What can the other secondaries do better than /Shield?

No, I don't think that's a good idea at the moment either. I don't think very many people will like where that ends up either.

YES YOU DO!!!!!!!!

The game was balanced around SOs, so you would think a powerset powered with SOs would play well... as you can see by this thread, Shields takes billions and billions if influence/infamy to make work. It is lackluster without expensive IOs.

The players wanted Shields, the players voted for Shields, and what we got is a powerset for the very rich.

I am sorry , but I am very bitter about this. There is not much that makes me bitter, but this does because I don't have billions to pour into one toon. . .and I do want to play a Shield scrapper. I have an Elec/Shield at level 32, she is doing wonderful now, but reading the forums, and hearing about the need for billions of influence I am expecting her to fall apart any day now....and that is not a nice feeling.

Sorry about my Venting, but this has been a sore spot for me for a long, long time.

Lisa.

No Castle. No. Do not nerf when you can buff. Look at TA, Mercs, Fire Armor, and Electric blast, for instance.

And please, take another look at EM, but this time wear rose colored glasses or something.

See that is the trap that people keep falling for, you don't need billions of influence for shields to be good. If you set yourself a decent budget you will need at most 200 million influence for a character that will perform better than 90% of the game.

I understand that you're deeming it simply a feeling looming over you that you have and dislike, but if you're loving your elec shield now at 32, she isn't going to just start sucking. I mean, you don't even have shield charge yet - she doesn't really have anywhere to go but up.

So, take heart !

Another good point, you will be getting what makes Elec/Shield so destructive LR + SC

Not at the moment, no, but eventually I'd like to see more consistency in the presentation.

When the time does come I don't see it hurting FA because it is pretty clear that active mitigation is permitted to reach considerably higher levels of force than proactive mitigation and it would seem apparent that someone is valuing the fear of burn. Unless that paradigm is changed, but that would be far more devastating to the buff/debuff AT's than the armored AT's.

But I agree, I'd prefer his
is cast onto other things at the moment.

Just ask them two questions.
1) Do you have a favorite food?
2) Would you like to eat it three meals a day, every day?

Actually, this thread says that Shields takes billions of influence to become the greatest secondary available to scrappers. It is "lackluster" without expensive IOs in the same sense that Invuln, SR, DA, and Fire are lackluster without expensive IOs. Even Willpower is not pylon-soloing fantastic with just SOs and limited power pool stacking.


Wait: you're saying by your own estimation its fine now but reading the forums makes you afraid it will fall apart? Personally, I would recommend you stop reading the forums. If the forums can make you bitter about a powerset that is "doing wonderful" for you in actual play, the forums are doing far more harm than they could ever do good for you.

Your L32 Electric/Shield isn't going to fall apart as she levels. She's already wonderful by your own admission, and she's going to get better and better. Just because you CAN spend billions on a build doesn't mean you MUST spend billions, or your build will suck, and all the minions in the game will laugh at you and spit on your corpse. You're imagining things.

You can make a killer Shields build on the influence you earn while simply playing the game from 1-50. OK, it won't keep up with the Joneses with their 10 billion influence builds, but it'll sure handle most anything the game throws at you. Shield Defense compares just fine to any other secondary I've leveled, and I level on the cheap. I don't get where this whole Shields sucks with SOs idea is coming from. Sometimes I feel like I'm playing a different game than other people.

Yes, top end Shield Defense is a rich person's game. Top end ANYTHING is a rich person's game.

I've been looking at the issue of offensive vs defensive valuation for years now, and even I can't fully predict what will happen to FA under a normalized system right this second. There are different regimes of performance, and offense and defense have different relative values in each. A lot would depend on what your specific balancing target is, and there's no way to hit all of the reasonable ones (the set of all of the reasonable ones is mathematically contradictory).

The large uncertainty comes from the fact that in a normalized system, lots of rules including the one you mention are likely to have to change in some way.

The big question is whether the offense in AAO is "correct" for Shields in a properly balanced powerset. It might not be. And if its lowered to below the offensive power of FA, all bets are off as to whether FA is "protected" from being lowered in a normalized system. It might not be.


Its tricky to predict where something like this would go. Consider this: one really interesting requirements of the current MA custom critter XP system is that *all* critters are actually smarter**. Really: they are (or should be) much better at selecting and using attacks. Even outside the MA. So far as I know, no one has even noticed this fact yet, but its there, and probably having interesting effects even if people aren't noticing them overtly.

I think few people would have predicted that would be a necessity (and no one ever mentioned it in any "quick fix" threads posted on the subject from I14 to now). Normalizing offensive and defensive values in secondaries (and for that matter in primaries) is bound to call all sorts of things the devs currently do into question, and probably force significant changes in how they grant powers to powersets to fulfill their concept.



