MirrorDarkly

Late in the beta for the last release the Storm Blast powers Storm Cell and Cat 5 were changed so that you could set the color of the lightning to be different from the color of the storm. Is it possible to do the same for the Thunderhead costume aura? I have wanted to use it on several characters but always end up frustrated that the cloud color and the lighting color are the same and usually one ends up looking bad.

Maybe try File --> Open --> My file in Mids?

Here is a stab at a build. I have no idea how to get it in a state you can read in the forum but you should be able to load it into Mids. I went for resist and more or less ignored defense. It has 90+% to everything besides Psi (82.63%) and Toxic (24.45%). Seems End stable as long as you use Power Sink when your blue bar dips to below half. I'm not great at this so I am *sure* there could be improvements made. Power Surge is mostly there for if you start taking heavy toxic damage. You could probably take out Weave and use those slots for something else if you wanted. FF is on all attacks and they all have one or more additional proc. Likely expensive as a lot of purple sets were used. Edit: I skipped Beheader and Gash. Tanker (Electric Armor - Battle Axe).mbd

Thanks for the breakdown! I have not played Seismic yet and didn't realize it got a flat recharge reduction.

How have you gotten over 1,100% recharge? I thought there was a hard cap of 500%.

Procs placed in Storm Cell have a chance to go off when it attacks with lightning, however it doesn't happen all that often.

It's possible to like something but not think it is balanced or well performing. My feeling on Storm Blast are complex. I *love* the set and have more fun playing it than I have any other blast set since I joined the game way back in the preorder early access/beta. But there have also been times where I felt almost any other set would have performed better. And I have never been in a situation where I noticed storm blast performing significantly above average to balance that out. So is the set "good enough"? For me the answer is yes but I could absolutely see others come away from it feeling differently.

Sorry, that should have been a reply to your post on the other thread. I'm not sure what procs you tested. When I tried, one of the few I felt might be making a noticeable difference against pylons and AVs was -Res in Cat5.

@Sovera You might try the -Res Annihilation proc in Cat5. I've done some Pylon testing on my Storm/Regen that makes me feel like over a long enough fight it can make a difference (One Test I have 5 slotted Ragnarok leaving out the immobilize and the -Res). But I find my times fairly swingy with storm overall, that may come down to how an unusually high % of the damage is left up to chance.

Replied to the wrong thread somehow. As a wise man once said.... D'oh!

Would you be willing to share your SB/Fire/Ice build? I tried for a bit to put one together on test but I was never happy with what I came up with.

While I mostly agree with you, on my Sentinel at least I find just Storm Cell + Chain Lightning very anemic AoE damage, often failing to take out most minions before I get to them with my single target attacks. Now Storm Cell + Cat 5 + Intensify (w/ Build Up Proc) is an beast and usually destroys most groups. No idea how much of that is a Sentinel issue as opposed to a set issue however.

I took all the Storm Blast powers initially and respeced out of the Cone and Gust at some point (I want to say around the time I got Clouburst?). I've toyed around with picking it back up but I don't know what I would take the slots from.... Good to hear your loving it, the set can be amazingly fun.

My experience so far SB is that it certainly works solo. At the low to mid 40s on my SB/Regen Sentinel I've been soling missions of +0/x7 Malta and Crey and I took out the Countess as an even level AV solo at level 44 (Endurance ended up being the biggest issue in that fight and I had to drop many of my toggles part way through). What I go back and fourth on is if it works well. I fell like it lives and dies on my ability to get Cat 5 and to a lesser extent Storm Cell down effectively and sustain a constant barrage of attacks while they are out. When that happens it's glorious with mobs being tossed everywhere and dyeing left and right. However if anything interrupts that cycle; a sapper I didn't see, being confused, LoS issues, enough enemies escaping the area, etc.. it's effectiveness collapses and I'm left taking them out one after another after another.... I very much feel that outside of Cat 5 I lack an sort of effective AoE. Even with Storm Cell out and using Chain Lightning on cooldown I'll often find that I have to target and kill each individual enemy. Now sometimes that is not the case, SC will go off enough and CL will jump effectively, but much of the time that just doesn't happen. This also can make joining grouping incredibly frustrating. My general thoughts on the set right now are that it is incredibly unique and (for me) fun but that it's probably under tuned. There are a lot of very obvious situations where it's damage output will be dead last for a blast set and its peak damage output in the best of circumstances (which is rare outside of solo play) seems to be about average. In exchange for that it gives a not insignificant amount of mitigation through knocking, slows and shear chaos that is very hard to quantify. It is also feels extremely END hungry and besides Incarnate powers (on the test server) I have not found a way to completely manage that.

