ClawsandEffect

It's a clear cut case: If you want more damage, you're going to have to give up the advantage of having higher base values for resistance and defense, because THAT is what it is balanced around, NOT the caps.

You say you can hit the damage cap on your Tank all by yourself? Good for you. Show me a Brute that can do the same and you might have a leg to stand on.

In practical game play, your average player is never going to SEE the caps on a brute, let alone be sitting at them consistently enough for it to matter.

Incarnate powers are also irrelevant, because you can't tell Mr. Premium Player that he has to 1)subscribe 2)be at level 50, and 3)have run tons of Incarnate content before his character is even balanced.

That's why balancing by what an AT can do on SOs is even more important now than it was before. Because we have a lot of players with no access to anything else. Because a brute can come close to tanker survivability when it's IOed out the wazoo does NOT, in any way, shape, or form, mean that tanks deserve a buff.

You keep talking like the caps matter, while consistently ignoring the fact that your average brute player doesn't even know what his damage or resistance caps are because he has never seen them.

You talk about "potential" power like it's something every player in the game will be achieving on a daily basis, and that isn't even in the same zip code as true.

Simply put: If you give tanks the ability to hit the smae level of damage as a brute, while letting them keep their higher base values on mitigation powers, it is both unfair, and unbalancing. And it is why the devs have not done it even though you have been whining about it every day for 5 years now.

You are the only person I am aware of that thinks tankers are not being treated fairly, every one else I have seen even bring it up drops it when they are shown the actual numbers behind everything and they realize that they ARE balanced. You on the other hand, completely ignore any numbers you are shown because the numbers disagree with how YOU think things should be.

Go ahead and keep playing the martyr, Johnny. The devs are never going to let you have your way, so you can waste all the time you like whining about it.

Blazing Aura doesn't chase them away, but it doesn't have a taunt component for scrappers either.

Burn, however, WILL make them run away, but that has more to do with the damage than any mechanic it has. (It used to have a Fear component, that was removed a while back)

You do realize that you can set up Practiced Brawler to go off automatically, right?

If not, here's how you do it: Hold down Ctrl and click on it. You should see a green circle appear around the power icon. When that happens it will fire automatically every time it recharges, assuming you do not have something queued up at the time.

Do that and you can get rid of Acrobatics, it's completely unnecessary for an SR scrapper. That will help your end problems by itself.

Also, you should takle Combat Readiness MUCH earlier than you have it here, and slot it with 3 recharge immediately. You don't really need even one to-hit buff in there, let alone 3.

And for the love of Pete, get rid of Jump Kick! You didn't slot it, and you don't need it to get Combat Jumping.

I think it's option 2.

I've kept attacking with my stalker while I had the little orange ring around my AS and it stayed there much longer than it would if you let it expire.

So I suspect it just refreshes the stack.

I can't prove it one way or the other, because I have not noticed a way to tell how many you have stacked anywhere. But my experience tells me it's probably #2.

On another note, I rescind my suggestions of buffing scrapper Crit chances and resistance caps.

In all the math I did, I basically proved to myself that they are unnecessary and would probably overpower scrappers compared to Tankers.

Yes, I CAN do the math when I choose to. I just seldom choose to.

And the conclusion I reached with all of that is that if the devs decide they are going to balance all 4 melee ATs, then Brute players are going to be REALLY pissed at them.

Probably best to just leave well enough alone at this point.

Okay, in the interest of squashing the "Tankers don't deal enough damage" argument once and for all, I did some math.

The results were....interesting. For the record, all of my calculations are assuming the AT in question is solo.

Scrappers have 75% of the Tanker base value for resistance and defense powers. This is inarguable fact. I'm just putting it here for posterity and because it supports my point.

When I did the math to find out what percentage of the Scrapper damage scale te Tanker damage scale falls at, I discovered to my slight surprise that Johnny is technically correct in that tankers are shortchanged on their damage scale. But not really.

I'll explain.

Scrapper damage scale is 1.125 and Tanker damage scale is 0.8.

