UberGuy

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But the great majority of melee-range damage is smashing, particularly for /Electric and /Energy, and nobody had their defenses cut that much in that department.

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This is false. Lethal/Smashing was reduced a minimum of 33-50% across the board, with some powers being reduced to 1/4 their original resistance.

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more like "you should need someone with dedicated mez abilities to bypass my mez protection, solo"

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So while we're adhering to a rigid tank/healer/damage/crowdcontrol model, shouldn't it be expected that a tank or brute shouldn't actually be able to get any kills themselves, but get a damagedealer. I considered putting a question mark after that sentence, but frankly I don't care about your answer.

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Tankers never had especially low damage, nor have the devs ever claimed they should be unable to deal their own damage.

The only ATs the devs have ever made comparisons to for damage/defense ratios are Scrappers and Tankers.

It's (near) identical crap to what a Scrapper gets with Dark Mastery.

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NOTE: Before you ask--yes, what I've shown here states that recharge enhancements are NOT allowed in the 15 minute recharge pet powers.

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Supremely dissapointing.

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The melee people should not have to worry every time they see a blaster run up to them. It should be the other way around; blasters should be afraid to get into melee range.

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I want to toss in that a melee character should have to worry. Blasters are supposed to have very high damage, and (looking at thier powersets) they are supposed to be extra damaging up close.

The difference is that a Blaster's up close damage needs to be very "bursty". They need to do a lot of damage fast and then get out of dodge, falling back to deal damage at range that may get them the win on their damaged foe. This is my image of how the AT should work. Just because they deal a lot of damage in melee range should not mean they want to stay there.

In practice there are problems with this because of things like the animation times of powers, etc. Jousting helps, in turn, counter some of these limitations.

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Which are strangely unclickable when you've been mezzed after your Unyielding or Rooted or Wet Ice drops.

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It is irritating to see this harped on over and over and over. Just because you're playing tank/brute/scrapper does not mean you are on a higher plane from everyone else and should simply never ever have to eat a breakfree. It would never occur to me when playing ANY character, brute or tank or whatever, to enter a PVP playfield without a few breakfrees. Refusing to make use of a readily available and very effective tool that is pretty much a requirement for everyone else is simply bad tactics, and imo nobody should be rewarded for stubbornly using bad tactics.

Repeatedly pushing this forward also seems to me to glaze over the fact that you CAN carry breakfrees just like everyone else, and much of the complaint in this thread would be simply irrelevant.

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There is a difference between what you are saying, above, and having to rely heavily on Break Frees as your mez protection. Having an AT inherent protection from mezzes should be useful. The problem with toggle dropping as a mechanic are that:

*) It allows the binary disabling of powers which are features of an AT.
*) Its chances to do this were, for some powersets, very high
*) Some of the powersets given the best ability to drop toggles were inexplicably the ones with the best ability to take advantage of it by combining high-percentage odds of dropping mez protection toggles with mezzing and excellent damage.

The first point there is the biggest problem with this. Having powers able to be just turned off is no fun in any context. Most of us hate it in PvE on any AT when mobs mez spam us and constantly make us retoggle, so I don't know why anyone would expect people to like it in PvP when it's possible to be "TD" spammed and have to retoggle. But more fundamentally, it's frustrating to have something that is part of your character's abilities just vanish frequently.

Note that the above is not some notion that "melee" ATs deserve special treatment in this. Instead, I contend that the design we have of armored ATs makes this frustration, true for all ATs, much more visible and much stronger an effect for them. Some people choose to interpret that as players of armored ATs asking for "god mode" or whining because they don't ever want to be defeated. I contend that nothing could be further from the truth. There is a vast difference in enjoyment in a battle you lose because the other guy/gal out-damaged you, out-played you or just had better build than you and losing because your powers turned off (without being mezzed).

Because only 20% of ATs possess direct mez protection powers, the other 80% constantly experience their toggle powers being turned off in PvE because of the prevalence of mezzing. The degree of inconvenience this causes varies by AT and powerset - I think it's fair to say that, in general, some powersets have at least one key toggle that dramatically affects their survivability . This is especially true among Defenders, but there are examples in other ATs - for some common builds it is an extreme inconvenience to lose Targeting Drone on a /Devices Blaster.

