UberGuy

I've never had a problem doing that. I have been combining Synthetic ones with normal ones for some time now.

There seems to be a culture on Justice that is more than willing to grind out the same trial multiple times. Sure, some people want to alt or just leave if they come across a trial they've already run, but most seem to just want as many reward tables as they can get, and if they can get the other trial rewards (such as Emps, or 60-Thread bonuses), so much the better.

Edit: I do agree with Aura, though, that few of them are willing to re-run Undergrounds. That one is long enough that most folks who are willing to run it at all are happy to stop after one, no matter how well it goes.

You'll notice I made no specific claim to any particular "ideal" regarding balance. What I dismiss out of hand is the notion that, because the devs have escalated our relative power compared to the environment in the end game and with some powersets in particular, that the reigns are completely off.

What I believe is a non-starter in that is the very assumption that the devs think they're ramming the throttle to the max as the train races down the mountainside. Your position says hey, we might as well throw more coal in the engine, right? Except I don't believe there's any chance at all they think they're driving the train that way. They may think the train is racing down the mountainside, but if so, I suspect very much that they are working the breaks and the engine to mitigate the acceleration. So I don't expect them to give suggestions based on the idea that they are driving that way more than a raised eyebrow.

That position is a huge non-starter. If you think the devs are going to buy into that, knock yourself out. I won't be betting on you.

Everyone's job, especially solo, is to kill things. For the vast majority of the game, that's the only way to progress through content. Even the ATs who don't have a primary role of killing things themselves have a primary team role of either making either easier for others to kill things or making it safer for them to kill things. What matters for Scrappers and Stalkers especially, and more diffusely for Brutes as they blend over into the aggro-management role of Tankers, is that they do not play the same way when they kill things, at least not if you want to leverage their strengths maximally. Yes, a Stalker gets Hide and Placate, but those exist to support their role in killing things.

Again, I maintain that you are calling a difference that you do not prefer no difference at all. Lack of uniqueness implies a lack of difference. You want a different difference, and you are arguing for it under the auspices that Scrappers are completely covered by all the existing options. Yes, if you look around enough, you find all their features in all the other ATs. But you don't find them all in one place except specifically as Scrappers.

I infer he means that they might need someone to champion a drive to make them more unique, based on his interpretation of what it means for an AT to be/play uniquely. Que disagreements on whether such perceived uniqueness can be created without resulting in an unwarranted buff.

But single-target performance is only one aspect of the game, and it's an aspect that Stalkers are expressly supposed to be very good at, at least by Synapse's declaration. By extension, based on your assertions about Regen, a /Regen Stalker should be the one eking out better performance.

It would be a mistake to infer that "less important" always implies "not significant". All my considerable experience with Regen disagrees that QR it is not an extremely desirable boon even though we have Fitness. My Regen Scrappers have QR and Fitness. My level 50 Stalker had Fitness before it was inherent, and I assure you I still desperately miss QR as much if not more than I have ever missed Placate when playing my DM/Regen Scrapper. Do you know how I fuel my MA/Regen's AS chain? Incarnate Ageless Destiny. Do you know what my Regen Scrappers use instead? Barrier or Rebirth. AS's new utility has a very real cost.

Viewed as a whole AT, uniqueness does not require that one possess attributes that no one else exhibits anywhere. It requires only that you combine those attributes in a way that no one else does. Your list attempts to show [edit: non-]uniqueness by illustrating that Scrappers share some individual attributes with other ATs. That does not make them non-unique.

You mention other ATs having higher numeric values for some attributes, but other AT having higher numerical values for any given attribute doesn't make Scrappers non-unique. If those ATs have the highest values of some of those scales, or of some compound metric derived from those scales, that might make them unique. And in this regard, Scrappers do have specific uniqueness: having the highest base damage scale and unconditional crits makes them unique, because it gives them the highest average DPA and EPA for any given power damage scale of all the ATs.

I don't think you have to prove the single-target performance to me, if nothing else because of how CS interacts with Build Up.

I don't see this as proof. This is a discussion of AoE burst damage, and doesn't address the sustainability of that over time. Yes, you get this "for free" on openers. You don't get guaranteed Placate success when mid-fight against enough foes to be using AoEs on, because of someone hits you with damage you lose the hide effect. Of all the examples you could have offered, Regen is one of the ones most easily plagued by this due to its lack of in-set defense - only a fairly high-end IO Regen build is going to be able to pull this off mid combat with high regularity.

You don't have to sell me on Placate. I still love it as a mitigation power and have no plans to ditch it in a post I22 world. However, touting how a Stalker can use MoG to escape longer hardly sounds like my idea of a shining endorsement of superiority. And capped AoE defense is nice but there's a reason most general purpose builds that use positional defense prioritize AoE defense last. I'm not going to say it's useless, but it's not selling me on unambiguous superiority.

Edited for EG fixing of post: Placate is not neutral, but it is not, itself, an unconditional mitigation benefit that can swing the tide in a Stalker's favor. For example, it is of very limited use in the middle of a pile of foes unless you have a very high defense build, in which case you may not need it as mitigation. The exception is when you can use it to disable singularly inconvenient foes out of the pile, which is a conditional benefit. This has to be weighed against the way a Stalker often loses an AoE attack to have AS, which makes most Stalker sets less efficient at clearing those same large spawns of enemies as a Scrapper. So a Scrapper is often better at taking down the spawn as a whole while a Stalker is often better at disabling one enemy out of that spawn, and, with I22's changes, would not be better at defeating one foe at a time than a Scrapper that omitted the same AoE from their build. I do not see unambiguous superiority there.

