Ugh!

I agree. I much prefer a buff/debuff based game to a heal based game but I'm not going to claim that the current strength of buffs is really balanced.

Buffs, maybe. Debuffs, no. Purple patch, massive AV resistances, and not much stacking.

Purple patch and AV resistance do some to offset the potency of debuffs, but the sheer size of most debuffs allows them to still compete very well when they're pitted against buffs. Compare the sizes of most tohit debuffs to defense buffs and you'll find that the debuffs are, quite often, substantially stronger.

The issue of stacking is similarly vague. It's remarkably easy to stack a large number of different debuff types, but that requires a certain team makeup, or lack thereof. The same applies to stacking buffs, however, so it's not like it's a weakness of debuffs exclusively.

Not against the maximum reward rate content in the game, the kind where dev power-weakening efforts, if any, should be focused. Farms, Hamidon raids, various AV or GM heavy end-game content.

In more common gameplay, yes, debuffs are better than buffs. Live em, love em, don't leave home without em. But if common gameplay becomes the basis for weakening debuffs even more, a lot of end-game content will go right back to Issue 0.

Issue 0 (true story):
Fire Controller team leader: "lol dark miasma" /kick "hydra farm lf emp healer".

(Regen debuffs being the major exception, but only because they're a countermeasure to something else that's overpowered.)

For farming, the reason debuffs don't matter much is largely because enemies don't survive long enough. If you're killing anything that gets near you within 10 seconds, that 20 second debuff isn't really a stellar performer compared to the buff that doesn't care whether your target dies or not.

For hami, there is very little that actually does matter beyond +regen, +recov, and heals. An FF fender is going to be less useful than a Rad fender for this exact reason: at least the Rad fender has a heal.

For AV based end game content, you're assuming a lot based exclusively off of a very small level range. Yes, AVs and their debuff resistances play a large part in the end game, but that's not the entire game. Hell, the desv have explicitly stated that the game is intended to be replayed with alts rather than played extensively at the end of the game with a single character.

You can't simply say "well they suck at the endgame where everything resists debuffs or dies to fast to make them worth is" without readily admitting that, for the entire rest of the game, debuffs are more powerful than debuffs.

Well, the problem that you're attempting to bring up (debuffs would get hosed by top end content if they were brought in line) is less due to debuffs and more due to the sheer amount of debuff resistance that the devs have had to put into the game in order to prevent buffs and debuffs from rendered even the hardest content pointless. If buffs and debuffs were brought in line, you can likely expect that debuff resistances would likely be brought back in line as well, likely such that debuffs and buffs would act in a roughly identical way.

I wouldn't say that AV native regeneration is overpowered. The problem is, as I said before, with the fact that the game operates under an assumption of indefinite survivability rather than an attrition based survivability model. -Regen forces one side of the fight to become attrition based while allowing the other to maintain indefinite survivability. It would be much better if the entire game operated off of an extended attrition model (AV fights last 3-5 minutes, any longer and one of the two parties has died thanks to simple attrition) so that -regen wasn't needed anyway. -Regen is simply there to address the problem that the Cryptic devs gave absolutely everything the same in combat regeneration as out of combat regeneration (which is simply bad design).

When people tend to yell 'HEAL' thats the point you realise you have a noob tanker

I had a blaster in a team yesterday who was running into mobs first before the tank and screaming 'HEAL ME!!!!' which was quite funny because the team was fairly laid back and we were just watching him for a few minutes running into every spawn headfirst then ressing and repeating. He also seemed to think Assault only buffed if we were near him when he pressed it and he randomly turned it off mid combat lol. In his words 'this is my buffing build' on a blaster....

Was well worth it for the comedic value, it was especially funny when he died and said 'need yellow' (he was generally very rude and never said please) so someone felt sorry for him and handed him a yellow and two secs later he said 'someone got 2 blues? I made sturdy to help me live longer'. The guy was dead and he was worried about living longer lol.

Ouro anyone?

At least my "support" Blaster uses debuff instead of Blaster "buffing". Rad Blast + Heel procs ftw.

:composes and deletes rant citing way too much CoH nerf history:

On second thought, for sake of ontopicness, I'll just say I do not share that expectation.

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Yeah, I can't think of many instances in the game where an empathy defender is needed but any flavor of defender or support-specced controller (i.e. probably not fire/kin) won't suffice. ITF? Don't need a healer. STF? Nope. DKTF? Just need -regen. Random AV/GM run? +Def/Res, -Damage does just fine. Farm? Fire/kins are supposed to solo it, that's what makes it a farm.

Add in the fact that empathy defenders and fire/kins attract players who think they know how to play their character, how to play my character, and the entire game better than I do (but really don't).... I'd rather take my chances with some random newbie TA/A defender willing to learn the ropes.

There is ONE situation where an Empath is significantly more useful than basically any other Defender: Hamidon Raids. The nature of the raid means that defensively the only buffs/debuffs that work are healing and regen buffs.