Controller Role Truth(To The Devs): I'm Not Sure Why This Is So Hard To Understand....

The Harder you make it, for a Troll to keep up power..... The harder you make it for a troll to do his other jobs. It is harder to multi-task when one of the tasks is taking more of your resources, time, and effort than the others. Maybe some people are superhuman and can do it fine. But it is not normal. I will repeat:

The Harder You(The Devs) Make Power Management, The Harder It Is For Player's To Have Fun. Controller's shouldn't have to baby-sit everyone's power bar.

Stop Making It Hard.There are MULTIPLE ways to go about this.

• Buff the weapon power regen for all non-troll roles
• Nerf the power-cost buff associated with T5+ gear
• Add additional Ways to give power(other than supply drops)
• Adds in Raids and Alerts need to drop power regen orbs

Trolling should be fun. It's bad enough the community forced trolls into being one-dimensional as a result of content mechanics. Its worse when the Devs seem to want to do the same thing and are the cause of the mechanics.

That's all folks

I agree with basically everything you said but don't blame the community, blame the game mechanics.

There are several things wrong with the Controller role:

Power costs
I was probably the biggest advocate for introducing the increased power costs and I made threads on the old and new forums about it, however they went a little too far with it (Its roughly a 60% increase in power from the base cost to IL 90 gear)...Because power costs are so high and most "optimal" DPS rotations require players to use powers back to back to back, it forces controllers to keep up with it...While in T4 this wasnt an issue, due to how close Vit was to matching certain power costs, it became an issue when the power costs were raised so dramatically

Bringing down power costs slightly would be step 1 in a multi-step process

Power returning
It is our primary job at this stage in the game, yet we only have 2 ways of doing this: Power over time (provides power over a 20 second period to 8 people) and Instant power (instantly returns power to 3 members)

Give us another way to give power back to the group to free us up to do other things (a soul well type "set it and forget it" kinda thing maybe?)

Adversely, they could remove the battery mindset by taking away our ability to give back power every second and increase the cooldown on instant power to 4 seconds...I cant give you power if I dont have it ready to cast...This option becomes far more viable with the introduction of Weapon Mastery

Content
This is the biggest issue by far.

There is no content available where our skills as controllers (meaning CC, debuffs, power and damage) are fully utilized...With each tier the amount of CC has been lessened and lessened to the point where we have become backup CC'ers to the Tanks...Because of how immunities work, the job of CCing just cant be done by 2 separate roles without having an adverse effect on a group...If I stun an add and a Tank needs to juggle it and cant then they'll die.

There is no hall where Controllers NEED to stun adds and no enemy that NEEDS to be debuffed...Controllers are only NEEDED to give power in any given piece of content and thats a problem

Id like to see content that has (copied from another post ive made 100x):
- Enemies with high HP and high damage that arent immune to CC
- Enemies that heal each other unless healing debuffed
- Enemies that shield until defense debuffed
- Enemies that 1 shot until damage debuffed
- Enemies immune to Tank pulls/juggles
- Enemies that cannot be pulled/juggled until stunned and/or enemies that can only be pulled/juggled once by a tank and need to be CC'd by controllers for the duration of their life
- Enemies that turn "invisible" or move quickly unless stunned (think cheetahs in Catwoman duo)

The only piece of content in the past 2 years that has required a controller stun is the very last room in AnB and the tanks can take care of 2 of the Manhunters/Lanterns themselves...We dont even get a full room for crying out loud!

Necessitating a controller does something other than give power would do wonders...If I physically cant give power to a DPS because I need it to stun a bot or put a debuff on an add to remove a shield then DPS cant shout for more power all the time and will actually use a weapon combo...Content that uses not just a controllers abilities to their full extent, but all the other roles as well and isnt just all about how fast a DPS can burn stuff would be an awesome change of pace


TL;DR - Reduce power costs slightly, give us another way to give back power OR slow down our ability to give power and put out content that necessitates CC, Debuffs as well as power returning

^TRUTH.

feels sorry for trollers. i have a troller but only run it in alerts because it no fun to run it in raids. scaling power cost with cr was the worst move. it never going to get better.

really what they did was so half baked because unless the troll is the same or higher cr than everyone else they are even a bigger disadvantage to keep people powered.