That works out to Tankers having exactly 71.12% of Scrapper damage scalar. So, on the surface it would appear that Tankers need 4% more damage to equal 75% of Scrapper damage, which is where it should be if Scrappers get 75% of the base defense values of Tankers. So, if you increased Tanker damage scale to 0.844 you would be at exactly 75% of Scrapper damage. This would probably get rounded to 0.85 just to make it easier.

But then you have to look at the variables: Critical Hits and Bruising.

Bruising adds a flat 20% damage to any target it is applied to, and this is independent of Tanker damage cap. In damage scalar terms, that would make that Tanker's damage scale against that particular target 0.96 (because 20% of 0.8 is 0.16, which you'd simply add to it). For the record, that would be almost exactly 85% of Scrapper damage. (85% of 1.125 is 0.95625, which rounds up to 0.96%)

Now, I did not calculate what effect Critical Hits has on Scrapper damage, mostly because I do not know the formula to determine exactly how much average damage the chance of Critical Hits adds. But, with that said, I very much doubt a 5% Critical Hit chance adds more than 10% to a Scrapper's damage over time. I strongly suspect that 0.96 is very close to 75% of Scrapper damage when you factor Criticals into the equation.

End result: With the addition of Bruising, Tankers and Scrappers are very close to perfectly balanced against each other, receiving almost exactly 75% of each other's values for defense/resistance and damage when you factor in the variables.

Also, until Tanker Max HP was buffed, Scrappers got exactly 75% of that as well. It's more like 68% after the HP buff.

That pretty much proves that Tankers are right where they need to be damage-wise. Numbers do not lie, or make subjective assessments based on how they feel about something.

That leads me to the conclusion that it is Brutes that are broken and throwing the balance point between the 4 melee ATs off, not Tankers. I didn't do the math to back that up, but it's a strong hunch.

To clarify my position further:

I do NOT believe that scrappers NEED anything at this point.

I would LIKE them to get a minor tweak or two.

I also concur with the people who would like them to remain simple. Any tweak they receive, which is at this point completely theoretical, should keep that in mind. I've put a couple ideas out there, I'll just run through them to compile what I've said thus far:

1)Critical chance increase to match stalker base crit chance, with no team scaling like stalkers get.

Incidentally, I like the idea of a Scourge-like mechanic that increases the chance to Critical as the target's health gets lower. I don't think that chance should get TOO high though, maybe have it increase up to 20%?

The idea of increased Critical chance as the scrapper's health gets lower is intriguing as well, and might be the better route to go.

Neither of those things would be a gimmick that you need to pay any more attention to than the current Critical Hit mechanic, though I could see some scrappers intentionally remaining low on health to leverage it, much like blasters used to do.

2) Slight increase to resistance cap for both Scrappers and Stalkers. I explained this earlier, but I'll do so again: It just seems odd to me that a combatant meant to be in the thick of combat at all times should be capable of no more resistance than a Defender. I think Brute resistance should actually be lowered a little as well, like the devs originall planned along with the Fury changes. 85% cap as opposed to 90% isn't going to make a huge difference in Brute survivability, and it will widen the gap between them and Tankers.

Speaking of Tankers. Bill Z mentioned making Tankers the undisputed king of agro management, and I agree with that idea. Brutes stomp on that territory a little too much in my opinion. I propose that 3 things occur to meet that goal:

1) Tanker Taunt target cap increased from 5 to 10. If 10 is too much, maybe up to 7 or 8.

2) Strengthen Tanker Taunt auras so it is more difficult to pull agro off of them. I don't know how to go about that, so I'm not going to get into how to do it.

3) Increase the agro cap for Tankers ONLY, if at all possible. I don't know if that is something that can be adjusted by AT or if it's hardcoded into the game itself. Maybe increase the agro cap to 21-24 for Tankers. With the huge amounts of enemies you fight at once in Incarnate Trials, this could almost be seen as a general improvement to aid the survival of the entire league.

Basically, make it so that if you want agro control on your team, a Tanker is the single best choice for that role.

Johnny Butane won't like that idea, but Johnny doesn't seem to grasp very well what a Tanker is meant to be doing in this game. (Hint: It's not dealing massive amounts of damage, hence the defense primary)

Those things occurring should balance things out pretty well. At least in my opinion.

Thoughts?