Katharos

I am really, *really* sorry about that. I was on my pain defender and I'm afraid I can't solo +2x8 on this combo. I tried to pull them into the two drones on the far side and nearly died for it. And my team TT'd straight to Gharbag- Gharbu, so they finished that mission before I could even get to it, and I was nearly dead for my efforts. 😞 I don't see a compelling reason to keep it in the game given the grief it causes. At least other ambushes are largely in level-appropriate zones.

During Operative Renault's strike force, an ambush spawns to attack the first player who makes it to Kalinda in the Speak With Kalinda segment of the SF. Kalinda is smack dab in the middle of the level 1 spawn-in area. There are not nearly enough Arachnos Drones in the area to keep it clear of even level 1 Longbow, no matter level 30+ Arachnos. To make matters worse, because the mission is a simple talk to a contact mission, there's usually only one person who's ever at Kalinda, so even if the player wants to fix matters, it's often not possible because the spawn is x8. This causes all new villains to get stomped by level 30+ Arachnos, and sometimes the odd level 30 player, too. The ambush would be better if removed entirely, or moved to a different part of the SF, where the local area isn't occupied by level 1-5 players. It's a situation that's hard to imagine being replicated in Atlas!

I see a lot of people don’t do basically any ignoring. That’s really interesting to me. I do a great deal of ignoring — I have a couple dozen or so names on my list. I also form about 2-6 teams a day, largely TFs, and have for maybe a year or two now. I see it as my responsibility to make sure as many people on the team have as good of a time as reasonably possible, because for most people, a TF that lasts 30 minutes to an hour is the only CoX time they’ll get in a day. On the non-social side, that means making sure the difficulty’s set to just the right level for the group’s capabilities, knowing the content well enough to explain it, and being reasonably aware of how the general community approaches various types of content (like how most level 50 TFs are speedrun fodder.) On the social side, that means keeping track of patterns of behaviour. If I know a person will disregard instructions and respond rudely/angrily when there are consequences for them, I feel like I have a responsibility to make sure the other six people on my team aren’t punished for their bad behaviour. For example, if someone isn’t listening to my instructions in an Abandoned Sewer Trial on the shield generator phase, the entire trial can end up taking thirty minutes or an hour longer than it should. I’m also pretty vigilant to inter-team dynamics. If I see someone making snide comments to another person about a choice of powersets or a costume or whatever, I can pretty safely bet they’re not going to become a more pleasant player to team with the next time they join my team. Slurs also get a gignore. That said, I’m pretty forgiving of honest mistakes — if I ask a person politely to stop, and they do so without a nasty comment, that’s different from repeated destructive behaviour. I try to make notes about these kinds of things when they happen, because sometimes a friend of theirs will join my team and wonder why I didn’t respond to (name) if I still had space. Luckily, so far these people have been pretty understanding when I’ve offered an explanation. I had someone go “Oh yeah. That sounds like him.” Which is... Interesting. I definitely more use the star rating system and notes than ignoring people, though. Sometimes a person’s fine to have on radio mission teams, but will log off during a speed Dr Quaterfield four missions in, saying, “That was interesting but I want to do something else now.” Man. I did not like that. Someone else had wanted that slot. I use the star ratings especially for people who just aren’t very good at the game. I don’t think that’s a sin, but it’s very good to be aware of when you’re making decisions about settings or considering the best way to put instructions. CoX used to be something I played with my dear, severely disabled mother, who was never good at games no matter how much she liked them, and who suffered a lot of abuse for being clumsy with her keyboard. I don’t want people like her to be excluded, and I definitely don’t want to see them being attacked. Even people who have bad hand-eye coordination and couldn’t figure out a good power set combo to save their lives deserve to have fun in peace. Related, I am a lot more forgiving of people who outright quit a TF than I am of people who log off during a TF. I don’t think a lot of people realise this, but the x difficulty doesn’t downgrade when a person only logs off. It gets locked to the difficulty it would be if that person were still logged in. It’s something like sabotage on borderline teams! So I make a note of logging off and let the quitting pass without comment, though I never ignore. Sometimes you realise a team or a piece of content isn’t for you. Sometimes your spouse gets into a car crash and you actually can’t spare the five seconds it’d take to type an explanation. I’d rather someone leave than stay and have a bad time. The knockback/repel discussion seems pretty off topic, but my two cents is that it matters mostly in two circumstances: AOEs, and defeat alls. AOEs with significant knockback can seriously reduce a melee heavy team’s effectiveness. That’s true of a poorly used AOE immobilise though, too, and I see a lot less rage about those, even though unlike KB an immobilised group is still fully capable of murder. In defeat alls, big knockbacks have a tendency of shoving enemies through the geometry. It happens less now than on live, but that can still bug out a defeat all mission to the point where it can’t be completed. Yes, even trying to use pbaoes and pseudopet aoes. In either case, I find it’s simple enough to ask the player to refrain from using it for (duration) because of (mechanical concern,) and that usually goes over pretty well. If I see they’re low level and/or they don’t have a lot of IOs, I offer to buy them the KB to KD conversion IO(s) myself. Sometimes it makes people initially defensive, but I find offering solutions and being polite about it usually gets me pretty good results. I admit, though, there’s nothing more excruciating than playing my titan weapons tanker and watching a storm controller run up to my deathball, use gale, and then my momentum falls off while I chase down the scattered group. It does psychic damage to me!

