LostHalo

Heh. What's the current minutes per merit approximation, something like 3 minutes to each merit? Yeah, if my group's average times were the norm...

As for the RSF being more normalized towards faster play? Put simply, villains just don't have as much content to run. Granted, it also doesn't help that villain content was made second for the most part, so it tends to be on the less "busywork" side of things. As in, they have 5-10 missions as opposed to having 15 missions of which 5 tend to be defeat all clones of one another (with laughably little content to justify it usually). They are also more poorly made in regards to their challenge levels, making them rather brutal on ill-prepared teams or just outright boring for being so easy.

Stupidly enough, this then results in villains effectively getting punished in regards to rewards because the old hero stuff is poorly made.

TL;DR: Devs do hate villains!


I'm going to be amused by what will happen to Positron's reward in the next "balancing" because of the +5 levels making the TF that much easier. Of course, god forbid they apply an ounce of logic to what individual recipes cost and balance those but hey.

It's the difference in size on the AoEs. War Mace's attacks are all larger (except for Whirling * in both sets being equal sized...and WM having more damage amusingly enough) and even though the cones are marginally weaker on Mace, they're easier to maximize against a group. You wouldn't think that extra foot of radius makes such a difference but it really seems to.

Except your average Scrapper player fails miserably at providing the grouping function of a Tank that at least understands what they're doing. The only Scrappers that do pull it off are ones that have actually played good Tanks or builds with nonstandard playstyles like Spines/DA as opposed to "Lol, my Clawlz/SR can do it! Wait, why is everything ignoring me now?"

I will put it this way though:

If I have the choice of a Tank or a Scrapper and I already have a Tank, the second Tank better know exactly what they're doing or they're a waste of space (it's called leapfrog or hopscotch). A Scrapper can almost always be relied upon for at least hitting stuff. Although some have failed at doing even that.

Except it isn't and it doesn't have the other benefits of control with it.

Hell no to both options you're implying.
I hate playing Radiation because I have to go through the painfully long toggles for every mob and when you're on teams that don't suck, everything is dead by the time you finish the animation. Oh joy! I never get to do anything because I'm in animation lock!
And the factor that's making me think of rerolling my TA? Animation lock for the debuffs (and Acid Arrow being a stupidly small AoE) keeps you held in place long after everything is dead. Passive debuffs are fantastic.

That said, being able to cast it on yourself would be great.

I'm fairly confident any sufficiently powerful and clever PermaDom could probably pull it off. Probably would require a sleep however.

Soloing the STF? I'm kind of skeptical on that claim. And it isn't soloing it to be using a glitch like '-1 to level' incorrectly spawning the final AVs... I've personally been in a trio of the STF and haven't attempted a duo at all but soloing... I'm not buying that.

Except it wasn't. I overplay the whole "it's powerful!" then move immediately into saying "it's not anymore so than any other set!" It's that simple.

Damn straight.

I say nothing of the sort. My argument is that Kinetics doesn't add an egregious amount of support more than any other set available. I also then add undertones of the set doing one thing and doing that one thing really well.

Curiously, a lot of the "farming" builds I see on the Controller boards always seem to follow Fire/Storm|Kinetics|Cold (rarely admittedly, but that may be its relative age at the moment)|Radiation (this must be a TF build or something)/Fire with the occasional Plant/*, though mostly for soloing lowbie TFs.

Because Blasters live within that cap. They have no means of stepping past it. Similarly, Scrappers and Stalkers both have that same cap of 500% which they can surpass and double to 1000% damage. On a proc. Controllers don't have a proc, it's part of their attack chain to double damage 99% of the time.

I don't really have an opinion regarding Containment but when people start raging out about Kinetics, and specifically Fire/Kins, I tend to note that they're ignoring the whole double damage aspect of what is going on.

Well, I was just basing my opinion of his ability based on his original "T9" suggestions above. It's fallacious to expand my observations of him to all examples but hey.

