UberGuy

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Except WE DON'T KNOW WHAT ADJUSTMENTS/BALANCE CHANGES WILL BE MADE TO THE SET.

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No, but we have past precedent in order to base extremely reasonable predictions on.

There are no fundamental differences in power scale for any power shared by Defenders and Corruptors or for Controllers and Corruptors. The only differences are in Scourge/Containment, where appropriate. Based on that, and the assumption that AT modifiers are supposed to absorb the AT distinction, there's no reason to expect any modification to those sets beyond what's needed for Scourge or Containment.

Edit: What the hell is 'Courge'?

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But the Heal % is the same, at least I believe so.

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TG is actually a teeeny bit higher. Not enough to crow much over, though.

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AFAICT, not all villains are calling doom. Just a certain group - the ones that always cry doom. So really, is it to be taken seriously, or is it just another round of Chicken Little?

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Not everyone who sees issues with the change is calling doom. Not all critisism is doomsaying, and the fact that we're getting something (some of it quite nice) doesn't mean we shouldn't point out reasons that other things are disappointing.

Franky, certain poster's response to critisim regarding the changes is disgusting. It gives rabid new face to 'fanboi'. Are some detractors going overboard? Yes. So are some of those going on about how we should bow and scrape at how wonderful the devs are.

The reality is that, especially in PvP, heroes are very dominant. One of the most consistent villain ATs for PvP is the Corruptor, and part of (not all of) the reason for that is the strength of the Thermal and Cold powersets, which were previously unique to Villains.

Now those powerful powersets have been graciously provided to heroes, who already arguably had the PvP edge. So new, powerful tools which the side with the edge never previously had are now theirs. Villains, in comparison, got very little, if anything of PvP value - certainly nothing I'd spec on par with Cold Domination with Defender AT mods and Power Boost. And certainly nothing that compares to Blasters getting Psi Blast. (I suspect that giving Psi Blast to Corr's instead of Electric Blast would have been vastly more popular.)

Is it the last of powerset crossovers? We've been told no. IMO That's no reason to just zip it and not tell the devs what we think of these options at this time. We aren't being "gifted" with this - there's no gift horse to look at the teeth on. This is content of a sort that the devs are providing to try and keep us happy. If they didn't succeed, it behooves us to let them know.

Totally unsurprised by Fire/ and /Fire for Scrappers. Those wer, IMO, the easiest direct ports most in line with existing Scrapper powersets.

Dark Armor on a Tank is actually potentially incredible in most of PvE. I actually look forward to that.

A Defender with Cold as a primary... my God. I didn't expect that one. And I'm pretty surprised to see Controllers get /Thermal.

I'm sort of on board with folks who say Villains got the shaft in this deal, particularly from a PvP perspective. A lot of people talk about the lack of parity in Hero/Villain powers, and two of the best Villain powersets ported over to Heroes (along with whatever a Psi Blaster primary brings). The reverse is not true, IMO.

I'll be interested to see the actual powersets, but without knowing specifics my thought is I wouldn't touch an Elec/ or /Elec Stalker with a 10' pole, and I say that as someone who enjoys his Stalkers (in PvE no less). Storm for MMs and Corrs is nice in PvE. Not impressed with Elec Blast for Corrs, but I haven't messed with the set in a long time, so maybe it's OK these days.

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And I mean this as no offense to WW, but if you did rank what bits of info we wanted to hear about, the Hollows rework would be near last if not last. Giving us info at the rate of one per week I'm perfectly fine with. Just give us the stuff we want to know about the most first.

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You guys really need to put yourselves in the Dev's/Rep's shoes here.

How does what you're asking for make any sense at all except that it fulfills our desire for instant gratification?

No one with any sense ever doles out information meant to excite people with the best, most interesting news first. You give out the little things and work your way up to the best, most interesting stuff last, closest to the main event.

I want to know about the cool, nitty-gritty gameplay stuff too, but if I was in charge of giving out this info I would do exactly what they did here.

