Frosticus

I agree and I think that is why some of the better formed suggestions are FF and traps, ideally with provoke.

I'll emphasize traps because it just has a lot more tools than FF that will greatly reduce any damage that escapes the tankfenders control. That and the fact that it can just as easily kill the whole group itself.

the only short coming is that the FFG didn't receive a mez protection bump when ported to defenders and 7 points can occasionally be overcome even with all the distraction and mitigation values that traps can generate. I say occasionally because seekers will soak up most of the mez that would initially overwhelm.

That isn't to say other primaries can't do the job. I know I've taken lead numerous times on my storm/sonic and drawn the vast majority of the agro the entire encounter. It just isn't as easy to do without support as it is for a well built trapper ime.

The CoX business model has evolved considerably over 6 years. It is far from being a straight subscription based revenue stream.

On a slightly different tangent, I have respect for any MMO that opens up shop and manages to turn a profit these days. It is way harder than it used to be. Suffice to say if CoX launched now in the shape it did back in '04 we would probably be joining the ranks of Tabula Rasa.

I think it goes without saying that things change over time. We've seen a definite shift away from pure subscription based models in the last few years and I well imagine that shift will continue. Whether that means more DDO style systems will be popping up who's to say (they aren't exactly rare). But just like how layered defenses are the best in this game a layered revenue model is probably the best for MMO's as well. Which CoX has already taken steps to moving toward. The 2010 Financial report might be an indication that another step in that direction will be coming at some point too.

CoX has survived and even done well for itself for 6 years, but it has not done so using the same business model the entire time.

If you have read this thread in its entirety you wouldn't be posting this. This thread is an example of the exact opposite of what you are saying.

I don't think anyone is saying what you think they are saying. Have you read the thread?

I'm getting a strong feeling a lot of people posting haven't actually read what they are posting about.

I'm sure if he was an editor, or a copywriter, or some other profession that specializes in writing he would have spell checked it.

Are you sure you want to liken a Lead Programmer position to someone casually posting in a forum? I don't think that will have the desired effect you are hoping it will.

For the purposes of this discussion programming has a lot in common with accounting. I mean aside from requiring far less education and not having nearly as much accountability. But the point I'm eventually working toward is that they both involve going over your work with a fine tooth comb while starring at loads of information that wouldn't make any sense to an outside viewer. Is it hard? sure. Are you paid to do it? yes. Is it your career choice? yes. Will mistakes happen? you bet. Should you be held accountable for those mistakes? and here's where the drama started in this thread.

We know an audit of the power never happened, but hopefully an audit of the process will occur and things will be better in the future. That's all I personally care about. What's done is done and what happens from here on out is what matters. Continually striving to improve our performance is an admirable trait.

Definitely. Most doms have to wait until 35-38 to unlock key attack powers too.
/fire without blaze isn't that great
/psi without PSW
/thorny without ripper and barrage
/ice without slash and bib
/earth without fissure
/elec without thunderstrike

The only secondary that doesn't really care is /nrg (not that powerburst isn't a good attack, but nrg already has 3 solid ranged attacks and 2 melee attacks by 28).

Both AT's tend to mature kind of slow, but the main difference is that controllers have stronger base values on their controls and buff/debuff to assist those powers. So while doms tend to be mediocre at both control and damage until later game, trollers at least control well and do mediocre damage.

Domination sure is great though. The problem I've been having since the revamp with the two that I've tried leveling is that with the higher end burn I need domination for the endurance refill. If I could just pop it every 90 of 200 seconds the weaker controls would no longer be an issue. But I have to choose between doing more solid control or playing with minimal downtime. As the toon progresses though and gets endurance under control the use of domination shifts to more intended purposes, but ime that isn't until the late 20's at the earliest, often later. Control powers aren't very friendly on the blue bar and neither are the increased dpa assault powers.

If you are in to doms though they are really fun and they certainly don't feel weak.

