Give Super Reflex DEf Debuff inherent Resistance

/Defensive secondaries have become too popular with how easy it is to soft cap. Your few enemies that will get enough +tohit are sparse. The quartz are easy to take out and high-level Resistance in Maria's Pretoria are just troublesome for everyone.

Let's get more on topic with pure resistance sets that need some extra love

Mmm, great comments...

Perhaps my complaint in mobs and their powers, is when they are really over the top. i am of the belief, that mobs should have access to the powers we have, it bothers me as it is done with the longbow when they cross-match AT sets; the whole idea of a Tanker-Blaster strikes me as kindergarden mentality.

With regards to mobs that buff or debuff, they should not be any better than a player that specializes in such activities. What is the best ACC debuff a defender can have? Whatever that value, should also be the top value for any mob that debuffs ACC, same goes with any other debuffs. When it goes to buffs, once more, I believe the mobs should be able to get the most powerful power that a player could have, not more. But to arbitrarely say, they get 100% this and that, is plainly wrong. To simply give mobs auto-hit is wrong! I don't believe players should have auto-hit either on their adversaries.

Now with regards to resistance, I am told the issue with the eminators was not the debuff of my defenses, but the extraordinary buffing of my opponents ACC; which rendered my defense null.

As Bill said, I would like for resistance to get loving as defense has received, I fully support it; with the proviso that all ATs can benefit from it equally as defense has been set to. Tankers and other melee gets plenty of loving on the unconditional protection area as is, giving them more is nice, but would that not result with the mobs hitting even harder, which would affect orders of magnitude more the support classes who have dismal unconditional protections in the form of resistances. Given that mobs are now equipped with ultra-long range status effects that get spammed like no tomorrow and ranged attacks that very much in league with snipe ranges, it would only make sense, since range is no longer a defense at all, that perhaps support classes could get some resitance to damage and status effect as well.

Would be nice if the game could have shades of grey, not be so binary. In the case of status effect, give support classes Boss mob level resistances. Strong enough to resist the stray attack, but not nearly enough to resist a conserted attack.

Stormy

No matter what angle you approach them from, they are not soundly balanced.

Quartz exist prior to any of those powers being available (excluding PFF). If they were meant to be an Elude-killer, they should only spawn 38+. (In fact, I'm pretty sure they cap out at 40, never to be seen again. Edit: Yeah, they exist 30-40. That's pretty bad.)

Tier 9 powers like Elude are supposed to make you nigh-invincible. That is their entire purpose. Putting in a counter to a specific tier 9 as part of a basic, yet completely avoidable enemy group is nonsensical.

Even if you were going to go out of your way to spite SR for whatever reason, you're also destroying the defensive strength of every defense power in the game. That's quite a bit of collateral damage in pursuit of that goal. Stealth powers are comparatively low-key to nullifying entire protection sets.

Overall, you seem to be a bit hardlined against soft-capped characters, which is largely where the baseless assumptions come in. I do not play a soft-capped character. In fact, I am quite displeased with what IOs have done to the game. This entire time I've been speaking from the perspective of someone who only uses SOs or generic IOs.

You could cut that To-Hit buff in half and it would still ruin a majority of defense-based characters, because it's larger than the soft cap. (Not to mention, most soft-capped character don't even bother with Elude, for very obvious reasons.)

I will still maintain that Quartz can exist long enough, or in great enough numbers, to completely destroy a character. I'll also point out that you have a leg-up on the average player with your targeting bind. Honestly, if the best counter to a threat is a meta-game advantage, there's a design flaw somewhere.

I'm not hardlined against softcapped characters at all.

I have a softcapped DM/SR brute myself, and that DE mission was the first time in quite a while that I didn't get bored playing him because nothing was a credible threat.

Like it or not, softcapped characters are getting much more common. If you start nerfing things that are a threat to them, what are you going to be left with? Characters that people get bored with because they can hit 3-5 buttons on a keyboard and get through a mission in perfect safety while reading a book.

I will never understand the cries that something is broken because it faceplants someone's favorite character. Maybe you should try something else if rushing in attacking the first thing you see doesn't work.

Too many people are like: "No, this is how I play my character, I refuse to deviate from what I've been doing for 30+ levels"

You honestly believe that the players should be able to be literally untouchable by anything in the game? Why?

