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Spec tweaks and buffs to improve quality of life and get rid of "dead" specs
thisiscraftaaa
Posts: 252 Arc User
With the buffing and nerfing of different powers, and the advent of new powers, PVDs and the likes, some specs that used to work correctly just don't fulfill their intended purposes any more. Some others have always been, for a lack of better words, absolutely mid, and are in need of some changes to make the spec trees they belong to more useful. With that in mind, I am postponing real-world responsibilities to write this! I'd like to talk about some specs that could use some touching up, and at that, I'll also be addressing them as they are on Live, rather than digging through the PTS in case something's been quietly changed and not mentioned in the patch notes. I'd also like to raise, briefly, that I'm going to talk about commonly used specs, and only a few at that; there's way more and way less-used ones I could touch on but that's best saved for another time. With that said...
- Strength's Quick Recovery / Constitution's Quick Healing / Recovery's Rapid Recovery / Endurance's Quick Recovery
The various "Health Regeneration" specs have, at least as far back as I joined the game (slightly over a decade ago now) been genuinely garbage. As opposed to Resurgence, whose "Regeneration" is a scaling 5%/10%/15% of the user's HP per second, these specs' Health Regeneration is more in line with the behavior of the Regeneration slotted passive, providing a flat tick of healing every few seconds while in combat. The difference is that the healing of these specs is miniscule to a laughable degree. While a good passive healing spec (Sentinel Aura) can heal a few hundred points every second if statted right, similar to if slightly weaker than Medical Nanites, these give a hilariously small spike of healing, such as: Strength's Quick Recovery gives 0.1/0.2 points of healing per tick per point of Recovery. If you theoretically had a thousand Recovery then it would, at max rank, heal you for 200 points every ti. Considering we're in a world where tanks are expected to have 16k-20k health if they don't want to be one-shot through a block by world bosses, healers can put out 10k+ healing per second depending on what they're doing, and DPSes would have to... you know, sacrifice some of their DPS specs for what would- to them- be more like a hundred points of healing or less every three seconds, well... I'm sure you can see how bad this is.
To that end, I'd like to propose one of several changes to this group of specs.
1. make them provide a true Regeneration value (see: Resurgence) of 1% of max health per second per rank. Sacrificing damage output in a game where everything is already balanced around forcing the player to do as much damage as possible while giving the middle finger to tanks so hard that gear mods had to be added explicitly to allow them to generate enough aggro while still having enough health and defense to not be one-shot is... big. To that end, I would suggest that turning them into a much weaker but constantly-active version of Resurgence would make them not only viable but a strong pick for tanks leaning hard into the tank side of things rather than the "DPS with two Confront mods and a shield icon" side of things, as well as some use both for healers looking for passive sustain without spamming Drains and direct self-heals and more mixed solo builds looking for the same. Avoiding a dependence on stacking any specific stat allows for flexibility and ensures the usefulness of this spec is tied only to max health directly, ensuring it remains primarily for pure tanks and anything adding "tanky" to its name.
2. make them provide a true Energy Regeneration value (see: Dark Transfusion/Power Conversion) of 1% of max energy per second per rank, and a 10% increase to total Energy Equilibrium per rank. Contrasting the prior suggestion, this leans hard into regeneration more an energy generation tool. Because, you know what Strength and Constitution have in common? They're the go-to for tanks, who are tailor-made to have energy problems since energy is tied directly to toggleform stacking and energy unlocks (and there is no toggleform or EU that scales with Constitution.) And you know what Recovery and Endurance have in common? They're the throwaway "I never want to run out of energy" primaries nobody takes unless they're forced to, whose only strengths as far as direct damage goes are that if they're at near full on energy they'll do bigger numbers. (Crit chance for Rec, base damage and base healing for End.) To that end (no that wasn't intentional) this would help alleviate tank energy problems for the former two Primaries and turn the latter two into overwhelming fonts of energy for low-damage high-gimmick funny builds, as well as ensure that for builds attempting to actually do damage with them they aren't constantly knocked out of their optimal energy range (since both demand over 90% energy, and even if you had five hundred max energy, that's still 50 energy when throwing around powers that eat through enough to keep you out of 90% almost constantly.)
3. make the existing "points of healing every few seconds" scale more favorably and with stats that all builds will have some amount of, such as "(Offense points + Defense points) / 2 * (Rank) = health gained per tick." In this example, having 400 points of Defense and 500 points of Offense at 2nd rank would result in 900 points every tick... which seems like a lot considering Regeneration only reaches something like twice that, but we're in a world where all properly built healers will heal that many points if not up to twice that with an AoE that affects five people every half second rather than the, what, once every three seconds this ticks at? And it's worth considering that, generally, the kinds of builds that'd reach this much shared Offense and Defense would be builds running high-ranked Coruscating Mights or (for some god-forsaken reason) twin Impact Prisms, and then mostly just tanks and tank-heavy solo builds and some dual-roles beyond that.