The other 20% of ATs, the armored ones, typically have longer list of "key" toggles. They have two primary features in their toggles: defense-oriented powers and protection versus various mez effects. (Yes, I do know there are two "armor" powersets whose mez protection is a click power.) Because these ATs do possess an ability to avoid mezzing, they also have a much heavier reliance on toggles to function than most other ATs.

When someone has a toggle dropper power, they get to annoy just about anyone with it. But when there's a high chance of multiple toggles dropped, even if it involves multiple TD attacks, the armored ATs see the effect more strongly. Their design is toggle-heavy.

This is why the complaints come from armored ATs. No one reasonable is asking for "god mode". They're asking to not have their fundamental design have an end-run done around it. A fundamental design that is toggle-heavy on a predication that mez effects will not be immediately dropping all those toggles. Note that this is not the same as immunity from mezzing - it is threshold-based protection.

The complaint, simply is that TD is a bad mechanic because it performs an end-run around features of the AT for such characters. This is not the same as claiming that the result is therefore balanced (though, my opinion is that the result is not as catastrophic as some posters claim).

Indeed, many of the resulting balance complaints from the players of Blasters, in particular, actually involve dissatisfaction with their baseline AT performance. I maintain that, instead of asking for means to perform end-runs around features of other ATs, Blasters should be asking the devs what their intended performance should be, and, if it's not being achieved, what's being planned to fix that.

I think that there is advantage for a Blaster in melee. His attacks there do more damage (per attack, at least).

The question is: is it too dangerous for a Blaster to be in melee with an armored AT. I think that if they cannot be constantly mezzed for no other reason than that they are in melee, the answer is no; they can afford to be in melee briefly - especially with Defender support (or a power like Force of Nature).

Of course, that cuts both ways. I don't think it's great fun for a Blaster to be able to mezz the bejesus out of people he gets in melee with. And I don't mean the guys with armor on.

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I feel NO sympathy for you MOG guys and gals...
though i too have a regenn scrapper, from the way you all talk, it sounds as if most of you are I3 or earlier regenners. I know you've taken more than your fair share of nerfs in the past, but FINALLY, this update lets me, as a FF defender, take on mobs more than 1, yes ONE, level above me. I can actually stand against a purple buss, and survive long enough to attack back(aka without PFF).

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I'm pretty sure this harshness is unwarranted. What people are asking for is for the power to make sense. It's not like we're asking for the Critter Accuracy change to be repealed because it makes MoG a bit worse. If the power provides a net decrease in survivability, then it's just dumb.

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But when engaging a team of heroes it was regularly the first thing that would happen to our Brute. I wasn't the guy running toggles here - I was supporting him. He would run in and, if there were two or three Blasters they would gang up on him and repeatedly toss out 50%+ of his toggles. It was frustrating for him.


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Tactics for the win. Again, it took multiple players to take down an armored player and those multiple players had support. That is exactly the balance that you say that you want. Multiple players being needed to take down a single armored foe. What? Did you want to him to be able to stand there and take it?

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No, and this is, in fact, quite the crux of my point.

Toggle dropping in that scenario was overkill. He should have been able to take it briefly. Instead it regularly devolved into "well, there went my mez toggle" followed by a little skull in the team list.

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If you have three people who hit you with 100% 1 toggle drop powers and then secondary chances for more toggles to drop, and you have 5 toggles, odds are exceptional that you lose your mez shield.

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Why yes, if three people are attacking me with toggle droppers then I do expect to be defeated. Why wouldn't I?

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Because it becomes a matter of binary behavior. It becomes an AT that can take that pounding (if only for 5-10 seconds) by design being virtually automatically stripped of those capabilities.

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The best comment though is stacked mezzes. Uhm, why didn't the mez work the first time? Right, because you have those nifty defenses that you said were negated upon entering combat.

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And here is the problem.

You see, you seem hell-bent on deprivng other non-Blaster ATs of features that they posess. You don't have them, and you therefore seem perfectly content that it's fair that no one else have them either. Thus, toggle dropping is OK. You don't have mez resistance, so what's unreasonable that you be able to strip it from those that do?

