Erydanus

I have a friend who has a very pacifistic mind set and in every game he tries to play a pure healer. Ultimately I have to say this game really isn't set up that way but if you don't like attacking much there are so many choices you can make about taking key powers that represent control and debuff more than straight blasting damage. Also, I do want to let you know that this isn't a new question and in the old days there were people who would play the Empathy set and then only take the 1 required attack. They were not well regarded. Often these people wouldn't even actually be good healers, they'd just stand around spamming the healing aura power and not doing a darn thing and preening that they were so indispensable to the team. That's not the case. Healing is spackle, it's not an absolute for many party formations. There's so many ways to negate damage offensively with crowd control and debuffs, as well as passively negate it by placing buffs on the team. A mix of techniques is actually great.

This is honestly my sincere advice as well. Regen needs a rework/balance pass. It's just not in a good place right now. Willpower is much better. It's much more functional. It's more or less what Regeneration should be adapted to this game. The entire idea of a Wolverine-type character who regenerates through everything doesn't translate well, basically Wolverine doesn't have levels, hit points, or have to worry about being defeated except when the plot calls for it. They could only have it working by having it be super overpowered and thus we got nerfed instant healing. Even then, a purely regenerating character can never stand up to an attack that exceeds their hit points, while someone with damage resistance can. Ultimately regeneration needs to be changed to have more appreciable layered mitigation: some defense that represents attacks that were brushed off by the amazing recuperative powers; some resistance that represents damage that was insta-healed as it was delivered; and then of course, actual healing. Now it has SOME of that already, like Resilience with its 9% damage resistance to all. But that's just not enough. It needs like …. 30% toxic resist instead of the 15% in Dull Pain, and it needs Resilience at a lower level and at like, double or triple the base value. Which, basically the way the game works is if you have a passive damage resistance power it's usually like 5-10% but if you have a toggle it's a lot higher. Resilience needs toggle damage resistance shield numbers but then it also feels wrong to change that into a toggle. Really, it's all a mess. It's like, throw the set out and start over would be better … and that brings us back to Willpower.

No, you're good. Carry on. Enjoy the hideous combination of Tar Patch, Wormhole, and Crushing Field Take both your attack powers, Lift and Propel. Establish containment and spam the heck out of them. You get extra damage ("impact") from things that have been hit with Gravity Distortion previously so squeeze a little extra recharge in that so you can spam it. Slot Singularity with 3 damage. Singy doesn't get impact or containment but he does do double your normal damage and Lift got a serious damage buff so he's plenty of damage. Don't skip Dark Servant, its slotting is personal pref question but it can be a healing or debuffing machine for you. Remember Howling Twilight is an autohit stun and fear with a 500% regen debuff. Coincidentally it also will full rez your entire team but aggressive use may prevent the need for that auxiliary function. If the things in your tar patch aren't dying fast enough you may need to zero out their regen with "The Howling." (The inspiration for Within Temptation's song? Maybe, maybe not, it could also refer to the werewolf movie; but they're cool and I could see them playing City.) So enjoy some good battle music while you rip things apart with your grav/dark:

Nature is a late to the game set so most people with experience of it have that experience from here. I think you're doing a fine job with your play so far. My immediate (no pun) hot take on this combo is: finally the damn imps won't die all the time. I mean even as a Fire/Kin spamming transfusion I had imp death problems. But you, you can put so many buffs on them that the little death monkeys should be ok. Now as oedipus_tex pointed out the direct heal is a cone which is slightly awkward but in my experience on my beasts/nature mastermind (which frankly I feel puts me in a position to talk about pets and this power because I've got some puppies that like to die too) it's going to be fine. The damage resistance buff and the absorb shield are both PBAOE so you'll want to be with them a lot of the time which does synergize with your hot feet and entangling aura. Now as to Regrowth I must point out it's a 90 degree arc, 45' long, and the vertex is BEHIND YOU which is why you're always affected by the heal. So that is a fat-ass cone. If you are in the middle of a fight and the imps take too much damage you only have to step back slightly to catch them in the heal. As far as your power pool choices for controllers I feel Assault is the power you want to get first because you want to up your pet's damage and that's just automatic. Maneuvers? Sure, if the pets benefit from that too and yours do. Tactics? Optional. Controller pets are usually very accurate and a regular accuracy slot should be all you need. If it's for your own benefit or a team's that's certainly fine. I would just prefer to give the imps 11% more damage before I give them 7.5% tohit. You mentioned you don't have the fighting pool yet. Are you sure you need it? Everyone on the forums seems to reflexively slot it in to everything and I just never use it and never feel I have the need. At high levels I do like taking a defensive toggle in an epic pool just for that extra damage you may get at very high levels, but that's it. On the other hand if you were taking Sorcery to get Rune of Protection so you'd have click-triggered mez protection in case you run into say a room full of Death Mages, that I would think is A O K. (Also arcane bolt does good damage, gets containment, and does knock down. JUST SAYING.)