Regardless of which of these appeals, the fact of the matter is, the current iteration of these specs is laughably undertuned in a way that remains undertuned all the way from squishy sub-20 leveling builds all the way to the hypothetical limits of full R9s and double AoPM stacking. Nobody in their right mind uses these, and a significant buff of some kind is in order. The alternative would be to just delete these specs entirely and replace them with something more useful, which... yeah.
- Warden's Upper Hand
Now, don't get me wrong, this is a good spec. But it's one of the ones that's fallen off a little more because the scope of the kind of build it was meant for has expanded over time. Currently, it works by providing 2% to the Offense/Severity layer per rank to all your Melee attacks against any target afflicted by: Demolish (18% Crushing) / Shredded (18% Slashing) / Disintegrate (18% Particle) / No Quarter (15% Crushing/15% Fire) / Stress (8%*3 Ego) / Stagger (2%*3 all.) This is... good, honestly! But of note, this became a thing back when those were the only kinds of damage types associated with Melee. Crushing, Slashing, Particle, Ego, and occasionally a small sprinkling of Fire. But. But. Hear me out here.
This neglects the following powers, devices and PVDs, some of which are old while some of which are quasi-new, which are intended to be used as the center-piece of a build or as a strong auxiliary to a build. (This is not an exhaustive list, this is only what I can remember off the top of my head.)
- Bullet Ballet, a base power which does a mixture of Crushing and Piercing damage and is intended to be used with Armor Piercing.
- Cloak of the Infinite Planes, a device from the Drifter which does Magic damage and is intended to be used with Hexed.
- The Magic Imbued Gauntlets family, a trio of devices obtained at the lowest form from the first-ever Serial mission and upgraded twice at the Lemurian Refugee on Monster Island, all of which do Magic damage and are intended to be used with Hexed.
- Therakiel's Blade, a device obtained from the limited-time Therakiel Rampage as part of the TTAlert Week, which does Dimensional damage and is both intended to be used with and applies Devoid on its combo finisher.
- Brilliant Cleave, a PVD obtained from the aforementioned Therakaiel Rampage, which does Dimensional damage and is intended to be used with Devoid.
- Electric Vengeance, a PVD obtained from Red Winter, available once every few weeks. It does Electrical damage and is intended to be used with Superconductor.
- Havoc Hammer, another PVD obtained from Red Winter. It does Sonic damage and is intended to be used with Deafening.
- Thundering Claws, a PVD obtained from Fury of the Dragon, available once every few weeks. It does Electrical damage and is intended to be used with Superconductor.
- Venom Shock, a PVD obtained from the GCR store or during Blood Moon. It does Toxic damage and is both intended to be used with and applies Debilitating Poison on full charge, plus refreshing it on on taps/partial charges.
- Toxic Blades, another PVD from the GCR store and Blood Moon. It does Toxic damage and is intended to be used with Debilitating Poison.
- Blight Touch, a third PVD from the GCR store and Blood Moon. It does Toxic damage and, wouldn't you guess it, is intended to be used with Debilitating Poison.
Again, this isn't even an exhaustive list. This is just what I could remember off the top of my head thinking about it for a few minutes. All of these powers, devices and PVDs, some regular old melee attacks and some melee combos (which you'd be even more inclined to use with Warden since it has multiple specs for dedicated combo builds) all rely on / use defensive debuffs that don't proc Upper Hand. Mind you again, when Upper Hand was still fresh, these things weren't around for the most part, and while I don't remember the specifics, some while back we had an Upper Hand fix that made it register another defense debuff now that it didn't back then. So, with that in mind?...
My suggestion- and it's only one hard "this is NECESSARY" suggestion rather than several soft "it would be neat if" suggestions- is as such: make Upper Hand provide its 2%/4%/6% bonus to Offense/Severity layer for all Melee attacks when the target is affected by any of the owner's (active) defense debuffs. For this suggestion, passive ones such as DUCs, Pestilence, Detect Vulnerability and the likes obviously wouldn't count, but ANYTHING actively applied and/or refreshed by the user would, whether innate to a power like the aforementioned debuffs named, or active specs like Brawler's penetrating Strikes, Dexterity's Expose Weakness, Sentinel's Wither, etcetera. This would serve to allow all builds using the aforementioned powers, devices and PVDs more flexibility by not forcing them to take something that applies a defense debuff for Upper Hand to proc off of that doesn't actually benefit the damage type their build revolves around (the common picks for this are Mental Storm, Incendiary Grenade and sometimes Hurl or Nuclear Shockwave) and instead letting them... simply benefit from using their intended defense debuff(s).
