oedipus_tex

No, because the power itself is actually useful. It's a one slot wonder and actually really good in that role. I think it's in the perfect sweet spot of balance.

RoP is in a good place IMO. It takes Resist sets and needs no slotting, so its the perfect place to sink a +3% Def IO. I think comparing to a Break Free isn't quite accurate, to me it's more like a contract with the game that a certain percentage of Break Frees are guaranteed to drop into your tray. It really does make a difference in my survivability on fast moving lawnmower characters.

I agree with the posters above that for a support character Dark Control is a very good choice. It's the most well rounded of the control sets in my opinion. I also feel obligated to mention, since this is a power comparison thread, that for a healing character Dark/Thermal would get my nod. Thermal's resistance shields pair comfortably with the -ToHit in Dark to deliver a really robust package. I also just find healing with Thermal more enjoyable, since Resistance shields prevents people from dropping dead as fast. No worries if you are set on Empathy, but I don't know a team would turn away a /Therm.

In permadom, sure. My point is that a Dominator sans IOs has lower mezz duration than a Controller and actually usually has worse ability to handle a boss level enemy than a Blaster Controller Defender or Corruptor picked for that purpose. Dominators do not have the option to stack Freeze Ray and Char or whatever other combination. Domination is a blessing but also a bit of a curse. Because Dominators have Domination, their secondary sets and APPs lack many powers that would actually benefit from it. It's true you can re-cast the same Hold power a few seconds later, but most Dominators do not have debuff, armor or healing. You need that boss held now.

Force Field getting DDR and the Force Field player getting some Endurance Drain Resistance are way up on my list. More generally, if we want to expand Force Field's role as the "premier defensive set," giving it resistance to some additional debuffs would be a good place to start. Resistance to -Perception, -Regen, -Healing, -Recharge etc are all justified by the idea that Force Fields insulate the protected person from negative effects.

I always wished Icey Assault got Ice Patch for similar reasons.

The holds in the Controller secondary sets used to be skippable, but the math involved in proc bombs makes them more desirable. Especially Trick Arrow's Ice Arrow, which animates faster than some actual Controller holds and comes with a boat load of debuff. I forget all the specific ways Mids miscalculates proc damage, but if these numbers are even close to accurate Ice Arrow hits far harder than most actual Controller attacks. You'd have to worry about Accuracy, but you can build for that. Rad is not an Assault set I've ever been able to get into. If concept is part of the issue and you can justify I'd roll it as Earth/Energy. With Energy you can hit Power Up to double the -ToHit in Earthquake and extend the duration of Controls. Energy also has an attack that conditionally saps Hold Resistance from the target. Of course Earth/Earth is also an option, since it also has Power Up, and has Seismic Smash.

I'm going to echo that Controller is probably a better fit for this challenge than Defender, unless Defender specifically is part of the challenge. Based on your criteria, I'm going to suggest an Elec/Elec/Elec Controller build, built to maximize endurance sapping. The enemies will do a little damage to each other because of your confuse, but you'll drain them and stop that pretty quick. Most powers otherwise don't do damage, including your endurance sapping aura. I'd personally break the rules just a little and allow yourself to use the AoE Immobilize. It does some damage, but not a lot. It's mainly a tool to use for sapping endurance. You can take or skip the Gremlin pets depending on how literal you want to be about your challenge. A close relative would be something like Elec/Nature/Primal, which isn't quite as strong a sapper but still has a lot of synergy, few attacks, and almost all the power benefit from Power Boost in some way. Getting detoggled can be frustrating though, which is why Elec/Elec stood out to me initially.