There's a reason for this. The power used to be just like Black Hole, you cast it on a group and they became intangible and stuck in place and the duration was quite long... I'm not succeeding on looking that up right now but I feel like it was 30-45 seconds or something like that. The upshot was if you used it as an emergency button everything else would die and then people would have to stand there... waiting...and waiting. So quite late in the game it got changed to a toggle so you could turn it off early if you wanted, I guess, and also lowered to 20 seconds because that's plenty of time really; but also made into a mini "phantom zone" so you could just go in and attack them if you wanted. Really it's incredibly flexible now, it's just real different than most controls. It's more like an ice patch that makes things fall down over and over … total lockdown outside the typical mezz system.

I understand why people want to receive an award for doing some particular threshold of content, but I always felt that too many costume elements were locked away like this. Example, unlocking the family style tommygun for getting the defeat x family badge; the old devs said that they saw this as your character taking a trophy from them and using it in the future. But COUNTERPOINT: what if your concept is a reformed Family member and you wanted to have that tommygun from day 1? That blocks that concept. What if was even higher level content like Rularuu weapons? You used to have to unlock them. What if your concept is someone who was given the family's cursed sword and you as a new level 1 hero don't know that sword's eyeball is literally letting Rularuu spy on you and start to corrupt you? Concept block. You used to get a witch hat from doing the Katie Hannon TF. What if your concept is a witch from level 1 and you need that hat? If these unlocks had been account wide so once you achieved them all your new alts could use them, it would be a different story. But they're not. Even something like the Vanguard armor where you originally were given the pieces after you joined vanguard in-game, maybe you want to play someone as a vanguard rookie from the get go? That's also completely valid. That's why I, personally, am happy everything is just unlocked. Costume pieces are just not something this game should limit you from accessing. It's just too messy.

Well … I think that's already the case. I was able to activate Kuji-In Rin on my claws/ninjitsu stalker when he was held during Trick or Treating. I was able to activate Rune of Protection on my mastermind with the sorcery pool when he was held. Also for anyone complaining the market is too expensive to purchase a Steadfast Protection: Knockback Protection, you can directly purchase the recipe for 20 or 25 merits at a level of your choice from the merit vendor. You can get those merits from running a Hollows arc. I've done it. It's easy. You can also use Breakfree inspirations which grant 5 points of knockback protection for the 30 seconds the inspiration is in effect. Knockdown is merely knockback that is less than 1 so this is more than enough to protect yourself from all knockdown. Larger resist effect inspirations of course last longer and you can select the prestige power that manufactures 3 random medium to large inspirations every 30 minutes to amass a huge stash of them with ease. Another option for low level characters is to use your supergroup base's empowerment station. That can buff you for just a few pieces of salvage to have knockback protection.

You can create your own custom tabs easily with a right click. You can then assign exactly which channels are on it. I personally do have a Rewards tab and I have only the Rewards and Request/Auction channel on it. As already mentioned xp information does go into that same channel, but it's actually quite easy to backscroll and see recipe drops when xp and drops are the only thing in the window. Recipes stand out very well.

Of course it did. It's a Windows 7 problem, specifically, introduced with the queue code.

Ok first, thanks for mentioning this I'm gonna go buy a bunch of my favorite HOs while they're cheap. Secondly converting HOs sounds like a good idea but maybe the exact approach ought to be by using a new kind of converter separate from the ones that affect IOs. Maybe IO converters can be crafted to make HO converters at some reasonable ratio, maybe 3:1? Perhaps it could be a worktable function and you convert with a specific recipe.

There were 2 pretty big nerfs that lowered controllers role in the meta in the classic game and I think both of them could be reverted and would just bring them closer inline to other ATs. 1. revert the change where all controller AoE holds became half duration and double cooldown (and was the 60% base accuracy instead of 75% base accuracy added in that too? Maybe.) AoE holds aren't a staple of play and it's not going to create the "punching statues" meta but it would increase build choice and help holding tougher foes when that was desired. 2. revert the change where all controller epic pool damage was halved, because the devs "forgot" they got containment on them. It's not going to be huge but it would be nice supplemental damage at higher levels.