Simple. These ATs have it by design. I would argue just as firmly that it would be unfair to strip the EPP DR toggle from a 41+ Blaster. It's part of your character's capabilities, and I have a problem with anything that reliably, fully nullifies that.

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This is the complaint about Fire, Dark and Electric rmor - their lack of knockback protection is not some occasional weakness but rather a constant source of irritation and reduced efffectiveness.

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Yes, things that are irritating should never be used for balance. Man, my blasters and defenders sure get irritated by mez and that mez completely negates my ability to perform my job, but I have the ability to realize that it is a balanceing factor. Like I said, you don't want any weakness. Anything that irritates you must go away.

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Constant irritation should never be used for balance. Two points about that.

First, a Tanker and sometimes Brute often has no choice but to be the focus of a majority share of the attacks (and secondary effects) flying in PvE. Those effects are thick with knockback. The frequency of knockback is absolutely preposterous. You are knocked back by pistols and crossbows, backhands and kicks, let alone more visually meaningful effects like hurled boulders, energy blasts and explosions. The Tanker, in particular, by design, gets more than their share of these effects. It's actually a much more valid argument, in my opinion, for Tankers than for Scrappers, though I feel for them too. Like I said, I work on avoiding it on my Blasters, Defenders, and so on.

Second, look, you won't really get disagreement from me about the overuse of mezzing in all aspects of this game, PvE and PvP both. Because they have to close to melee to do their best damage, Blasters have some of the worst of all worlds among all the ATs here, and I know it. The devs painted themselves into a PvP corner here - they made whole ATs that depend on mezzing, and if everyone has a baseline immunity to it then it has no point. So we have the joyous situation that the Controllers and Dominators get whole ATs that they can pick on. We have lots of secondary mez powers on our melee attacks (across all ATs that get such things) because it's great mitigation/control/immersion in PvE. That creates a very non-excellent world of everyone without a mez toggle sucking down Break Frees at every turn, and that in turn annoying the control characters.

Again, this is a PvE game with PvP shoehorned in. Your complaint is that you don't like your AT's design point compared to the other ATs. I say that's an awfully old complaint originating in the PvE world, and it hasn't changed much.

I'll say here that the Blaster's lot in life in PvP is not balanced. It's not. The answer to that is not to design in mechanics that let them completely destroy the base functionality of other ATs. Maybe they need more irresistable damage - while that bypasses other AT features, it doesn't so do fully and those ATs are still tougher via more HP. Maybe melee attacks should mez less well in PvP, since that's another problem for the blaster who charges into melee. I don't know - there are a ton of variables here, and every change has domino effects on balance I am sure I can't even see - including this one on Toggle Dropping. But I am dead certain that removing TD was the right first step, whatever else comes later.

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This is not the same as PvP. The entire team is not trying to kill the tank. Ergo, the tank should not be balanced around trying to fight an entire team with team support. He should be balanced around fighting single opponents with team support just like everyone else.

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First, I think that's going to be changing, because Taunt is actively being changed to affect more people in PvP.

Second, I maintain that, as implemented on the powersets it was given to, with the chances that it has, toggle dropping went vastly beyond making Tankers fight single targets with team support. For the powersets that made TD notorious it was frequently just plain neutralization. It was over powered

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If you don't do that, then it becomes support + Melee VS. anything. You think that range is going to mean anything with all the negative travel powers in the game? I just took my TA defender out for a spin, No one is going to be at range for very long or airborne for that matter.

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How often have you seen -movement applied to a character that does most of their damage in melee? It's a great way to completely castrate their damage output and make them an easy target. Those kinds of debuffs work both ways.

Edited that last paragraph, I said something strange there that wasn't what I meant.

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Maybe because, in a team context (you know, the way the devs want you to play) it was positively impossible to keep any toggles up.

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Hyperbole. It is also completely untrue. Unless, for some reason only known to the lord himself I have just never suffered like you have. I run 5-6 toggles on my Stone/EA brute and the most I have had dropped is three. I have had EM come up to me and knock off three toggles, and I wasn't mezzed. Does that contradict everything that you believe? Well, it is normal gameplay experience for me since I do PvP regularly. Maybe if more melee types got out there with a team and fought they would have similar experiences.

