Sword and Board for Brutes

I think the biggest problem with proliferating Broadsword is, quite simply, Parry. Because Brutes and Tanks get punch-voke (and they have higher survivability than Scrappers or Stalkers), they could just spam Parry forever and kill virtually anything without much risk to themselves. If/when BS gets proliferated, I would expect to see Parry changed or replaced to prevent the set from achieving full on borkitude. Scrappers and Stalkers can get away with it largely because they don't have "hey hit me!" built into their AT and have lower survivability (both baseline and peak). I doubt the devs would let Brutes and/or Tankers do the same.

sounds good to me, but you forget that the Devs are not fencers or kendoka in anyway, shape, or form (to my knowledge, and at least the devs who first made/animated/named the powers).
But your idea has merit, another possibly one is also a -dam debuff.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

I dunno... With the incredible stackability of Parry a -Dam debuff could get pretty big pretty quickly. And with Damage Reduction one of the best forms of mitigation for Brute sets (and by best I mean primary... dark/fire/inv/will/elec/etc) you're granting a higher effective Damage reduction. It's little different than granting higher defense, save that at 90% mitigation a damage debuff on your target still makes you take less damage.

Recharge Rate debuffs tend to be small enough to shave off a few tenths of a second on the recharge of an attack. If you've got it stacked nice and high you might keep that attack from cycling for 1.5-2 seconds before it comes back around, mitigating damage -slightly- for both defense and damage resistance brutes.

Meanwhile a recharge rate buff, while nice, is basically useless to the slow-animating and fairly long recharging Broadsword set itself, but is useful for defensive or support click powers like build up or active defenses making broadsword/shield or broadsword/sr more attractive... And to some degree any secondary with one or more clicks that are nice to have up fairly often (like Dark's heal, or Energy Aura's end fixer)

-Rachel-

Not with a 10sec duration...Unless you've got a hoard of sword-users stacking it, you're still limited by animation time vs debuff duration. How many times can you stack Divine Avalanche now?

-dmg doesn't favor resistance sets any more than other non-resist sets. Because -dmg is applied to the attack and not combined with your resistance, the debuff will reduce the damage by the same amount of points.

Honestly, an outlier -rech debuff attack that doesn't coincide with the set's theme is as useless as the -movement from Crippling Axe Kick. By itself, even if stackable, wouldn't really provide much of anything unless the debuff was significant. Besides, with all the knock- the set has, it's rather counter to the effects intent. A foe juggled isn't even using their attacks. Stacking -rech on them only matters if they can use their powers.

If you ask me, just replace the powers with more 'brutish' type attacks...or at least in the case of Broadsword. A Seismic Smash-esque attack called Blade Bash that does lethal and smashing damage and has a chance to hold while doing great damage.

Rationale behind that change = if Stalkers and Scrappers can become ridiculously defensive thanks to these sets, Tankers and Brutes should become noticeably offensive by comparison.

Haha Good point. I don't care if they change out parry for a very cool attack.

Because of the insanely low recharge on Parry/DA (3 sec base), it is easily possible to maintain 2-3 stacks at all times with just SOs. The 1.584 sec animation combined with a 1.81 sec recharge time (3 / (1 + .66)) allows for a cycle time of 3.4 seconds. With a 10 second duration, this means you're going to have 295% uptime on it with just SOs.

The problem with this line of logic is that Stalkers and Scrappers aren't getting the incredible defensive advantages of Parry/DA for free. In order to tap the defensive advantages of the sets, they have to take a proportionately large hit to their damage dealing capabilities thanks to Parry/DAs low DPA. If you wanted to invert that design, you would need to make the attack high damage but force it to lower the Tanker/Brutes survivability. If you simply added a Seismic Smash port, you wouldn't be inverting that at all.

If the devs really want to play around with the role alteration thing with a power that replaces Parry/DA, I would expect something along the lines of a resistable 15% -def debuff that lasts 10 seconds and the attack would get some portion of its damage for "free" (not factored into the dam/rech/end formula). Assuming it keeps the same animation time (1.584 seconds), I would give it a 3 second recharge time and make it deal the same damage as Hack (you would have a power tied for the best DPA in the set on a 3 sec recharge). Conversely, if you wanted to play with the "big heavy sword" mentality, you could instead have it apply a ~50% -end redux penalty (which increases the end cost of everything).

Either way, the entire point of such an exchange is to provide a reason to not spam the hell out of the power. Kat/* and BS/* attack chains are generally built around the assumption of a single stack of Parry/DA because of the side effects of using the power. If Brutes/Tankers got a version that allowed them to deal more damage, I would expect it to come with a rather glaring weakness to discourage using it in the same way.

That portion about the 'big sword mentality' so it would increase your endurance consumption would discourage spamming the attack too much. Alternatively, a strong layered debuff to lethal damage (strongest after application then tapers off after a time maybe 15-20sec) to simulate smacking something so hard, you run the danger of breaking your sword. Spam it, and you're basically going to be fighting with a big butterknife.

I thought about something like that, but the tradeoff is then a little extreme and you have to start asking yourself what the point of it is. The idea is that there should be a reason for you to spam it, but you shouldn't want to spam it all the time. There's also the problem that a growing -dam debuff would reduce the overall effect of the power itself and also encourage players to not use native attacks, even with the redraw penalty. I'd much rather see a truly inverse Parry (-def and higher damage) or a tiring variant (-end redux and higher damage) than something that dealt big damage right off the bat and caused the rest of your damage to simply peter away. I think it would work better to have an effect that causes you to trade survivability for higher damage in the same way that Parry already causes you to trade damage for survivability than to have an attack that only really exists for burst damage (at which point you have to ask whether there's much of a point to it recharging quickly in the first place).

Hmm... Interesting idea.