Hide is not neutral either, but I see it only as its unsuppressed 2.5% base defense value the vast majority of the time. It comes at a cost of a lost power in the secondary powerset, of which I think there are good examples of this being a steep price to pay. (All loss of Quick Recovery comes to mind, especially given the EPS burn now associated with frequent unhidden use of AS.)

Except I'm using the dictionary definition of "unique", and you aren't. "Solitary in type or characteristics". Scrappers possess a unique set of defining attributes and features which are not shared in that specific combination by any other CoH AT. You are the one claiming that's not the case. I think then that you're beholden to provide a definition that defends your position other than to repeatedly declare it to be truth.

No, it's like saying you don't have to masterfully juice your stickshift to get from 0-60 in 4 seconds because you have a high-end automatic with a large enough engine that it does it for you.

Strawman. They do not have "inferior performance" unless you focus solely on peak single-target DPS. They have superior HP, superior total damage scale on attacks that aren't AS, lower EPS for comparable DPS as a result of the higher damage scale, don't give up anything for Hide and don't give up AoEs to have AS, have higher damage self-buff scales, and have damage self-buffs besides Build Up .

What Stalker secondary except for SR is better in survivability, and what Stalker primary is better in AoE damage than its Scrapper version? We can build combos that don't compete in either direction all day long. That's a non-argument. Compare apples to apples.

Proof please.

Circular reasoning. You define Scrappers as non-unique, and argue that therefore they are not unique. I don't buy that.

That you wish to ignore that players think about how they go about hitting things differently does not change the fact that there are differences in how you play the ATs. Yes, you can just run around and just hit things on a Stalker or Brute, and it works pretty well. If you want to eke out the best they offer, you need to pay more attention to Fury for one and AF for the other. Yes, I think right now you need to pay more attention to AF than to Fury, but that does not change that the need exists. That need does not exist for Scrappers, and that indeed makes them unique.

What you're really arguing is that you're not satisfied with that particular brand of uniqueness. That's not the same thing as them not being unique.

Indeed. I believe it's more that they cannot post as devs from a personal account, and likely vice versa.

Apparently, by your description here (which I do not agree with universally across powersets) the ability to split the difference and function without conditional performance (e.g.: no reliance on Fury or Assassin's Focus).

To be unique does not require that you "own" peak performance in a specific area. It requires only that you not function identically to others. It's an aside that one should also not perform in a way that's meaningfully objectively inferior to others. That's not a prerequisite of being unique, but it is important for a "healthy" AT.

Which was done with a small change, within existing powers systems (already created for other reasons), to a single power in each powerset.
The technical nature of the change had a very limited scope, yet the result was very significant. That's practically the common-use definition of something that's called "low-hanging fruit". It's something that's easy to make happen that has a large benefit.

Contrast this with what appears to be needed for Blasters, which is being discussed in the other thread as ranging from adding new features to every attack to redesigning their secondaries to adding new alternatives to Build Up. That is not "low-hanging fruit".

Not a concrete statement of fact.

Oh, come on. You cannot make that claim on that basis, unless you want to come out and say that you think Zwillinger's explanation for their reasoning was a flat-out lie. He gave perfectly clear explanations about how they don't have the in-house resources to maintain the regionalization of the game's text.

You're inferring that they therefore had to ditch them this because they're throwing ballast overboard to remain afloat. Sure, that's possible. Alternative explanations are that they couldn't justify the expense that it was incurring in time (or the cost of hiring someone to do it better) for the number of players those servers had. Zwil made it clear - those servers have never been big, and while PS was hoping F2P would make them bigger (thereby justifying the ongoing regionlization), that didn't happen. You can think something is a poor investment without needing the money you're spending on it to stay afloat.

I'll tell you what I see. I see my home server of Justice more populous in I22 than it's been in two issues. I saw so many multiple large-scale events going on this past Sunday evening that it was hard to form a TF at the same time, not because people weren't online, but because they were all busy taking part in pre-planned events. I see people who had left the game in I20 coming back to play on premium accounts and spending money, even if a small amount on micro-transactions.

Is any of this going to turn around the game's downward trending income? I don't know. We'll probably get our first clear indication of that (as clear as they ever are) in the next quarterly results report from NCSoft.

All things come to an end, and if CoH abruptly died tomorrow, it would have had an excellent run in my opinion. But I don't think the writing on the wall is as large or clear as you seem to think, and I certainly don't think we can assume that what's happening with the German and French clients is writ large there.

The prior buffs to Stalkers did help, but I would not describe them as "transformative" to the performance of the AT the way this latest one was. They can't be ignored, but they just weren't as big a deal as this one. I think that by any objective measure the latest change was transformative - it made good single-target Stalker sets exceptional and poor single-target sets pretty good. I don't see how the mechanical nature of the change makes my (c) untrue - it was a change to only one power.

Agreed, with a dose of that being in relation to what other ATs can do across multiple powersets.