Neogumbercules

Agreed with this. It's the only option that doesn't demand a slot tax from players that want to disable the effect but also doesn't force anyone to change who doesn't want to.

When advancing to the character naming page during character creation my cursor focus was set to the Character Name text box. When typing, the text would be entered like normal but the "Enter Character Name" prompt was not removed, showing my character's name and the prompt text overlapped. When clicking into the character name text box, the prompt text went away.

Scrapper - Dark Melee/Bio Armor - During character creation, when set to minimum FX, the effect for Hardened Carapace only existed on my characters right arm during the looping animation showing the effect on the power customization screen. This effect carries over into the game. I did have customization of my DM effects but I am not using asymetrical gloves (not sure if that's even available yet honestly).

I know you picked /Elec but /Devices is actually a super chill blaster secondary. You get a stealth, your sustain power is a toggle, and targeting drone gives you a lot more snipe damage and allows you to slot some interesting IOs and gives a huge tohit buff. The recovery one Field Operative is as strong as Stamina. Both of those slotted up basically removes your endurance bar from the game. The stealth will give you the ability to get in close to nuke with complete safety. You can use it with super speed for near total stealth. That's if you don't take a PBAoE nuke. Trip Mine and Time Bomb were both buffed to remove the interrupt. Time Bomb still kinda sucks but trip mine is great. You should give it a chance!

Unfortunately when the game shut down there were several incarnate trees that never got used. We were supposed to have incarnate abilities that went beyond hybrid. Does anyone know what those other ones were supposed to be, and do we have plans to implement them in the future?

Arch/storm with a force feedback +recharge and sudden Acceleration in every power that takes it. Build for tons of recharge too. You'll be running around with nearly 300% bonus recharge at all times, double stacking freezing rain, throwing out fistful, explosive, and RoA faster than you can blink, and enemies will be permanently controlled by a non-stop barrage of Gale, freezing rain, and explosive arrow knockdowns. It's disgusting.

This is honestly the best solution and I'm pretty sure one of the other servers does exactly this. It serves everyone. No one could complain about this (convincingly).

The low level enhancement treadmill is without a doubt one of the most outdated and functionally useless aspects of this game and it's absolutely the right thing to address, and this proposed update looks pretty good. It's a problem when the best strategy is to literally not use enhancements until level 22.

Have you considered Rad/Mental/Fire? I rolled one up on Brainstorm and it's kind of a beast. Irradiate and Psy Shockwave are really fast PBAoEs and then you have Neutron Bomb and the two cones. Might be fun!

I have a 165hz Monitor on the way and I was wondering if anyone is playing at >60hz and if there's anything special I need to do with the in-game settings to make it work.

Even without the DC changes they had planned, DM is gonna be in a great spot with just the Shadow Maul update. It's a shame they couldn't work out the DC changes, but it's better than nothing.

Agreeeed.

Designing (or redesigning, in this case) a power in a vacuum and refusing to take into account the way the meta of CoH gameplay has evolved is equally a bad approach. Besides I wasn't referring strictly to balancing this attack to incarnate powers, but recognizing that new and redesigned abilities need to be designed to co-exist in a very fast paced environment. Slot dots, I argue, are poor fits.

I think it's important to remember that a power has to be exciting and feel impactful and hit those dopemine receptors that we're all feeding to still be a good power. We can give DE a 15 second dot, and then math out that over the course of a standard radio mission it's output is roughly equivalent to Atom Smasher, but what power is better to a player? Personally I'd go Atom Smasher every time. It's still a video game that we're playing here and long, slow dots are lame. This game is closer than its ever been to an ARPG like Diablo 3 and the fun of those games is blowing up monsters. Why would I ever fire off DE when my whole team just opened with Radial Ion Final Judgement and everything is dead? My AR blaster has the same problem. Flamethrower is not touched on teams. I'm lucky to get out Bonfire and Full Auto before entire spawns +4/8 are reduced to a boss or two. If anything I'd like to see slow dot powers revamped entirely to very fast dots or direct damage.

What about applying an end drain-over-time effect to go along with this to give the impression that the player is leeching endurance directly from the foes over time? Either way, 15 seconds is an eternity in CoH terms. I'll definitely be on Beta trying it out, but I feel like we've strayed really far from the original premise of giving DM a decent AOE attack.