And I honestly got bored of replying at this point. This thread has played out its amusement factor for the most part.

My writing tends to be laden with landmines of subtleties and multiple layers of implied meanings. And this particular stuff is just rapidly fired out with little concern, so you're just getting a soft breeze of how my writing can be. It's also been a long-held belief of mine that you shouldn't explicitly write "down" to your readers, just letting your natural habits show through to build a strong conversational tone in even the most dry of papers. Granted, I also think writing "up" to your readers is just as silly (I'm looking at you, virtually every modern philosophy book in existence..."I got your point 300 pages ago, why have you not moved on?!").

Of course, if you're a UniqueDragon, you might want to better yourself (or not, his utterings are still epic).

I knew this thread had potential.

You fail at reading comprehension. My point was that it gets an inordinate amount of publicity for performance in a narrow band of the game, which isn't really special since pretty much every set does well in that same band and outside of it, it doesn't fare any better or worse. It just has obnoxious publicity.

Going from 400% damage to 800% guaranteed on virtually all possible targets isn't wonky? I like Catwhoorg's option, granted, the numbers he puts in just changes the definition of the damage dealt ("Well it's not out of line, it's still just 400% damage!").

When did I say it was only "super-strong" for Controllers? Did I? No? Hey, I didn't!

Missing my point again. Good lord.
I used Melt Armor to point out that it was a bad argument to suggest FS is overpowered because it wasn't on the list of APP choices. I didn't say the incarnation available was good or bad, just that it was there (and in contrast, a power like Gale isn't on the list of options either so it must be overpowered similarly--perhaps trade Gale with Heat Loss in my example?).

Okay. It doesn't really reinforce your point but go for it.

As opposed to what? What is this "line" that makes something overpowered? Do we have measured examples that makes Kinetics cause

According to the above you're apparently not interested in disagreement.

I haven't shouted it down as far as I can tell. I'm caustic in my presentation but I also haven't denied the possibility. I just haven't been offered any argumentation in the other direction beyond "BECAUSE". Perhaps you could enhance his argument? Of course, admittedly, saying it was in his "distorted opinions" is a tad hostile but it makes more of an impact than saying "Perhaps you're overhyping the supposed problem you're seeing?"

Fire/Kins are good at a very narrow band of the game. Very good at that narrow band. They, however, get a lot of publicity from it because of just how good they are at that narrow band and how easily they can be made to demolish that narrow band. Outside of it...they're not any better or worse than other available sets. The dumbest aspect of that narrow band? Any set can destroy it as well. Fire/Kin just gets strong publicity.

And secondly, it's not a problem of Kinetics, it's a problem of Containment.

Every time someone starts calling for this nerf, they are either an awful Kinetics or they made the quintessential Fire/Kin and went after the narrow band of simplicity. Every time. This is anecdotal and insulting to say but it repeatedly holds true...particularly with the other most vocal guy in your camp.

No, but it makes the set a bigger pain in the *** to play because now you can't just fire Fulcrum and move on, you've gotta sit there and spam Siphon Power over and over on each mob in-between uses. After that, Fulcrum does not keep you alive by itself when you dive in to use it. Heat Loss can do that. Liquefy can easily do that. EMP/Arrow can do that.

After that, with Siphon Speed...you're changing the power just to spite the player. 300/(1+x) = 90, with x = 2.33. Subtract 1.00 for slotting, so 133% more is needed. Go look at the average farming build and tell me what their global recharge is before Siphon Speed. Now add Siphon Speed 3x over. Doing this would just to spite the player.

... Seriously? Yeah, you keep giving me a better picture of why you make the claims and statements you do. As for why most don't use it... Kinetics has a habit of living within the mob it is fighting. Sending those targets away, particularly when there is a great need for said "buffs/heals" to succeed, tends to not work in your favor.