The ability to self cast some team buff powers I think would do a lot for certain sets. There are a couple of ways to accomplish this, and being able to self cast doesn't necessarily mean getting the full benefits of the power or that you could do it with every power. For example I think Force Field being able to self cast half-strength, unboostable Deflection Shields is fine. Empathy self casting an unboosted, half strength Fortitude, or getting those effects when they self cast another power like one of their auras, is also fine. We do have to be a bit careful not to step all over Sentinel's toes, but most of the sets that would truly benefit from this run somewhat behind sets that do plenty for themselves already. Cold Domination with self-cast shields of any strength does give me some pause. Although according to the powerset popularity charts Cold Domination is less powerful than Force Field. ;)

Doing it as a Dark Controller might bring you closest to the original experience, if that matters. Altho Dark Control didn't exist when Praetoria came online, it was the last Control set added to the game and has that new-er feel. I also personally consider it the best balanced Control set, doing exactly what it needs to do in terms of safety without being over or under powered. Electric Control did release with Praetoria and is the set I first played all that content with.

Dominators are good but not necessarily the best in show in terms of mezz stacking. It's true they get extra Magnitude from most controls in Domination mode, but the archetype is limited on the number of mezzing powers they get access to. This might seem counterintuitive, but it stems from the Assault and APPs being very light on mezz. For example, you can build an Ice Blast Defender or Corruptor who holds a boss without spending anything on IOs. Freeze Ray -> any hold from the secondary or APP will do it. In comparison, in all of their secondary and APP choices Dominators have a grand total of one Hold power, Seismic Smash. Seismic Smash is even a lower Magnitude on Dominators than it is on Controllers (its Mag 3 for Doms outside Domination, Mag 4 in, but always Mag 4 for Controllers) so the only thing Domination does is catch you up to other archetypes, not pull ahead. That said, Dominators can still be quite good at mezzing. Several of them get Power Boost style powers that can help a lot with durations. But all of the above is why people say Domination is so important. Most Dominators are actually pretty bad at control when they are outside Domination mode, and given they have little in the way of healing, defense, or debuff, you can see why people go all-in on permadom.

I mentioned this in the other Empathy thread in the Suggestions forum, but I do not read the number of players playing a set as an endorsement of its abilities. Empathy is popular because a lot of MMO players are drawn to the Cleric/Priest/healer playstyle. The set could do more to cater to that style. Anyway, according to that list, Force Field is #5, ahead of Storm, Nature, Dark, and Cold.

The documentation on Ourodev gets way into this. It's here if you want to browse it. https://wiki.ourodev.com/view/Power The section on StackType tells us the four possible ways an attribute can be affected when that effect is re-applied by the same caster.* ( *"Same caster" is literal. Effects applied by pets and pseudopets normally count as having gotten the effect from the pet, not the player who summoned the pet.) For mezzes, Stack is the most common. The mezz will stack with itself. Extend is very rare, I can't think of many examples. Ignore is usually used for stuff that adds temporary powers. Replace just replaces the existing effect. Replace is the standard used for many self buffs and toggle powers; it basically prevents the toggle from stacking the effect endlessly. Ther are a few mezz powers that Replace rather than Stack tho, like the Confusion in Arctic Air. Keep in mind none of these settings have any effect on whether the mezz stacks with mezz applied by other powers, just this power. There is no mechanic I know of that limits interaction between mezzes other than an oddball PVP mechanic that allows a player affected by mezz to ignore all other mezz for a time afterward that is unrelated to PVE play. With regard to mezz mechanics, the whole system makes a lot more sense when you look at anti-mezz powers and realize all they do is apply a negative value mezz. What I mean is Protection from Hold is just coded as a -10 Hold. If a character's Hold stat is ever greater than zero, they are Held. Simple. Players with no powers running have 0 protection to mezz. Minions have -1, lieutenants have -2, bosses have -3. Any combination of powers stacked on each other that gets their mezz table row above zero will mezz them.

