Fitness is dead; long live Fitness.

Yes, because explaining historical events as if the causation runs backwards through time sure is a valid argument.

So I should be like you and ignore all dev statements made regarding ED as a prelim move for the skills system which became the inventions system?

Nahh, I prefer not to live in ignorance.

Edit: And, no, I don't buy that the GDN wasn't also done as a step to prepare for IOs.

Are you saying that if IOs hadn't been planned, the pre ED/GDN days would have been an acceptable level of balance for the game? Because if not, whether or not IOs had been planned is irrelevant to whether a GDN/ED was necessary.

Nope, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that the game was borked, the devs knew it, they also knew they wanted a crafting system and that ED and the GDN were part of the plan to both deal with balance issues at the time AND prep for crafting.

EDIT: Or I'm giving the devs far too much credit and every step along the way have been reactionary kneejerk reactions.

I hope leadership gets real popular.

I think the stealth pool will be more so, its doesnt need much in way of slots, fits the LoTG +recharge, and can see it freeing up superspeed picks too - instead of stealth IO + superspeed, it will be stealth IO + Stealth power + ninja run with swift/hurdfle.

If that is actually your position and it isn't a superposition of quantum uncollapsed positions that have the property that whenever it is refuted it collapses into yet another eigenstate, its easy to refute.

Any highly optimized solo build has just gained leadership. +80 % damage on a team is not a few percent. That is a game changer. It is such a game changer I can see masters of tf runs turning people away that don't have leadership in their builds after this change.

Edit: If you can't do much with 3 extra power picks and three more slots to play with in a build you aren't min/maxing.

Highly optimized solo build... damage on a team...

Like teams can't already eclipse +80% damage just by having three people firing off AoEs at the same enemies.

Teams are going to run amok! OH NOES!!!!

Oh yeah you know you are completely right dude +80% damage is insignificant, what was I thinking.

< /Sarcasm >

Was the game borked or was the lead dev at the time a dork for thinkin that 1 hero equaled 3 minions?

Originally Posted by Shadow Ravenwolf My favorite combo is Faceplant/DebtCap with the TeamWipe Ancillary

Originally Posted by Dispari Yeah, I like Blasters too.

On highly optimized solo builds, +80% damage would be big. Of course, it is not +80% solo, but on teams.

On teams, it is a drop in the bucket. Sorry your teams think an additional +80% damage matters on top of what they already bring. Most of my teams would yawn at that, and that is without kinetics, with a kin, it becomes not just insignificant, but irrelevant.

Well, that was the commentary at the time, but frankly, I didn't find those comments at all persuasive then, and I still don't today. At the time of I5/6, those changes were, IMO, done entirely to slow levelling speed in advance of the new expansion, to try to make sure people didn't blow through the new content even quicker than they ended up doing.

While those changes may have had the consequence of creating the space for IOs to happen, I have a hard time believing that was a motivation for the changes. It may have been, but unfortunately at that time period we had a powers dev who basically never spoke to us.

Getting back to the main point, I still find this contention that every buff is balanced out by some corresponding game change to negate that buff bemusing. If that was really the case, there'd be no point in making any powers changes at all.

I look back on the history of a power set like Dark Miasma, and I don't really see where it paid for say, having -Res added to Tar Patch, Dark Servant being made mobile, the change to Howling Twilight so you couldn't rez people with 1 HP, or the global change to the Terrorize-Cower fear that made Fearsome Stare a great power. Other people can surely bring up examples of the sets they know best getting buffed without corresponding nerfs.

Were they to say make Fitness inherent, and then turn around and dramatically reduce the effectiveness of Stamina, or increase power costs, or add Sappers to ever faction, then the whole exercise would be a gigantic freaking waste of Castle's time, and the smarter thing to do would be not to change anything. I don't think they're quite as crazy as people seem to be presuming.

If that was ever the point in the first place, you might have a leg to stand on. Unfortunately for you, that isn't the case.

The point is that power creep leads to nerfs. Some buffs happen in this game because a set or power is underperforming. Blasters got buffed because they died too much and leveled too slow as per developer data mining. There was no wholesale buff to everyone to improve blaster performance.

Here we have a case where every character in the game is getting the same buff and it's happening at the same time as the introduction of another system which will buff all players at level 50. Edit: that utilize the system, of course.

When everyone is overperforming, global nerfs happen.

With +80% my teams can drop a defender from the lineup and split up more to get things done faster. That +80 is a -res and +damage buff we don't need anymore.

Glad to see you thought this through.

Swurdle!! FTW!!!!!!

LOL, but it sounds more like a desease debuff...

I thought the +80% was from Assault. How does that work with splitting up?

Glad to see you thought this through.

Was waiting for someone to catch that.

If I were playing in an organized 8 player team set up to play through content very fast, I probably wouldn't even notice that 80% +DMG. Everyone is already playing at maximum efficiency (or close enough to it), meaning any further +DMG will be wasted.

If I were playing in an organized 8 player team set up so that everyone plays whatever they want, I probably wouldn't even notice that 80% +DMG. The only case where I might notice the +DMG was if we had very little AoE (less than two or three), buffs and Debuffs. Something that just won't happen even if you pick 8 characters randomly. Your average 8 man team has enough AoE (you only need, what, three or four AoEs, to mow down minions at +0/+1?) to steamroll through most missions, you should also have at least one or two people with buffs or debuffs so the +80% damage simply won't make a big difference.

If I were playing in a PuG, I everyone would take Leadership even with three new power picks available, so no change here either.

Then there's also the thing that -Res multiplies +DMG. Dropping -Res because of getting +DMG seems kind of strange from a min/max perspective because if the -Res was already better as a multiplier than the added damage from a Scrapper/Blaster/whatever, it would still be the better choice.

You do actually play this game ?

Just when and where does a team need -resistance or plus damage ? AVS, GMs, the choke points that are handled by the entire team.

And seeing as you used a kin for your counter, that +80% is about what a kin will give you against a single av without the need to hit.

Rad Defender -Res is 30% go for the full 100% enhancement that works out to +60% off base damage

Rad Corruptor -22.5% or 45% off the fully enhanced.

TA defender -20% or 40% off the fully enhanced

Any set that doesn't have a double -res or a self stackable -res is going to be at a loss to the assaults.


For pugs the greater availability of vengeance will be the game changer. All it will take is one or two people with vengeance to get pug teams through the hardest encounters in the game.

You did not even read what I wrote. When it comes to +80% damage being insignificant, I specifically mentioned WITHOUT kinetics. With kinetics it goes from insignificant to irrelevant. Here I'll quote it for you, because I doubt you could figure out how to find it yourself.

Which is it? +80% damage from assault lets my team split up so we can go through missions faster or +80% damage is a significant factor when we are all grouped up and fully benefiting from every teammates damage/buffs/debuffs? You can't seem to make up your mind. When I said it was insignificant on a team because of how they already work together so well you told me it let you split up. When I said splitting up doesn't work with Assault, you said it helps when they are together.

You can, at this point, either just admit you were wrong or simply state that you feel I am undervaluing +80% damage on a big team of min/maxed builds. I'd recommend the former, but if you choose the latter, the reader can decide whose experience matches their own and move on from there.