Jabbrwock

The problem is, we only get the new numbers if we actively look for them. The text descriptions are the first thing we see. That would be fine if they were at least usually correct and informative. In actual practice, they are quite often neither, straying far too often into the actively misleading.

Ideally, either the text descriptions would be systematized into something that actually meant something, or they would be replaced by actual numbers. Either works, I'd prefer the second, but either works. In practice, though, I think the devs have enough on their plates that even if they consider this a problem, they're still gonna give it a pretty low priority.

Same reason you need tanks even though you can make a scrapper with tanker level defense. Better aggro management tools, and easier time getting that defense/resistance, higher base HP and HP cap and the associated improvement to regeneration and click heals.

Technically, the Sky Raiders are now a mercenary force. . . where's the Porter for Mercs/ Masterminds?

Would making the backlash damage take buffs and any damage enhancements in ET solve the problem?

I for one never run Fly in combat, and always have enough recovery to run Fly plus my toggles indefinately, so it doesn't bother me. It's borderline on my Mastermind, though - he doesn't have Stamina, and Fly + Leadership toggles will slowly drain him, IIRC.

The problem is not that they nerfed ET, it's that they nerfed it too much, that the set had very little else to recommend it, and that they did not buff any of the set's weaknesses when they severely nerfed its single great strength.

They also reduced the stun in Total Focus so it's no longer a boss stun, and I believe they slightly improved Barrage, but it's the ET change that really hurt the set.

I just checked on my SS/Elec Brute, and the Rage crash did not send any of his (normally zero) defenses into negative numbers, while in perma-Rage. Granted, I only checked two cycles. It did not even send any of his few extremely low defense scores down to zero. Just to make sure, I took Rage off of autofire, and sure enough, the Rage crash drove all my defense scores into negatives. Does Tanker Rage work differently from Brute Rage?

This, except I believe EB's were meant to be on the boundary between soloable and not.

Personally, I do have some issues with what normal contacts will dish up to you when you're solo, at least hero side, but that's more a matter of simultaneous click missions than Elite Bosses. And I think it's absolutely insane to believe that the devs are even *ABLE* to make sure that everything in player created content is of an appropriate difficulty level. That level of control is impossible without requiring that they validate every single player created mission and all the enemies within it, unless somebody cares to propose that the MA be crippled to an apalling degree.

I honestly think taking away the 90% res cap was a mistake - at least leaving it taken away after the GDN and ED prevented Scrappers from coming anywhere near Tanker numbers. It's just a penalty to resistance sets to pile on top of the relative rarity of resistance (compared to defense) in pool powers and set bonuses and the completely out of whack relative imbalance of resistance vs. defense inspirations. Dropping the resistance cap to 75% made sense when it happened, but right now it really serves no purpose beyond driving home beyond doubt the absolute inferiority of resistance vs. defense.

And an equally obvious mechanical disconnect. Anchor toggles + largely uncontrollable knockback = ?fun?

You not liking the reason does not negate its existence. It's pretty clear from the way it's coded that the devs regard NR as more of a substitute travel power than an alternative Sprint. That's not simple stubbornness, that's the power being what it was designed to be.

And there's plenty of folks who already prefer having Controllers on their teams than Defenders. After all, with pets, Containment, and epic aoe's, the Controller will quite likely bring more damage, and the control effects are dramatically potent at mitigating damage in ways that Defender secondaries don't usually (ever) match.

I don't think any AT is doomed. I do think a few will have their shortcomings made dramatically clear when they have to compete directly with what are currently opposite faction AT's for every team, and not just for the relatively few co-op zone teams. But even the worst, least viable character will have its fans, and if we see fewer Defenders, we will still see some of them. And maybe we'll have fewer Lord of Winter fights called off because there were no debuffers, only Tankers, Scrappers, and Blasters.

Well, that picture isn't actually that bad - it works out to about 3% more damage for Scrapper SS than Brute SS on the base numbers. The trouble comes when you figure in crits and double stacked Rage.

That said, I don't see any problem that couldn't be solved with a simple tone-down of Scrapper Rage to not be 100% damage. 80% damage buff from Scrapper Rage might actually be too weak unless double stacked - the set is awfully lame without Rage, after all.

At any rate, it's not an obviously unsolvable problem, and to me, the set doesn't seem particularly non-Scrapperish. Then again, I've never really had much respect for barring sets from archetypes for thematic reasons. Theme is what you make of it.

I'll give that a shot, but I really like the look of that dark shield. Using the lava shield for now.

Regardless, Fire/Shield is an awesome pairing, even if I have to take the cavalier shield or something lame like that.

I'm not sure where your numbers are coming from. Defender with Assault and 95% damage enhancement is doing 0.65 * 2.1375 * 1.6 = 2.223 damage. Blaster with Assault and 95% damage enhancement is doing 1.125 * 2.055 = 2.311875 damage. That's ~96.2% of the Blaster's damage, which is admittedly more than I expected since last time I did the calculations Cold Domination wasn't available to Defenders. And I thought nothing had happened to improve Defender damage.

Were you calculating without any damage enhancements in the powers? That gives 99.3%, but it's not very realistic.