We can buff ourselves to demigodhood, and the enemies we fight should remain pushovers? Nah, doesn't work. Ever wonder why you don't see Superman fighting the same caliber of enemies Batman fights? It's because there's nothing interesting about someone beating down a bunch of thugs that pose no threat to them at all.

If the devs dumb the game down into what amounts to "Push button = Gain XP", it's going to start bleeding off players as people start looking for something that doesn't put them to sleep. Suddenly running into something that flattens your normally invincible character is something to be overcome to most gamers, not a reason to complain.

I've started to post several times in this thread, but chose to sit back and watch for a while instead.

I find that I have agree that quartz crystals, while a serious pain the in the butt in their own right, don't need to get nerfed. If they do, they rularuu observers need to be nerfed and any attack that autohits needs to lose its autohit status.

And although I am on record in the past stating that ALL autohit powers should be removed/altered, I no longer feel that way.

Ian, if you are ever facing more than one quartz crystal in a mission, it's because you're facing a team sized spawn and should either have buffs from those teammates or the teammates should be assisting in their destruction. Arguing that angle is a non-starter.

Once we could say that defense debuffs were too prevalent and too much of a an issue for SR and its one-trick ponyness. With 95% DDR, we can't make that claim anymore.

That leaves tohit buffs and autohits. I can think of TWO autohit attacks in the game that I run into. Romulus' fluffy in the last mission of the ITF and that Rularuu AV with his autohit pbaoe aura. Not common enough to mess with and both are team based content.

That leaves tohit buffs. What do we got? Quartz crystals, Nemesis vengeance and Rularuu observers? Oh, and enemy pets sitting at 75% tohit instead of the 50% they're supposed to hit at? And weapon sets that have higher base accuracy... and then we found out some of the new enemies in tip missions are sitting at 64% base tohit instead of 50%....

Wait, which side am I arguing for again?

I guess my stance can be summed up as:

I don't see any valid justification for changing something that has been in place for 6+ years. Especially since people have been handling it just fine all that time.

Yes, Quartz emanators make defense useless. I'm pretty sure that is completely intentional, or it would have probably been addressed sometime in the past 6 years.

There are 2 things in the game that hit defense based sets especially hard: Quartz emanators, and stacked Nemesis Vengeance. Since the things that can hit through high defense are rare and avoidable, they should just be left alone.

I'm just going to leave it at that, I'm tired of arguing about it.

Mmm...

Once more interesting arguments, and at times a bit heated...

I believe the game must strike a balance at several levels, having mobs or players with auto-hit powers, with "I Win" like buttons just makes the balancing at different angles much more harder to do, and as a consequence some ATs and builds are much more negatively impacted than others. Now is that actually a bad thing? If it in on occassion, and "all" ATs have it as bad, just as often, then the answer is "it is a good thing", if the answer is no, then the answer is "it is a terrible thing".

Now, what do I mean with AT balancing...

The game eventually evolved into very defined, means for protection. That is how a character gets to survive enemie attacks.

The first distinction between protection types, was broken into Unconditional protections such as Resitance and Defense; and Conditional protections such as debuffs and status effects.

Unconditional Protections, are protections that worked all the time, they did not require you having to do anything special besides activating them, their performance was not dependedent on the type of mob that is minion, lt, boss, eb, or AV; if you could withstand 80% smash damage, you would shrug off 80% of it regardless if it was originated by a minion or AV; the main difference was than an AV would hit much harder, so despite stopping 80% of its damage more damage would go through. Same can be said for Defense, but Avs obviously have better Accuracies than minions, but regardless of the mob type, your defense percentage remained the same.

Conditional Protections, are those were an AT depends on their ability to neutralize and enemy before the enemy kills them. There are two forms of Unconditional Protections they are Status Effects and Debuffs. In the case of Status Effects, you are hoping that your "hold/Confuse/Sleep/Disorient" powers neutrilize the mob,or otherwise you are pretty much toast. They are Conditional because the mobs get a chance to resist, the higher in the organization chain the mob is, the less likely it is to be affected by a Status Attack. For instance a Minion in the old days had a 25% chance to avoid being "mezzed", while a LT had a "50%", Boss had a "75%" and so on. These percentages were based on a MAG 3 potency single application, obviously the more applications you lay on, the better your chances to nullify them. Of course, you need to survive or be able to get the chance to apply your status effects more than once. Thus the catch, and why the Protection is considered Condtional. Now Debuffing, normally these can not be resisted, although more mobs are being developed and fielded that are more resistant or less susceptive to debffs. The issue with debuffs is that they are small and takes many applications to ge tythe job done. The question is can the debuffer last long enough to get the job done? For instance a Dark Defender, their ACC Debuff is like 5%, so bringing a minion's ACC from 50% to say 25%, would take about 5 hits, if the duration of the debuff would last long enough; my experience is that you may be lucky enough to layer 3 debuffs, before the first one wears out.