You need to learn the zen of the tags (without the capital "C").

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Stealth powers have no effect on the Rikti's ability to select a Hero or Villain as a target and their counting scanners for determing threat levels are likewise not affected by stealth.

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An epic "I told you so" to everyone that griped about Shadowfall.

An epic "OMG thank you for settling that" to DW.

Oh, my.

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In closing: LOL.

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Psst. You missed a joke.

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Slowly now...stop shaking the kitten...release the death grip...relax. Good boy.

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Hey! I'd never do that to a kitten!



I actually felt good enough about that post that this was my intention. I appreciate the reminder, though!

I do feel the need to make a couple of parting comments to the OP. Sorry, as I'm sure you know well, I just can't resist.

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My experience is based on the performance of a MA/DA Scrapper.

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STHU and GTHO mah Brute thread?

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Consider that your OP attempts to show that the mitigation of DA compared to the brute secondaries is weak. Scrapper DA has identical mitigation to Brute DA, except that Brute CoF is actually higher mag (go figure). The only sound argument I see against using a Scrapper as a metric is that blue-side experience doesn't cover how the set would perform against CoV enemies. Well, I do have a L35 EM/DA, so I've at least got that part of the game covered, and I've got 3 L50 villains, two of which are melee (one Brute). So I've got a basis for comparison on the foes.

So sorry if attempts to dismiss a Scrapper's understanding of DA's survival metrics aren't very compelling.

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Dark Regeneration? Hands down the most powerful self-heal in the game, like I said, six slot it and stick it under your arm, it's your crutch.

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I'll be right next to you hobbling along with the guys rolling in their tier-9 wheelchairs.

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What misconceptions? You mean like misconceptions like guides that tout Dark Armor as the most survivable set in the game that don't factor in edurance usage, which is Dark Armor's weakest point, especially since it's reliant on more endurance than probably any other armor set? [Edit: Should add that Arcanaville does mention Dark Armor's endurance usage being higher than the other scrapper sets it's compared to, and that it can't perform at peak levels as a result of this, but the actual calculations used to demonstrate it's the most survivable don't factor in end cost.

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And you wave your hands at the notion that this can be mitigated by slotting, obscurely stating that other sets could instead focus on slotting for more offense. That's not quantified, and proves nothing. My experience is based on the performance of a MA/DA Scrapper. Moreover, you refer fairly frequently to team performance of the sets, and while not every team contains a /Kin, one that does lets DA absolutely turn loose. Indeed, it wasn't until I was once boosted by a Kin that I truly had my eyes opened to how powerful the set was, as I survived - and defeated - a spawn that wiped out the rest of my team because I could fire DR more often and keep in endurance.

Because of that, I focused my build on strong endurance slotting of my attacks and greatly improved my overall end burn. Now with IOs the options are much more diverse and I can get all the endurance slotting I had and more with no meaningful sacrifice in accuracy, damage or recharge.

It's arguable that no armor set except possibly ELA or Invul benefits as much from IOs, because of all the toggles it has for them. Expensive? Possibly - it depends on what you go for. Even just "frankenslotting" the armors for DR/end is extremely attractive, but you can also easily go for +recovery/+end. Positional defense is also popular.

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Never does the guide once say "zomg Devs, plz help Dark Armor" because I don't believe by most standards, it needs "Dev Help."

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I cannot accept that you would not condone that a set you would advise people to "never play" doesn't need help, or that, conversely, that anyone should advise that a set that doesn't need help should be a "never play" on the basis of factual performance metrics.

That simply doesn't line up. You're trying to play both sides of the fence here, and it's not flying.

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It's never said to be "Useless" and I actually say that several reasons to play the set is for challenge or concept.

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For a great many people who play games like this, being the best and brightest is all it's about. This is the source of lots of advice you see in game about what sets people should and shouldn't take. It's incredibly naive of you to think that making the assertion that the set is only good for concept or challenge isn't tantamount to telling people it's a steaming heap of dung. Ergo: it's useless.

