IanTheM1

Which is a complete betrayal of what the game was built on. Besides, the concept is ruined by itself existing. Why would I want to wear a flashy Incarnate uniform if everyone else is going to be?

Increase Density is also an underrated resistance buff. That change also worries me because it lessens the chance of them looking at how a buff that cannot be sensibly used reactively is balanced like a reactive power.

I beg to differ. Also, Mortimer Kal.

(Also please, offer another of your gems explaining how random glowy armor set #401 is clearly and definitively indicative of Incarnatehood.)

Huh, I'm pretty sure every single one of my villains have links to the Well, thanks to Mortimer Kal.

Also my Prince of Demons character has essentially been an Incarnate from level 1, and Issue 6. I hope I get the set for free if I mention that in my bio.

I too can make arbitrary arguments. I forbid you from wearing the Incarnate armor because your name starts with G.

Also let's make it so you're not allowed to use tech costume pieces unless you're tech origin.

More CoH merchandise period would be cool.

(Also, as someone whose Loyalist is a TPN reporter, unsigned to making TPN-related costume parts exclusive.)

Well there's a problem right there. Fire Manipulation only has 2 powers that provide any form of mez, and it's largely movement-based mitigation, plus the likely unreliable afraid effect in Hot Feet. Though I'm not quite clear how Blazing Aura or Hot Feet actually get anything done if you're hovering above melee. Or for that matter, how you melee. Do you swoop in and out?

That's not what I said. I said that there's no point where a Blaster would encounter a group while solo that would be worth nuking. If you did stumble into 8-16 enemies, then it would probably be worth it.

You don't fight Yellow Ink Men in any of the level ranges you can nuke. Malta are a pain to fight, period, and Rikti are binary, in my experience. Either they pose no threat or they're wrecking you.

This just confuses me even more. You're not trying to clear the whole mission with just your nuke, eh? And when I say "use inspirations to mitigate the crash" I mean "pop a blue and just deal with the problem or pop a single tier 1 purple, which will nullify 90% of trouble in the entire game". Plus I only suggested it as a method of hedging your bet against the gamble of using your nuke in the first place.

Personally, I've never actually experienced any nuke fails, largely since I always pair mine with Aim and Build-Up.

In Sam's case he was exclusively talking about Blasters. In your case, I was objecting to the idea that it would take a significant amount of time to retoggle important powers, regardless of AT.

You wouldn't be invisible when the fight began anyway - Cloaking Device suppresses like most stealth powers. If Targeting Drone is your sole method of landing hits, there's a bigger problem. The rest are more important, but aside from Tough all activate pretty darn quick. Yes, together they all add up into a large time investment but one, you don't need all seven toggles running to deal with a few nuke leftovers, and two, every single one of those powers can be activated while moving.

This sounds borderline fictitious, or you've got the difficulty cranked too hard. Between all of your debuffs and buffs, you nuke, but somehow leave enough enemies alive (either by not doing enough damage, missing, or hitting the target cap) that your team cannot handle them without your debuffs? Every single Defender nuke with a crash, with perhaps the sole exceptions of Nova and arguably Thunderous Blast, leave a hyper-potent lingering debuff or mez (or both) on enemies. This is also implying that your teammates are incapable of covering you in any meaningful way, since none of your personal defenses should be immediately necessary, especially if you can get the first two toggles back up. (Rad Emission also comes with a built-in recharge buff, which means the majority of the time your main toggles are coming back up in six seconds rather than eight.)

And if that was the case, that you were the sole thing keeping your entire team alive, then yeah, don't nuke. Defender nuking comes down to making the judgement call of taking yourself out of the fight for a few seconds in exchange for some burst AoE damage plus a singular, powerful debuff. How useful that would be varies wildly with your build and play style.

Also do you take Tough and Weave on all of your characters...?

The original purpose of this thread was addressing the imbalance between powerset nukes and Incarnate Judgement powers. But most of the arguments I've been countering have really been less "Nukes are unbalanced!" and more "Well I don't like nukes. Make them different to please my sensibilities.". You may not find yourself in the situations where nuking is totally worth it all that often, but I very much do.

Nah, the proto-Positron only shows up in the other shots, not the loading screen. What's only interesting now, thanks to recent events, is that his radiation is very blue and fiery...

Actually, wow, from a lot of these it looks like the designs have essentially been promoted to separate characters. You even have proto-Posi standing right next to Positron in one.

There are those toggles again. What toggles are you running on your Blaster?

Snipe boss, remove a fourth of his health, step in, nuke. That's what I would try. Of course, I can't imagine actually encountering resistance tough enough to make me want to nuke while solo.

