UberGuy

I just talked to them without issue. I was on an Incarnate if that might matter, with all current slots unlocked and a Rare slotted.

I honestly don't remember if Respecs were for sale before, but it seems new to me.

Edit: But yes, no converters, still.

Trust me, folks raised this point in Beta, especially when the Degenerative and Cognitive DoTs did even less damage than they do now.

There's a common misconception that because Psi and Toxic are "exotic" in terms of how rarely player characters have good protections from them, the same must be true for NPCs as well. Unfortunately, it seems that the devs themselves may be susceptible to this misconception.

It could be that they instead view these as damage types that players aren't good at dealing. If so, Psi seems odder to me than Toxic, because we have a variety of damage-dealing powersets revolving around almost pure Psi damage. Toxic is certainly available, but we don't have anything as blunt as a Toxic Blast, Toxic Manipulation or Toxic Assult.

Now you're on to something I might buy into. Abilities that only affect teammates.

How about this, though. Instead of something so direct as hit-chance or damage buffs, how about something for the squishies? What if every Scrapper on the team gave them something like a decent chunk of mez resistance to holds, stuns and immobilizes? Say three Scrappers on the team cut mez durations in half? Think of it as a confidence boost of some sort.

It could be set to work on non-sqiuishies too, but they would probably rarely notice it.

That would be extremely unique, would not buff Scrappers themselves, and would be pretty desirable on teams. (Outright mez protection would be more desirable by far, but I can't see the devs giving that.)

Just to expand a bit on BrandX's response, the Tanker damage buff cap is +300% over base, or 400% in total. They share this cap with Defenders, Controllers, Dominators, Masterminds, Kheldians, SoAs and (I believe) all player-summonable pets.

ATs with primary roles related to damage dealing have caps of +400%, or 500% total. This is the cap for Scrappers, Blasters, Stalkers and Corruptors. Brutes, with their design combining comparatively low base damage with high-order damage buffs, have a higher cap of +675%, or 775% total. This used to be 850% total, but was lowered in I18 to put their peak damage somewhat below that of Scrappers.

The problem with this is that, while it leaves the average contribution of crits where it is now, it makes the discrete behavior feel "more random". In any given fight, there will be half the chance of a crit happening. Sure, when it happens, it will be larger, but it's going to happen less often, making it less likely to be a factor against each foe.

In other words, in order to observe convergence in damage towards the calculated average you're more likely need to fight for longer.

That seems pretty unattractive to me.

Why would you advocate making it trigger less often? That makes every fight less likely to actually approach average behavior, while not changing the average.

I will mostly agree with Brutes, but not with Stalkers. Fury is not ignorable in my opinion, but it's easy to build, especially solo. I do not ignore my Assassin's Focus. I spend time paying attention to where it's at to gauge when best to AS. I don't have to do that, but I need to if I want optimum performance from AS, which I do want. I like that Scrappers are "stuck", just like a lot of people prefer powersets that are "toggle and go". Don't get me wrong, I like my Brutes and Stalkers, but how the Scrappers play is my favorite experience, because they just "are".

With the folks I usually run stuff with, I've never had a problem bunching up the AVs on the STF on ... anything. I just buff up, run out and blast, punch them or toss an anchor toggle on them, then run back. I've never seen anyone have to do anything special to clump the AVs in Kahn. We just fight in one of the side rooms in the back and they come running over all by themselves. (We also never bother to kill them until after Reichs is defeated, though they often die to AoEs.)

I'll grant its utility in Apex, though to be honest we do those without a taunter fairly often and still usually do that whole TF in around 15 minutes. Having one makes it faster, but we're probably only shaving off 30 seconds or so.

Good luck with that. I don't think those players will notice or care very often.

Maybe you should consider how this would feel turned around. Would you like for teams to skip picking up the Scrappers they see with Confront?

By the way, this is some excellent projection of motive onto others. Perhaps it should occur to you that someone who skips Confront might be doing so with the intent to build the best Scrapper they can in order to bring the most to a team that they can. A Scrapper's strongest abilities lie in dealing damage and surviving damage (so they can deal more damage). By focusing a build on those goals and not diluting their build with things other ATs are better at (aggro control), a Scrapper can bring more base damage to the team, which can then be magnified by buffs and debuffs, than most other ATs. I think that's a laudable build goal.

