oedipus_tex

My test for this is simple. "If this was an Armor set and not a Buff set, would this interaction be permitted?" I think the answer to that is obviously "No." The reason to correct it isn't to interfere with people's fun. It's to recognize that part of the fun is making choices. That's the reason none of the Armor sets combine with a pool power to provide permanently capped Defense to all positions and damage types. And IMO if Armor sets can't do that, Buff sets shouldn't either, at least on powers that affect the caster.

The tricky part is that +4 enemies only receive 48% of a Recharge debuff. Against +4 enemies your stats are: Freezing Rain: -24 Snow Storm: -30 So together they are -54 against +4s. If you happen to be a Psi Blast secondary you can potentially cap off the -Recharge with a Psionic Tornado (-18 vs +4s). What really holds Snow Storm back is the animation time rarely is worth it. (The endurance cost is a factor too). If there were some way to apply it with no cast animation (maybe 0.1 seconds just so its not literally free) it would be a lot more useful.

You make excellent points. I think you're right about the difference between Fulcrum being just a click for insta-capped damage, versus what it is, a fairly risky power. By the way, do I remember correctly that you used to play an Illusion/Cold Controller and were one of the folks who used to share builds for that combo back in the day on the Controller forums?

This isn't a Time Manipulation discussion thread, but I will say even without Power Boost Time Manipulation would be a top-performing set. The only things it lacks (sort of) are -Regen and self-mezz protection. Self-mezz protection is available to only 3 sets (Traps, Sonic Res, Force Field). Farsight without Power Boost provides more base Defense than Dispersion Bubble, and Time is one of only 5 buff sets with a reliable heal. It is the only set that gets a Defense buff higher than +5 and a heal at the same time other than Controller Dark Affinity. The Power Boost thing just takes it and makes it hilarious. +31% Defense to all, as a baseline, no issues here.😄

I recognize that the Buff sets will always be the most difficult sets to evaluate because there are few hard rules to govern them. For Armor, Blast, Melee, Assault and even Control sets, the rules are more straight forward in comparison. I also acknowledge that there exists an informal "Kinetics rule" for Buff sets. If Kinetics came out tomorrow and no one had seen it before, we would probably think it is overpowered because of the capped Damage. The value is allowed mainly because it is grandfathered. The Buff/Debuff sets are supposed to offer powerful buffs and some pushing of boundaries, as with Kinetics. But this powerful? Then again there is nothing to directly compare Kinetics too. So maybe huge amounts of +Damage is totally within bounds. Based on the fact that the set has been around so long, it seems so. Beyond that though, its worth asking whether a set is immune to review just because it happens to be called a "Buff" and not "Armor." If Farsight and Fade were Armor powers and not Buff powers, I know they'd be changed. They fall too far outside the acceptable mainstream for an Armor power. I don't think there'd even be much discussion about it. Everyone would recognize why soft capping to every position and element with a handful of powers is not healthy for Armor sets as a whole. That's because the mantra "just let the players have fun" has multiple implications. For a lot of players it is not "fun" to have one set that is such a large outlier that it dwarfs other sets. It is not enough to say that Farsight with Power Boost provides +Defense. It provides +Defense far outside the normal enhancement Schedules (Defense powers are schedule B, or +20% enhancement per slot.) And it provides it in a way that, once cast, is immune to endurance drain or detoggling. Note that the Defense and +ToHit systems are considered delicate enough that a whole different Enhancement Schedule governs them from other systems. We could argue that Farsight should be powerful because Fulcrum Shift is powerful. But to me there has to be a breakline somewhere when a power simulates Armor. For situations where the character is buffing teammates or pets, we know from the design that the Armor value provided can be substantial. But when buffing themselves, the rules that would seem to govern that are well established, and, in my opinion, even sets formally called Buff sets should still basically obey them.

I hope this is on the list of considerations when the Control sets come up for review.

I vaguely remember that when power was added, Power Boost came up in discussion. I believe the developers said they specifically did not want it to be boostable because it would be inappropriate to give Dominators such solid armor. Farsight is a very similar power so it was a surprise when it was boostable.

Link Minds is unboostable. The power has a teensy tiny bit of Resistance in there, which I always read as an excuse not to allow Power Boost/Power Up.

I was going to write back and say it does boost Recovery, but you're absolutely right. Power Boost does not boost Recovery. I had it mixed up with +Endurance Mod, which it does boost (as in the instant Endurance you get back from Power Sink or Chrono Shift). Glad you said that, because even tho I understand the difference between -Recovery and -Endurance, until just now I hadn't really thought through the difference between +Recovery and +Endurance.