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Just because a majority believe A, doesn't mean A is the case.

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When it's a matter of describing the message delivered in written text, it does. It doesn't matter what the author intended, it matters what the author achieved. If people read the author's text regulawrly interpret it in a similar way then the simple fact is that the author's word choice and overall structure is delivering a patricular message.

Here are the messages I can find in this guide.
[*] "Don't ever play Dark Armor as a Brute." (Explicitly stated.)[*] "Dark Armor's mitigation is lower than any other set's." (Aggregated through attempt at illustration. Debatable.)[*] "Dark Amor for Brutes should receive dev attention because it's so bad." (Easy to infer from such strong assertions about its low performance.)[*] "Dark Armor is ineffective/pointless/useless" (Predictable condensation of the guide's message into chat messages with friends.)

I consider that last "message" a leap easy to make for those who trust guide writers to be largely objective in their works.

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Additionally: Reiraku is right to attempt to pull away the strawman arguement being attributed to the OP. I have no experience with /DA, so I don't know if his arguements are correct or incorrect, but one of the most common (and most flawed) attempts to disprove someone's arguement are to attribute things to them that they didn't say and then disprove them.

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While this would be admirable, I don't think it's what's going on. The people who will end up at the "strawman-esque" conclusion will be the otherwise uninformed readers who read the guide.

"Hmm, if it performs so badly, and must obviously need love from the devs, with all the other powersets we can choose, what's the point in playing such a gimp set? If they aren't going to fix it up they should just remove it from the Brute sets. It's obviously useless."

What we're objecting to is not that the OP made these conclusions, but that he used "facts" we dispute to make it easy for a trusting reader to come to them. If you've ever wandered through the Suggestions Forum you'll find people asking questions about all sorts of things that sound like some CoH version of the "phone game," with the most bizzare-seeming misunderstandings of game mechanics that they heard third-hand. (At least some of them come and ask about them!) The last thing I want to see is this section, of all places, becoming a platform fostering those sorts of misconceptions.

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I see more people that haven't read it as that. Is it really that hard to say "Do you believe /DA is useless?" instead of just assuming that is what he meant? It definitely would have saved a couple of pages worth of pointless semantics.

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The only person I see chasing the semantic argument here is you. You are the one who specifically started it, asking someone to quote where the OP said "useless" in response to Gilfred's use of that word. I just happen to be playing along.

The only people I have seen reply in here in an affirmative way are folks I either don't know from Adam or who their posting history specifically indicates to me that I will not aggree with their conclusions (or how they came to them). On the other hand, the people who disagree with this guide's survival assertions are some of the names on thos forum who I most respect and trust, especially in terms of the viability of powersets in terms of survival. Given that, and given my own play experience which contradicts the conclusions in this guide, and given the strong terms used ("you should never do this") I find this guide of low face value. I think that's worth discussion. I think it's worth efforts to show readers why this guide presents poor advice and backs it up with poor conclusions.

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I seriously doubt the OP believes that /DA is useless, but that for all its use, there are other sets that could do a better job.

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Then by your claim the OP has made very unreasonable assertions in his "guide", because a reasonable person would not advise people to "never" play something that was not so much less useful than the alternatives that it wouldn't be considered to be of vanishingly small use.

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Perhaps, but once again you are taking an assumption on his meaning based on "reading between the lines." If you wish to find out if he thought the set as useless, then ask him for clarification on whether or not he does feel the set useless. If he answers positively to that, then you can make such a claim. Otherwise, you're reading into a conclusion that is not presented.

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I don't need to ask him that. The very fact that so many people have, in fact, read it between the lines is sufficent to the point.

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That is taking assumptions on what he is saying. So, if you wish to attribute him to saying that /DA is useless, please do so when he actually does and not when you feel they do. Otherwise, are we to believe that Arcanaville thinks /SR is useless because it has a lower immortality line according to her comparison?