Two things: one, I log my chat to a file using an in-game setting so I can reference roleplay later, and two, it still clutters my combat tab when I need it to see, well, actual combat! It's actually a huge bother to search to see if a specific ability has a to-hit check with the level of clutter the performance shifter and panacea proc add to the combat log. When chat's saved to an external file, all of your tabs are jumbled together. Like so: This isn't super helpful. I'm going to be using the free disable all powers rather than pay a 260k tax every time I want to RP, then having to remember to reslot afterwards. No matter the times I'm roleplaying while running mission/tf content. The beta server also doesn't have 26 roleplayers sitting in Pocket D at all times, and I'm not going to be asking people to log out of the main game, download the beta server, move their characters to the test server, then launch and play. It also doesn't address the other issues I mentioned with the procs, either. To be clear: I don't need help. Like I said in my post, Disable All Powers maintains the status quo to my satisfaction. I'm here to provide feedback on the beta server changes, which are good, even if the situation could be better overall.

The two things that concerned me about the incoming walk changes was the suppression of the panacea and performance shifter procs that clutter up chat files I use to record roleplay, and the suppression of movement-affecting set bonuses that make the geysers in the Shadow Shard throw you into oblivion, which Disable All Powers seems to handle fine. That said, it's a shame panacea, performance shifter, and the power transfer proc can't be removed from chat logs separately from having to disable all powers period. It would make my in game combat log a lot more usable, and would probably enable me to find combat-specific bugs better. Besides which, it'd let me use the new walk with toggles on in roleplay, which I had thought was part of the intention of walk changes. I suppose it'd take a lot more work to put procs into its own channel/tab the way pet powers are... I know hardcore players who use a log parser to get around the spam, so I should probably figure out the details about that instead.

I'd rather KM still have the 100% crit chance. But if you're going to twist my arm about it, the tiny radius (eight!) and long activation time (2.67s!) need improvement, and maybe some extra dot damage on top. I like KM's animations broadly, even the slow ones, but not the animation times. Fire sword circle has a radius of 10 and the same cast time for more damage, and an exotic damage type at that. Ice melee has a radius of 10 and a cast time of 2.1s for more damage. Psi melee, mass levitate, 2.5 cast time, 10 radius, more damage, exotic damage type. It's hard to be sure about rending flurry's deal because the blood frenzy minigame, like most minigames, isn't transparent, but it looks like it has a radius of 15 (variable), a cast time of 2.17 (not variable) and higher damage (variable.) And even then, almost all of those powers come from sets that have more than 1 AOE to their name. If it doesn't hit every enemy in a group, you can move onto the next AOE. A bit worried listing off raw numbers might invoke nerfs... If I had to say my biggest and most unreasonable wish, I want the set to have a second AOE. That said, I don't even want repulsing torrent on non-stalker ATs. It's a cool idea conceptually, sort of like claw's shockwave which is a legitimately cool and interesting and good power since the introduction of IOs. I like the random ranged attacks in melee sets almost as much as I like the random pbaoes in ranged sets. In execution, though, it's a disaster. A 2 second cast time with an arc of 45 degrees and a need to pay the knockback tax does not compare to shockwave, which has a 90 degree arc, a 1 second cast time for identical damage. It doesn't. It's almost a mix between shockwave and breath of fire, really, except it took the worst of both instead of the best.