- Constitution's Resilient
Some people swear by this spec. And I'm going to be brutally honest. They're wrong to. For whatever reason, the way Knocks work is that, unless specifically scripted to always ignore knock resistance or always obey knock resistance, there's 50/50 odds they'll do either. You can have a thousand percent Knock resistance, and some level 40 Normal-difficulty Viper henchman's grenade has a 50/50 on nudging you a quarter of an inch to the right or sending you flying so hard you get knocked through geometry and wind up falling outside whatever instanced map you're on and into the empty abyss below. Having said that, what Resilient does is give you bonus Knock Resistance based on your Constitution. This is... fine and all, in situations where things don't just bypass Knock Resistance whenever they feel like it? But this is Champions Online, so of course 80% of the things in the game have a 50/50 of bypassing it. And even if they didn't, having a massive amount of Con still results in Knock Resistances on par with just having, like, a spare 200 Strength lying around, and, fancy that, if you're playing a Str-prime tank instead of a Con-prime tank, you get that for free and instead get to put those spec points into having way more Defense than Con-prime would give you, making you tankier with a DPS primary than with the tank primary. So really, this is just a flat-out lame spec, in a spec tree overshadowed for tankiness by Strength, by Intelligence, sometimes by Ego and Presence depending on the build... yeah, uh, Constitution needs some help, and I'm of the mind that addressing some of the awful specs with it will help there.
For making Resilient more useful, my suggestion is the following: make Resilient increase the duration of stacks of Knock Resistance on the user by 1%/2% per 10 Constitution based on Rank. Unlike the Knock Resistance stat, the Knock Resistance buff is actually VERY big, if you manage to get it to 3 stacks. At 3, almost all Knocks in the game just flat-out won't affect you until they expire. As such, this alternate Resilient would instead allow well-geared players to just about double (or slightly higher if extremely Con-stacked) the duration of their Knock Resistance stacks, which would mean more reliable knock immunity during sequences with lots of knock spam that otherwise pens Knock Resistance and pens Blocks, resulting in unavoidable deaths, such as the infamous Vargulf Grenade (which, fancy that, can bypass a Block that's been held down by more than 10 minutes before aggroing them. How's that for "early blocks mitigate all secondary effects from enemy attacks," huh?) Of course, the risk is still that reaching 3 stacks of Knock Resistance in the first place often involves being in extreme danger, but being able to double the safety period after reaching 3 stacks without dying violently would still be helpful, especially for having breathing space in add-spam-heavy environments. Alternative suggestion: +0.5%/1% Knock Resistance stack duration per 10 of all Superstats added together based on rank. The primary suggestion would be much more beneficial for tanks specifically, while the latter/alternative would be beneficial to solo builds and the odd healer taking Con instead of Pre or Int (for some reason or another) as well.
- Constitution's Unyielding
This one is also pretty awful, but for the opposite reason. While almost all knocks will randomly bypass the Knock Resistance stat when they feel like it, almost all Holds/Crowd Control effects that enemies use can be mitigated by blocking early, and those few that can't are usually scripted anyways, such as Black Fang's (and Chimera's, the dirty thieving lizard-turkey) howl-and-stun threat wipe, or Eidolon's stun threat wipe during Red Orb phases. And in situations where you just genuinely slip up, usually popping an Active Offense- even at a low rank- or Resurgence with the appropriate Advantage is enough to get back into the action before being forced to eat any hits you were supposed to block. There are other powers that can help other people break free of Holds early too, as much as nobody really uses those for the most part since your sword and shield against Holds are always your Active Offense/Defense and your good old trusty any-rank Block and that's more than good enough. With that in mind, a tank, who is even more encouraged to regularly use their Block, is going to suffer even less from awkward Holds. The end result is the same as with Resilient: why would you ever use this when you can go for the ideal of Tough 3/3 + Fuel My Fire 2/3? And Constitution is meant for tanks, this isn't like Strength or Ego or Presence or Intelligence where your spec choices will differ depending on what you're building for since here you only take Constitution explicitly for tanking. Of course, with that said, the idea of something passively providing more Hold mitigation is nice, but it's too passive here, and way too weak. In that stead, my suggestion is the following.
Make Unyielding tick (Constitution*Rank) Break Free damage once per second while Held. See, once again, if you're running Con Prime then you're a tank. That, or you've made a very, very poor career choice. Of course, being a tank means you're almost guaranteed to be running at least a R1 Active Offense, and there's a high likelihood you're running R2 Resurgence and a moderate likelihood you've also taken Unchained on said Resurgence, as well as a moderate likelihood you're using Protector Mastery so you can effectively spam the daylights out of your Resurgence in order to survive the endless onslaught of stupid that is whatever Teleiosaurus's design philosophy is. You might even be running Sparkstorm with the Toggle Adv or Ego Blade Pandemonium as your ult, since both of those eat enemy Holds alive. My point is: you're going to have lots of tools to deal with Holds. But, let's say for a moment you want to R3 that Resurgence instead. Or maybe you'd rather take, say, a Hold of your own instead of an Active Offense. In situations like that, this alternative/revamped Unyielding would act as an absolute woodchipper for enemy Holds, and a reward for taking Constitution over other traditionally-better Primaries for tanking.