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It's a fundamental aspect of human communication to be able to read between the lines when taking in what another human being says. We all use commonly understood shades of meaning to color the words we use with more meaning than they convey in a literal sense. Inherently it may be the case that the listener/reader sometimes interprets this incorrectly.

However, it's ludicrous to try and argue that there's a meaningful communications separation in the following concepts.

"You should never use this approach because it is the weakest, least effecive approach possible."

"This approach is useless."

Stating that something is useless doesn't require that it absolutely not work at all. It can be "useless" when viewed in comparison to all the other available options. It was common , for example, for people to claim that level 50 Training Origin drops were "useless", because no one would ever want to slot them and they sold for junk prices. There's no "use" for an option to which all other options are superior, which is a specific claim the OP makes multiple times.

Moreover, Arcanaville has never tried to convince people not to play lower immortality line powersets, even in cases where their lines appear dramatically lower than those of their peers (sometihng I believe is actually represented more strongly among Brutes than Scrappers).

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I wasn't going to poke my nose in here again, but I watched that video... and yeah. I see what Haetron was saying now about Dark Regeneration being a crutch.

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OK, what?

So Granite is a crutch for Stone? Dull Pain is a crutch for Regen? Invincibility is a crutch for Invuln?

If you want to declare a cornerstone power in a powerset a "crutch" then we can go around doing that with nearly every powerset in the game.

Dark Regen is a cornerstone to the tremendous mitigation that Dark Armor can achieve. How that makes it a "crutch" is beyond me.

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Weaker does not mean useless. Try harder.

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And the parts Arcanaville highlighted in yellow clearly say "don't ever play this." If no one should ever play it it's pretty useless, no?

Try less hard.

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To date, I have seen this same mission run on a six person spawn by an EM/Elec, EM/EA, and Fire/Stone brute with no outside assistance.

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If the /Stone ran using Granite then they'll be a big outlier compared to all other sets in terms of what sort of damage they can soak.

That said, for this mission a DA has sigificantly better overall mitigation than Elec unless the person happens to actually be using their drains as mitigation - something that I have never actually known any player do intentionally to date.

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This is easily the best guide I've seen thus far.
Why?

Because it gives me a comparison of the various sets, and explains the shortcomings in significant detail of a single set that I might be interested in.

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I disagree. The reason is that the OP allowed subjective bias to influence the attempt at analysis which he provided.

His results might match yours, but they don't match mine, and they don't match some people who I trust very much to apply rigorous and largely objective analysis and observation to this powerset.

As a result, I don't think it's a good guide at all. It's a nice opinion piece. That's not what this forum is supposed to be for. At least not without more clear warning to the reader. The very fact that the post contains numbers and comparisons to other sets obscures its subjective nature.

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Except, those transitional periods almost never come up in casual game play, people save their Tier 9's for situations where they will actually need them, and don't fire them the instant they're available just because they are there. Im not trying to pretend that T9 resistance numbers are permanent parts of gameplay, but then, Toxic damage almost never is either.

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Then I think that then you undercut the premise of some of your own guide. If you use tier-9 performance to establish (conditional) superiority, then admit that people reserve that for when needed, then you need to analyze the comparative performance in terms of what happens when those things actually are needed.

Imagine you've got Elder Snakes, a DA and an ELA. The DA has some resistance and a big heal. In general, this is a good situation to be in - the DR alone is probably not enough, but it takes the edge off the damage to buy more time for the heal. The ELA has no resistance and a smaller but faster heal that may be interrupted by DoTs. The ELA might actually need his Power Surge there to match the pace the DA can roll at. The problem is it wears out - what then?

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Exactly why can't you click them when you need them? The only reason you could not, would be if you had used them previously, and that still shows their overall usefulness.