I think the player base we have now has a large amount of people used to the trinity playstyle, and so they are bringing tankers and maybe brutes and blasters nukes have no crash so they're really up there on the front more. When you have so much damage frontloaded, any support role looks less useful. This even carries over to defenders, people sometimes don't appreciate some of the great power sets because they do have that "just need a healer in case" mentality. It's just meta. I did a super smooth Dr. Kane recently and it was 2 controllers, a stalker and a sentinel. But that's really how this game goes, it can be functional with just about any team (though if you've got 8 blasters you will need some rez inspirations or everyone needs a revive temp power, but those are easy to get). I would like to see some buffs on controllers, but not because the AT is bad, just to give it some "frosting" to make it look tastier. I would love to see the epic pool damage nerf reverted - at one point controller epics got the damage straight up halved because the devs said "oops, wait we forgot to halve them when we introduced containment" even though it had been like 12 issues and the player base had mentioned it. Directly raising controller end game damage would make them much tastier without really changing anything of the mechanics; it would also help soloing controllers.

My gut reaction to this question, and this is also based on times on live when I ran with multiple MMs in the same group, is this: diversify. Diversify on every level, because this game is balanced around diminishing returns on every level. So if you're going to stack ATs, you normally want to do variations because multiple of the same thing quickly becomes redundant with a few exceptions. Since you already have so much defense layering some resist is fantastic. Sonic or thermal are both good. I don't think it's necessary to think about if you're hitting caps or not, the effectiveness of well layered defenses is very high. So I'd add a set with solid resists on top of core defense, and then move on. Literally I think the choice could be based on theme, or on if you need thermal's active heal (because of a suicidal arsonist, for instance). The second team I'd go for debuffs. Rad or Dark are both good; Dark's debuffs aren't always appreciated (it's -regen is hidden in the heal and the aoe rez) and it's more focused on -tohit than damage boosting debuffs but it does have some (tar patch) and lots of controls. Because you have so much defense already I would give the preference to rad, as the benefit of shadowfall will be relatively less compared to a setup that didn't already have so much defense. Counterpoint though, if you want to not take maneuvers and enjoy team stealth, dark is still an option. If you go with kin for a third member, this is a stronger choice yet because it lets you wade in to the fight more easily and drop point blank fulcrum shift. Kinetic is definitely a great third choice. You've got team durability and enemy debuffing covered already, the next thing to do is just buff buff buff yourself.

Force field is probably really good for defense but it's such a passive set generally that I personally have not played it. If you're already planning to go into Fighting pool significantly I think you could probably be more flexible in your choice of secondary unless you want something that will let you do very high difficulty content (I'm personally fine playing on base or slightly higher difficulty). Anyway wanted to offer up /dark as a possible alternate. You get concealment and significant defense from shadow fall and I had a vampire themed MM who used thugs as his brainwashed minions. It was very easy to be up in the front line with them, and at the time we didn't have dual pistols so it scratched my itch to do a little shooting. ^_^

Indeed, I went over to the test server and started trying to set up a test. I haven't created a good scenario for aoe testing yet though. I actually know LineNoise I may get tips from him on how he got his set up originally.

Yeah so the thing is my 50 is a ninja-ish guy so the Tsoo were a great thematic match. But he's kinda a techno ninja - after going through the First Ward arc I was almost horrified to feel that it would be quite plausible he was an escaped Seer program guy. (Psi melee stalker who can teleport... and has tech origin because some of his powers come from implants.) So some other choices might work too like the Polar lights. The nice thing is I remembered you can just make incarnate powers on the test server so I went over there and started making lore powers to try out. Would be nice if the cooldown could be erased somehow but it's not too bad. So far I did like the staff-wielding Tsoo guardian but was underwhelmed with the ancestor spirit. I haven't tried out the Sorc combo, I really expect to not like it, but we'll see.

Having read the thread, I am aware of that. My point was when he did his tests he did single target and AoE tests. I saw the updated single target pylon test results. I didn't see AoE tests done.

That's correct. I had an elec/elec brute when the set was new, before it got Energize added to replace Conserve Power (lol, so unnecessary). It really wasn't a big issue though, and very seldom actually came up. Unless you wanted to play a flying/hovering character, I wouldn't worry about it; even then a single KB IO would be enough to guarantee no knockdown ever affected you. If you'd like to bathe in the warming light of a Rikti dropship main cannon, electric might be for you. I do think that it benefits from stacking on some defense through your IO build but it's a pretty fun and flashy set.