The level 30-39 rogue to hero Paragon City tip mission Liberate gold from the Council from the Innocuous Slip of Paper tip does not flip Overdrive from a hostile into a friendly before she dies. When she dies, the mission becomes unable to be completed.

While overall a solid update, I have to say I'm still disappointed with the nerf to ninjitsu movement and I still don't understand the rationale behind it. While it's overall not a big deal for me because I have many characters and only one is a nin scrapper, it has diminished my enjoyment of her. The unique mobility of nin was what made me seek it out over other options and that is no longer a unique feature of the set. I will be stripping her and will not be playing the set again.

Sorry for doubleposting, didn't realise the MM changes would be here too. 😅 In this cycle of beta changes, I put two MMs on the test server: a beast/rad and a thug/cold. The first I did before I had looked into the newest round of changes. Rad's definitely a borderline to failing MM secondary and isn't well regarded as an MM secondary in spite of being a still very solid support set overall. It doesn't have passive mitigation for your pets, which is a big one for MMs. Many of the things that people like about rad just don't apply to MMs; pets don't benefit from recharge changes, and very few pets have such endurance problems that recovery would improve their performance a notable amount, so AM is something to shrug about. The mezzes that MMs can usually disregard will frequently wipe a rad MM's pets, and shortly thereafter the MM itself, because its active mitigation lives in toggles that drop off when mezzed, and in radiant aura, which you can't cast when mezzed. I had wanted to test how much of a difference choking cloud could make on an MM's ability to mitigate incoming damage to their pets, when on other ATs it's just about worthless. Of course... choking cloud also falls off when mezzed! C'est la vie. Rad emission remains borderline to failing. But I did notice the MM changes even without having read the patch notes at the time. Being able to summon my fallen pets (and oh, did they fall) that much more cheaply and that much more quickly meant that I could, actually, come back from a stray hold or stun, whereas on live it would have been a case of inevitable death. At the end of combat, I wouldn't have to summon, upgrade, then rest for two minutes to be able to get my endurance to a place where it could support my toggles. It would take maybe five seconds of resummoning and training and I could run into the next group. I can't say it was a fun experience, but it's viable in a way it's not on live, and that's not nothing. For people who have just one page of characters (compared to my three pages of fifties) I'm sure this'll make the difference between rolling then abandoning and playing all the way to 50. I have to imagine it's going to be a boon to MM play on high performance teams, too, where T1 pets often get deleted without chance for reprisal or recovery. But, I can't test that kind of thing on the test server, so I'll have to wait to see for sure on that part! In contrast, I can't say I noticed the changes on my thugs/cold. Not because they're bad changes, but cold's such a good secondary that losing a thug is very rare. So it's definitely the kind of MM improvement geared towards borderline play, and I think that's all it needs to be. In my opinion, the biggest problem for MMs as an AT is the huge gaping canyon between performance on a good choice of primary+secondary and the performance of a bad choice of primary+secondary.

Are there plans to push this fix before implementing the changes on live? I wanted to get a feel for these changes in particular - I had concerns the new mechanic might make nin feel lurch-y and clumsy when going from one to two back to one stacks.