Actually you did ask for education. You asked me to compare every single build in the game. I'm assuming you did that so you could draw relevant conclusions. I have compared a heck of a lot of them, but I'm not going to post the 50 page thread necessary to reach the answer that I already know.

So I asked you to narrow it down in order for you to show that you have some initiative and actually want to learn rather than just being spoon fed.

It would appear that you'd rather just happily go on in ignorance. That's fine, I don't really care how you go about your life, just don't try to call me out on something unless you actually want to hear the answer.

If the thread progression is followed:

He asked for advice on doms, which he received from a number of people (mine was plant or earth/fire)

He asked how doms compare to trollers, I answered they are different. Controllers built to purpose do a lot more aoe damage than doms (which isn't hard as doms kinda don't do much aoe do they?) and can also produce more st damage than everyone but /fire. If he is asking about /fiery doms (or high damage in particular) I highly doubt he is going to turn around and roll some bottom of the barrel earth/ff troller with the expectation it is going to fly through mobs.

I also explained they go about their business in very different ways. Doms are direct, trollers are lithe.

If controllers built with the intention of dealing damage deal said damage as well or better than most doms and they also have powerful buff/debuff abilities this means they are ultimately going to be more powerful than doms.

Now sure, IO's are going to make both AT's much better that goes without saying, but something like a fire/rad is still devastating on SO's, arguably more powerful than any SO'd dom combo.

The sad thing is that a lot of the fun aspects of playing a dom such as applying direct damage trollers also get to do. And very well. They just don't get to do it until the late game. But if you enjoy smashing things with seismic smash and fissure on an /earth dom, well trollers are better with those powers and do more damage with them. If you like throwing fire, well trollers get fireball, which is the epitome of fire casters imo and doms don't.

Also he speaks to the positive experiences he's had with FotM's in the past. Most FotM's either mature very quickly or reach much higher than average potential. Almost no doms mature quickly because of poorly ordered secondaries (/nrg being a major exception, but then it only deals st damage) and control sets themselves usually don't hit their stride until SO's. The other aspect is chasing them for their peak potential (ie high inf and time investment) and some doms certainly pay off very highly in that department. Perma dom is astounding as is the high recharge boosted attack chains in the assault sets. Not quite as astounding as what similar investment will get you in the troller department though. For the most part anyway.

All that said, if you read what I told him about the doms I have recommended I have said nothing but praise. Despite the revamp though, they are still an AT that takes more effort to get good bang out of them. That isn't for everyone. And I hate to say it, but if someone has previously gravitated toward FOTM builds a dom may well not be to his liking. I say try it out though and I recommended two powerful doms both of which mature about as quick as possible for the AT and both of which have some of the highest peak damage potential within the AT as well.

But he should know that a dom that can "lock down large groups and then lay waste to them" (or something of that effect that he said). Is also the same dom that pulls aggro like Me in a thread where Castle posts inaccurate information lol.

You need a good minion melter and purples will start to come your way. More specifically you need a toon that can move through an entire group in roughly the same time as it would move through a x1 spawn.

MM's are insane too. I finally got around to leveling one and tbh my bots/storm is almost unparalleled in power.

That said, yes I'm specifically talking about peak potential. The best means no limitations. Far from norm of course, nowhere near what the average user will experience with the toons and very much tweaked to be extreme corner cases. Heck, just slotting a controllers controls for damage is straying far from the norm

The best "cheap" toons, if that is a category able to be distinguished are probably MM's and brutes, like you say.

Ya that dom was frickin' sick. You should see the ill/fire dom I have planned if we ever get it and it would actually be able to leverage the damage in situations that matter to have that kind of damage potential.

There is a reason I noted this caveat earlier:
If you can build a chain of incin>fireblast>blaze on a /fire dom it is one of the highest st damage chains possible. It trails a fire/elec blaster by a bit, but not much else out there. It's Largely due to the fact that if you have enough rech to power it then FE is up nearly 65% of the time. You need 364% rech in blaze though!, so +264% buff. That is pretty extreme. A chain that includes flares drops in significantly.