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You can call it hyperbole till the cows come home. If you have three people who hit you with 100% 1 toggle drop powers and then secondary chances for more toggles to drop, and you have 5 toggles, odds are exceptional that you lose your mez shield. Toggle dropping was so effective that it was the entire basis of the smart Blaster's strategy. Smack the armored guys with toggle droppers as much as you can, working for that mez shield - once that's down everything else goes with it. In one-one one play, to be honest, this wasn't that bad, although the odds of multiple toggle drops were high enough that it was frustrating to me when I tried it. But when engaging a team of heroes it was regularly the first thing that would happen to our Brute. I wasn't the guy running toggles here - I was supporting him. He would run in and, if there were two or three Blasters they would gang up on him and repeatedly toss out 50%+ of his toggles. It was frustrating for him.

Binary effectivenss is not enjoyable. And please don't tell me that without toggle drops Blasters are binary ineffective. I don't buy it because my Blaster did well and can't drop any toggles.

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Because you end up with a team of Tankers + various support casters if you go down that balance road. It is what ended up happening in PvE. The Tankers have the damage to kill anything. If it takes multiple people to defeat them, then why in the world would a team want to take less of them?

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You must be playing some other game than I am. What I see are posts all the time about how it makes more sense in PvE to grab a Defender and a Scrapper than to take a Tanker, since the Tanker needs a Defender anyway, and the Scrapper does more damage. Funny how only the perspectivew that support the current discussion come into play.

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Here is the other flipside of the equation, since we are talking about team PvP we can ignore all 1v1 situations. So, taking a tank or brute and pairing them off against a blaster with both sides having the same support, is it an = fight. From what I have seen with toggle droppers the way they are NOW, it is if you are comparing comparable sets of Tanks, Brutes to Blasters. EM VS. EM for instance. Throughout various leveling stages this balance is thrown off by power acquisition. The only way to balance that would be for everyone to have all their powers whenever they go into a PvP zone, or in other words, the zones are not balanced.

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I won't make any claims that PvP in this game is balanced. My oft-stated opinion is that this game should never, ever have had PvP based on its pure PvE origins. All its power designs, acquistions, improvements and implementations are forever stamped with the fact that they were conceived in a pure PvE setting. I don't care if PvP was on the whiteboard; what the implemented at release was a PvE game with PvE balance and PvE considerations. And now they've shoehorned PvP into it. The only way it will ever be "balanced" for PvP is by totally unmaking the PvE game that I happen to love dearly and remaking it to fit PvP concepts. Honestly, PvP is enjoyable to me as a casual side-bar, and I would rather that it remain a stinking morass of imbalance than have the changes I see needed to make it "balanced" come into PvE.

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You can't tell me that it's reasonable that they have powers that simply never come into meaningful effect. In contrast Blasters do not have any such powers (barring EPP armor toggles, which they should also be able to use).

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Except that if you PvPed at all, you would know that the armors do come into effect since you are not only being attacked by blasters 24/7. Your entire fight is not against a blaster. There is this team out there, and your armor helps you against most of them. If nothing else, it helps you against the initial melee attack of a blaster or any of the blasters attacks from range.

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So it comes down to the issue of melee not wanting to be weak against anything.

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Where's our invincibility to Defender unresistable debuffs? Our invincibility to stacked mezzes from control characters? Where's our invncibility to slows, recharge and regen debuffs? Where's our invincibility to toHit debuffs? To Fear? How invincible are we to that 30% unresistable damage?

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I can back that up with statements from melee players concerning the new electric set. The set has built in weaknesses and the players are complaining up a storm about how it is retarded for any melee set to have a weakness.

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You're twisting that argument, and if you can't see that then you and I really don't have anything more to discuss. That perspective you are twisting exists because in PvE we face hundreds, maybe thousands of opponents in a multi-hour play session, and those foes have incredibly ubiquitous knockback. I take either Hover or Acrobatics on my non-melee characters to protect myself from this annoying and frustrating aspect of the game. The devs take every weakness and instead of making it interesting by exploiting it occasionally they instead exploit it constantly. This is the complaint about Fire, Dark and Electric Armor - their lack of knockback protection is not some occasional weakness but rather a constant source of irritation and reduced efffectiveness.