I pulled out my test thugs/cold with the latest changes - and I'm thrilled with them! Unlike in my last run, I was able to save my arsonist every time he pulled a stunt because of the burst of absorb on cast. The endurance improvements for spirit ward were noticeable too, even with heatloss to help me out. As it is, I could see taking spirit ward on other MMs to shore up pet healing and using it on an as-needed basis instead of all the time, because of how much more responsive it is now. I think it can co-exist with teamwork under these conditions fine. The spirit ward changes also make being mezzed less punishing! Spirit ward does seem to double stack on the caster. I think it's just a visual error, because my endurance consumption seems to track with single spirit ward. Not a biggie, though. Enflame is much better without the forced fear effects, and I think I'm getting the full value out of it now. It does feel *weird* that it gets detoggled when I'm mezzed in a way detoggling damage auras doesn't, though, and I'm really hard pressed to put logic to why it feels weird. On one hand, when I use, say, claw's spin, and I get stunned mid animation, it does its full damage anyway. Spin doesn't do, say, 1/3rd damage just because I got stunned while casting. On the other hand, enflame isn't spin! It just isn't. I want to say, when I cast blazing aura, I fully expect it to drop when mezzed. But, blazing aura only has to pay the animation tax once and it does damage into perpetuity. Enflame has to cast it a whole lot more. So it's not *quite* blazing aura either, and it feels weird to make it operate by blazing aura's rules too. Damned both ways, I suppose. I don't think it needs to be changed on the basis of feeling weird, though. I remain ambivalent about ROP. Again, probably because MMs don't feel mez the way other ATs do.

I don't see recharge changes to kuji-in rin listed in these patch notes, but there must have been something, because on live my nin scrapper can comfortably doublestack kuji-in rin, and on the test server I can't even maintain 100% uptime. With a recharge IO in kuji-in rin and hasten up, 182% global recharge, I still have 20 seconds of downtime on kuji-in rin, and its amount of remaining recharge does not change when I use hasten. If working as intended, this is a serious nerf.

Since this has become a sticking point, I’d like to restate and expand on my enjoyment of the proc mechanic for arcane bolt, inspiration proccing included. I also have a distaste for the encroachment of gimmick/combo/minigame mechanics internal to individual powersets and I wish there was a location to have a frank discussion about them, but arcane bolt’s execution isn’t effectually different from, say, the Assassin’s Strike mechanics. As a stalker main, I’ll attest it’s actually much simpler and more graceful in execution. It’s restricted to one power, it does not fundamentally alter what that power does, the time limit is generous enough that you don’t have to immediately stop what you’re doing to smack it, and it doesn’t step on the toes of other internal powerset minigames. As it’s designed, arcane bolt explicitly rewards using control sets and support sets as much as if not more than attack sets. This is a great boon for defenders, controllers, and MMs, and I can’t think of another example of a conditional effect bending in their favour over other ATs in the existing game. It’s very exciting!

Maybe the wrong direction to go with this, but what farming map do you use? The farming maps with higher ceilings could make a bots MM with group fly work, probably FF for maximum survivability. Then he’d be doing some damage, too. Especially with the improvements on the test server on the way.