** In I14 beta, I noticed and reported publicly that it was possible in many circumstances to give a custom critter a power and then engineer the situation so they didn't use it. So long as the critters could be outsmarted in that way, any system that attempted to grant XP based on the powers a critter possessed was doomed to be exploitable. Thus the requirement.

Packs of Romans (ITF) eat WP. Even if you cap to smash/lethal, as they debuff defense.

I don't have a SR toon and I've never really leveled one too high, but I feel like people really liked SR even before IOs. Mostly because of all the defense and defense debuff resistance and +speed and such.

Again, I'll defer to you since you've had a SR for so long, but did your main really suck when you were just running on SOs and HOs? Maybe I'm missing something.

Well, it does have +recharge, which buffs damage output a little. I'd probably take AAO, though.

But this is really based on a misconception. The devs don't balance "the game" around SOs alone. Powersets are designed around the assumption that they must deliver a certain range of performance when slotted with SOs. But the devs do take IOs into account when it comes to powerset and archetype balance in many ways. They obviously factor into datamined performance, because at least *some* SR scrappers slot IOs (as do other players). The devs also have some design constraints on the invention system itself, but they are just much more relaxed than they are for powersets themselves. People have to be able to solo and function on teams when slotted with SOs: that places some absolute value limits on the powersets. But Inventions are incremental buffs above that mark: for obvious reasons they cannot be designed and balanced around the same marks, because all powersets are intended to hit those marks even without Inventions.

However, this is true: if Powerset A has roughly the same performance as Powerset B when slotted with SOs, and when slotted with the best possible IOs Powerset A is twice as good as Powerset B, that's a problem, but a relatively minor one. But if Powerset A has roughly the same performance as Powerset B when slotted with the best possible IOs, and when slotted with SOs Powerset A is twice as good as Powerset B (as the devs define performance), that's basically a game-breaking problem the devs would be compelled to address virtually immediately (essentially, this is what provoked the devs to making sweeping changes to Blasters in I11). In that sense, the balance rules surrounding the SO-slotted data point are weighted far more strongly.

When I started playing, my main died more than the blasters I teamed with. Someone told me that the debt cap on a scrapper was a badge of honor, so I was fine with it.

Then one day I found myself with hasten and elude 6 slotted with recharge. The days of permalude were nice... most of the time. Other times, due to how broken tohit and defense were back then, permalude meant absolutely nothing and the faceplants continued.

The loss of permalude, ED, the GDN all caused a time when SR was... bad. REALLY bad. It was the outcry of just how bad it really was that caused the devs to add the passive scaling dam-res and then later allowed the DDR to be enhanceable and prompted the change to how enemies rolled their tohit checks.

So, yea, when I was coming up through the ranks, SR sucked entire fleets worth of chrome off of battleships.

SR still sucks until level 36 and you've stacked weave and CJ on it. IOs gave us back permalude.

Ignoring IOs in balancing the powersets is a bad idea. This doesn't mean that the powersets in question must be tweaked in order to account for IOs. It could mean that IOs must be tweaked to account for the powersets using them.

Have you seen the builds in this thread? http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=216944

As the author of those builds, I'll admit that some of the builds in that thread are absurd in terms of price. However, the cheap build and to a lesser extent, the moderate build are affordable and play well. The cheap build was spec'ed to be affordable for anyone who doesn't want to market, doesn't want a farm, but still have an effective toon. There's not a single build there that I wouldn't play.

If you've played SR from release to now, you've had a rollercoaster ride unparalleled in the history of the game.


But then again, BillZ plays Claws. He probably beat the RCS challenge at least once with Focus and Shockwave while forgetting to turn his toggles on. He calls Elude "my slower backflip." BillZ idea of normal performance is not the same as normal humans.

Every time BillZ talks about performance, you should picture this:


(Actual picture of BillZBubba circa I9)

The riddle of SR? Shall I tell you? It’s the least I can do. SR isn’t strong, boy, stacking make it strong!
What is SR without the slotting that enhances it? Look at the strength in my build, the defense in my powers, IOs gave me this!

Contemplate this in the planner of Mids.

So has Regen simply just been downhill from launch, and a small bump with the MoG changes?

As I recall, for the most part, yeah. But when you start as good as Regen started, it's kind of nowhere but down. MoG was a nice buff, though.

Oh so true .

I've stared at Mids until the vultures started circling many a time...

It's generally done as a deflection. Very similar discussion around PSW and how it was only "uber" on perma doms.

DP also gained enhanceable +hp iirc.

True. I think I came in after that happened, though. Not sure what the order was for the major Regen changes. I am sure there was a post about it, but has probably been swallowed up by now.