A few thoughts on these comments - Shadowy Binds, you said "to make it a useful attack would take more enhancement slots than I’ve ever been willing to put in it. " You need only slot it with 1 accuracy and 3 damage for it to be a useful attack, just as with any other. It actually has the typical 90% base accuracy that controller single target holds & immobilizes all have. You do not need to enhance its immobilize duration for general use. As the OP noted, it's just a good single target attack. You also said Shadow field is "punished by a 240 second recharge time" and I feel it should be pointed out that it has the standard 240 second recharge time that every single controller AoE hold has. If you don't find that type of power useful that's fair; a lot of people stopped using them when they were all nerfed and had their durations halved and their cooldowns doubled at the same time to give us the numbers we have today (in i6 I think it was). But Shadow Field is a bit like Volcanic Gasses in that it summons a pseudopet and maintains a persistant holding field. Tactically, I grade it to be one of the best of all such holds as you can place it and draw foes in or directly cast it; I actually have it macroed to cast on my current target as if it were a standard targeted AoE though it is actually a GTAOE. OP noted that Living Shadows was skipped for the moment but would like it soon, and in my case I made room for Living Shadows by delaying Heart of Darkness. My feeling was that Heart of Darkness could actually wait a long time because Howling Twilight is an autohit ranged targeted stun and can lockdown the not-bosses so well. As far as stacking Heart of Darkness on top of HT, that requires moving into range (assumably well protected by Shadowfall and Fade) and really you'd only need to do that on bosses most of the time so I'd rather just spam Dark Grasp a couple times or deploy Shadow Field and use Dark Grasp. So like Mercurias mine's going to be slotted in about level 49. Dark/Dark has so many good powers it really is hard to prioritize them though you will want almost everything. Mostly it comes down to do you team or solo because that will impact your play style and make getting the AoE immobilize and the fear a higher priority than if you were soloing. Keep in mind that with stamina inherent it really frees build slots (powers) up compared to ye olde days. Even if you take every power in your primary and secondary you'll have 2 power choices that must be filled with pool powers; for me I just took Sorcery pool, flight and arcane bolt for 1 travel power and a source of off-type damage when soloing. With the ridiculous buffs in Shadow Fall and Fade I don't feel like I need to take any leadership powers for the team or any fighting pool powers for tough and weave. I mean seriously if you need tough and weave when you're a dark controller you're doing something wrong, nothing should be able to touch you already from your inherent tohit debuffs, defense buffs, and you know, controls.

Certain mobs only come out at night, so this offers additional opportunities for collecting badges for defeating foes like vampyri, warwolves, and banished pantheon masks.

Thanks so much to the creator and contributors so far to this post! I was looking at the old test by LineNoise in comparison to these more recent results and it did make me wonder how the newer types do at AoE.

Thanks so much for the info. Wow it's a shame this might be a bad path (because) the Ancestral Guardian looks great and I really want to pick on looks. I can't say I'm shocked to hear the sorcerer is flaky. It looks like the Core Superior Ally version with an ancestral spirit might be a bit better? I have to say I don't love Ancestor Spirits in general, and I'm not a fan of hand clap, but I don't understand Lore pet options well enough to look at the attack powers and judge if it would be very good combined with the Ancestral Guardian.

Agreed, double is still pretty significant. I suppose for a game which is balanced around diminishing returns on multiple levels this shouldn't be too shocking. At least the outgoing absorb isn't capped by the caster's base HP and then again by the recipients, so the upshot is beefy types like Tankers are going to get more relative benefit. And now we know it's not worth trying to push the absorb rate super high.

The Tsoo and a couple other types weren't available when damage testing was done on the lore pets. I think most people go for the top contenders from LineNoise's tests back when, I sure don't hear much discussion. Still, I was wondering if anyone had taken them and how you felt they performed, as well as what sorts of powers the pets used were.

I took a few months off and now I'm back I'm still experiencing these kinds of delays. Also, if I back out of waiting I still see that "do you want to leave the queue" message Impish Kat posted a screenshot of back in July. I do think the time I'm waiting is usually lower than it was before, but we're still talking about a pretty good wait, like 20-30 seconds? It was worse last weekend when the server was under heavy load. My PC's older now but it's got an AMD quad core CPU running at 4.3 and 8 gigs of RAM and Win 7 Pro 64 bit so it's not like it's a junky machine.