Coming back to day 2 of testing, I hadn't realised enflame could still be used on enemies! It's a lot better that way. Still, the damage feels very anaemic, now that I can see it clearly. Even on a controller that doesn't have many better options! I guess it's probably not fair to compare to *roots,* of all the aoe immobilises. I checked enflame's damage by throwing out vines first, my taoe hold, so I wouldn't have other damage numbers cluttering my screen. The problem might just be that the ticks are too slow. You could probably trick my psychology into thinking it's better than it really is if the damage ticks were sped up. I'm not sure that 5 targets within 8 feet is a great ratio, either - both small, and a tiny amount of max targets? If it's going to be as small as it is and as costly as it is, I'd really rather it'd permit something like 8 targets. (Gosh, the visual effects for enflame are pretty.) I think arcane power just procced off me eating an inspiration. Completely awesome, but I'm so certain it's not WAI. Still, if there was a way to allow certain categories of non-damaging abilities to retain their ability to proc it, I'd be very happy about it. For controllers, a number of spammed controls don't do damage, and entire support sets too. It'd open arcane bolt up as an alternative pick for some types of defenders - being rewarded, basically, for priorising support sets. I'm very excited by the implications. I started off today trying to figure out an MM combo that would both be able to fit in the various sorcery powers and actually get some utility from them they couldn't elsewhere. That proved to be something of a problem for me. Beast Mastery and Demon Summoning really benefit from having the in set attacks, so I wrote those off pretty quickly. I wrote off Necromancy next - I was planning on picking a healing-lite secondary so I could really get a feel for how big of a difference spirit ward can make in that area, and zombies are just too fragile to not have AOE healing on the table. Besides, I think the Necromancy attacks are worth taking. Ninjas I wrote off for the same fragility reasons. Robots I wrote off because they're pure ranged, I honestly haven't seen enemies be able to reach them to attack them on my live characters, and I didn't want to futz overmuch with their upgrades. That left Thugs and, um, Mercs. I settled on Thugs because, well, Mercs... I think that's a full statement, actually. Well, Mercs... I'm actually pretty sure Thugs is going to make for a great test. No internal pet healing, and right out of the gate I know the bruiser's going to be eating every alpha. I went on to pick cold for a secondary because it's a solid, well-rounded set for MMs except for its lack of healing, it's got a number of powers that are good for skipping, and heat loss can justify the entire leadership set and then two thirsty sorcery toggles on top of that. I almost went time, which does nice things for the endurance too, but Time's too good to be representative of the larger selection of support powers, and it's one of the best healing sets in the game. It doesn't need help from spirit ward. It really doesn't. A shame for sorcery, because thematically they're a great match. I really debated including the above paragraphs because it seems a bit more of a discussion about the state of MMs than sorcery, but I've decided to include it because I think it's representative of how a subset of players approach the origin pools as a whole, and I do think the sorcery changes are specifically appealing to MMs and controllers in particular. I feel obligated to take as many choices from an origin pool as possible because it's locked me out of the other origin pools, and I need to make it feel like it's worth that loss. I think it might be worth revisiting the origin pool lockout. Or at least, restating the logic behind it. It's worth mentioning I had the ability to pick up boxing/tough/weave in this build (not a guarantee on MMs) and decided against it to test sorcery. That's not a weird decision for an MM to make, but it's pretty dang weird on any other AT. Again, don't think the build's incredible as far as MM standards go - I got s/l def softcapped, took all of leadership, sat at 185% global recharge, around 20-40% resists, very little in the way of proc monkeying. Before I go in, I expect ROP to not be very important at all. I find mezzes on my MMs are a non-issue, because enemies would have to lock down me and all six of my pets to actually make me useless, but that'll be true of live ROP, too. I kind of only took it because I didn't need an extra LOTG mule on this combo, I'd already picked up 5 power pools, and power boost is useless on cold. Going into this test, I had hoped sleet would be enough to keep enemies from running away from enflame. My hope was, of course, poorly conceived. I'm not sure why MM sleet has half the duration of sleet on other ATs while still costing about double the endurance but I'd blame that for why it didn't stop the scatter. Enflame proved to be something of a problem because of that - the bruiser would chase down cowards into other groups, drag the groups over, classic MM shenanigans. Luckily that kind of behaviour is manageable with the go to command, but it proves that the terror is a significant hindrance on the effectiveness of enflame as an aoe attack. Which is a shame! When sleet did keep enemies locked down, I thought it really synergised well with MM play, where you've got your pet window up by default and managing pets is an expected feature of the AT as a whole. The only other way to get an AOE immobilise on MMs is via mu mastery, which wouldn't work as well on this combo. Oh well. (I guess I could use glue arrow from trick arrow, but trick arrow has just about no skip powers, and would struggle to fit sorcery into its build when leadership is an MM must-have. But it's something I'd think about, if I *really* insisted on having enflame. I guess it would set off oil slick...) I should temper my Spirit Ward feedback with the acknowledgement that I did six slot preventive medicine into it, so it was operating the best it possibly could under in game conditions. It ended up being around a third of my bruiser's health bar at full size, and he has 964 max hp, which is a good chunk! I felt like Spirit Ward did a very good job shoring up cold's lack of healing support, and made quite a difference on the alpha salvo. It's a bit opposite of traditional healing because of its cooldown and its build up. Very anti reactive casting. I found, if a pet started receiving undue attention that didn't already have spirit ward on it, I could not swap spirit ward to that pet fast enough to make a difference. (It was ALWAYS my arsonist. Always! Everyone was right, he is a little idiot.) I'm not sure the balance of the recharge on spirit ward compared with the amount of time it takes to build up a nicely sized absorb shield was balanced so well, because the build up time is effectively an extra amount of recharge on the power. It really effectively meant swapping spirit ward mid combat was a bad idea. It definitely *feels* like the enflame and spirit ward changes were aimed at MMs more than other ATs. They felt very good there, even enflame, when I could work around the enemy scatter. I'm just not sure it would work on any MM powerset that didn't natively have something to fix endurance problems. But that's really more an MM problem than a problem with sorcery as a set. Not much else to say on this one. Arcane power procced a lot less on my MM than my controller for some reason. You could blame the pets, but I felt like I was pretty active with benumb/sleet/heatloss/infrigidate, and more arcane bolts and enflame on the side. I guess both plant and storm are known for being good at proccing generally, so maybe that's what's going on there. Rune of protection continued to feel fine. Really did not make an appreciable difference on an MM. That's MMs for you.

