Open Letter to the Devs: Stats Revamp.

most of what i have seen on test was actually working quite well...
yet there are still a few points that i am not ok with, and i will tell it to the devs at every possibility, even if i have to annoy them to death:

1.) cooldowns prevent awesomness. PI setup and burst powers have animation times, thats all they need to balance them. oh, and they have (way to high) power costs aswell to make you think twice if you want to spam power or not...

2.) all support roles are diluted. they feel slow, weak and boring. example: as i troll, the team gets out of mana quickly. however: i can do nothing to give more power, simply because the game wont let me. because of problem nr1.) cooldowns prevent awesomness

Should players using only weapons be able to beat a raid? Sure. Should they be able to out-perform or even be on the same level as someone doing a more advanced rotation/incorporating powers into the mix? Definitely not.

I'm all for variety, but that doesn't mean that every single playstyle or rotation you can think of should be viable. All players should be responsible for researching and gathering information regarding their powerset if they want to be able to do great damage. Other games don't let brand new players press whatever buttons they want and perform at the same level as experienced users, and neither should this one. My point is, players should be rewarded for having smarter rotations.

As for variety, the kind of variety that I would personally like to see is having the freedom to choose both the powers and weapon you want to use in your rotation. That freedom of both powers and weapons would create a wide variety of possible rotations. And from then, how well you perform damage-wise would depend on how you set up your rotation.

Another thing I'd personally like is for skill to be a factor in damage out. Two players could have the exact same knowledge, but the one who executes better should out-perform the other. The main skill-based factor in this game is the player-controlled element of speed, which comes from clipping. I, personally, love clipping and having power over the speed of my rotations. That's why I loved the old HL (even though it didn't use weapons) and I dislike the way it currently is, and that's why right now Earth, Atomic (combo rotation), and Celestial are among the most fun powersets for me (even Gadgets with it's minor clipping and quick pace due to Distract, Stealth, FG). I know there are players out there who aren't huge fans of clipping, but they'll just have to accept that if they refuse to clip they won't be doing the exact same DPS as someone with a near 100% clipping speed.