The next rule of thumb that was evolved, made some sense, was that those ATs with unconditional protections would do less damage than those with Conditional protections for obvious reasons. That is why a Blaster is rendered basically protectionless; but on the other hand they are allegedly a powderkeg of damage. Personally I believe the Defender and Corruptor got shortchanged in this department, they have laughable protections and their damage is also quite mediocre instead of the very good they should be, heck my tankers do more damage than my defenders.

Never the less, returning to my explanation...

The game's mobs have been slowly evolved to provide more and more challenge to essentially the Tankers and other melee classes, the non-melee classes as is has plenty of challenges since their Conditional protections are increasingly becoming less and less effective as well, think of ITF if one mob roars, that's it for the Controller's ability to survive, as each day goes by, I find more and more arbitrary mobs with the ability to ignore status effects.

Eventually the Conditional protections became much more unreliable than they did at the begining, and truly the only protection a non-melee could go after for some semblance of safety was Defense. With the introduction of IOs, it was possible for support ATs to not be "glass jawed" by design.

Unfortunately the melee community did not receive the ability of support ATs being truly survivable that well at all, and of course the cries to nurf Defense to return the support class to be limited to support of melee quickly became much louder.

The devs always wanting to increase challenge in the game, were all too quick to oblige, and now mobs with auto-hit attacks, better to-hit buffing, higher perception, higher defense debuff are being both created and evolved, and of course more spam status effects were also added.

So support ATs are really suffering the much greater brunt of this changes, but now the Scrappers and Stalkers are now joining the family of the "Lesser God", because in the relentless pursuit in increasing challenge, mostly at the expense of the Support ATs, the Defense Based Scrappers and Stalkers are now saddly getting a taste of the Support ATs misery.

So all this go back to my statment of balance. It is not right that added challenge, affects specific ATs much more than others, while no equivalent discomfort or challenge is added to the other ATs. I do recognize that balanced challenge development is in fact very hard, on the other hand, hard does not imply impossible, it implies more cognitive work.

I believe that some of the later challenge content needs to be reversed or revised, and a wholistic review of conditional versus unconditional protections be frankly performed; as well as resistance versus defense needs to be revised. There are much more defense debuffing powers than resistance debuffing for instance; there are much more defense nulling and overcoming powers out there than resistance nulling. And we wonder why are Tankers calling for challenge?

It seems to me, the game has evolved so much, in general for the better, that old balance notions really need to be reconsidered. For instance, in the "old" days mobs either had ranged or melee attacks, not both. In the almost older days, only very few mobs had status effect attacks and often they wer limited to melee attacks; today all mobs have ranged attacks with significantly capable status effects at the minion level to boot! In the old days, range was protection; but frankly that is far from the truth today! In the old days, melee players had no ranged attacks, today that is not true anymore.

I find often that the ranges of many mobs are greater than my controllers' status effects; I am finding more and more mobs highly resistance to holds, and their ranged attacks having a greater range than my holds for instance. If a hold is supposed to be my main conditional form of protection, and mobs are now much more apt to simply shrug it off at the minion level, should I not be compensated with some level of unconditional protection? Which after IOs it became Defense, incidentally, but now we are seeing that Defense as an Uncondtional protection quickly being eroded away and anti-defense attacks being used much more frequently as well.

Game is still fun, and has many strengths and weaknesses, but perhaps a re-look at how protections are parsed out and AT inherent damage should be re-looked at.

Hugs

Stormy

stormy, AT's have the vunerability they do because it makes sense. that is never going to change. sorry to tell you. there should never be "normalization" across the at's.

Stormy,

I am done here. Your insults to my reading are enough now and before.