I know it was theorized that fire/elec blasters should be above 300 and they do, but not once you factor in all the powersink spamming that needs to occur to actually run it.

I think the two top damage single target damage builds go to fire/fire/mace dom and a bane/w mace epic perma pet build (even with all the redraw factored in). I'm confident that both could break 400, or at least come within kissing distance of it.

The problem of course is that neither of those toons really has anywhere they can flex that ability in game. It is more of just a figure to brag about vs dummy targets

The problem lies in the definition of damage. Everything that extreme dps is of value against tends to also have a high regeneration rate, so -regen starts to become analogous with damage. Not to dodge the question, but what kind of target do you set to be the standard because -regen is of high value vs AV's and extremely high value vs GM's.

The other issue is that everything that such high damage is useful against usually requires fairly high survivability. Which pretty much junks that fire/fire dom build I constructed.

That said, there are a number of builds (fire/rad, fire/therm, ill/cold, fire/cold and probably a few more) that at least on paper can break into he low 300's of effective dps vs AV's and actually have the survivability to showcase it.

On paper I know of a few builds that can edge trollers out for single target damage, some by a fair amount. In game and actually using the build against things that allow high st damage to be utilized it is a lot less clear. I managed to kill Chimera in 1:58 on my fire/storm just prior to the LS nerf (that is 333 raw dps cause no -regen). I was building it to hit 350 and would have too and the only reason I was doing that was because it would be faster than a fire/rad/fire by about 20 dps in the same situation and I wanted to prove that storm could provide enough damage to defeat the claim that regen is king vs AV's.

I didn't say those things though. I wouldn't say those things because those statements aren't true.

I said trollers are a. The most powerful class in the game. b. Because they are the best at everything. I said that because it is true. Of course it takes specific builds specialized to do certain tasks, that is true of every AT in the game. No different for trollers they are amazing, but they don't transcend the confines of the game.

Now "best" is a nebulous term, there are probably a couple activities where a troller is only in the top 3. Probably, maybe. I can't think of what it would be, but it probably exists. That said, no other AT comes close to having a build(s) that can medal in every single conceivable game scenario, which pretty definitively classifies them as the best and most powerful AT in the game
Are you looking for simple completion as the goal? When I say the best I mean the best. Do you want me to provide you with a troller build that will kill a pylon faster than the fastest scrapper on record? Or would you like to make a different task selection?

IMO the set needs more slow resistance, like upwards of 60%+, it still relies very heavily on its heal, the 20% added to temp protection was mildly pacifying, but is still easily overwhelmed by pretty much any and all -rech thrown at it.

Blazing Aura is just a tiny bit better than other damage auras. I think it needs to inherent the standard chance of additional fire dot. Obviously pretty low value, just ticks of like an extra 2 damage. Does two things: makes BA better and gives it the impression of setting things on fire cause even if they leave the aura they can still take a small amount of damage. Increase radius to 10ft (this can happen to all auras imo)

FE needs to be improved a lot. 30 duration for fire damage (to match brute/dom), 20 duration for non-fire. Reduce rech to 150. It provides no tohit buff so it should be a bit better than buildup at boosting damage.

Love to see Rofflecopter of the Pheonix made usable while alive. Even if it comes with a heavy damage reduction down to 150-200 base.

Some great ideas for burn have been presented in this thread already. Back when we were all happier about life I'm still a huge fan of making it into a firewalk kind of drop pet, but that is probably a pipe dream.

Raises hand. Also did you count yourself?

They aren't delicious though. All they are doing is blurring the issue by streaking the ink. It really reads like a child crying in hopes that the parents won't take away w/e it is the child is doing. I'm sure a concrete doctrine could be drawn up that would be very profound and compelling in defense of server segregation, but the one referenced in this thread isn't it.

I think the discussion has moved past where you think it is.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Castle say he is the one that did the original design for SC?

And if I'm reading correctly it never made it into the live game following that design principle. He then Ok'd it for a massive change, but didn't bother to check the results of that change.