Took the sorcery changes to the test server with a plant/storm/ice controller build. I figured these changes will probably make the most difference for controllers and MMs. Rarely do either have better attack choices, and they often have some extra power picks to spare. Besides which, both rely on their pets to a significant degree, which justifies picking up expensive toggles that can only be cast on another person. I built for s/l defence, some res on the side, and I had somewhere around 170% global recharge. I did not proc monkey more than just picking up the procs that were in sets I was already slotting anyway, except for carrion creepers, and carrion creepers doesn't count. I don't think it's an outstanding or even particularly unusual build by HC standards. Probably the first thing I noticed was how fast Mystic Flight is! I didn't slot for it specifically - I usually just drop a blessing of the zephyr into my travel powers and I didn't remember to put a flight IO in swift - so I'm used to going slow. It's zippy now! I'm a fan. When I got into combat, I pretty quickly realised arcane bolt's proc for arcane power is actually a global proc. I'm not sure how I missed that in the patch notes. I think that's a great move, especially for controllers, where a lot of combat time is spent making sure everything is locked down! I suspect, however, that arcane power isn't supposed to proc off hasten, which I witnessed happening while I wrote this sentence. I'd also guess arcane power isn't supposed to proc the second I activate arcane bolt, turning the active arcane bolt immediately into an empowered one. The window of opportunity to get it off felt plenty long, which I enjoyed. I haven't encountered a situation where I haven't been able to get it off before arcane power wears off, including a time when I missed twice in a row. As an aside, I really like arcane bolt's animation. I've never taken it from sorcery before, but I plan on taking it on several controllers now. My feelings are a little more mixed on enflame. Part of the problem has been that the Giant Fly Trap is a partially ranged pet, so he's often just sniping at enemies yards away from where the real fighting is. But that'll be a common problem on most controller sets, just thinking about it. (I'm more an MM player, and I've never understood the on record reasons why controllers don't get access to pet commands. But that's not what this thread is for.) Something I liked was that enflame is timed to fall off. The toggle is supposed to be thirsty - almost as thirsty as *hurricane*- so it falling off in midcombat, when my endurance has taken a dip, has been helpful. That's stormies for you. I suspect there'll be a subset of people who would rather it function like phase shift does, always being toggled, but suppressing both consumption and damage when on its downtime. Admittedly, having to continually target my pet and cast it is something of a hassle, and I ended up only using it at the very beginning of combat. Which was when my fly trap most certainly had not wandered into the fray. I ended up throwing it on a Carrion Creeper tentacle out of frustration, only for the tentacle to immediately die. C'est la vie. I didn't really think the damage, when I summoned the fly trap in the middle of combat, was worth writing home about, but I was comparing it to ice storm, which isn't entirely fair. Fortunately, the powerset combo wasn't lacking in aoe damage. If I played something that was lacking, I'd probably go back to force of will instead. If I had to make a suggestion, I'd say that enflame might benefit from applying something like a fiery embrace effect to the target it's cast on, so that there's a point to using it on people/pets that are hybrid or pure ranged. I skipped spirit ward on the basis that it's too thirsty to co-exist with enflame, but I will be making an MM build tomorrow to see if it'll sub in for a pet heal in an otherwise heal-lacking secondary. Rune of protection was fine. I never slotted it hard for recharge to begin with, so the 33% non-negotiable uptime will be a net bonus for me. I one slotted it with just a +5 boosted basic resist IO, and I felt like it was up when I needed it, as long as I wasn't playing like an idiot. It doesn't move this character up a weight class, but it does give me some breathing room when I make inadvisable positioning choices. The new recharge meshes very well with the resistance applying while mezzed, and made all the difference when in combat. Of course, storm is a pretty tanky secondary to begin with, so YMMV on something like poison. (Poison buffs when?) Overall, I'm a fan of the new direction of sorcery! Looking forward to testing it again on an MM tomorrow. edit: totally forgot to mention, I love the little symbol on the bottom of the icon for enflame that indicates it’s a different-person toggle! I hope to see it on Sonic Resonance’s Disruption Field too.