Literally all the "changes" that have been done this past year to controlling has made me scratch my head. We really need top-level trolls to be part of the balancing process, because it looks like it's not being balanced at all

It was necessary to scale power costs with CR...It kinda sucks for lower level controllers that run with higher level ones, but on the other hand you cant be giving back 350 power per power dump, when a power dump only costs 300 to cast

All raids would be run solo troll/heal/tank and 5 DPS otherwise

• Adds in Raids and Alerts need to drop power regen orbs
• Buff the weapon power regen for all non-troll roles

Just by them doing these two points and will seriously make me one happy controller.

Sadly, from what I'm reading about the new alert on test, trollers seem to have not just been once again reduced to batteries but, "put in their place" with being batteries .

Is it bad that im actually legitimately shocked about that?

Usually Alerts are the place where we can actually showcase our CC abilities, yet we get 1 single alert in this one and we're back to being batteries

We hit our crowd control threshold for the year with the 2 adds in AnB I guess...Maybe next year we'll get a full hallway of stuff to control

that would be terrible...not.

running troller you are forever just a battery because no matter how good your gear is you will never get better. you are only trying to keep up this level now.

people forget t4 raid could be solo troll. troll didnt have to just dump power. these changes are terrible...

I don't know how many countless "Revamp Trolls" threads I've made and participated in and the devs haven't put their input on ANY of them. They don't really care about the troll role, they intend us to be just batteries.

Honestly, I feel as though in 8 player content, the balance is there for controllers. 2 controllers can comfortably power up a team of equally or less-ly(?) geared team mates. The only issue is POT overwriting. Sometimes, no matter how many times you tell them or no matter how clear you make it, the other, lower vit controller will overwrite your POT. Sometimes intentional. Sometimes by accident. When it's intentional, it's infuriating. Fix this and it'll be perfect.

If think if you make too many changes to controlling, to make it easy, you're going to end up playing a game that runs with 1-1-1-5 groups and this would be a step in the wrong direction.

Perhaps buff a controllers ability or DPS' power costs in 4 player content, as too often you see people spamming their Nexus/Paradox rotations in 4 player content, where it simply isn't necessary. But keep it identical to how it works now in 8 player content because controlling is one of the few balanced roles left in 8 player stuff. You can rarely get away with a solo controller (at least in current tier raids) and more than 2 is overkill.

I'm still a firm believer that Passive Buffs (no, not again!! check one of my many replies discussing it for details) is the best way the developers can restore a balance to the roles, removing this "stack DPS" mentality in game.

Seems that way sometimes...The only time theyve ever responded to a controlling comment ive made was when I tweeted (LOL) at Spytle about how he wouldnt be doing any controlling after T2

I just dont get whats so hard about making content with specific controlling duties in mind...If they do that, then every thread about this goes out the window

no want a cc troll in their group. people saying having more things to cc doesnt fix the main problem.

Nah it doesn't. You simply run into groups stacking controllers so that the controlling duties are performed but power is never an issue.

Look at A&B and how many people run it with 3 controllers because the final boss actually requires something different from the controllers.

In turn, stacked controller groups allegedly supply DPS with unlimited power, which means they adapt to playing this way, which means that in smaller group content, namely alerts, they have no idea what to do or are ineffective when the single controller can't keep up with them... or they begin stacking controllers in alerts.

Seriously, fix the Controller role or take it out. It's obvious more people dislike doing it compared to those that do and it's STILL a dying species. Instead of WP, they could've just fixed the power issue. So much more simple and pleasing.

IMO, I think they should scrap pot and give every troll set a pet that give power back like batmans drone in PvP so you don't have to worry about overwriting and give use more time to actually troll. Just scrap one pot power and give us all a power pet lol.

I think we're very close, particularly now that WM is on its way and the game is being slowed down (We'll all have to reevaluate this after these drop)

Again, my biggest issue lies with content...At any given point in time Im only required to use 2 powers...Defense and Damage buffs only provide a 7% reduction respectively, so it isnt like they HAVE to be up at any given time and Healing debuffs really are only useful on 3 bosses in the whole game (Brainiac, Zetta Drone and Ravager)

An increase to debuff effectiveness, more instances where they are necessary to keep up at all times and a NEED to stun or CC to complete content would make me a happy camper

I refuse to run 3 controllers...The only time I ever have is when we walked a friends fresh level 30 into nexus

We have the Tank CC the 2 adds up front and the trolls take care of the ones in the back