He also referenced incorrect information about the power suggesting he didn't even have the right information until Arcana provided it (I don't think I was alone in my "who farted" look at the numbers he posted). How long would this issue have gone unnoticed for? I mean it wasn't noticed from the other numerous postings about the power prior to this.

I'm honestly not trying to be disrespectful I'm trying to find out why this break down has occurred. There are a lot of things I'd like to see happen in this game. They have less likelihood of happening if the powers team needs to revisit things and dump hours and hours into fixing something that should have been rectified before it ever went live. And if not then, then certainly when a second change to the power was authorized. It really really really has nothing to do with seeing the future like SDragon has unsuccessfully deflected with. Castle said he designed the power to operate in a certain manner and it initially went live not operating in that manner. You don't need a crystal ball to determine a problem. You don't even need any foresight, just the ability to cross your t's and dot your i's.

If you want me to thank him for saying he'll eventually fix this issue I won't. It is unnecessary. In fact, I'm not convinced dumping more hours into this set is worthwhile because it sounds like a redesign of the power is what will happen. It won't happen for many months still and by then everyone will have grown accustom to how it functions and it is just going to be another nightmare when it goes down. I'd rather he just sets it back to the original live value so that the problem is less glaring and then move on to other projects.

I will say thanks for looking into FA. In fact, I already did.

It's because I have respect for his position that I demand high quality and consistency. Just as I have high expectations of the Partners at work, or the CFO, or the VP of marketing. If you have the title it comes with expectations of performance. Mistakes can and will still happen, but this time it sounds a lot more like not looking before crossing the street rather than a piano falling from the sky and randomly hitting you.

I have no interest in educating those that are unable to educate themselves. How bout you name a build that you think is the best at something and I'll make you a controller build that will beat it. Feel free to also remember the specificness to which I said the claim about controllers.

No more than you have any idea of it and can definitively say the things you are saying. The statement that you claim defeats my argument actually defeats yours completely. The difference is you are fear mongering with yours and I'm being rational with mine. When you have a red name I'll take your vitriolic rants and sense of entitlement as something more than a fear of sharing your toys.

People that say "it can't be done" when they have no idea of what they are talking about are a personal pet peeve of mine. Such an unambitious view of the world aggravates me to no end. But there is a really large difference about what we are talking about. See, I have no idea how easy it would be to implement, but I'm not speaking to that, I'm speaking to overcoming the initial hurdle of how to approach the resolve without "losing characters, sg's, etc" that you are fear mongering with. The technical implementation is either possible or it isn't, at which point it just becomes work. And work being hard or easy is a subjective qualification.

That diatribe of tears posted on the first page will do nothing if/when the company decides to proceed. I seriously hope you guys don't think that it will.

Controllers can do everything better than everyone else. They aren't hugely popular because they take a long time to mature and even while outperforming everyone else they do it subtlety with a very high flow of dot damage rather than huge orange numbers (exception being controller seismic smash). That and very few people spec their controllers to maximize damage output.

Things like fire/rad, ill/rad, fire/kin, plant/kin, fire/storm, earth/storm, ill/cold and others are simply disturbingly powerful if built to the purpose.

And no I don't mean something as niche as a fire/kin farming s/l mobs only. People that think that combo is limited to doing that have either never played it or don't know how to play it.

Trollers do have some deep lows as well, but you'd no more pick something like an ice/ff troller for the purpose of dealing damage than you'd pick a /nrg dom for the purpose of dealing aoe damage. That is implied and really shouldn't need to be stated, but I'm doing it because it probably does need to be stated or someone will come along and pick that nit.
edit: see what I mean?

Why can they be more powerful than dominators? because buff/debuff sets are > assault sets at determining peak power and because trollers have exceptionally potent epic powersets available to them. It results in a very different playstyle, which I already pointed out though.

Based on the things that only you said in that thread I'm pretty sure we determined you were the one that was perverted. I think the admins agreed and gave you a little vacation to explore some of those taboo fetishes. I don't judge, but leave that stuff to more appropriate discussion boards, they aren't hard to find.