Oh no. Oh god. What have I done?

I'm confused about the rationale for the ninjitsu movement/jump speed nerfs. As others have noted, by virtue of the drop in max runspeed and jump height and the increased endurance cost for those lower numbers, this is an actual nerf. Not to mention that ninjitsu is already an endurance heavy set. I'm just not sure I believe the stated reason "they would be absorbed into the new stacking mechanics." Weren't the travel powers changed to allow stacking to begin with? I'd really like some clarity on the logic used here. Between the last attempt at a ninjitsu mobility nerf and this one, it's starting to look something like a fixation. If "they would be absorbed into the new stacking mechanics" is the true reason, why isn't sentinel bioarmour's athletic regulation getting a look? It's much stronger than nin's mobility, since it's an autopower granting movement speed debuff protection and defence debuff resistance with fly speed, which shinobi-iri doesn't get, and it's in what's absolutely the top sentinel defence set. Not that I think any sentinel sets need a nerf, but it seems like, if the concern with shinobi-iri was really the stacking, athletic regulation's exclusion deserves an explanation. When people play ninjitsu over super reflexes, generally they're making the choice of utility and extra tools in the toolbox over decent DDR. If they're losing some of that utility in the way of less mobility for more endurance, it seems more than fair to exchange that for more DDR. At least then it could be called a tradeoff rather than a nerf. (To be clear, I'd prefer shinobi-iri to be unchanged. Yes, even at the sacrifice of the very nice crit buff. As it stands, nin crits simply don't exist except on entering a mission. I don't think I'd consider making them happen at all a buff exactly - more a bug fix.) Otherwise, these MM improvements are very welcome and I'm very excited to hear more are planned. I hear a lot of people in here talking about keeping MM pets alive as a core AT mechanic RE: no auto-upgrades, but I'm not hearing a lot of people talk about necromancy. I'm actually pretty sure the T1 zombies were made so fragile because necromancers were intended to have a spirit or two out at a time, which often doesn't work out now that soul extraction's largely used for unique muling and nothing else. I've noticed my necromancy play becomes a lot less bumpy with one out, anyway. I hope, if people really believe that an MM's primary job is to keep their pets alive, T1 zombies will get a revisit through that lens. (And maybe soul extraction itself. It is odd to "reward" an MM for failure to do their job, even if it's very thematic.)

Sorry, I could have stood to be more precise in my language there. It’s often hard to make taking both a T1 and a T2 and then slotting to ED walls work with blast sets, while still fitting in the power pool and epic pool picks that are generally considered a good idea. Most often you don’t need both to assemble a full attack rotation. Given how many skip powers are in storm, probably less of an issue here. 😅

Storm tends to work better for defenders because of a defender's inherent; it'll grant you a scaling endurance discount depending on your team's overall health, and stormies tend to have endurance problems. Since you mostly team, you'd be getting the most use out of that. Of course, defenders can't usually pick up gloom, which is considered by some one of the best single target ranged attacks in game. It's a solid combo either way, and I don't think it's a big enough difference to be worth rerolling given how high level you already are. Even on a corruptor, since you're in the level 40 range, you can always pick up power sink from electricity mastery or mu mastery to fix any endurance problems you're experiencing. I can make you a build if you need. The important part, mostly, is making sure to pick up tenebrous tentacles. It'll keep enemies from fleeing from lightning storm and tornado.

The poll *does* say without enhancements. Bonfire's terrible without a kb to kd. Definitely down at the bottom with charge mastery. What's this about amp up not affecting pets?! Amp up's the set defining power of elec affinity! Where's the logic in that?!

