Work In Progress: Hard Light Balance - Updated

One thing I have always found about controllers is, their abilities all effectively do the same thing, just with different damage out or power interactions. Compare and contrast to healers, which every healing class, the heals function differently, some are area of effect, some are heal over time for large ticks, others heal over time for multiple sets of small ticks.

Why not do a different type of PoT, like an Area of Effect, or multiple power interactions, etc? or variations which let multiple trolls POT not overwrite...

My answer is because Originally Controllers did not supply power. The ability to give power was added to the Controller role. Controller classes "Control" differently. Different stun effects and such.
Think of our P.O.T. and Instant power as a Healers Emergency Heal and 7-man Channeled Heal (Guardian's Light, IOR, Bloom, Ionic Drain) Healers have other heals that differentiate between powerset just like Controllers have different CC effects(stuns/juggles/encasements/PI's).

Gadgets is the encasement heavy power set. Pet that can encase/ Stasis Field/ and an encasement PI with Cryo-Foam and Cryo-Aura (Field). Gadgets also has the explosion PI to juggle.

Mental has Terrorize to hard stun and panic. Daze does not do a PI CC effect, but the Telekinesis tree specializes in encasements and encasement explosions (stuns). Causing Helpless PI which it can get extra damage from.

Quantum has two unique PI's both of which CC effects. Time slows enemies and also root-stuns them in place. The Space tree uses Graviton-Charged into Polarity. Attracting enemies and objects towards each other and causing them to be rooted in place. Quantum also has an explosion knockdown juggle- both defense debuffs Singularity and Time Bomb.

Hard Light - has Stuns and Panics which are like being dominated by Will or Fear, but currently does not allow for extra damage aside from a CC enemy allowing you to complete a Construct combo.

Because the Power return was more of an attachment to the controller role, it is hard to say this mechanic should be vastly different between the Powersets. Instead think of P.O.T. and Instant Power as the equivalent of an Emergency Heal and Channeled Group Heal, with the key differences being in how a Controller power set can "Control" enemies with Control effects.

oh well, aren't you polite. HL IS balanced as it is.
I can totally understand the devs planning to balance earth and electricity, because as things are, they are unbalanced.
Hard Light is NOT unbalanced.
It's as easy as that.
And btw: I play a HL char too, and I have - at some point - played all powers in this game except for celest and nature.

While i agree that Fire is in dire need of some attention, you answered your first post here with your second. Once jump canceling is ruined HL will effectively be unable to do ranged damage.

We have no idea how the changes to animation times will affect our melee rotations and clip-ability with those which could mean our melee damage is ruined.

HL has the most to lose with the jump cancelling changes because the devs dont want to make content melee-able (when you are AT CR, not grossly above it, or Rage) resulting in being reliant on ranged damage.

This thread came about because someone on the dev team did the math and found out that a ranged HL DPS is 2.5X less effective without jump cancelling.

I'll give you an example to put it into perspective. Last night in nexus i put out 2.7 million damage. If we divide that by 2.5 it was only 1.08 million. That would have been less than the third place DPS (1.3 mil) who was still wearing green T5 gear and, kinda ironic considering your post, happened to be a fire player.

If HL does not receive some kind of compensation for taking away the speed at which we can do damage the power will never see the inside of a raid as a DPS again. (exaggerated at the end here but you get the idea)

ok, if these numbers (a 60% dmg loss) are accurate, I now see the need to update HL. Who brought up these numbers?

Still, I find it infuriating that Fire, which already IS desperately unbalanced (and has been for way too long), is so much hated by the devs that they still openly refuse to adjust it, while HL is already in the process of being fixed before it's even broken.

This is just a hard slap in every fire user's face.

I made a HL toon and frankly I felt it was good as is. I was 1 tier lower then other dps and still getting top dps with hardly any effort...so why make it more "balanced"?

Because they're nerfing the jump canceling mechanic that props up HL's sorry ranged profile in instances where standing next to the target will get you killed. There are like, three or four threads-worth of 50-page conversations on this issue.

From the posts ive seen with the info they claim it was Tunso who dropped the numbers. Again, i agree that Fire needs a fix and if you are that hard up for it i would recommend you follow and bump threads started by TrueOlympus. He has been advocating and providing the facts of Fire's weaknesses in quite a few threads. However, lets please keep this thread on topic and that topic is how to not break HL after they break HL.