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What exactly are you trying to point out here? That holes can be filled by other classes? Boy did you pick the wrong subject to argue.

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Huh?

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Yea... having a corruptor along would help... of course, what if the hero's team has a defender? (Even teams correct? can't just add another person to the equation without balancing it out) Oh my! We are back to where we started (actually a little behind because on the hero's side they have stronger buffs) and the hero still has that extra acc because (doot de dooo!!!) villians can't do it for themselves.

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The point is that only so much accuracy matters. All you need is enough to do is overcome their +defense, and you can do that just as well as they can if you have such team buffs in play. In fact, more of you will do it that they can, at lower cost to your team, than if a bunch of them are running FA.

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In a number of these sets you find Conserve Power. This is a fantastic but conditional power.

In both Scrapper and Tanker sets you also find Focused Accuracy. It should be noted that for everyone but /Regen Scrappers, this is effectively a conditional power. It is among the most expensive toggles in the game, clocking in at almost 5 times the cost of a standard armor toggle.

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I notice you keep stating about these being conditional powers. Please understand that conditional powers are the powers that make or break PvP.
Since it is your choice when and where you want to fight, you can always make sure the *conditional* power is under the correct *conditions* insuring a win. (barring stupidity or an act of god)

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All PvP is not Siren's call or even Recluse's Victory. You don't get to chose when everything happens in a Base Raid or in the Arena.

Also, the notion that everyone will retreat when their rocking powers are offline is ludicrous. If everyone does that then ultimately we will be disallowed all conditional powers, or we'll all be dissalowed to leave PvP once we enter.

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However, if you can evade or otherwise survive most of these powers for 10 or 20 seconds, they expire.

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Have you ever PvP'd before? Most battles are over in under 20 seconds, and certainly in group battles you can not simply run away when someone hits build up. (that would be hilarious to watch though, a group of villains scatter when 1 hero uses his *conditional* power) because *someone* in the opposing group will always have it ready to go.

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Yes, I have. Perhaps you ignored the "or otherwise survive" part of that sentence. In a team context something like Power Build Up or PFF alone is not going to turn the tide of most battles except by possibly allowing the one key person to live or be defeated. These are far, far, far from "I win" buttons. I know. I've used them. I've had them used on me. They're nice to have. They don't carry the day.

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Uhm... Yea, in the same extent that you can do the same thing with slash as you can do with headsplitter. (They both do damage but one is vastly superior to the other)

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I don't see this PFF superiority, honestly, but if it's that great it'll probably end up nerfed. Nobody I've ever faced used PFF to win a fight, and it certainly didn't do anyone jack in a team battle except for some MMs, who now can't use it like that at all in I7.

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SnakeGandhi, with a good many Tankers stating that 'balance' is needing a team to kill them

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If you keep dragging this dead horse out, I'll be happy to beat it every time.

One-on-one imbalance implies that some characters will need help to defeat some others. Because of their by-design inherent toughness, I utterly fail to see how it is a problem of any sort that Tankers in particular should require multiple damage dealers or a damage dealer and a buffer/debuffer to defeat. I just don't see it. You keep dragging out that it's a problem but you never offer anything to convince me that it is. It's like arguing that gravity is unfair to large people. I don't get it.

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with a good many Brutes saying that they'll go back to PvP now that they don't need to worry about Blasters anymore...

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Maybe because, in a team context (you know, the way the devs want you to play) it was positively impossible to keep any toggles up. Any one melee character simply suffered under mass toggle dropping. Sure, in a team context they too can be kept from being mezzed as a result, but the whole point of these ATs is that they are supposed to be armored. You can't tell me that it's reasonable that they have powers that simply never come into meaningful effect. In contrast Blasters do not have any such powers (barring EPP armor toggles, which they should also be able to use). It's a design point of the AT. They get attacks and more attacks. "Melee" ATs get attacks and armor. Why should that devolve into them getting attacks and nothing? Tit for tat? Blasters can't have it so no one else can either?

I have yet to see a single argument for toggle dropping as a fair mechanism given the dev-stated assumptions of the game. Those assumptions? PvP is balanced for team only. Some ATs are tougher than others. And Blasters are "glass cannons".