After that, despite its name, Repel only has Knockback. Wanna know who gets screwed over in that regard? I'll let you guess. And what's fascinating about this is you say the self endurance recovery is sufficient to cover the cost. Have you used the power? I have. It's barely enough if you're swamped by more than 3-4 targets. And the power itself is worthless when you factor in latency and your own movement--they generally still get the melee hit in anyway.

Another irrelevant hypothetical and I already covered the stupidity of 300/90 ratio on Fulcrum when compared with Kinetics' capabilities and other sets.

Ooh, a segue into "defender damage sucks". Dead horse isn't dead enough. In regards to the inherent...there are better arguments out there. Search for them. They're pretty easy to find right now.

Quickdraw!

No.

Well yeah, SB, Transference, and IR would be largely meaningless to such MMs and the rest of the powers would result in a rather anemic support secondary for a large chunk of the game. And it's not like MMs are incapable of accessing Kinetics--it's called a team. They aren't even particularly impressive with capped damage. And the situation would be especially unimpressive when the set has effectively no means of keeping the pets alive long enough to utilize said damage (ID and healz0ring only goes so far...for the pets you send into melee). You have to remember a lot of the pets take more damage than you per hit and they even might be taking some damage from you for Bodyguard, compounding the situation.

Yeah, Melt Armor would be so overpowered, it's a great thing that they don't put that power into ep...wait. They do. They just lower the effectiveness and it happens to be part of a theme. Fire. Water. Electricity. Wind. Heart. Perhaps Kinetics can be part of power mastery...but then, each epic seems to be limited at 5 powers as of yet. Perhaps it just hasn't come.

But you know what? Gale isn't in any epics either. Hey everybody, nerf Gale, it's obviously overpowered because it's not in any epics!

You can get the same recharge bonus from Adrenaline Boost by using two Kinetics Defenders as early as level 12. And it gives basically infinite endurance as well. Nerf Adrenaline Boost. Dispersion Bubble gives more defense than two Maneuvers. Nerf Dispersion Bubble. Those powers both do more than two players ever could with equivalent powers in a single package, thus they're broken.

You don't use quotes for an entire paraphrase. English Composition fail.

Ah, so your analogies, anecdotes, claims, opinions, and examples are the only valid matters here. Anything not 100% directly completely pointed is invalid. Sorry, I forgot this was the Internet.

What ones don't? FS effectively doubles any properly-slotted character's damage. Some ATs have a damage cap of 400%. That is: 100% base + 100% enhancement. Fulcrum doubles that (and does just that). Some have a maximum of 500% with which they get other toys and amusements to work with (Buildup, Defiance 2.0, Criticals--although except for BU, this doesn't really add to the actual damage improvement) but even if you disregard those, the maximum it is doing is 2.5x damage. For Brutes with their cap of 850% damage, you're looking at an enhancement between 2 and 2.5x (assuming Fury).

I knew that right off the bat, hence why I answered your post in full seriousness. You're basically trying a "foot in the door" method, albeit very poorly.

You make the same claims and whines that others have made before but never really substantiated. Dead horse is dead and in fact, dead horse never existed except in your own distorted opinions.

Exactly. This would just be bad business.

MMOs, in general, are designed with time sinks in mind and giving people an instant skip over some of the more "painful" facets is a very, very bad thing because it results in burn outs which results in less accounts, resulting in less money. I'm kind of taking the worst case scenario for the track here but it's pretty accurate to what happens. Just try to play Diablo 2 offline with one of those character editors at hand (or Fallout 3/Oblivion/other with console cheats)--it's amazing how quickly your interest in the actual game will wither and die. That's fine for offline games with little relative maintenance but not quite so fine for online games with high degrees of required maintenance that depend on your continued support.

