survival at 200dps, while WP does better when DPS drops lower from that.
That being said, in Cimerora, a +2 minion does 2 sword attacks, a 144 damage one that activates in 1.33 seconds and recharges in 4 seconds. They also have a 177 damage one that activates in 2 seconds and recharges in 8. These two can be combined for 44,7 DPS. Even 4 of these wouldn't match up to 200dps up to the 3 theoretical enemies that would deal more.
Sure, if you go after a WP toon with what it's most effective against then you will get better results than some other defence sets.
Try the same comparison with say, Fire damage. Or maybe run a comparison with Stone Armour? (Granite + Stone Skin + Rooted, nuff said)
There are also some weaknesses in Willpower that you haven't taken into account that can be crippling during combat.
-Regen effects will get a WP Brute or Tanks killed in seconds.
Slow and -Regen effects will bring a WP toon to a halt with very little effort.
Any non-S/L/Psi damage can make very short work of a WP toon if it doesn't have a horde in melee to regen off of.
Effectively the raw survival of WP is dependent of being "in the thick of it", remove that factor and WP isn't really any stronger than other defence sets.
WP already has better elemental mitigation than physical so it'd appear better if I did that.
-Regen is crippling to many, yes, but there aren't *that* many mobs that do harming -Regen. Right now I can think of Longbow Spec Ops' EMP grenades. Longbow as a group are just nasty anyway. Any other factions that have oodles of -regen?
WP does get resistance to -Regen in Fast Healing.
Why would Slows matter to a WP? It doesn't have clicks that are affected by recharge except the self rez.
I'd run a comparison to Stone Armor if I had the time, it's pretty simple to do but kind of time consuming esp. with variables like w/ Rooted on, w/o EE and so on with every combination.
edit: I'll do a 7-mob comparison later.
Slows matter because if you can't do anything then you're not going to be much use at all. What good is a tank that can't Taunt because it's still a pinprick in the powerbar? Or a Brute that can't build fury because no attacks are ready for another 20 seconds? And ofcourse there's the matter of actually getting at your target.
In the end though, the SS/Will or Will/SS debate won't go anywhere. It's in the same boat as Fire/Kin. Too good together, but not up to that much apart.
Except that SS and WP are good paired with anything. Fire/FF and Grav/Kin are both decent, but not uber.
The problem isn't just SS/WP combo, both sets are overperforming. I leveled up a WP/Fire tank in the double exp weekend to prove a point. At level 18 with DOs I was already strong enough to stand in spawns semi-afk where a level 19 Invuln struggled. This was against Council, which have their cryo-guns. Sure, they slowed, but they did not cripple as you are saying. Many other secondaries do not have slow protection either, like Dark which is much more vulnerable to -rchg effects due to having its heal as a click.
SS, on the other hand, just blows every other attack set out of the water. It does more AoE DPS than Electric Melee which is the worst primary for ST, while SS is among the ST DPS kings on the top. Stone and Energy used to be higher because Stone had faster animating mallets (which got slowed) and Energy got the infamous ET nerf. Guess which set might be next?
WARNING! HUGE WALL OF TEXT WITH HOLES BELOW!
I was about to post a thread containing calculation, comparison and experience of these two sets: Super Strength and Willpower. What my calculations showed that these two pull out very high in damage/mitigation departments, using Arcanaville's mitigation table and different DPS calculators, sometimes giving the slotting edge to non-SS and non-WP, yet SS and WP still pulled higher, or, came very close.
Why did I not include them here? I wanted to keep it short(er) and sweet, and keep the calculations to myself until they're needed. It became pretty long anyway.
Seems that these two sets, rather than being "Jacks of All Trades", they are Masters of the [censored] Universe. You may ask "How come?" all you have to do is a little bit of comparison, or how about looking in the game! What do you see? Unkillable /WPs and SS/ which beat all other primaries in damage and mitigation.
When IO'd, these turn into freaking Godzillas. You don't even have to put a million expensive sets in them, because they just don't need to.
If SS isn't overpowered, why does the set have Rage, KOB, and Footstomp? Rage is about the best self-damage boost with a very laughable "crash". KOB is a pretty standard scale 3.56 attack, but it has a hold, a huge KU and it is in the same set with Rage. Which can be stacked. The only penalty KOB has is that it recharges in 25 seconds instead of 20 like Seismic Smash and Total Focus.
Foot Stomp is a PBAoE with a 1.42 DS 15" radius. The other PBAoEs in other sets are usually 1 DS with an 8" radius. While the recharge on FS is typically 6 seconds slower than other PBAoEs, the huge radius and 80% KD chance make greatly up for it. And it's in the same set as Rage.
Then in the same set there are 6 other powers, to add to the mighty and powerful, those 6 other powers are in the same set as Rage, as well. Oh boy does Rage make the set soar high!
Would a reduction to Rage bring it in line with the other sets? Seems like the Devs are afraid to nerf the set. They even improved Rage to have a milder crash! More buffs to SS please!
Now, to WP. WP is to CoX like Jimi Hendrix to a guitar. It meshes perhaps too well to how the game is played and provides even additional advantages to other sets. The set was buffed heavily when it was still tested, and now, it is broken beyond anything. The guy with Willpower can stand afk in 90% of the game's spawns, go on like an /Elec Brute, tank AVs and is good with minimal slotting.
Why the guy with Willpower does better against S/L mobs than the Invulnerable guy, to whom S/L are his 'strong point'? The insane regen you get and multiple stacked defenses, complete mezprotection and no general holes, except "alpha strikes" as by game description. I've seen more WP guys take alphas better than any other secondary, except a Stoner with Granite on, and even then WP doesn't fall short of what Granite can take.
What is the set supposed to sacrifice? What do you lose in exchange for complete mezprotection? What do you lose in exchange for nigh-unlimited endurance? Survivability? No. Willpower is at the top at survivability charts after a Stoner with Granite. It doesn't have a tier-3 Godmode, but instead a Demigodmode that puts you into Godmode when combined with other powers in the same set.
It has the worst aggro-management capability, I'll give you that. It also has no resistance to enddrain, I'll give you that too. Which set lacks both of those too and has more holes than swiss cheese? Hmm, let's see... EA? Yeah, that's it.
Any aggro-management problems are easily taken care of simply smashing your opponents with an AoE, or just by taking Taunt. Both of those work to WP's advantage because 1) WP can take multiple guys being in melee range, so AoE becomes really attractive. QR takes care of endproblems, so you can also use all those AoEs taking all that endurance. Taunt fixes the lack of taunt, and also brings the enemies not in melee range TO melee range. Taunt sets, which are cheap, also come with great typed defense bonuses which all stack with WP, further improving survivability.
Enddrain, while impossible to be taken care of without outside buffing, is soothed by having QR. Many other protective sets also have no res to enddrain, such as SR, EA, Fire, Shield, Regen and Ice. It's hardly a unique hole.
Also, sure. WP is not unkillable. I've seen people die with WP. In those same situations any other secondary would have died too, and before a WP would have anyway.
What happened to Devs' vision of introducing weaker sets and buffing them up later? See: Trick Arrow, Stalkers, Mace and many more.