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Because we have been told over and over and over and over and over and over and over that this is not balanced for one-v-one. By definition, that means that one-v-one is imbalanced for some pair-offs. I don't remember anyone saying that Blasters had a special place as an AT that could take on just enyone else and win.


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It would be really nice if melee remembered that they need a team too. Even now in SC it is incredibly easy to get kills with a BRUTE if you have a team behind you. A couple of corruptors and toggle drops are laughable since the blaster that attacked you in melee is dead before he figures out why your not.

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I hope you aren't reminding me of that. Because I know it. In fact, if you look at my earlier posts, I mention not only how I think a Blaster with backup and/or buffs is going to maul the melee guys pretty well, but the melee guys aren't going to be able to kill one another very efficiently.

You start slapping -DR and -Regen and slows on people and suddenly things don't look so rosy for those big invincible melees.

Yeah, OK, you are going to have the Wild-Bill Scrappers, Tankers and Brutes wandering places like Siren's Call. So what. They're tough. They can handle small-scale engagements and either win or flee. Bring a team in there and they're toast if they stay solo.

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Thats okay though, just keep telling blasters to get a team. Remember when Tanks got extra damage? Remember when they took away the lack of mobility? There is always a flip side. Enjoy being overpowered while you can, cry when the other shoe drops like melee always does.

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I'm not enjoying anything. I play squishies in PvP. Squishies who've never had toggle drops. I'm the one doing the healing and the debuffing. With a much poo-pooed powerset, I might add.

I see.

I don't know. Given the scope of the power review and the need to chage the central algorithm to add that step, it might be worth reviewing the whole process.

After all, if you need to refit that pipe and then check the water pressure in all the rooms, you might just as well consider installing a new pump.

Definitely.

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In 1v1? Somewhere between 80% of S/L, and 100% of non-S/L.

UberGuy, think for a second. You just asked me how much damage a tanker provides that won't be resisted by a blaster.

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I honestly have no idea why the only way you're looking at this is Blaster vs. Tanker. I most certianly asked you no such thing. Tankers have to fight Brutes and Stalkers and, in the arenas and base raids, other Tankers and Scrappers. When it comes to actually dealing daming to those targets, who's going to do it better: a Tanker or a Blaster?

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Because if it's impossible for one person to beat you, by definition, you are overpowered.

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That's preposterous. Why? Because we have been told over and over and over and over and over and over and over that this is not balanced for one-v-one. By definition, that means that one-v-one is imbalanced for some pair-offs. I don't remember anyone saying that Blasters had a special place as an AT that could take on just enyone else and win.

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Because in PvE, 90% of your threats are minion or LT-tier.

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One at a time? What PvE game do you play? There are teams you know. A Tanker on a team of more than about 3 is taking on way more than a LT or a minion in incoming damage.

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Why should Blasters have to treat Tankers like Bosses, Elite Bosses, or Archvillains, depending on build, while Tankers treat Blasters like minions (and not even dangerous ones)?

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I think that's hyperbole. Moreover, I think a Tanker that does that is asking for a whupping. If you think you're Blaster's damage output is worth so little, I think you're doing something wrong. And if there are just two of you, I think he's toast if he doesn't run. I think if you have a Defender with you he's toast if he doesn't run (assuming he can).

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Brawl is the only reason my Claws/Regen scrapper had a chance of taking down an Invuln Tanker. Well, I should say was.

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Welcome to the world of tomorrow. Your partially irresistible damage has a place!

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Other than, you know, the part where 200+ points of irresistable damage at once is enough to kill someone that would have otherwise saved dull pain for another couple of seconds.

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I might win the lottery tomorrow. My odds of a crit are significantly better. I don't plan on either one.

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In World of Warcraft, a Warrior (tank character) can be popped like a zit within a good ten seconds of a Mage firing instants quickly. The Warrior only needs to get one good (and often mezzing) shot off to kill the Mage, but he risks getting beaten during that time.

In Guild Wars, an Elementalist (Mage) typically does well against Warriors without hefty interrupt skills and a series of Adrenaline-building powers.

In UberGuy's Dream City, no single player can kill a Tanker.