Hideously irrelevant hypothetical. But... I'll take it on. I wouldn't. I wouldn't want to lose the option of the T9 because in each respective set, their T9 brings something special to the set (well, except maybe Traps but seriously, that's because Time Bomb has long since been known as a gimmicky power before Traps was made--but it's hardly unusable). I honestly tried to give an option but my thoughts always came down to "Well, if I had that, then I'd lose that set's T9 which would suck ***". Except maybe Storm but then, I was never all that much into the zappy fart cloud and I would take Heat Loss before anything else in that regard. And even then, if I did that, well, I may as well just roll Cold Domination since I'd be 9/10ths of the way there, so I guess no, I wouldn't trade for FS on other sets.

Tar Patch buffs everyone's damage. Acid Arrow buffs everyone's damage every time. Assault buffs everyone's damage--even more all-the-time. Wtf is the point of this complaint? Sonic Attack buffs everyone's damage AND deals damage at the same time.

Oh? Well, that's lovely. I don't know what it has to with making the two best (instantaneous that it--V. Gases is in a class of its own) AoE holds in the game four times better than regular AoE holds (twice the duration, half the recharge, four times the effective area...).

Who are you playing with? Does your Sonic just use the large bubble and that's it? If you're getting complaints when you pull up a Sonic, you honestly need better teammates because they don't know what they're missing--or you're not giving them what the set has to offer. And on a Defender...if you enhance the -ToHit on Liquefy, you can reverse soft cap your team's defense. On a set that already halves incoming damage.

The only complaint I have ever had with the set is the endurance costs of the powers but even then, they're easy to deal with.

No, it's because you make sweeping generalizations about game balance and "despite" your 50s (which don't make for high degrees of experience), seem extremely disconnected from what your suggestions would mean to the rest of the game.

And it's not you I'm mocking, it's this strange opinion you've cultivated in your 'experience'.

That wasn't your argument, your argument was that they needed copious amounts of buffing. Now solely for reduced recharge times...that's a different argument that others have played out, and I'll add, have been played out more eloquently than I could ever do the same so I won't try to butcher them here.

So you want reduced recharge but are now okay with reduced effects?

FB has a radius of 50'. I'm rather doubtful there are that many ranged attacks that are incapable of getting past that. They're there for sure, but it hardly breaks your character, if the actual effect you claim is anywhere near that bad.

PFF and Force Bubble are entirely exclusive situations. One helps the team, the other does not (directly). After FB's relatively recent nerf, the ticks between repels are actually short enough that reduced size would damage the strength of the power.

As for soft-capping defense on a Bubbler...that's a min-maxed build. The game isn't balanced around min-maxing (sort of), or at least it's the official position on the matter. If you're going to include min-maxing into the balance, you've gotta include it in your evaluations of other Tier 9s--which get significantly more powerful as their recharge goes down--more so than Fulcrum gets.

Since you said you haven't played the set, I'll try to make it easy to get...but try doing the same herding you can do with Force Bubble with Hurricane. It's much more demanding of training and learning and is effectively what you're suggesting.

Controllers wouldn't choose FF for the hold--they would choose it for the invincible pets (teammates or otherwise) and their own strength (particularly the anti-mez, granted, the Psychic APP overrides this at extremely high levels of recharge but anyway). Force Bubble also acts as an excellent positioning tool for Controllers because of their immobilizes (or other movement-impairing mezzes). (This also falls under the Cottage Rule but I won't get into that.)

In general, choosing sets based on their Tier 9s is where you're starting things off on the wrong foot. You should be choosing sets based on the merits that each particular set has to offer with the Tier 9 being the epic usage of that particular set's abilities. And epic doesn't mean it's the best, just that it's of special note for what it can do.

Because then, no matter what, said KB power is guaranteed to at least KD the target, regardless of the resistance (purple patch or natural) of the target. Of course, outright protection supersedes that but anyway.

As for why it wouldn't work... There doesn't exist "negative" enhancement and there doesn't exist "additive" magnitude. Domination simply acts as a flag that causes a power to use a second mez magnitude. Procs are like a secondary effect that is added on--you don't actually change the existing effect, there just is another one applied. And again, there doesn't exist active "subtractive" magnitude (reactive in protection but anyway).