On my Sentinel I'm currently running 5 Bombardment (including the fire proc) and the proc from Position's Blast. Over a long enough fight I notice them go off but I'm still trying to decide if swapping out for 6 Artillery would make more sense.

At that point I would demand a stadium that could accommodate organized hamster ball games!

One thing I have noted is that my wind proc had a dramatically lower chance to hit than my lightning procs. (50ish% vs 95% on hard targets for example). I assume this is because I'm using a damage set. However on test when the change was made it was my understanding that the wind powers we going to be set to auto hit. It seem like some were either missed or left out of that conversation and I'd be curious to know if it was intentional?

Storm Blasts strength is that it looks and feels awesome. The weakness is that it is *completely* incompatible with the meta and any sort of fast moving team. There is also an open question as to if there is *any* payoff to that. It feels like it should be extremely effective when you can get everything in place for it. However there was some testing in the blaster form that showed it exactly in the middle of the sets, along with dark blast, against a single hard target that lasted long enough to get full use out of storm cell and cat 5. So there is the very real possibility that your damage will, at best, occasionally be average and most of the time aweful.

For what it is worth I tried SR, EA, Rad, Fire and Regen on test and settled on Regen. It does a good job of staying out of my way (which I find very important for storm) and still gives me a few buttons to recover from a bad situation. I have a version on test that I've used to solo Infernal, Chimera and just today Nightstar (who gave me a lot of trouble and I had to try out several different builds to finally beat) as AVs at +4/x8. I'm sure there are sets and players that can do far more but I'm happy with those results.

Looking for feedback on a build I'm working towards that is similar to one I used the test server and enjoyed. I'd love to be able to squeeze perma-hasten out of it and have better slow resistance without sacrificing to much else, but I'm not sure if that is possible. The only incarnate included is Vigor Core Paragon, which I used to solve my end issues as well as allow the lightning in Storm Cell and Cat 5 to hit higher level targets after I noticed them missing AVs frequently (since it only has 1.15 base accuracy and don't benefit from set bonuses and most other external sources of accuracy). The healing bonus also helps some of my secondary powers which is.... not bad. Sentinel (Storm Blast - Regeneration).mbd

So if I am going to drop Cat5 on a group of enemies there is no reason to first cast Storm Cell? If that is true I think it should be stated explicitly in the power descriptions because dispite playing the set quite a bit and trying to understand it in CoD I had no idea... It also begs the question; if I have both active in the same area, use another storm blast power and proc lighting, which power is actually triggered? If for example I have one with substantially better slotting that could matter a lot.

On test I tried /Rad, SR, EA and Regen. Regen was my favorite of those although I'm very tempted to try /fire now that it is live.

At the higher levels I'm having no problem with Storm Cells recast. The overall end usage of the set does feel a little high. Even on characters with slotted sustains like blasters and sentinels I can run dry quickly unless I really build for mitigating it or slow down my power usage. Perhapse consider adding a chance of End return to the lightning attacks when used on a target in the Storm Cell or reducing the cost of Storm Cell?

Some quick feedback in the latest patch. I really noticed the faster ticking DoT on Cloudburst. Also my Cat5 and Storm Burst had a 95% hit rate across the board (procs, etc) on a level 52 AV (Nightstar). Cat5 had 5/6 of the superior winter set and 1 IO recharge reduction. Storm Burst had 3 HO Acc/Dam and 3 procs.

Are you sure about that? Just on one target and assuming the proc does 100 points of damage. After three attacks at 80% with a lock out you'd have averaged 99.2 proc damage the current way. (100 damage x 99.2% change to see a proc). With no lock out after three attacks at 40%. 41% of the time you'd see 100 proc damage so 41 average damage there. 31% of the time you'd see 200 proc damage so 62 average damage there. 6.4% of the time you'd see 300 proc damage so 19.2 average damage there. For a total of 122.2 proc damage over the same 3 attacks. So if I'm doing my math right I understated how big of a % drop you would need to average out the same damage over time. Edit: Since the lockout is per target the more targets you have the less % proc chance you'd need to remove. But it also means it is probably impossible to remove the lockout and get the same average damage over time for all group sizes.