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What are you smoking? No, really? Where did I say that? I didn't say that. You did, and I'm telling you that you're wrong.

If my freaking Ice/Dark Corruptor can kill a Tanker, if you can't then you're doing something bloody well wrong.

Oh, don't get me wrong. If we have, say, a 5% better damage scale than the equivalent powers in an EPP, I won't argue that it's not technically better. I might argue, however, that such a degree of superiority is pointless.

I do reserve judgement until I see the pets. Honestly, unless the pets suck I see them being very, very useful in PvE. Of course, getting it at 47 doesn't leave much of a career for it to be useful for. I do have a hard time seeing the pets be useful in open zone PvP. They might be useful in base raids or the Arena.

I do have to say that I'm not seeing them be anything I would consider "more powerful". Scarlet's analysis indicated for one power that it was 5% more damaging, proportionally, but that's pretty meaningless, IMO, even if that holds true across the board. Among other things, Heroes tend to have higher base damage than comparable Villain ATs, so that's going to be a net loss.

I bascially have chosen to ignore that statement about "more powerful," because I think it represents an idea of the utility for these powers that isn't likely to be considered useful by the general gaming population.

Assume for a second that the pets really rock (and they might). They still are going to have, at best, around a 50% downtime. Lots of people are going to dislike that compared to something less flashy that's more utilitarian and less conditional. Such as an anti-mez toggle on a Dominator.

Not sure how that could work against ranged attacks, though. In melee it's nature is fairly obvious, however. And yes, splitting "hit chance" buffs into toHit and Accuracy components (subtly different but similar to what you're describing) did occur to me.

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I can understand arguments for making controllers weak at detoggling, but defenders? They deserve a reasonable shot at detoggling.

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This isn't simple, however. Remember that people will just do what is most useful, and not what is neccessarily the most fun.

I'm going to make up an example. I'm not saying it's the best or the only way to do something like this. Lets say you give Defenders a ... 33% chance to drop a toggle on their smallest blast. Seems vaguely reasonable. They can spam the attack often, if they drop a toggle maybe they can follow up with a bigger attack...

Except now you've recreated the problem for "melee" types in a new form. You've just required a new third party to do it. Now you get Defenders in there not because they're defenders and their buffs and debuffs are useful, but because if they can drop enough toggles then a Blaster buddy can rip some melee guy a new one. And now the "melees" are frustrated again because a core part of their character keeps getting shut off.

Making an unfun mechanic take more people to implement doesn't make it any more fun for the target.

The problem with toggle dropping, and the reason many of us never liked it and call it a kludge, is because it's so binary. It's similar to the whole thing with mezzes. Either it works and the target is screwed or it doesn't and the controller is screwed. Net result, one side or the other isn't having much fun. The key difference with Blasters is that I think they do have a much more viable role than a mezzer who can't mez anyone.

Also, why, exactly, are we worried about Defenders killing anyone? In PvE, yeah, rock on. I am all over people being able to solo. But in PvP I think that's just not gonna work out unless they just plain make those sets do more damage with some sort of PvP-only damage boost, similar to how Controllers do extra containment damage. Barring that I have to say that I think a Defender's job is to make other ore capable people better at killing, or helping keep their own teammates alive.

Dominators are broken. Toggle Dropping is not the answer, IMO. I believe Dominators are too weak in both the control and damage departments. They need either stronger control, more damage, or more secondary effects (either on their holds or their attacks - I'm partial to more secondary effect on the holds), or possibly all three.

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So here’s my challenge:

(1) Explain exactly WHY an AT with so many melee powers in all their different secondaries should not be effective in melee.

(2) Explain exactly WHY it is bad for a brute’s secondary powers to be ineffective in PvP, but it’s OK for blasters’ secondaries to be made ineffective.

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If I may ask: in what way are secondaries being made ineffective?

Note that I do not agree with any notions that Blaster melee powers should suck "because they aren't a melee AT." I think people get too hung up on the phrase "melee AT" when it's really a slang used for "armored AT". I know that when I say "melee AT" causally, I'm using it to refer to an AT with a "protective" set and an attack set, with the attack set usually made primarily of melee or short-range attacks.

