When we first looked at the beta patch notes for City of Heroes: Homecoming’s i28p2 Legacy, the first joke I made to MOP’s Bree was that we can tell the game’s current operators have inherited one trait from Paragon Studios: a complete failure to understand or establish whom the game is being balanced for, much less why. And that snap judgment only grew as I read through the patch notes for the content on the test server because this patch does indeed strike me as a case of not quite knowing whom or what you’re balancing for.

Now, first and foremost, I want to be clear here: CoH is an incredibly big game with a ton of moving parts. I am well aware that everyone who is working on the game is doing so in a volunteer capacity. And these balance changes are not apocalyptic by any means. But we also have to recognize that regardless of those caveats, this version of the game is now the public face of CoH. These balance changes are what people think of as the way the game is supposed to play. And I would love to say that these changes have a goal and a drive, but they really, really don’t.

Before I go any further, though, I think it’s useful to understand what the state of the game’s meta balance really is. While there isn’t a very clear thing I can point to in the game and say “the game revolves around this,” I definitely can point to an overall vibe, and it’s pretty clear. As it stands right now, the game revolves around speed.

This might seem like an odd thing to say when every game sort of does, but CoH at this point is very heavily dominated by quick kills and damage buffs. Rushing through content, killing enemies in a targeted sequence, and building enough defense that you require minimal healing is not just doable but preferable. This means archetypes that facilitate that are ascendant, and those that don’t lag behind, especially at endgame. Moreover, it means that there’s a strong emphasis on mechanics that justify that speed or benefit from it.

If you think my point is that this is a bad thing, that’s really not my contention. This is a valid meta state, but it does mean that control-focused characters, single-target characters, debuffing characters, and defense-buffing characters really kinda need more help to stay afloat in this meta, and you need to balance slower archetypes and powers around this. And the balance changes in this patch are… well, not that.

In theory, I think there are things to like for Controllers in here vis-a-vis direct pet control and sleep, but those changes come hand-in-hand with lots of sets having their hard control placed at a lower target cap. That alone does not help. Controllers already have a hard time in the current meta. Heck, you could even say that was somewhat true during Paragon’s reign (Editor’s note: Two words – purple triangles. -Bree). I make jokes about Controller mains, but they are jokes meant with love. Controllers are supposed to have an advantage whereby they are fairly safe thanks to hard control, and that’s balanced by lower damage, except with this patch, that’s been undone; they’re no longer as safe.

You can say “well, other archetypes aren’t safe,” but that’s just not true. If my Scrapper can plow through enemies in six attacks or so while I’m on +4/x8, the trade-off is that I have to deal with potentially getting hit through my defenses and resistance. At this point, even with the mild enhancements to inherent powers, playing Controller feels like the “wrong” choice, and that’s a problem compounded by the game’s rush-focused meta.

If the focus seemed to be on making the rush-based meta less dominant, that would be one thing, but no. A lot of the powers that are getting various downgrades are not meta picks anyway. I freely admit to not being an expert in every single meta pick available in the game, but as a general rule I do not care too much about the exact balance in this game. I mean, we’re playing a fun ad-hoc-grouping superhero game. I am honestly not worried or upset if it turns out that a couple of powers are a bit overtuned like 95% of the time. And the thing is that this kind of belies a bigger problem: I don’t believe the developers actually have a target for performance.

There are a lot of different ways to balance everything, of course, but the sheer number of powers available in CoH means that outside of having a team of experts who play everything, you are simply not going to have the same level of experience with every single archetype and power combination. I sure as heck don’t. When I talk about having a balance target, what I mean is having some basic grouping of powers and general state of affairs that the developers feel like should be in the right ballpark.

It’s perfectly fine if this plays into rushing, but if we want to play into rushing, then hard controls having longer cooldowns and lower target caps (such as the mindboggling nerfs for Plant Control’s Seeds of Confusion) makes no sense. If you want longer cooldowns and lower target caps, then damage kinda needs to come down across the board, otherwise Controllers are actively detrimental for pretty much anything other than Hamidon (i.e., they’re taking a slot that could be used to kill things faster). Do you want to have an archetype that is useful only in Hamidon? I don’t!

Again, my point here is not to say that the developers have Killed The Game. They haven’t. They haven’t even killed Controllers because this is CoH and you could just replace the first pick of every single Controller powerset with an option to hurt yourself with no upside and some people would still make builds that solo at max difficulty.

If anything, this looks like a philosophy problem. The devs seem to be increasingly balancing out a part of the game that has always been unique and valuable about this game in particular – specifically, its emphasis on control and buff/debuff characters as full and viable playstyles. I don’t think that’s an indefensible choice, either; CoH is naturally a slower game, and I think it is completely understandable to want to appeal to newer (and younger) players by tuning up the speed.

But these control changes don’t appear to have been made with that in mind. In fact, they’re entirely counterproductive to that goal, which is baffling. Instead, they seem to be made based on some abstract ideals rather than the game and the metagame that actually exist here in 2025.

That’s not to say that I think “faster” is even the only viable or reasonable option. I just think it’s the way that the game has pivoted since its return in 2019, whether we like it or not. And with the pace of development that this project can actually manage, the balance changes seem to be targeted at no one and with no comprehensive picture of how the game is supposed to play. They’re not all bad changes, nor do I think they are made by people who don’t care about the game, but I am beginning to suspect they’re made by people who don’t really see the game as a whole entity but as a lot of competing little bits and pieces in a spreadsheet full of numbers.

And that shakes out into downstream problems. If no one has a comprehensive picture of what the game’s balance is supposed to look like, and the end result is an MMORPG that feels as if the fun is slowly seeping out with each balance pass. And this patch doesn’t even hit my own characters; I don’t generally play Controllers, and my own favorite sets haven’t been hit either way. But a bad balancing patch that hurts other people’s characters for no clear reason does affect me if those people are upset enough to leave. Quests in the Wharf should have every fan psyched, and a bad balancing patch that sends the forums into uproar detracts from the massive content injection we’re about to get.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Eliot Lefebvre and Justin Olivetti covering superhero MMORPGs, past, present, and future! Come along on patrol as Into the Super-verse avenges the night and saves the world… one column at a time.