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This appears terribly flawed to me. You cannot simply assess their availability with such sweeping terms. An example of how to analyze this sort of thing is in Arcanaville's comparative surivivability comparisons. You have to compare both uptime of clicks versis consistent value of toggles/passives and the more discrete effects of needing to click things (there are transitional periods where you simply cannot activate the power even when you want it).

This would be similar to basing Invincibility's survivability on the assumption that it fired Unstoppable constantly. Doing so creates a terribly skewed view because if you actually absolutely need Unstoppable to survive then you are almost guaranteed to die (or flee) when it ends, and would probably do so even if it had no crash at all.

This is the sort of thing I think Deus is referring to as the spin. Your assertions sound reasonable and I don't neccessarily think you out to be dishonest, but I think you're glossing over important analytical details that would lead to different conclusions if you actually analyzed them more carefully.

Amusingly, in a team context, my DA Scrapper is normally one of the first characters to pile into large spawns for precicely the reason that I immediately disable many of them - I fill a role somewhere between that of Tanker and Controller.

(I do have a DA Brute, I'm just bringing up the Scrapper in response to your mention of roles.)

I really believe this comes down to playstyle - that you have a preferred playstyle for which Dark Armor is a poor fit. That's fine. I think I and possibly others posting here have found (and can enjoy) playstyles that fit DA's strengths and weakensses. The problem that remains then is that your guide doesn't really talk about that - it tries to assert that DA is numerically inferior and/or inferior based on the frequencey with which its weaknesses are exploited by the game. At best it tries to assert that DA is contrary to the building of Fury. That, at least, I can agree with to an extent.

FA's "moar damage" comes in two forms. Burn, which not all FA Brutes take without access to their PPP immobilize, and Fiery Embrace. FE is not a significant contributor to its overall survival. It is +80% damage for 10s if you have any primary besides Fire Melee, for whom it is +100% damage for 30s. For Fire Melee that's a significant buff, and that much addtional offense can translate into survivability, but I challenge you to show that the damage buff from FE is worth the difference in mitigation tools available for DA. After all, you can't defeat it if it defeats you first, and I don't think any of us are talking about soling standard missions here.

Healing Flames is not superior to Dark Regen. Yes, sure, you can come up with conditions where it can be. You might be facing one foe. You might be severely toHit debuffed. Your foe might have massive defense. In trivially common team situations DR is going to be a full heal, every time. DA's mitigations scale proportionally with number of foes (though DR saturates quickly) while FA does not scale at all.

Basically, I believe that your attempts to claim superiority of FA over DA reveal your bias. This guide isn't a factual one, though it contains facts. It is an opinion-based guide. While many guides contain opinions, I believe this one combines a negative spin with a certain amount of disinformation motivated by your bias against Dark Armor.

Personally, I disagree with your use of this section of the forums to negatively promote something. While I'm aware of no rule that says you can't post such a guide I think it violates the spirit of the section, which is to promote how to be successful with a given AT or powerset, not how to avoid it because it sucks - something I contest you've proven factually.

PS: I have a SM/Fire Brute which I enjoy dearly. I'm not down on FA. I just don't think you've given a fair, unbiased comparsion of the powersets in this "guide".

Nearly every response you've offered in regards to why not to play Dark Armor apply to Firey Aura. Obvious exceptions are FA's ability to stack Toxic DR through HF and the fact that HF has no toHit roll dependancy. However, FA suffers the same weakness to knockback (with attendant cost in either power picks/endurance or slots for IOs) and the lack of a "real" Tier 9. In fact, many of your comparsions include the use of their Tier 9 to show the superiority of the other sets - something which obviously one cannot do with FA. I assure you that it's a bad idea to ask the FA to tank an AV.

Mostly then that leaves the dislike of control as a mitigation tool because you feel that it diminishes Fury gain.

So I'm curious then why this guide is only about Dark Armor, since most of the same complaints can be applied to FA.

Let me note that I have a SM/FA Brute at 50, so I'm interested in your response.