If the idea is to lower the damage so you can't nuke off minions instantly, then turning into a DoT is a way to get there, but it has to be a fast DoT. As many people have already stated, this game is extremely AoE focused and everyone opens every fight with some form of huge AoE. In fact I'm not even convinced of the premise that it kills off minions too fast and provides too much safety. That argument could be applied to dozens of powers in this game. Why does DM need to be different?

Well I'm glad it's still in beta then of course. It seems really half baked. If the idea is to make it a viable AoE in a set lacking in AoE I'd say they had it close before, but way off now.

I did miss that part, thanks. Seems even weirder then. Does it recover more endurance and deal less damage when you're low on end? Because that would seem like the equilibrium part of the name to me. If not, then the damage scaling based on endurance seems even more pointless...

Appreciate this testing. It's clear this power just got nuked (pun intended). The missing endurance aspect of this doesn't seem too well thought out. It's an effect that will almost never matter in post 50 content or on teams where there's at least one person who can buff recovery (p.s. Almost everyone takes ageless). For a mostly solo player to make the most of this ability they'd have to intentionally gas themselves or gimp their build to spend more endurance than they can sustain. IMO the ability should just do more flat damage, if we want an interesting mechanic associated with it, I previously suggested damage scaling based on missing enemy HP to turn it into a finisher. Right now it's not so great.

I agree but CP explained in the other Focused Feedback thread that psuedopet powers can actually crit they are just designed not to. Of course I haven't had a chance to test yet but the new Dark Equilibrium sounds pretty underwhelming on paper now.

I'd take this over the proposed scaling diminishing returns from +dam. I feel like that idea is just an overly complicated workaround to making the power too strong. Another idea I had was to lower the base damage but apply the increased damage scaling based on enemy HP missing, that way you don't have a huge nuke to open with but it's a good follow-up power. Ultimately though I fee like it's fine as is. The small radius and DMs overall lack of AOE especially compared to other sets doesn't tip this power over any line IMO. It's not like it's going to make a difference when every single character in this game is a friggin demigod at level 50 anyway.

Certain live retail games out there like Diablo 3 take the route of bringing up the underperforming as opposed to nerfing powerful sets and I agree with that approach. The reason I agree is because from a player perspective it feels good as a player of an underperformer like Dark Melee or Devices to be able to reach high performance play and the spectacle of blowing away +4s is a lot of fun! On the other hand, a TW player might question why it was justified that some "bad" set was chosen as the performance standard and their play style was neutered. The outcome of a nerf like that is players will just gravitate to the next highest performing set and use that, and bad sets will stay bad forever. Buffing rarely played, weak sets like DM is a positive change that excites the player base. Nerfing powerful sets doesn't solve the problem that weak sets have and only pisses off the people playing them. Worse yet if the nerf doesn't make something else better, players will just be left wondering why they got nerfed at all, and if something else does end up being better, they will just dump what they were playing, move to the next best thing, and the cycle continues. I think most importantly though is that there are no truly bad combinations in this game and everything can be powerful. A powerful set doesn't diminish the role of anyone else on the team, and this game isn't competitive at all, so you don't need to compare your performance to anyone else. It's also important to realize that this is a very old game, with some mechanics that are highly exploitable, that most people have mastered, and is not hard at all, even on the hardest settings. The mechanics in play here are inherently broken. There were plans to expand the incarnate level content but that never happened. Now we have a bunch of IOd up T4s curb stomping content that they were never intended to be challenged by. To me it would make the most sense to make a pass across every underperforming set try to get them to some level of power that's on par with the top performers, then focus on expanding the difficulty options for the game to make the fights more interesting.

I threw the critical strikes set into Soul Drain which proc'd almost every time and immediately followed up with Dark Consumption for a massive damage boosted crit-tacular explosion, then follow up with a crit-tacular ball lightning, then finally shield charge to bring it all home.

Yeah I was using it in the rotation. I'm not sure if it made a huge difference to DPS overall but it was still great even as an ST attack. I also crushed AE 125 with DM/Shield because of DC being so good. One things for sure, my next main will definitely be DM.

I know this thread is about DM/Shield but I just did 416 DPS on a slap dash DM/Bio (with t4s and my robot drones lore pet out) and wowzers!