All that said, I don't happen to think that melee-strong Blaster secondaries do suck, even with zero toggle dropping. (A separate issue is that some secondaries do just plain suck, but lets concentrate on the offensively strong ones, like EnM and ElM.) I'll readily admit that, to take full advantage of such powers, a Blaster is going to want help in the form of protective buffs (or offensive debuffs) to protect them from the negative effects of entering into melee. But given those, I really don't see this as a PvP armageddon (intentional hyperbole, don't go off on it please) for Blasters in particular. I honestly believe that their tools are powerful enough that they are going to remain dangerous weapons in PvP. I just don't think they'll be able to go it alone.

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In a world where a single Emp can stack Clear Minds 4 deep, toggle dropping does have its place. It may have been an I4 kludge, but notice how they didn't remove it from the game entirely? As long as toggle-dropping exists in any form, even reduced, it's part of the balance equation.

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I don't understand this. What does Clear Mind have to do with this?

I can only infer that, because you are mentioning Clear Mind, you believe that the next best approach after the TD reduction would be to switch to mezzing armored characters. However, it is my opinion that the point of this change is to actually require people to deal with armor toggles.

Toggle Dropping trivialized amor toggles. Any focused attention by a PvE tuned Blapper could readily disable most of an armored character's toggles. Meanwhile, Blasters were able to benefit just as well from a Clear Mind and/or Fortitude, and the smart ones ran around with this sort of buffing.

Armor toggles should not have been a trivial factor in the PvP contests. Yet most of them were. Certainly there are other areas of the PvP game where powersets are trivialized (control powers have what I consider serious balance issues in both directions), I think this is a step in the right direction.

I can imagine what a sticky problem it is. The biggest reason that pops in my mind is how incredily useful and important they are in PvE.

PvE foes have long had fairly ubiquitous access to toHit debuffs and defense, usually through Dark Blast / Dark Miasma type powers and Force Field powers. Every mob certainly doesn't have these powers, but you do encounter it in almost every spawn when facing certain factions.

In my experience, toHit buffs are crucial in countering these powers on mobs, because the mobs have them at higher levels of functionality than players can have in the modern game. That, and at higher character levels, we tend to face higher-level foes more often. The debuffs of higher level foes are stronger and our base toHit is lower against them.

I suspect that serious tuning of the balance of toHit bonuses in PvP would require a rework of the toHit calculation system. I'm not suggesting that can't be done, but we know based on previous dev comments that it would be very difficult, and it would require a review of the defense, accuracy/toHit and related debuffs for every power and mob in the game.

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Blasters still have 30% unresistable damage in PvP, so invuln tanker resistances (27.5% max against non-s/l) pretty much mean nothing anyway.

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So, instead of requiring 212% of the damage to kill that a Blaster does (before considering Defense powers, Dull Pain, and other power choices, which still keep getting ignored by the "Invuln r r3s1storz!" crowd), you only require 191% of the damage to kill?

This is supposed to reassure us? This is your weakness?!

Don't make me drag Arc_Salvo in to point out exactly how much of Blaster damage a Tanker can easily provide.

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How much ranged damage can they provide? How much unresistable damage?

Why do you consider it a problem that the toughest AT in the game is so hard for one person to kill? An AT that, by design, is intended to be the focus of multiple foes in PvP? Why should PvP be that functionally different from PvE?

Tankers, Brutes and Scrappers don't get to drop one anothers' toggles either. They never got to, except with Brawl. They don't get any irresistable damage, with the exception of Scrapper crits, which is rare enough to be a non-factor for most purposes.

Having the "tank" be tough is not unique to CoH/V. Having the "mage" be fragile isn't either. Nor, I might add, is having buffs from other people make the mage really, really scary.

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But my Corruptor gets a hold, 'right now'. Ghost Widow's hold is nice, but no different in style.

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Ghost Widow's hold appears to have erronious recharge information. Note that I have not tested this; it's based on information I received via PM. If it compares to Blaster and Defender single-target EPP holds, it actually probably has a 16 second recharge time, lasts around 10 seconds, and does "moderate" damage.

Note that, based on the video footage we've seen, it likely has a farily extraordinary activation time. I'm guessing it's closer to Bitter Freeze Ray than Petrifying Gaze.