As for a possible workaround...have a proc with an instantaneous bonus of unresistable KB resistance that applies before any KD/KB is added and such that it wears off in 1 second or whatever the slowest example happens to be. But yeah...there's a lot more problems associated with that.



And god forbid people learn to make use of KB rather than raging out about it and/or instantly respeccing when they can't handle it.

It's not that I've personally experienced it but if you have global chat channels set up, you will see plenty of examples where people start complaining about how "hard" an encounter is...then you find out they're complaining about their full TF team failing against Romulus...and they're level 50.

The best time to observe it is to wait for a new issue that releases a new task/strike force and read all the whining.

Unless if you have Boost Range for around 600'+ like on my AR/EM Blaster (641'). Granted, usage starts to get a little tricky at the most extreme levels.

Because -all- that Fulcrum does is double the damage of a properly slotted character. That is basically its single function in regular play. Yes, it debuffs targets as well but that ends up being meaningless except against AVs or when soloing.

It has a 45 second duration. Contrast with Heat Loss which has a 90 second duration and 300 second recharge. Are you really so sure to say which is better?

Liquefy has long been a source of contention so I'm not going to get into this except mentioning that -50% in a set that can (on a Defender) already reach -30% at all times and -60% with liberal Sonic Siphon spam? On top of that fact that it's already both a soft (KD) and hard control (short duration Hold) with copious amounts of debuffing for both self-protection and offense? I'd love it but I can tell you with a high...scratch that, regular recharge build, it'd be grossly, grossly overpowered.

You think Green Machine needs anymore incentive to be obscene? Do you even recognize what this buff does?

... The damage? If you're using HT for damage, you're doing something horribly wrong. And tripling the damage would make it do what, at most 30 damage unslotted? Wtf is the point?

And your opinion is wrong. I've seen PuGs use Force Bubble successfully.

Lol. No. Okay: 120 second recharge for a double length duration AoE Mag 3(+1) Hold that also has some pretty savage debuffing attached to it? Have you played a Controller with a Mag 3 AoE Hold? If you have, you'll know why this is pretty laughably unbalanced.

Go check the numbers on Cinders, Glacier, or any of the rest. Go ahead, I'll wait.

So, I know of at least one specific friend off-hand that has a toon with Heat Loss nearly permanent. 300 seconds down to 90. They would have Heat Loss up every fight. And they'd be able to stack the recovery buff 3 times over. Why would anyone play anything but Cold at this point? With a total of -60% resistance debuffing, awesome shields, a unique +HP buff, AoE Stealth... It's already insanely awesome and you want to make HL that powerful? ...

Are you sure? Looking at your suggestions above, you're either joking or woefully inconsiderate of what the term "balance" means.

All the Tier 9 powers have their own special effects. Fulcrum has one specialty. And that is damage. That's it. On a properly-slotted character (which they would be by 32/38), the best it can do is double damage output. Any of the above sets with -RES debuffs up there can do that if paired with Sonic Attack and more. Long before 32/38. At this point, I've lost the patience to argue against your above claims further but...



Explain, point by point, exactly why you think the other powers need such blatant breaking to "equal" Fulcrum? And what exact situation made you believe this to be true? And how much AE have you had in your diet?

Too bad it can't cure the "healer's" blindness.

Not quite. These are still covered under Category 1, under both Subsets A and B. They could indeed be veterans of only this game and formed the habits. They equally could also be people that don't know the ideal methods. (And before people jump on me, I already covered the "let them play as they want" under Category 2 and possibly 4, depending on the circumstance. There are degrees of "RP", it doesn't immediately peg from nothing to tentacle catgirl.)

Nah. I just enjoy making the horrifyingly over-elaborated descriptions of extremely stupid topics. It lets my mind wind down from writing stuff that actually matters.

Habits are far easier to form than they are to break.

*And my wall of text owned you. I already covered this. :P