- Intelligence's Tactician
See, here's a funny little thing. Even with the, uh, pretty badly-thought-out nerfs to Intelligence coming soon, none of them actually address the problem with Intelligence. See, Strength can be built to stack Strength or to stack a Secondary Superstat. Ego can be built to stack Ego or to stack a Secondary Superstat. Even Dexterity can- actually, Dexterity's a bit weird in that it wants you to crit but is also built around stacking a Secondary Superstat (which means less critting.) But my point stands! The other heavy hitters are about flexibility. But Intelligence, for as much as it can be used to DPS, tank or heal, suffers from being built exclusively to stack Intelligence when it comes to doing DPS, which is where 90% of people use Intelligence. The closest it gets to rewarding stacking secondaries is Expertise, but Expertise results in having ~15% to ~25% less Critical Severity than Ego-Prime Secondary Stacked (what with Int having no way of amping its Crit Sev,) and way less Critical Chance (excluding comparing Int-Prime Dex against Ego-Prime Dex, in which case you'll have slightly lower Critical Chance with Int Prime as well as far as I've tested.) And with upcoming Intelligence nerfs making the defpen portion of things less useful and preventing you from going full Enlightened 3/3 + Detect Vulnerability 3/3 + Expertise 2/2 by squeezing Enlightened into the top row with the other two, Intelligence is left with some... very unfavorable bottom-row-of-specs action. Now that Detect Vulnerability is being nerfed, and that's entertainingly not a nerf I'm too bothered by, there's room to expand in the other direction though. That is to say...
Change Tactician to be a Critical Severity bonus based on Secondary Superstats, similar if not identical to Strength's Brutality. This would be much more useful than the almost microscopic Offense bonus of current/Live's Tactician, and give a slight buff to Intelligence-stacking builds but mostly would open up Intelligence to more viable Int-prime Dex-stacking, more comparable to Ego-prime Dex-stacking (if still not nearly as good as Str-prime Dex-stacking but that's besides the point.) Do I really need to say anything more? If Intelligence's "defpen but no crits" gimmick is getting nerfed, then it should get some crits to compensate, and some flexibility to do things that aren't PSS-stacking with Int would be very welcome.
- Intelligence's Revitalize
I gave different suggestions for introducing crits to Intelligence over here, and while those stand on their own full-well, I'm giving different suggestions intended to be used with each-other here instead, instead of just going "uh, just do those!" With that in mind, though, my criticism of the current Revitalize still stands: literally nobody is using their Energy Builder unless forced to, which is usually by playing sub-40 leveling builds that have no energy, or by being hit by badly-designed game mechanics (Lemurian and Destroid Master Villains with their instant energy drain that repeatedly blockbreaks as well, the atTENd Alert boss who just deletes everbody's energy arena-wide whenever he feels like it, etcetera.) This goes doubly for Intelligence, which is one of those most energy-rich Primaries in the game, especially since in its current iteration it strongarms you into stacking more of it to function. You are never going to use your Energy Builder as an Int Prime build, leaving this useless lump of a spec just awkwardly tacked onto Intelligence, contributing nothing for anyone. So! Consider the following.
Change Revitalize to instead provide a passive 2%/4%/6% Charge Speed buff and 2%/4%/6% Recharge Speed buff, the latter bypassing Recharge Speed DR similar to Aura of Arcane Clarity. This not only keeps the same spirit of "this spec makes your powers recharge faster even though they already do it pretty fast since you're Int Prime and all" but also adds that littlest, teeniest bit of extra something for charge-heavy builds, since a lot of charge-heavy builds (especially ranged) already use Intelligence, and current/pending updates are leaning heavier and heavier into putting a lot of focus on mobile maintains rather than riskier-to-use self-rooting charges. Granted, this would still be good for maintain builds too, but importantly, it's on the bottom row after the pending Intelligence nerfs, which means there'd actually be a full 5 on the bottom row worth taking at all if this were implemented.
- Ego's Sixth Sense
This is the last one I'm going to type up, I am practically out of room to keep this all in one post and this time around I'd actually like to keep it all in one post, instead of spilling out into two or three. So! Sixth Sense, to me at least, has a bit of a clunkiness problem. If you're Ego-stacking, you get more DPS in the long run out of Exploit Opening 2/2 instead of Sixth Sense 2/3 to go with your Follow Through. On top of that, you can't fully rank both Sixth Sense and Follow Through. This contrasts Strength, where you can and should fully stack Overpower 3/3 Brutality 2/2, as well as Dexterity (Deadly Aim 3/3 Expose Weakness 2/2) and pre-nerf Intelligence as it still is on Live (Detect Vulnerability 3/3 Expertise 2/2.) In fact, even Ego itself contradicts Ego, with Follow Through 3/3 Exploit Opening 2/2. And Exploit Opening requires you to not crit too often, so you should not pair it with Sixth Sense, sending that straight out of the window. It's just... awkward. And again, Exploit Opening is stronger at 2/2 than Sixth Sense even at 3/3. Those in turn fall behind current/pre-nerf Intelligence as well as current Strength, which I bring up because, you know, Str is better than Ego for TKBlade despite TKBlade scaling off Ego's damage buff instead of Str's. So, with that in mind.
Suggestion: flatten Sixth Sense to a 2-rank Spec from a 3-rank, while keeping the same max scaling (flattened 2/2 would be the same as current/Live 3/3.) This wouldn't really increase Ego's maximum damage potential when Ego-stacking (Exploit Opening 2/2 would still do better to my knowledge) but it would give Dex-stacking Ego an edge, both for an alternative stacking for some ranged DPSes as well as letting the intended Ego-prime TKBlade catch up slightly to the much-better Str-prime TKBlade.
