UberGuy

No one is owed "reparations" for anything in CoH remotely close to the area of archetype design. That you hold such an attitude and express it regularly (though in various ways) contributes meaningfully to the way other forum regulars view your opinions. If your perspective on things makes your fellow players take your opinions with a chunk of salt the size of Minnesota, do you really think its convincing to the devs?

Understand that I hold it's not impossible that you could have a good idea, or that you might point out a legitimate problem with the game. I do read your posts. I don't think you're dumb. I think you have a completely unreasonable set of expectations about not just what Tankers should be, but what the devs owe you or any other player.

It's one thing to want something, no matter how much other folks might feel it's unreasonable. It's another to proclaim, in effect, that you're owed it.

With a little disrespect as possible meant to your friends, I think they are downright weird.

If there's anyone my friends worry about on a "master" spot (and for the most part, there's not, as long as we know the player is competent), it would be a Blaster or Stalker.

I know that I, for one, was aware of that. Unlike you, I don't attribute that to Tankers somehow sucking at their designated role. I attribute that to their designated role having never been in high demand in this particular game. It doesn't mean it has no place or offers no value.

Consider it a whole-AT version of how the player base values the Empathy powerset versus a set like, say, Cold Domination. Is Empathy useless? Hardly. Are there places where Empathy shines like few other sets? Absolutely. Does that mean Empathy is widely highly regarded and something tons of people want to play? No.

Does all that mean that everyone who plays Empathy is actually bitter about that? If this was you talking about Tankers, that's surely the message I'd be getting. But I don't believe that about Empathy players as a whole, because I know players who either really like it, despite its niche role, or who at least go in to it accepting that it has a niche role that they're willing to fill. Something you seem to assume no Tanker player is willing to do with being a meat shield, simply because you aren't willing.

No, that's not the case. DR debuffs are normally resisted by any resistance you have. A 50% resistible DR debuff applied to someone with 90% resistance becomes a 5% debuff, resulting in 85% net resistance.

[edit] Irresistible debuffs do not work this way. They apply their rated % right off the top, without being resisted first. So a 50% irresistible debuff applied to 90% resistance would result in 40% resistance. [/edit]

Any resistance due to the purple patch is applied before this. So if you have a -50% debuff applied to a +2 critter, it becomes a 40% debuff (+2 critters resist effects by 20%), and that applied to 90% resists would result in 86% resistance. Even if the debuff is irresistible, the purple patch still applies.

Thanks for reminding everyone that you don't speak for the community here. IYeah, sure, pretty much everyone I know would run around like a kid in a candy store if Tankers got a major damage boost. Pretty much no one I know thinks its a sensible thing to do.

That's because the presence pool blows, not because everyone hates playing the meat shield.

Newsflash: helping teammates is what the Tanker AT is for. Everything else it can achieve is bonus. If you don't want that "everything else it can achieve", play something else. When I play solo Defenders (and I do a lot), I know full well what I'm signing up for, and I don't come to the forums demanding the AT work differently because I think my vision of how that should go overrides every other consideration.

That's correct. Rank does not incur the purple patch. There is one effect that is resisted by rank, which is toHit debuffs, but that is an explicit, and, as far as I know, singular effect.

I don't recall if it's gone live yet, but I remember seeing either a patch note or some comment about the devs planning to address that. If it hasn't changed already, that will probably change Soon™.

I can buy that. However, I think the horse representing correcting that imbalance probably left the barn a couple of issues ago.

Sadly, I don't think the circa-I6/CoV devs thought very hard about mixed CoH/CoV AT balance. I don't know if they didn't think the ATs would ever be co-mingled, or if they just didn't have time and resources to plan that mixing out that far in advance. I believe Brutes at CoV release were pretty much too good to be true when compared to either Scrappers or Tankers. While this made CoV-release Stalkers extremely superfluous in PvE, it didn't really break much else, because Brutes didn't really compete with hero ATs for roles on the same teams.

Notably, I believe the circa-I18 devs, meaning basically the same ones we have now, realized the issues this caused once side switching (and, later, wide-open AT selections) were allowed. And this led to the various attempts to reduce Brute performance during I18 beta. Unfortunately, the I18 devs were by this point painted into a corner of hard decisions to make. Brutes rank among their greatest success stories as far as popularity among ATs go - nerfing them was going to be pretty unpopular no matter what, and buffing everyone else raises lots of other concerns. So they tried a few things and settled on reducing Brute damage to a hair below Scrappers. Probably not far enough below Scrappers to really represent the "correct" ratios you're talking about for Tanker vs. Scrapper, but enough to keep Brutes from trodding all over two ATs.