That highly depends on what you're fighting and how you're going about it. If you're trying to mez a boss, yes, it'll leave you open while you go about it. But if you're one-shot holding a lieutenant, say, it's a simple jump-hold-land-nuke operation.

Wait, which is it? Do you need to use all of your inspirations all the time on your Blaster just to survive, or need to use none at all? Also, maybe I'm just reading too deeply, but are you implying you would need to use all of your inspirations to survive a nuke crash?

The real question is if that interruptable period was kept as-is because you can toe bomb. Device's relative safety thanks to Smoke Grenade + Cloaking Device makes things complicated to balance.

As someone who generally dislikes Rikti invasions (along with Zombie invasions for that matter), I thought the event was pretty cool, mostly since the devs running it were clearly spicing things up with fun or funny gimmicks.

In the case of Virtue, there were just lots and lots and lots of Neurons, followed by him using his "resurrection serum" on the IDF, at which point a Zombie invasion triggered.

Considering the event is being run semi-manually, and they're trying to get the most out of the available toolset, I think it was pretty enjoyable. Definitely not a "let's do this every weekend!" sort of event, but enjoyable.

This. I love how many hoops people try and jump through to avoid advocating a nerf to player characters, lest they upset someone with the notion. But sensible balance dictates that you fix the outlier, not change everything else around it.

With the rising ubiquitousness of ambushes and gimmick fights (such as the BAF), the usefulness of trap powers is actually slowly going up.

But that said, no, I don't believe trap powers were ever really examined to see if their interrupt/activation/recharge times were really balanced logically. Of course, Devices probably throws everything out of alignment by being able to toe bomb enemies.

I'm okay with this. Maybe slightly less than Caltrops range, but it's a good compromise.

Ouch. Being compared to Jack Emmert.

My point was less "Just get a team! " and more "If nukes leave you vulnerable, then don't leave yourself vulnerable." Of course, the post I was replying to was talking about bosses and lieutenants and getting enemies' "full" attention, which alludes to team play (or a high-cranked difficulty slider, in which case the nukes aren't the problem)...

If you don't have faith in your nuke saving the day, then don't use it; it's a high risk but high reward power. But there's plenty of things you can do, even when solo, that will mitigate the risk. Even a small bit of planning or forethought would help. Not only do inspirations still work during a crash, so do your character's own two feet. You could also mez problematic targets before nuking to make sure they don't retaliate afterwards.

I'm 100% in favor of raising nuke target caps to 24.

1) Where's your tank? Control? Debuffs? ...Damage?
2) Your team has zero additional damage to make up the boss HP difference? Including yourself?

What build are you playing that has toggles with long animation times or simply has so many toggles that are 100% critical to your survival that you need them running at all times? I can't even think of any Defenders that would normally have that problem.

And if you do have toggles that are critical to your continuing survival, then don't use your nuke.

...Well, you convinced me. Turn Poison Trap into Static Field (Trap). I am 100% okay with this. Though I'd also throw in some level of -Recovery to go with the -End. That way if you keep enemies in the patch long enough, you can turn an AoE sleep into an AoE pseudo-stun.

Considering nukes can rather efficiently destroy entire spawns, I think losing all of your endurance is a fair trade off. Now, whether it's a logical trade off, since if all goes well the mob will be dead anyway and there's nothing stopping you from popping blues/resting to immediately get back all of your endurance, that's another question entirely.

I don't really get what this means. A mez-breaker is a great power for any support AT to have access to. I'm not clear why it needs "backup" in the form of other support effects. Also, it is not a carbon copy of Clear Mind. Instead of +Perception it has Cold, Toxic, and Slow Resistance, the last of which is incredibly potent and useful.

Additionally, from previous developer comments, "reflection" type effects cannot be done in the engine.

Combining Envenom and Weaken would not be "fair". Assuming the devs weren't completely ignoring balance, it would actually be a significant nerf to the set, as now the set's primary stock of debuffs would be in a single power, with a significantly high endurance cost and recharge time.

An infection power actually sounds like a cool idea, especially since they could potentially re-use the Chain Lightning effect rather than a plain AoE. However, Poison already gets significant -Regen (which I'm not really sure is all that generally useful in an AoE anyway) and an AoE slow later in the set.

I pretty much agree with the posts above - just swap in a clone of Traps' Poison Trap. The extra -Regen might a bit overkill, though...

I'm honestly a bit flabbergasted that you think /Poison is entirely without use or worth until Noxious Gas. I know the set isn't exactly stellar compared to others (due to a whole can of worms worth of reasons, such as how Dark Miasma was slowly built up into a borderline overpowered set), but useless?

There's a fair bit you could do with Cole and Richter gaining their powers from different Pantheons. Or what if they got their powers by finding the Path of the Dark?