And with that, I'm ~600 characters past the post cap and have to trim some down, so I'm stopping it here! Suggestions and thoughts from other players on the topic of neglected specs, please, pretty please.
- Strength's Quick Recovery / Constitution's Quick Healing / Recovery's Rapid Recovery / Endurance's Quick Recovery
The various "Health Regeneration" specs have, at least as far back as I joined the game (slightly over a decade ago now) been genuinely garbage. As opposed to Resurgence, whose "Regeneration" is a scaling 5%/10%/15% of the user's HP per second, these specs' Health Regeneration is more in line with the behavior of the Regeneration slotted passive, providing a flat tick of healing every few seconds while in combat. The difference is that the healing of these specs is miniscule to a laughable degree. While a good passive healing spec (Sentinel Aura) can heal a few hundred points every second if statted right, similar to if slightly weaker than Medical Nanites, these give a hilariously small spike of healing, such as: Strength's Quick Recovery gives 0.1/0.2 points of healing per tick per point of Recovery. If you theoretically had a thousand Recovery then it would, at max rank, heal you for 200 points every ti. Considering we're in a world where tanks are expected to have 16k-20k health if they don't want to be one-shot through a block by world bosses, healers can put out 10k+ healing per second depending on what they're doing, and DPSes would have to... you know, sacrifice some of their DPS specs for what would- to them- be more like a hundred points of healing or less every three seconds, well... I'm sure you can see how bad this is.
To that end, I'd like to propose one of several changes to this group of specs.
1. make them provide a true Regeneration value (see: Resurgence) of 1% of max health per second per rank. Sacrificing damage output in a game where everything is already balanced around forcing the player to do as much damage as possible while giving the middle finger to tanks so hard that gear mods had to be added explicitly to allow them to generate enough aggro while still having enough health and defense to not be one-shot is... big. To that end, I would suggest that turning them into a much weaker but constantly-active version of Resurgence would make them not only viable but a strong pick for tanks leaning hard into the tank side of things rather than the "DPS with two Confront mods and a shield icon" side of things, as well as some use both for healers looking for passive sustain without spamming Drains and direct self-heals and more mixed solo builds looking for the same. Avoiding a dependence on stacking any specific stat allows for flexibility and ensures the usefulness of this spec is tied only to max health directly, ensuring it remains primarily for pure tanks and anything adding "tanky" to its name.
2. make them provide a true Energy Regeneration value (see: Dark Transfusion/Power Conversion) of 1% of max energy per second per rank, and a 10% increase to total Energy Equilibrium per rank. Contrasting the prior suggestion, this leans hard into regeneration more an energy generation tool. Because, you know what Strength and Constitution have in common? They're the go-to for tanks, who are tailor-made to have energy problems since energy is tied directly to toggleform stacking and energy unlocks (and there is no toggleform or EU that scales with Constitution.) And you know what Recovery and Endurance have in common? They're the throwaway "I never want to run out of energy" primaries nobody takes unless they're forced to, whose only strengths as far as direct damage goes are that if they're at near full on energy they'll do bigger numbers. (Crit chance for Rec, base damage and base healing for End.) To that end (no that wasn't intentional) this would help alleviate tank energy problems for the former two Primaries and turn the latter two into overwhelming fonts of energy for low-damage high-gimmick funny builds, as well as ensure that for builds attempting to actually do damage with them they aren't constantly knocked out of their optimal energy range (since both demand over 90% energy, and even if you had five hundred max energy, that's still 50 energy when throwing around powers that eat through enough to keep you out of 90% almost constantly.)
3. make the existing "points of healing every few seconds" scale more favorably and with stats that all builds will have some amount of, such as "(Offense points + Defense points) / 2 * (Rank) = health gained per tick." In this example, having 400 points of Defense and 500 points of Offense at 2nd rank would result in 900 points every tick... which seems like a lot considering Regeneration only reaches something like twice that, but we're in a world where all properly built healers will heal that many points if not up to twice that with an AoE that affects five people every half second rather than the, what, once every three seconds this ticks at? And it's worth considering that, generally, the kinds of builds that'd reach this much shared Offense and Defense would be builds running high-ranked Coruscating Mights or (for some god-forsaken reason) twin Impact Prisms, and then mostly just tanks and tank-heavy solo builds and some dual-roles beyond that.
Regardless of which of these appeals, the fact of the matter is, the current iteration of these specs is laughably undertuned in a way that remains undertuned all the way from squishy sub-20 leveling builds all the way to the hypothetical limits of full R9s and double AoPM stacking. Nobody in their right mind uses these, and a significant buff of some kind is in order. The alternative would be to just delete these specs entirely and replace them with something more useful, which... yeah.