What it says in the title. Traps' force field generator is permanent without any slotting, with a 15 second recharge and a 4 minute duration. However, a traps character will still have to recast the force field generator when that duration ends. Often it ends while a traps character is in combat, leaving them without mez protection and defence, shortly thereafter preventing the traps character from recasting ffg because they're mezzed. Sure, the character could recast before every combat to be absolutely sure it won't fail, but traps already has so much prep it needs to do to get into combat to begin with - caltrops, acid mortar, poison trap, seeker drones, trip mine, time bomb, and/or triage beacon depending on who you ask. Surely, this small pet that can't even teleport to catch up could be made permanent and save a little time and frustration.

I'm sceptical about the broad direction of blaster reworking. Each time the Homecoming team decides to make common powers uniform (in damage, recharge time, range, duration, base accuracy, etc) and each time the Homecoming team adds new cross-set uniformity (high damage single target melee T9s, everyone gets identical PBAOEs, roughly identical power orders, blaster t1 and t2 blasts must be exactly the same) it comes across that Homecoming is focusing more on making power sets successful on a self-contained level, rather than creating opportunities for cross-set synergy. Worse, it comes across that the Homecoming team is largely interested in making sets successful in the same way, over and over. I've seen this in the sets for other ATs in this update, but I think it's currently best exemplified by blaster sets. I'm concerned by this quote from the OP in particular: "lacking in incentives to get into melee range." Blaster secondaries don't have to universally motivate melee play. I'd much rather develop the individual personalities of the control-heavy blaster sets by leaving the control elements alone - that is to say, to allow them to be uniquely strong among blaster sets - while making the melee powers hot trash. Allow them to be specialised. Even the best blaster control powers will not match up to a controller or dominator because blasters do not share their inherents, and if one has concerns in that area, it'd be better addressed by making dominator and controller inherents stronger, thus allowing for a more diverse range of viable play. Or, if that's too overarching, make the comparable powers of a dominator and controller better. Dominators aren't among the least played ATs for no reason. (And I don't think controllers really need to worry about blaster-control competition anyway, looking at the most recent statistics.) To be clear: I do like the transparency of the standard damage formulas. But I think that should be a guide for set balance, not a noose, and I don't think a primary or secondary set should be considered in a vacuum, separate from the primaries and secondaries it can be combined with. I also agree that there is a difference between an underperforming set and a set with "personality," and that some sets do simply need buffs, or nerfs, and that this update had some very necessary buffs and nerfs for blaster secondaries. I have a related concern that the Homecoming team's deep investment in a set's interior success (as opposed to success on a cross-powerset basis) is leading the Homecoming team to "fix" all skip powers by making them must-haves. For better or worse, skip powers are currently necessary. For most viable builds - and even for quality of life purposes - there are a certain number of power picks that must be used on either power pool powers or epic pool powers. Everyone wants a travel power. The game is balanced around hasten. Most ATs and power sets really need the fighting pool. There are more specialised examples - like blasters wanting an epic pool resist/defence toggle - but skip powers allow for room to include those things without making a set perform just plain worse than it should, and it allows for more freedom in when to pick up powers. It's rough that the Homecoming team is leaning towards making all 18 powers from your primary and secondary necessary at the same time they're making legitimately fun and interesting origin pools while also fixing the existing pool power sets. I'm not sure I'll have space to look at the new teleport powers! Also, can blaster Shadow Maul get the size increase that scrappers did? Please? I don't think the darkness manipulation/ice manipulation buffs went far enough.

Mayhem missions randomly don't reward any bonus time for property destruction. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason for when it happens vs when it doesn't. The missions that are bugged will reward bonus time for side missions or resisting arrest, but not for breaking any amount barrels, crates, trucks, cars, etc. Have had this happen on and off across many characters and red-compatible many alignments, from soloing to full teams.

Frankly, Briggs' farms have better writing than ITF. 😛 I'm not going to change the topic of a discussion that's supposed to be about veteran levels to purely farming, but this doesn't seem like a particular response to anything I said and instead seems more like a blanket response to general concerns about farming. Which is fair, I get the dialogue about them has been bitter. I'm going to leave it at that for fear of too much seguing. 🙂