I think a safer bet than further monkeying with Brute (or anyone else's) damage or mitigation levels would be to try and ensure that a Tanker was far and away the king of aggro, along the lines of the math Sarrate mentioned earlier in the thread. Yes, a Brute can stand in for a Tanker, and perhaps too well, but at least let a Tanker clearly be in command of aggro when they are present. Some people play the meatshield not because it's the "right" ratio of damage to toughness, but because they really enjoy doing that. Let them do it it with authority when they take on that mantle.

What you seem to be missing is that doing that would neuter the threat against the characters its actually targeted at.

Irresistible damage isn't especially more scary than plain old everyday damage to most Blasters, Defenders, Dominators, Controllers or Corruptors, because, with the common exception of L/S damage after getting epic shields, most of them aren't used to resisting a lot of damage across the type spectrum anyway. Even if they have an epic shield with third or fourth resistance type, they are pretty used to having other damage types bypass them. They might not be used to being hit with autohit damage, depending on how good their inventions access is, but otherwise they're probably pretty used to being hit, and being hit hard when they are hit.

The whole point of irresistible damage is to hurt the people who are most used to shrugging it off. Yes, it hurts them a lot more than they're used to being hurt, by definition. But it doesn't hurt them worst, because they start from such a much stronger mitigation position. A well-built Tanker who has lost half his HP to irresistible damage is still far, far better off than a Blaster who has lost half of his HP. If you make a Tanker able to ignore irresistible damage, they establish pretty firmly that nothing is able to threaten them unless it blatantly takes them out of the fight a-la sequestration, Ghost Widow or Reichsman grade mezzes. And that is almost certainly the point of those irresistible damage types.

This right here is at the heart of why some of us are disagreeing with you. No one has been kicked down the ladder. Uplifting one AT cannot be viewed as lowering another. Viewing it this way is the very essence of what perpetuates power creep.

Scrappers lost nothing. Nothing was changed. That other ATs might be viewed as viable alternatives to playing Scrappers is a good thing. There is a difference in providing players with other ATs they might like to play (which "steals" away players) and having an AT that people stop playing because there is something wrong with it. Your position comes across as if you view the two things as equivalent, and they are not. Nothing is wrong with Scrappers. If more people play Stalkers now, it's because they now view Stalkers as more viable/enjoyable as alternatives to Scrappers than they used to be.

In an ideal world, all the CoH ATs would be equally popular. We should not strive for one AT to continue to "out do" the others if the others are actually made more comparatively popular.

That's me too. I have never had a level 50 Controller before, and was working on getting one there. I really wanted to go through all the 40-44 story arcs, and ended up doing that on DXP weekend. So I got to 44.9 and turned off XP after two arcs, and spent the rest of the weekend earning double Prestige.

I dinged 50 last night, though.

In general, I agree with this sentiment. I think the War Walkers in the Underground are an example of this - they have mechanics that there is no good way to understand without outside guides. There are no in-game indicators that can show you how to deal with them. However, I think the Telepathists are a much weaker example of this.

It's pretty amazingly obvious that the league is supposed to care how many Telepathists are in play - there's a status bar showing you it on the objective status window. Also, there's a debuff icon with a power name that matches what the windows say the Telepathists are doing. (Pacification.) If people choose to blindly ignore that the objective window might be telling them something important, that's not something I'm willing to lay at the Devs' feet. Ignoring it in an informed way is one thing - that can be a viable strategy. Ignoring it without understanding what it may do is fairly dumb, IMO.

I consider that separate from the rock throwing thing, though.

You really are the king of "can't let stuff go".

Look, honestly, I don't know anyone who thinks the rocks in the TPN was a good idea. I think it was dumb, too. It's too late now, and it seems incredibly unlikely to me that they'll revamp that trial in a way that corrects that dumbness, because of the time it would take away from other effort.

Apparently unlike you, I can look past that shining example of dumbness. I'm sure there's plenty of other stuff about how the Incarnate Trial content doesn't live up to your expectations of personal power, given how you think Tankers ought to work, but overall I'm happy with them, because my characters can do stuff that's absolutely ridiculous with Incarnate powers compared to what they could do without them. Yeah, the story could be better. I care about the results more, and I find the results fairly spectacular.

People say this a lot, and I can sort of forgive it, because it can seem like the debuffs do nothing. I can promise you, they do something very extreme at max stacking. When leagues feel they do nothing, that means that league has plenty of buffs (probably +defense, but maybe also +DR) and/or lots of +3 Incarnates.