- Warden's Upper Hand
Now, don't get me wrong, this is a good spec. But it's one of the ones that's fallen off a little more because the scope of the kind of build it was meant for has expanded over time. Currently, it works by providing 2% to the Offense/Severity layer per rank to all your Melee attacks against any target afflicted by: Demolish (18% Crushing) / Shredded (18% Slashing) / Disintegrate (18% Particle) / No Quarter (15% Crushing/15% Fire) / Stress (8%*3 Ego) / Stagger (2%*3 all.) This is... good, honestly! But of note, this became a thing back when those were the only kinds of damage types associated with Melee. Crushing, Slashing, Particle, Ego, and occasionally a small sprinkling of Fire. But. But. Hear me out here.
This neglects the following powers, devices and PVDs, some of which are old while some of which are quasi-new, which are intended to be used as the center-piece of a build or as a strong auxiliary to a build. (This is not an exhaustive list, this is only what I can remember off the top of my head.)
- Bullet Ballet, a base power which does a mixture of Crushing and Piercing damage and is intended to be used with Armor Piercing.
- Cloak of the Infinite Planes, a device from the Drifter which does Magic damage and is intended to be used with Hexed.
- The Magic Imbued Gauntlets family, a trio of devices obtained at the lowest form from the first-ever Serial mission and upgraded twice at the Lemurian Refugee on Monster Island, all of which do Magic damage and are intended to be used with Hexed.
- Therakiel's Blade, a device obtained from the limited-time Therakiel Rampage as part of the TTAlert Week, which does Dimensional damage and is both intended to be used with and applies Devoid on its combo finisher.
- Brilliant Cleave, a PVD obtained from the aforementioned Therakaiel Rampage, which does Dimensional damage and is intended to be used with Devoid.
- Electric Vengeance, a PVD obtained from Red Winter, available once every few weeks. It does Electrical damage and is intended to be used with Superconductor.
- Havoc Hammer, another PVD obtained from Red Winter. It does Sonic damage and is intended to be used with Deafening.
- Thundering Claws, a PVD obtained from Fury of the Dragon, available once every few weeks. It does Electrical damage and is intended to be used with Superconductor.
- Venom Shock, a PVD obtained from the GCR store or during Blood Moon. It does Toxic damage and is both intended to be used with and applies Debilitating Poison on full charge, plus refreshing it on on taps/partial charges.
- Toxic Blades, another PVD from the GCR store and Blood Moon. It does Toxic damage and is intended to be used with Debilitating Poison.
- Blight Touch, a third PVD from the GCR store and Blood Moon. It does Toxic damage and, wouldn't you guess it, is intended to be used with Debilitating Poison.
Again, this isn't even an exhaustive list. This is just what I could remember off the top of my head thinking about it for a few minutes. All of these powers, devices and PVDs, some regular old melee attacks and some melee combos (which you'd be even more inclined to use with Warden since it has multiple specs for dedicated combo builds) all rely on / use defensive debuffs that don't proc Upper Hand. Mind you again, when Upper Hand was still fresh, these things weren't around for the most part, and while I don't remember the specifics, some while back we had an Upper Hand fix that made it register another defense debuff now that it didn't back then. So, with that in mind?...
My suggestion- and it's only one hard "this is NECESSARY" suggestion rather than several soft "it would be neat if" suggestions- is as such: make Upper Hand provide its 2%/4%/6% bonus to Offense/Severity layer for all Melee attacks when the target is affected by any of the owner's (active) defense debuffs. For this suggestion, passive ones such as DUCs, Pestilence, Detect Vulnerability and the likes obviously wouldn't count, but ANYTHING actively applied and/or refreshed by the user would, whether innate to a power like the aforementioned debuffs named, or active specs like Brawler's penetrating Strikes, Dexterity's Expose Weakness, Sentinel's Wither, etcetera. This would serve to allow all builds using the aforementioned powers, devices and PVDs more flexibility by not forcing them to take something that applies a defense debuff for Upper Hand to proc off of that doesn't actually benefit the damage type their build revolves around (the common picks for this are Mental Storm, Incendiary Grenade and sometimes Hurl or Nuclear Shockwave) and instead letting them... simply benefit from using their intended defense debuff(s).
- Constitution's Resilient
Some people swear by this spec. And I'm going to be brutally honest. They're wrong to. For whatever reason, the way Knocks work is that, unless specifically scripted to always ignore knock resistance or always obey knock resistance, there's 50/50 odds they'll do either. You can have a thousand percent Knock resistance, and some level 40 Normal-difficulty Viper henchman's grenade has a 50/50 on nudging you a quarter of an inch to the right or sending you flying so hard you get knocked through geometry and wind up falling outside whatever instanced map you're on and into the empty abyss below. Having said that, what Resilient does is give you bonus Knock Resistance based on your Constitution. This is... fine and all, in situations where things don't just bypass Knock Resistance whenever they feel like it? But this is Champions Online, so of course 80% of the things in the game have a 50/50 of bypassing it. And even if they didn't, having a massive amount of Con still results in Knock Resistances on par with just having, like, a spare 200 Strength lying around, and, fancy that, if you're playing a Str-prime tank instead of a Con-prime tank, you get that for free and instead get to put those spec points into having way more Defense than Con-prime would give you, making you tankier with a DPS primary than with the tank primary. So really, this is just a flat-out lame spec, in a spec tree overshadowed for tankiness by Strength, by Intelligence, sometimes by Ego and Presence depending on the build... yeah, uh, Constitution needs some help, and I'm of the mind that addressing some of the awful specs with it will help there.