There are a lot of great ideas in this thread. For the folks posting icons, you might like to hear that there's a .psd document you can use to generate custom power icons. I'd credit the person who made it but I am not sure who they are. You can edit this document in Photoshop or Gimp. This is the PSD document used to create "real" modded in game icons (although they have to go through a process after export from Photoshop/Gimp). I won't provide a full Photoshop lesson here, but the basic technique involved in icon creation should be familiar to anyone who has worked with Layers. power-icon-template.psd

I think what those popularity graphs show is that the Priest/Cleric/healer archetype is a popular one in RPG gaming and a lot of people really enjoy that role. I don't think they're a reflection on the efficacy of Empathy as a set. I feel confident most Empath players would appreciate more scenarios where their playstyle was rewarded. I usually play Priests or Clerics in other MMOs so I can understand the appeal. I don't play that role in this game mainly because the gameplay encourages it less and the mechanics of Empathy don't achieve as much as other sets. If folks were requesting that Empathy turn into a Titan Weapons or something totally off script I could understand the pushback. As-is the requests seem reasonable to me. Discussions about the efficacy of the "healer" class aren't even unique to City Of, those debates are constantly raging on other MMO boards as well, and various tweaks made. Getting back to power suggestions, given the downsides of Absorb Pain, I'd be fine with this power being a 15ft radius AoE. That would make it a ranged version of Healing Aura instead of Heal Other. 15ft is neither small nor huge (fireball radius). I could also see a case for the power only applying 30% heal resistance, stackable. You'd only get locked out of healing yourself if you spammed it constantly.

FWIW this may be a cart before horse issue. Sleep could be useful if there were enough enemies vulnerable to it but not other controls. Especially if those enemies had dangerous toggle powers you could disable by Sleeping them. I've long thought that's how to make Dominators and Controllers more useful. They don't necessarily need to do more direct damage, just for players to face more encounters worth shutting enemy defense/resistance down.

I've always approached this game a bit like a more forgiving and friendly Diablo. The core of both games are basically the same. You take a diverse build and head into a dungeon to square off against a comically large army of monsters who hate you for existing. Your goal is to dispatch them in various entertaining ways using the mix of abilities you chose. I'm at my happiest when the game rewards many alternative solutions to a problem. Probably the most excited I get is when a new powerset launches, especially when it's something very different from the others. I also strongly appreciate the costume options and power recoloring features and consider both of these features superior to Diablo. On the more critical side, I am at my least satisfied when the combat system devolves into a nuke-athon against severely mismatched enemies. The incarnate system in particular loses me. I can't put any of this on the Homecoming team as it's the situation they inherited. It's mildly frustrating because I can remember how the game played before those systems were added, and altho the game wasn't a utopia, it's hard to care too much about build particulars when fights are dominated by powers that don't vary, and your hope is people just don't have or use those powers. Privately, I also do some of my own modding on a private server. I have some game assets of my own I may eventually share with community at large. None of these are so impressive that they solve some of my misgivings about the end game combat system above, but they are additional pieces of content that a few people might find entertaining.

I feel like the majority of the conversation is about whether powersets are useful in the context of the game. If we were to talk about sets purely on SOs, there are a lot more sets I'd haul in for changes, including some top performers, like Cold Domination.

IMO Bonfire on Controllers and Dominators is probably okay. Bonfire on Blasters is either performing much better than it should or Earthquake and Ice Slick are performing worse. Mainly Ice Slick. This may be fair game because Sleet in the Dominator APPs similar overperforms. Or maybe not. It feels a little unfair in my opinion for Ice Slick to be matched by an APP power. For the record, Ice Slick has an 8% chance to knockdown, roughly rolled 5 times per second. Earthquake has a 7% chance to knockdown, also rolled 5 times per second. Enemies can get knocked down again while being affected by the previous knock, which makes calculating the amount of mitigation hard. I don't know what Bonfire with KB to KD chances are, but it's around as good as either power. All of these knock powers are way better on Homecoming than on the OG game, thanks to how the team here thankfully converted AoE immobilizes. RE: Sleep, my main grief with it is the damage/control specialist archetype, Dominators, is loaded with secondary sets that have DoT. Electric Control's Sleep is one of the better ones but even that doesn't mix well with some of the Dom secondaries. I've long advocated for Dominators, as specialists in this area, to have all their damage converted to up-front. There's at least one instance of a Dominator damage aura that doesn't harm sleeping enemies so at least they've thought about it.