Haven't use my Troll stance since Update 35, and I appreciate the fix on Entrap Debuff to work if damage hits. Keep the Hard lighting going strong

Yeah, totally agreed that HL don't need much work to be revamped. Maybe abit of twitch to controller role.

As for dps wise, it is still beast and one of the power that uses the least power.. It need a nerf for ram so that we can block or interrupt it.

Apparently Tunso who's a developer came up with these findings. I hope this answers your question. I understand your resentment against the fire imbalance but that ought not to translate into breaking another power. I hope they fix fire some time in the near future.

It's a good DPS power currently but won't remain so when the intended nerf i.e. Jump Cancel is altered. Anyway, asking for a nerf is against the forum rules. This thread is about rebalancing the powerset. Please try to make constructive posts if you must. Thank you.

I'm gonna have to agree with you on the fire thing. And this is coming from me, a hl player; i feel like fire shouldve been one of the first powers to get dev attention. Now that i think about it, ive never seen anyone use fire to tank or dps outside of pvp arenas
Now i gotta stay on topic >.>

I dont mean to come off as rude, but i think your facts are a bit jumbled. HL is one of the most if not the most power hungry powerset. I could understand if the powers were amazing damage wise, but for something that hits fairly weak for the consumption cost, it needs reworking. Serious reworking
P.S if nerf becomes blockable, that will effectively render one of HL's useful combo opening powers null. Do you know how much that would hurt this powerset? HL already has a vast number of interruptable actions. Including another would be downright terrible

I can undwerstand your frustration, but Fire already got a revamp.
Electricity and earth as it is need more attention than fire.
Some devs talked about this lost of damage. And i suppose that if they put HL in elektricity and earth 'revamp', it means that this reduction of damage bring HL in line with them.

I tried 2 days ago to go paradox without using Fan and melee(which is kinda comon for the melee part XD). I also asked our earth tank to go as dps and not use JC.With no death and a greedy dps mentality, both of us did less than 40% of the other dps(a gadget friend that i usally 'overdps'). And guess what happen? The earth dps was singing all evening on TS that he really 'overdps' me(very anoying from a 30+ years old man).

And don't worry, WM, JCnerf, time animation, should balance all power(fire include) if it's well done. Can be interesting to see a 1sec mass detonation!

Concerning the precision buff. Lot of us, propose a group buff like celestial, rage, nature ones.
Those buffs overwrite each other and are available in popular power.

I would prefer a personnal precision buff like earth. It's not in order to be 'the best', just to avoid useless power consuption.

As far as the dps side goes, right now it's fine. Hopefully everyone in this thread gets that a HL user relies on a lot of damage coming from the ability to jump cancel. Beating a dead horse I know. As far as trolling goes, it's not terrible either. Claws works fine as a pot casting power, just clip it with recharge. That crappy brick wall and triage, I think that's what it's called, should just be replaced with sum thing like Kyle rather And Amon sur's abilities to summon pets like in the coast city alert.

The 25% supercharge needs a damage buff for how long the animation is or it could taken out and replaced by a power like Krona's light blast in science cells and could be called lanterns might. Or that could be light blasts new name, makes it sound like it hits hard when it doesn't.

There is one ability that nobody uses called Chain Saw.
Chain Saw needs a buff in damage or speed or both and can be made into damage out debuff and always Panic enemies in controller role.

Claw precision combos also need a damage buff. For example its not normal Claw>Left mouse Hold into Slam combo to crit less than 1H' s Spin Chop. Whats with that ?

At least from what I was noticing, and I DID check because I was thinking it was that, it appeared it was legit two instances of might damage at the same time, so at the very least it was considered two rams for damage type; I could've sworn it was also appropriate damage as well. Weird bug either way.

Also, if there is one change I would ask from the devs, it would definitely be a precision buff like Bloodlust. You totally should see if that would make it possible to pull off the skintight rim lighting aura as the gfx for that!

I seriously do not understand why people constantly sprout nonsense on a subject they know nothing about. Please find it within yourselves not to post any in-constructive posts on a subject you know very little of. You are not helping anyone.

P.S. The Nerf brigade is not needed here, if comprehension is a problem, simply log out of the forum.