I have a long post in the Suggestions forum about Power Boost + Farsight /Fade if anyone wants to add their thoughts to the discussion there. A developer chimed in at one point in the discussion to say they had no specific plans but they did make note we were talking about it. Slightly off topic, what's interesting about Power Boost is at some point it became semi-associated with the Dominator archetype. Three of the Assault sets had a direct copy of it (Ice, Energy, and Earth Assault) and one had an offshoot (Gather Shadows in the Dark Assault set). The devs for Homecoming turned all the old Power Boosts into a new power called "Power Up" that retains some of Power Boosts function and adds some +damage. So, currently 4 / 11 (or about 1 out of 3) of the Dominator Assault sets have some version of this power baked into the set. RE: Force Field's shields. Like Redlynne said, Power Boost has always technically worked for these powers. What changed is they didn't used to be AoEs. So you could always create PB'ed shields. It just took more effort, and you couldn't hit a whole league with it. If I recall correctly, the feeling at the time of the change of Deflection and Insulation Shield to AoEs was that Force Field significantly underperforms. So the developers allowed it to keep its Power Boosted AoE shields mainly so Force Field could at least not totally suck next to Cold Domination. Force Field has carved a minor, tiny niche for itself for certain iTrials like Lambda as a the premier AoE Defense set when teams break up and run around a maze, due to Power Boost.

One other thing that is weird about Power Boost is it does not align with the normal Schedule of enhancements. Like, +Defense, ToHit, -Defense, and -ToHit all take schedule B enhancements, which are weaker than Schedule A (Healing, Absorb, End Mod, Mezz Duration, etc). But Power Boost boosts them all equally.... That's why Power Boost is so incredibly effective in powers like Farsight and Fade, and would be in FFG if it worked. You can achieve with Power Boost numbers way outside what you could do with enhancements. Note the Alpha slot enhancements do follow schedules. That's why the Defense in Alpha slot powers is so much lower than the other enhancement values.

Subdue and Mental Blast have the same recharge, animation time, and damage. The only difference is Subdue has an 80% chance for a Mag 3 immobilize, and Mental Blast has -30% recharge (negligible in a single target power, especially in the Dominator archetype.) Subdue is the clear winner because blasting AVs is a thing and most Doms skip their single target immob. You just have to watch out if you exemplar frequently below level 23.

For any Dark Blast build I always feel a strong pull toward Soul Mastery for Power Boost. Power Boosted Blackstar is just stupid good. The base -ToHit of Power Boosted Blackstar with no IOs at all is -124% ToHit for 20 seconds. That works out to -59.52% ToHit against +4 enemies. The incarnate soft cap is 59. So, Power Boosted Blackstar will basically soft cap any teammate to all positions for 20 seconds for against each enemy you hit with Blackstar in almost any content you encounter.

Nice ideas. Thanks for the commentary. -Damage wouldn't be a crucial secondary effect for me, it just seemed like the most natural fit. A secondary effect that might be interesting is -Special (one power in Dominator Energy Assault has this). There are also some unusual effects you could deploy, like -Mezz Resist. In terms of why I'd want this particular set, its mostly for theme. All of the existing Assault and Melee sets lean very heavily on punches and kicks. But it seems like there are a lot of characters in comics who rarely throw a punch but are still very dangerous. Some of this is covered in the Controller, Blaster, Defender etc archetypes, but most of those powers are designed for range. There isn't a gentle-but-deadly-up-close set. You could tweak Dark Melee to sort of be this, but Dark seems very heavily associated with its particle set. Maybe if it was available in the full color palette it could work. I like your suggestion of an Atrophy support set. I can picture how it might be a second answer to Kinetics. But, I'd still like a Melee/Assault sets for use on armored characters and Dominators. 🙂

RE: the damage type. Personally I think almost any damage type could work. Negative Energy, Toxic and Psi are all good options. There's an argument though that there are very few Fire or Cold attacks in the game outside of the actual Fire or Ice sets, and breaking down a living being aligns with the concept of Fire in the sense that burning is a similar chemical breakdown process.

I just went into the test environment and checked to be sure. Can confirm that Force Field Generator is not affected by Power Boost. I do believe there are psuedo pets that benefit from Power Boost, but FFG is a "true" pet.

Note that because enemies are generally not very intelligent about their power executions, Electric Control is poised to keep them mostly helpless for an indefinite period of time. It's true that they will occasionally get enough endurance back to attack you, but its also true that using any attack lowers their endurance again. So, they can still throw the occasional light punch, but doing that actually hurts them since it prevents them from regaining enough endurance to use an attack that could threaten you. Since enemies have no patience to wait, they help you out by draining themselves. Also, since Electric has two pets for them to expend their powers on, not to mention the ability to open with a confuse power to convince enemies to expend their energy on each other, in the context of Electric Control specifically endurance drain is very effective. It does help a lot, though, to spec into the Mu pool, and to take an Alpha slot that provides Endurance Modification. The Mu pet has lightning attacks that, on top of Conductive Aura from you and punches from the gremlins, tend to keep enemies from being able to respond. Plus it provides on extra punching bag for them to waste their puny attacks on.