For making Resilient more useful, my suggestion is the following: make Resilient increase the duration of stacks of Knock Resistance on the user by 1%/2% per 10 Constitution based on Rank. Unlike the Knock Resistance stat, the Knock Resistance buff is actually VERY big, if you manage to get it to 3 stacks. At 3, almost all Knocks in the game just flat-out won't affect you until they expire. As such, this alternate Resilient would instead allow well-geared players to just about double (or slightly higher if extremely Con-stacked) the duration of their Knock Resistance stacks, which would mean more reliable knock immunity during sequences with lots of knock spam that otherwise pens Knock Resistance and pens Blocks, resulting in unavoidable deaths, such as the infamous Vargulf Grenade (which, fancy that, can bypass a Block that's been held down by more than 10 minutes before aggroing them. How's that for "early blocks mitigate all secondary effects from enemy attacks," huh?) Of course, the risk is still that reaching 3 stacks of Knock Resistance in the first place often involves being in extreme danger, but being able to double the safety period after reaching 3 stacks without dying violently would still be helpful, especially for having breathing space in add-spam-heavy environments. Alternative suggestion: +0.5%/1% Knock Resistance stack duration per 10 of all Superstats added together based on rank. The primary suggestion would be much more beneficial for tanks specifically, while the latter/alternative would be beneficial to solo builds and the odd healer taking Con instead of Pre or Int (for some reason or another) as well.
- Constitution's Unyielding
This one is also pretty awful, but for the opposite reason. While almost all knocks will randomly bypass the Knock Resistance stat when they feel like it, almost all Holds/Crowd Control effects that enemies use can be mitigated by blocking early, and those few that can't are usually scripted anyways, such as Black Fang's (and Chimera's, the dirty thieving lizard-turkey) howl-and-stun threat wipe, or Eidolon's stun threat wipe during Red Orb phases. And in situations where you just genuinely slip up, usually popping an Active Offense- even at a low rank- or Resurgence with the appropriate Advantage is enough to get back into the action before being forced to eat any hits you were supposed to block. There are other powers that can help other people break free of Holds early too, as much as nobody really uses those for the most part since your sword and shield against Holds are always your Active Offense/Defense and your good old trusty any-rank Block and that's more than good enough. With that in mind, a tank, who is even more encouraged to regularly use their Block, is going to suffer even less from awkward Holds. The end result is the same as with Resilient: why would you ever use this when you can go for the ideal of Tough 3/3 + Fuel My Fire 2/3? And Constitution is meant for tanks, this isn't like Strength or Ego or Presence or Intelligence where your spec choices will differ depending on what you're building for since here you only take Constitution explicitly for tanking. Of course, with that said, the idea of something passively providing more Hold mitigation is nice, but it's too passive here, and way too weak. In that stead, my suggestion is the following.
Make Unyielding tick (Constitution*Rank) Break Free damage once per second while Held. See, once again, if you're running Con Prime then you're a tank. That, or you've made a very, very poor career choice. Of course, being a tank means you're almost guaranteed to be running at least a R1 Active Offense, and there's a high likelihood you're running R2 Resurgence and a moderate likelihood you've also taken Unchained on said Resurgence, as well as a moderate likelihood you're using Protector Mastery so you can effectively spam the daylights out of your Resurgence in order to survive the endless onslaught of stupid that is whatever Teleiosaurus's design philosophy is. You might even be running Sparkstorm with the Toggle Adv or Ego Blade Pandemonium as your ult, since both of those eat enemy Holds alive. My point is: you're going to have lots of tools to deal with Holds. But, let's say for a moment you want to R3 that Resurgence instead. Or maybe you'd rather take, say, a Hold of your own instead of an Active Offense. In situations like that, this alternative/revamped Unyielding would act as an absolute woodchipper for enemy Holds, and a reward for taking Constitution over other traditionally-better Primaries for tanking.
- Intelligence's Tactician
See, here's a funny little thing. Even with the, uh, pretty badly-thought-out nerfs to Intelligence coming soon, none of them actually address the problem with Intelligence. See, Strength can be built to stack Strength or to stack a Secondary Superstat. Ego can be built to stack Ego or to stack a Secondary Superstat. Even Dexterity can- actually, Dexterity's a bit weird in that it wants you to crit but is also built around stacking a Secondary Superstat (which means less critting.) But my point stands! The other heavy hitters are about flexibility. But Intelligence, for as much as it can be used to DPS, tank or heal, suffers from being built exclusively to stack Intelligence when it comes to doing DPS, which is where 90% of people use Intelligence. The closest it gets to rewarding stacking secondaries is Expertise, but Expertise results in having ~15% to ~25% less Critical Severity than Ego-Prime Secondary Stacked (what with Int having no way of amping its Crit Sev,) and way less Critical Chance (excluding comparing Int-Prime Dex against Ego-Prime Dex, in which case you'll have slightly lower Critical Chance with Int Prime as well as far as I've tested.) And with upcoming Intelligence nerfs making the defpen portion of things less useful and preventing you from going full Enlightened 3/3 + Detect Vulnerability 3/3 + Expertise 2/2 by squeezing Enlightened into the top row with the other two, Intelligence is left with some... very unfavorable bottom-row-of-specs action. Now that Detect Vulnerability is being nerfed, and that's entertainingly not a nerf I'm too bothered by, there's room to expand in the other direction though. That is to say...