The reason I say this is that if you dive into a spawn of IDF at something like -20% defense and -20% DR and you don't have enough buffs or controls or something to offset the debuffs on you, the IDF will have their way with you most unpleasantly. The less shifted you are, the more heinous this will be. I have experienced leagues where the leader didn't pay attention to how equipped the league was to ignore the Telepathists. After all, it had probably always worked, and he just didn't realize exactly why. The result was too much death fighting the IDF, which meant taking too long to defeat the Technicians, which meant too much loss of PO, which meant failure.

I'm sure a lot of leagues do just fine, because a lot of leagues do have a lot of buffs just by accident of having 24 people on hand. A couple of Cold Domination characters or a lot of control can make the debuffs not mean much. It's not guaranteed, though. That's why it bugs me when people say the debuffs don't do anything - that suggests than any old league can ignore them and be fine, and that's just not the case.

When they did that, I had three Scrappers (more than any other AT at the time). A Kat/SR who was already collecting dust, a BS/Invul who I loved but for Unyielding Stance (hey, self-stacking Invincibility was pretty hot), and a DM/Regen, who I created because, at the time, Regen was the only Scrapper secondary with unconditional, toggle mez protection that protected against all standard mez types. The fact that IH was pretty much god mode didn't factor in for me until later.

I think Regen did need to change, because (especially once Invincibility was fixed) I think it stood head and shoulders above most of its peer powersets. I also think it was over-nerfed. That was, frankly, SoP for Cryptic at the time - the standing joke among my playing friends was that Cryptic would think of three ways to nerf something and then implement them all.

That said, I have actually come to enjoy click-happy Regen's play style. I do think it could use a couple of small buffs. I'd like Integration to be fully enhanceable, and I'd like click Instant Healing to have an up front heal to make it usable reactively. I'd love resistance to recharge debuffs, but I don't see Regen getting it.

I understand why some people prefer a "toggle-and-go" playstyle, and I sympathize that they might very much dislike modern Regen. I just don't share that dislike. And I definitely don't count the changes as a nerf against the AT as a whole.

Have you, like, every played any other games that purported to make you into gods? Because I have, and I consider this completely standard and normal.

What exactly do you expect? "Hey, you won! Nice job, now you can be done playing! No more goals for you..."

I hate to say this, but if you're going to bring up how your Stalker is stealing aggro from a Tanker in a sub-thread about how Scrappers must need something because of how well your Stalkers do, I'm afraid I can't give your claims much credibility. Either you're talking about taking aggro that was beyond the aggro cap for the Tanker or your Tanker wasn't taunting to speak of, because there's no way for a Stalker to actually steal aggro off of a Tanker who's doing their job.

A Stalker did not and does not have better mechanical survivability than a comparable Scrapper, period. That's not debatable, it's a simple numerical fact. If your Scrappers were not surviving as well as your Stalker, that has to come down to one of: comparing unlike sets, comparing very different builds in comparable sets, or comparing wildly different playsyles that lead to better survival for the Stalker.

Here's an observation. All your Scrappers have Taunt auras, and of course your Stalker does not. If you don't play (and build) your Scrappers in a way that makes sense for the fact that they can end up with a lot of aggro, that will make all the difference in the world.

It probably depends somewhat on your primary, but I would say yes. Willpoer has only one power that benefits meaningfully from +recharge, and that's its self-rez. That means the only place you're going to really notice Spiritual's +recharge is in your primary, where it might (for example) help you build a seamless attack chain. Barring that, and given that Vigor has higher heal enhancement than Spiritual, I would think that Vigor might be better for a Willpower.

Then you could have been playing your Scrappers better. Before the recent changes there was no excuse for consistently performing better on your Stalker, unless you are comparing radically differently performing powersets, like, I don't know, an ElM/Nin Stalker to a MA/Regen Scrapper.

Given the numbers Sarrate just posted, I honestly don't see how you can say that seriously.

Brutes are the AT designed explicitly to have the next closest survivability after Tankers. I see the point in debating whether they are too close in survivability, but it's to be expected that the AT designed to be the next closest in survivability be, well, close in survivability.

Actually that is the best reason possible for not giving anyone something, no matter who it is. Unless you give them something that is almost pure fluff, it perpetuates the cycle. "Hey, Scrappers got X!, why didn't my favorite AT get something?" Bonus points to the poster that points out "they needed an improvement less than my favorite AT did", because odds are decent that this would be a true statement.

Now...when we Scrappers nerfed?