Concentrated Strike in PvP, why Castle?

I've always played ranged AT's for pvp, and decided to roll a scrapper for fun. I made an elec/elec and have been collecting some numbers. Thunderstrike has an activation time for 3.3 seconds, and WITH build up I can crit a dominator w no armor for around 450 damage. Thunderstrike never knocks anyone down due to everyone having acrobatics or armor. OK.

Concentrated strike has an animation time of 2.83, and with no build up or crits needed can hit for 700 AND stun on the same dominator with no armor. Can we get some input on this Castle? Is this a bug? Or just bad design? So elec melee's hardest hitting attack is longer, has to crit, AND be used within the 10 second window frame of build up to do a fraction of what CS does?

Is there anyone else working on the balancing of powers in this game? If you guys need help I will send you my resume. Mountian View sounds nice.

No it isn't a bug and it isn't bad design. CS is a T9 and Thunderstrike is not. It is how ever needed to be looked at again in PvP which is unlikely going to happen for a while. Also Castle is no longer working on CoX. So you'll have to ask Black Scorpion or I think Ghost Falcon.

I think the proper answer to your question is 'LOL PVP.' I could be mistaken, though.

Thunderstrike is an AoE. That's your problem. AoEs are teh suck in the pvp.
Let's not get started on pvp, especially in this forum. Very few of us actually know much about it :]

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Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze I hate to be the bringer of bad news... but Willpower sucks!!! you're better off rolling a regen

It has significantly longer base recharge than those powers, and it cannot critical. It also has a longer activation time, and activation times affect base damage in PvP, because PvP attacks are "balanced" around normalized DPA.

I suspect the power is not broken, based on the rules they use.

Syn-

If we look at the base numbers:

CS- damage: 441, recharge: 20 secs, cast time: 2.83 (stun mag 3, 2 secs)

HS- damage: 236 (472.73 with BU), recharge 14 secs, cast time: 2.33 secs.

GFS- damage: 247.25 (514.42 with BU) recharge 12 secs, cast time: 2.33 secs.

EC- damage: 241.84 (483.68 with FC) recharge 12 secs, cast: 2.53 secs (mag 3 stun 2.4 secs)

At first glance, yes CS seems OP (which is why you see so many of these running around in RV and such) it seemly gets its build up (+damage) thrown into each attack it does, however, here are some of the key points that makes KM not as OP as it looks:

1st) For powersets with Build up/focus Chi you can often get off 2 attacks while still the +damage buff is still running.

2nd) CS lacks the ability to 'critical hit' which a fair amount of spike damage to other scrapper powersets.

As soon as I saw the 13 years old comment I just knew someone would get all mad and angry about it and go full quote-warrior while throwing an usual more or less passive aggressive "PvE carebears" comment.

You can't just cry about people taking a jab at "your" community and then proceed to take a jab at "their" community, sorry ; or then you have to let me play : people don't care about PvP because PvP is full of underachieving losers who look for competition in an obscure stat-based video game, because they can't hack it in more popular PVP MMORPGs, let alone in FPS/RTS, let alone in real life. Also, broad generalizations based on no evidence are fun.

Seriously though, at least for a second ; new system more balanced than old system ? Lay down the crack pipe, brother. The only thing it did is widen the gap between good PVP powersets (of which there are a lot less than before) and everything else, and drive out casual players out of the zones.

Pre-I13 was over powered? New PvP isn't bad? What kind of heresy is this? The changes to PvP did one thing and that was make more sets suck even more. It was classic case of "I am Dev and I know better than all of you who play all the time and have a metric ton of experience."

Now before hand when SR, Invul, Regeneration, and Fire were decent, now all but Regeneration and maybe fire with a crap load of influence invested into it are completely laughable. PvP turned into LOL Defense and Melee after I13.

I had a long reply partially typed up, but this really isn't the right forum for this anyhow. Let me try to say concisely that I emphatically disagree that the new PvP rules are good as a whole. The old PvP had issues to be sure, but at its core I believe old PvP had features unique to CoH that the new system significantly took away from it. I consider the new rules the greater evil by a long shot.

I didn't PvP much under the old rules because PvP wasn't what I came to CoH to do. PvP is still not why I'm here, but now I wouldn't play the new PvP because I think it blows.

I literally spent 1000's and 1000's of hours in pre I13 pvp. It was fun. Tweeks were needed, but for the most part every AT and almost every powerset had a place. Post I13 with heal suppression, travel suppression, innate resists, mez changes...
Everything the devs hoped to accomplish had the opposite effect.
instead of a greater range of toons capable of playin and being competitive, you now have selective ATs and powersets within those ATs that are the only thing capable of performing "well".

I have probably spent a total of 100 hours in post I13 pvp.

Oh how I miss the epic battles in SC.