You could if you could find animations with exactly matching animation times. Dark Melee's animation times are for the most part don't match up with existing buff animations that I know of. Shadow Punch - 0.83 Smite - 0.97 Shadow Maul - 3.07 (outlier--note this is also the sands of mu animation) Seems like it would be easier to just create a new set. Two powers in Dark Melee do have similar characteristics to the proposed Atrophy set: Touch of Fear - uses a 1.17 second 'reach out' animation shared with Cold Domination's ice shields Midnight Grasp - uses the 2.07 second animation shared with Force Fields Deflection Shield Buff powers generally have slowish animations in the +2 second range. Thus, the resulting attack would also be slow animating. To compensate, it would would need to deliver enough DPA to keep up with other sets. RE: Kinetic Melee. I feel like that is something else entirely. Kinetic Melee is a wonderfully strange set and I don't see it as similar conceptually to a touch-attack set.

Interesting changes. Thank you to the developers for the obvious care you put into the game. RE: Tanker mezz strength. I actually had to go look it up because I always just assumed it would be stronger for Tankers, due to mezz being a property of certain armors (e.g. Dark Armor). I'm not upset it wasn't updated, although it doesn't break immersion for me for Tanker mezzes to be substantially longer than for other melee archetypes. It feels very in-role for me.

A much underrated combo IMO is Illusion Control/Thermal Radiation. People tend to overlook it because it's not an obvious synergy right away. But Thermal actually has both -Resist and -Regen, and while not quite as much of it as /Cold, its still there. You don't need to worry about healing your Army pets at all, so that frees you up to manage Thermal's various buffs.

In addition to the stuff mentioned above (especially about Power Sink), you should take an Alpha slot with Endurance Modification. Once every power is dealing 45-33% more endurance drain your sapping abilities go way up. It also helps if you go Mu Pool to get the pet. Having a second creature blasting enemies with lightning does a lot to keep their blue bars empty. Turn on the setting where you can see enemy health / endurance bars at all times.

BR is not an AoE powerhouse but has a ranged nuke you will actually use as a Defender, so it's not as bad as it looks at first glance. Because Cutting Beam, the AoE, does -Defense, you can slip a -Resist proc in there. Sonic Attack gets a lot of rave reviews for Defenders but Beam Rifle isn't that far behind it in debuffing potential, with a different flavor nuke, and much less annoying sound effects. 😄

Most of the suggested animations look like the character stretching a hand out toward a target, as opposed to violently punching. Dark Melee, in general, looks like you are throwing a punch, at least for the core powers. In terms of differentiation, Dark Melee does -ToHit as opposed to -Damage and limits the color palette to subtractive tones. Atrophy Melee could as easily belong to an angel as to a lich or succubus. Or to any character whose skin/touch/presence is draining.

If you want to be a strong support character, Dark Blast for the -ToHit. If you want to be a resistance debuffer, Beam Rifle. Just general all around not a bad set: Water.

One common power seen in comics, science, and fantasy fiction is the ability to drain enemies gently, with or without contact (depending on the hero or villain). Most of the existing animations for Melee and Assault sets are violent attacks. I'd like to see a powerset devoted to more gentle, but just as deadly, assaults. Because this powerset is in many ways the inverse of Empathy, I propose the name "Atrophy Melee/ Assault." Ideally, it would be great if the attacks actually physically touched the target. But, given what we have to pick from, being able to drain gently from a short distance would also be fine to me. Set Concept: Atrophy Melee / Assault Animation: Since new animations are likely not in the cards, this set would need to borrow from existing sets. Luckily there are a number of touch-like animations in the existing Buff and Control sets. Heal Other (reach forward with both hands) Haunt (roll one hand and reach out) Deflection Shield (reach forward with one hand) Fire Breath (alt animation) (step forward with hand out reached) Radiation Infection (reach one arm forward and hold that pose or a moment) Particle Effects: Borrowed from Empathy and Pain powersets I don't have any specific stats to share, because those tend to get worked out at design time. I can just picture the set having powers with names like: Grasp Enervate Enfeeble Degenerate Devitalize Drain Caress Embrace Cool extras: Instead of Build Up, the set could get a version of Drain Psyche, possibly with different effects. Same concept though: drain foes to get stronger. The set's secondary effect could be -Damage.