It's an opinion. It holds that those are the only things that can be described as an issue with an AT. That's an opinion, not a fact. I'd add it's an opinion that the devs don't seem to share.

The bolded part is your opinion, and I feel comfortable in saying it's not an opinion that was representative of the majority for the ATs in question.

I do not believe that to be the case in this scenario.

I <3 EG, but I think there's some serious BS in there.

I'm sorry, Werner's "curious puppy" image above belongs imprinted under those words.

I love Placate, and keep it now even in the days of glorious new AS, and that statement is ridiculously overstating the case. Placate is good against one target. Placate is not perma even with fairly exceptional recharge. And Hide means jack squat once a fight has started. Other than its handy 2.5% base unsuppressed defense, I'd love to know how exactly Hide makes up for the difference in base HP, except in specific build scenarios with defense in the mid-30s and up where that 2.5% defense can be stacked to create meaningful average mitigation.

So I'm sorry, but I full on laugh in the face of anyone who makes an unequivocal claim that Stalkers are "always" (caps omitted) better than Scrappers. That's just plain ludicrous, and tells me that person is selling something.

I explained this in one of the other threads. If you're going to argue for the same campaign in a lot of threads, please don't force the people debating the other side to repeat their arguments in different threads.

There is no such thing as a change to an AT that does not change balance. It does not have to be a direct or indirect boost to damage or survivability - a change to Scrappers that introduces even a completely orthogonal ability to those they possess now cannot help but to change balance in some way, either relative to the environment, relative to other ATs, or both. If it doesn't, it wasn't really a change at all.

No one knows when a balance pass might result in change even to the AT we have now. However, the Scrapper AT has been "feature stable" for a very long time, and there is very little indication it's on anyone's radar for modification, up or down. Adding AT features changes that - it moves the AT into an area of relative uncertainty with respect to further change.

Such change, otherwise unsolicited and "just because", bears with it implicit risk through the "law" of unintended consequences. Imagine that future balance pass determines that the sum total of the Scrapper AT features we have now plus some new feature is somehow too strong. It might be determined that something about Scrappers should change to address this. But there is no guarantee that any such change would be to simply revert or modify the new addition. They might choose instead to change some other aspect of Scrappers as they exist today. That's the part of Scrappers that those of us who like Scrappers just fine would not want changed.

I, personally, do not want to even risk running afoul of such unintended consequences. Such risk is worthwhile when it buys you something you feel is important. You feel the risk is worthwhile because you feel Scrapper change is important. I do not feel Scrapper change is important, and I therefore want to avoid risk. Therefore I do not simply stay quiet while you argue for change, because I worry that meaningful change may risk something I am quite happy with.

If there wasn't such a hairline tightrope in role between various melee ATs, I might find this less of a concern, but there is.

For a glorious example of that not working very well, take Johnny Butane's Tanker crusades.

The squeaky wheel does not always get grease. Sometimes people just kick it 'til it stops squeaking for a while.

I'd use that "not sure if serious" image here, but I know that you're serious.

And those powersets are available to Scrappers, and allow them to step right back ahead, exactly proportionally where their base HP put them relative to Stalkers.

Seriously, it just doesn't work like that.

You don't all have to abandon the archetype. Just those of you who want the archetype to be something it's not, and almost certainly never will be.

Edit: By the way, JB's only been suggesting one specific quantitative change in this thread - a damage cap increase. If that were to happen, it wouldn't really bother me one bit. I have a really hard time imagining the devs actually doing it, for a variety of reasons, but I wouldn't be on the forums somehow campaigning against it. That suggestion, though doesn't really seem to mesh well with the vision of Tankers I think JB's been describing in qualitative terms for ages now, so I'm pretty sure that wouldn't the the last of the topic from him.

Moving to another country implies an awful lot of things that playing a Brute instead of a Tanker does not. You might not speak the local language, the laws will be different, you might not know anyone there. Nothing like that happens when you play a Brute.

So what is it about this that you think is so inconvenient about playing a Brute instead?

I realize that, but I hadn't seen a post of someone testing the proc in a sufficiently long recharge AoE to produce 100% chances irrespective of the AoE modifier, (at least in this thread). If it's been eliminated already, then coolness.

Edit: I know based on the info in the beta thread that the 2nd formula is wrong. I was making sure everyone else did too.

Apparently, at least as recently as the last update to Blaster defiance, Blasters leveled slower, even solo.