Change Tactician to be a Critical Severity bonus based on Secondary Superstats, similar if not identical to Strength's Brutality. This would be much more useful than the almost microscopic Offense bonus of current/Live's Tactician, and give a slight buff to Intelligence-stacking builds but mostly would open up Intelligence to more viable Int-prime Dex-stacking, more comparable to Ego-prime Dex-stacking (if still not nearly as good as Str-prime Dex-stacking but that's besides the point.) Do I really need to say anything more? If Intelligence's "defpen but no crits" gimmick is getting nerfed, then it should get some crits to compensate, and some flexibility to do things that aren't PSS-stacking with Int would be very welcome.
- Intelligence's Revitalize
I gave different suggestions for introducing crits to Intelligence over here, and while those stand on their own full-well, I'm giving different suggestions intended to be used with each-other here instead, instead of just going "uh, just do those!" With that in mind, though, my criticism of the current Revitalize still stands: literally nobody is using their Energy Builder unless forced to, which is usually by playing sub-40 leveling builds that have no energy, or by being hit by badly-designed game mechanics (Lemurian and Destroid Master Villains with their instant energy drain that repeatedly blockbreaks as well, the atTENd Alert boss who just deletes everbody's energy arena-wide whenever he feels like it, etcetera.) This goes doubly for Intelligence, which is one of those most energy-rich Primaries in the game, especially since in its current iteration it strongarms you into stacking more of it to function. You are never going to use your Energy Builder as an Int Prime build, leaving this useless lump of a spec just awkwardly tacked onto Intelligence, contributing nothing for anyone. So! Consider the following.
Change Revitalize to instead provide a passive 2%/4%/6% Charge Speed buff and 2%/4%/6% Recharge Speed buff, the latter bypassing Recharge Speed DR similar to Aura of Arcane Clarity. This not only keeps the same spirit of "this spec makes your powers recharge faster even though they already do it pretty fast since you're Int Prime and all" but also adds that littlest, teeniest bit of extra something for charge-heavy builds, since a lot of charge-heavy builds (especially ranged) already use Intelligence, and current/pending updates are leaning heavier and heavier into putting a lot of focus on mobile maintains rather than riskier-to-use self-rooting charges. Granted, this would still be good for maintain builds too, but importantly, it's on the bottom row after the pending Intelligence nerfs, which means there'd actually be a full 5 on the bottom row worth taking at all if this were implemented.
- Ego's Sixth Sense
This is the last one I'm going to type up, I am practically out of room to keep this all in one post and this time around I'd actually like to keep it all in one post, instead of spilling out into two or three. So! Sixth Sense, to me at least, has a bit of a clunkiness problem. If you're Ego-stacking, you get more DPS in the long run out of Exploit Opening 2/2 instead of Sixth Sense 2/3 to go with your Follow Through. On top of that, you can't fully rank both Sixth Sense and Follow Through. This contrasts Strength, where you can and should fully stack Overpower 3/3 Brutality 2/2, as well as Dexterity (Deadly Aim 3/3 Expose Weakness 2/2) and pre-nerf Intelligence as it still is on Live (Detect Vulnerability 3/3 Expertise 2/2.) In fact, even Ego itself contradicts Ego, with Follow Through 3/3 Exploit Opening 2/2. And Exploit Opening requires you to not crit too often, so you should not pair it with Sixth Sense, sending that straight out of the window. It's just... awkward. And again, Exploit Opening is stronger at 2/2 than Sixth Sense even at 3/3. Those in turn fall behind current/pre-nerf Intelligence as well as current Strength, which I bring up because, you know, Str is better than Ego for TKBlade despite TKBlade scaling off Ego's damage buff instead of Str's. So, with that in mind.
Suggestion: flatten Sixth Sense to a 2-rank Spec from a 3-rank, while keeping the same max scaling (flattened 2/2 would be the same as current/Live 3/3.) This wouldn't really increase Ego's maximum damage potential when Ego-stacking (Exploit Opening 2/2 would still do better to my knowledge) but it would give Dex-stacking Ego an edge, both for an alternative stacking for some ranged DPSes as well as letting the intended Ego-prime TKBlade catch up slightly to the much-better Str-prime TKBlade.
And with that, I'm ~600 characters past the post cap and have to trim some down, so I'm stopping it here! Suggestions and thoughts from other players on the topic of neglected specs, please, pretty please.
The fact that the forums refuse to tell you how close you are to the character/post size limit until you attempt to post something that happens to be too big- and the automated spam filter will immediately completely lock you out of posting long-term if you attempt to post or edit posts too close to the character limit- is genuine agony.
This is my cry for help
This is my cry for help
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