The answer is yes/no/sort of. It depends a lot on how the particle system was put together. The short version of it is something like this: Each power has a PFX file that defines the different possible varieties of the power (normal, bright, dark, etc) Each section in the PFX file points to various FX files that defines the special effect for each possible event. Typically for blast powers there's an Attack, Hit, and sometimes a Continuing (lingering effects) or Conditional (play this if target got mezzed) FX files normally call upon various PART (particle) files. The FX file also determines where each particle it calls originates. Sometimes this is done on a part by part basis Sometimes an origin point is defined for all or most of the FX file and updating that one origin point moves the whole system Moving particles around is technically feasible. Lining them up can be a really timely process though. It might seem like you can just move the system, but with the way Magnets and other effects work doing that sometimes breaks the system in odd ways.

The point is Empathy is not very strong with SOs. It is also not very strong with SOs. Empathy has always been popular because of its concept and not because of what it actually does. Empathy's key powers have uptime to recharge ratios as such: Regen Aura: 500 down to 90 up Recovery Aura: 500 down to 90 up Adrenalin Boost: 300 down to 90 up I wouldn't even consider playing the set if IOs weren't part of that picture. The set has nothing else but some heals and Fortitude juggling.

I'm going to be honest and say as much as I feel like these two sets compliment each other conceptually, mechanically they don't do each other a whole lot of favors. The best news is that both of them benefit from a lot of Global Recharge, but that's about where the synergy ends. By all means you should play it if that is what your heart is set on. Concept matters a lot. But as far as soloing, like you said, it's going to be punishing. Even on teams these two sets don't have a whole lot going for them by the time you build them with IOs. If you're willing to reconsider your set choices, some alternatives with very similar mechanics/concepts are: Dark/Empathy: Would give you a single target Confusion power, a cone fear with -ToHit, a good PBAoE stun you can use as either a shutdown or proc bomb, and two pets. Your regen and heals combo nicely with all of the -ToHit in Dark Control. Illusion/Empathy: All the fire and forget pets here let you send your illusions into the world and then concentrate on your buffs. Gravity/Empathy: Lacks the Confusion abilities, but doubles down on the "telekinetic" aspects of the psi concept. You can't heal the pet, but probably wont need to. You can buff his Regen and Defense. Don't forget that you get to pick an APP pool, so you can tie your Psi concept together with the Psi APP. If you're determined to stick with Mind/Emp you'll probably want a Ranged Defense + Recharge build. I'd set my expectations fairly low. Even Mind Controllers with debuff secondaries often struggle to deal enough damage. Things are a bit better these days with powers like Arcane Bolt, but Mind Control's Containment issues are well known, and the set doesn't have particularly good AoE controls nor a pet to make up for it. I did used to main a Mind Controller a long time ago and the best advice I can pass along is that Power Boost is your friend. You can Power Boost Total Domination and use that to set Containment. It's not ideal but does function. Power Boost also happens to combo well with Empathy so that's a plus.

I'm not able to load the build either. I'm always on the fence about petless builds. Even the pretty weak pets usually pretty good damage if you think of them like blasts instead of pets. It does depend what you're going to be fighting though. The pet saves a lot of endurance cleaning up remaining enemies if you can make it survive semi-well. It's one of the better behaved pets and tends not to cause too many issues. If you hate the look of the pet you can still do okay without it. Seismic Smash is an absurdly powerful attack. That fact that it's also a Hold makes it even better. Proc this to heck and back.

I disagree, IMO Empathy is a poor performer without IOs. The Recharges on key powers are too long. It's a set that's only made manageable by global Recharge and even still isn't great.

This isn't feedback on the specifics of the powerset, but an interesting property of light you may want to incorporate is its quadratic nature. Light travels over huge distances very quickly (literally light speed) but also falls off in strength rapidly. In flash photography this is represented by the rule of thumb that double the distance = half the strength. It would be interesting to make the area of effect of Light powers very large, and use the Distance property to modify the scale of the mezz. The Distance property is already used to modify scale in a few powers in game, most notably the teleport in Savage Assault (damage scale is partly based on Distance).