Edit: then again, assuming that the Blaster took Assault isn't terribly realistic either. Nor is ignoring Defiance v2.0 and Aim and Build Up. I'm just gonna wash my hands of the whole affair at this point, math is not my thing I guess.

Any team with 3 or more Defenders is most likely unstoppable. Degenerate cases (like stacking 3+ FF Defenders) may be exceptions, but it's a solid general purpose rule.

-HP will disable them permanently if you can stack enough of it. Not like Jaegers are particularly tough kills. Or maybe that's my predominantly smashing damage bias speaking.

I was kind of disappointed that I couldn't color tint the Dark Shield option. To my mind, that option colored in red and orange would look more like a shield made of fire than the existing fire elemental shield option, which looks more like lava.

Anybody know why they won't let you recolor that one?

I'm pretty sure that no Defender build can debuff resistance enough to meet Blaster damage with the same blast set. In fact, I'm positive of it, since Defender damage scale was reduced to 0.65 from 0.75 explicitly to prevent that from happening, and this was back when Blasters only had damage scale 1.0. Now that Blasters have a higher damage scale and a better inherent, it's not even close.

The real problem is that ET was the only thing Energy Melee had going for it. At a bare minimum, it should have remained the best melee DPA champion, since it's the only melee power out there that eats a chunk of your health. That train has left the station, though, and I'm not seeing any real chance of ET getting a new animation. In fact, I'm not seeing any real chance of anything in Energy Melee getting a new animation. My suspicion would be that if anything happens, it will be a normalization of Whirling Hands to a more standard AoE attack in terms of damage.

That's why I included the caveats that I did - that maybe things would change in GR, but that with current content (implying to me also current AT balance) I'd prefer Brutes in nearly every situation.

We can't know what GR is going to be like. What we can know, or at least believe and debate about, is how the AT's balance up today, now that we have reason to believe that faction based barriers preventing villain and hero AT's from competing with each other are going away. To whatever extent any discussion of balance on these forums is worthwhile, this one is - after all, understanding the balance for the status quo is key to moving it to where it needs to be in the future.

Not sure if this is a typo or a misconception on your part, but the PBAoE endurance recovery, Power Sink, is autohit. It has no to-hit check. Also, Energize is a heal/regen click, not a heal/recovery click. More specifically, it's a heal/regen/endurance discount click.

Just had to chime in on one of my favorite secondaries. Electric Armor feels awfully squishy to me, but it's a ton of fun, and the gleeful abandon with which I can spend my endurance because there's always more just takes me to my happy place. I cannot recommend it with Fiery Melee just because the set really benefits from some mitigation in the primary, and FM has none. Electric Armor is only marginally tougher than Fiery Aura.

Nothing's going to die off with GR. That doesn't mean that Tankers are going to be at an acceptable balance point when they have to compete directly against Brutes for team tanking positions.

Tanking is a binary proposition - either you're good enough, or you're not. Either you control the aggro and don't die, or you lose control of the aggro, or you die. Or both. There are no bonus points dealt out for overperformance with tanking. If you're still alive at the end of the fight, and you kept the baddies from murdering your teammates, that's that.

There are always bonus points dealt out for dealing more damage.

That's the problem. The only way Tankers can really hold their own against Brutes is if there is stuff in the game that Brutes just plain can not tank. Maybe we'll see that with the new content coming in GR. I'm willing to wait and see, but I'm quite sure that with current content, I would rather have a tanking-specced Brute tank for my team than a Tanker, because the Tanker's extra capability is pretty much wasted, and the Brute's extra damage isn't.

That's a complete non-sequitur, frankly. There's a simple reason CJ doesn't work with Ninja Run - CJ doesn't work with any +jump toggle other than Sprint. Ninja Run is obviously and hugely superior to Sprint, giving it the same treatment as Sprint would be completely absurd. CJ being exclusive with Ninja Run is just the devs following the basic balance rules for powers they've always followed. Quickness being inferior to Hasten, however, is a fairly significant violation of the general balance rule that powers in power sets should be superior to pool powers.

I tend to agree with you though, that the devs will likely ignore the issue with a handwave. Super Reflexes is not regarded as underperforming at this point in the game, and I don't see the devs in any rush to "fix" things that are doing pretty well, even if individual powers within the sets seem pretty poor.

I mean, seriously - if they're going to buff an armor set, I'd rather see Fiery Aura get ungimped than SR go from being one of the top choices to. . . still one of the top choices.

Well, that's not why it's a high level vs. low level situation, though.

It's always more effective to slot an attack for endurance reduction than a toggle. However, at high levels, you may have the endurance management tools to handle less effective use of your endurance reduction slots, and may have attacks fully six-slotted with other stuff. Your armor toggles, though, only need 3 slots of SO's to be fully effective, after that any additional slots may as well be endurance reduction. My usual response to this situation is to frankenslot, or just build full sets, but there are plenty of people who rely on SO's or common IO's. For that matter, even folks who are frankenslotting or building sets still have to actually acquire the set IO's they're going to use, and until then, make do with the cheap stuff.

At low levels, you flat out need endurance reduction in your attacks in order to continue attacking and thus build Fury. At high levels, you *MAY* be able to get away without, and further *MAY* have a reason to do so. So sometimes, endurance reduction may be better (for your character) in armor toggles, even though it's obviously better (strictly for conserving endurance) in your attacks.