Quote:

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

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari Yeah, I like Blasters too.

i agree with you jam

i to was like that except i havent spent as much time pvping lol, ive gone into rv maybe like 3-4times since i13 and for all of an hour total rofl, ive done arenas every once in a while mainly because fighting ur friends can be so fun to break the boredoms back

were 2nd builds introduced before or after i13 ? I think that would solve a lot of the issues pre i13 pvp might of had.

first build for content, second build optimized for pvp

I rarely venture into pvp so I am not sure, but when I do, I check what character I am on. Some are more single target, others aoe based, I understand which will do better and which wont

Let's see -- in somewhat order, without making a gazillion quote boxes:

@Syndace -- no, I was NOT trying to mock you. I was expanding on the above "LOL at PvP" remarks and trying to give a fairly brief overview of the history of PvP in the game for all the newer players who might not have known about the so-called "improvements" to the PvP system. Nor did I think you were 13 years old, but back in Issue 2 or 3, one or two looks at broadcast chatter strongly hinted that the PvP crowd WAS a lot younger.

"we need pvp here lol i totlly pwn my buds at countesrtike why cant we pvp here lol?"
"Because the devs didn't design the game around PvP? But we're superheroes! Go. Hunt. Kill Skulz. Er, "arrest Skulls." Be glad you're not raiding and go have fun!"
"lol id pwn u 2 u noob lol u got counterstsike lol? besides im level 40 now and bored"
"That's not exactly what we call a "well-thought, compelling argument". Anyhow -- did the box SAY there was "PvP" when you bought it? No. Relax. Have fun. Make an alt. You made level 40 in 12 days? That's -- wow! But anyhow...."
"lol this game suxxors ur only level 22 u suxxors 2 roflmao ima go pvp somewhere else"

There was a little hyperbole in my post, to be sure, for comedic value. There ARE more than 38 people who read the PvP forum. There might even be 3,800 of them. Now, if there were 38,000 THAT would be a significant chunk of the player base -- BUT THERE AREN'T.

I'm glad YOU agreed that veteran players with more experience and more INF should be able to have better builds and more skill than someone who bought the game on Friday night and got PL'ed to 50 and then got pwned on Sunday night. I agree with that concept, too, but there were (are?) still some new players who wanted instant parity with veteran players and the devs tried to make PvP more "noob friendly" with their "fixes." Obviously, a lot of people don't like the "new PvP", as this thread shows.

Lastly, yes, this IS the scrapper forum, but scrolling back through the past couple of pages of topics, I don't see any other obviously PvP specific topics, whereas the PvP forum IS full of PvP specific questions and answers. However -- the "madness" I was referring to here isn't about asking PvP questions here. The madness I referred to is the scrapper forum trend towards bigger and wilder Crazy Scrapper Tricks™, such as soloing Rikti Pylons, soloing multiple AV's AT ONCE, the old RWZ Scrapper Challenge, and Arcanaville's Scrapper Challenge AE mission (arc?). (There's also mathematical madness in the way of algebra and calculus, and arguments over all sorts of survivability and damage tenths of a percentage point, too!)

For the players who don't live on the edge of scrapperlock, with health bars routinely turning a VERY dark orange, or to new players who come looking for build advice and find themselves boggling at multi-billion INF builds, this place probably DOES look like madness. For those that hang around here regularly, we view this kind of insanity as "totally and completely normal"! [Now, if someone like Werner said "hey guys! I rolled up a defender and I'm quitting the scrapping business FOR GOOD!" we WOULD find that to be just completely deranged! (And let's hope THAT never happens!)]

@kangaroo120y -- dual builds (now aka multiple builds) were introduced in Issue 13. Unfortunately, as mentioned in other threads, very few people with very expensive builds are willing to spend just as much and then some on a PvP specific build as well.

Castle completely ruined pvp by literally making it a completely different game. The changes didn't draw in any significant number of new pvp participants, and it drove away a signifigant number of pvp enthusiasts. It was really a very bad design move.

That's not to say the old pvp didn't need tweaks and fixes. The biggest problem with pvp is the huge disparity between mellee players and ranged players. You can also see this diparity in pve where the devs always make sure npc enemies have some nasty ranged attacks for players who fight from range.

The correct answer for that problem was to close the gap between melee and range somehow, which would have meant buffing melee or nerfing ranged. And the argument I often hear to justify the disparity that basically is 'you shouldn't bring a knife to a gunfight' doesn't fly because this isn't a conventional fighting game, we're dealing with superheroes. Using that flawed logic, you're basically saying you shouldn't bring superman to fight the wasp because wasp has more ranged attacks.

I would have increased the range of melee attacks so they worked similar to how shield charge works, were melee would target someone, click their attack, and they would teleport or lunge at the target and deliver damage. Ranged attacks would still have the advantage of greater range, but the disparity would not be so great as to make melee players laughingstocks in pvp.

I think concentrated strike was an attempt to do the same thing, except instead of increasing range, they wanted to see what buffing melee attacks dmg to extreme numbers would do. I guess the mindset would be that since its so much harder to land melee attacks, they should do significantly more damage.

Ultimately, the core problem is that the redesigned pvp is a complete mess. They should revert pvp to function exactly as the game functions in pve, then make tweaks from there. With castle gone, maybe one of the new guys will look into it and make sane alterations to a part of the game that could be very fun and a huge asset to this game.

People may go lol pvp but overall Castle has kept thousands of people interested in this game, he is has done more than carry his own weight as a Dev imo.

I don't really disagree, but that really is neither here nor there with respect to what was done in PvP itself.

I posted in Castle's going away thread, and I thanked him strongly for what he did in PvE. I didn't mention PvP at all, going for that whole "if you can't say something good..." I don't live my life by that adage, but there are times and places for it, and I think a going away thread is one.