Galaxy Brain

I do want to apologize to you @Itikar, I was in a crabby mood + on mobile and seeing the back and forth set me off. Attacking the language of an argument by belittling/dismissing the poster just sort of opens the door to this kind of discourse. I should not have attacked in kind, but that is on me. Anywho, as for the main point of the thread there is a legit comparison to be made where certain sets get mez powers that also deal respectable damage while others get comparable mez which do not deal damage. Take Cosmic Burst and Beanbag for example, both are ST stuns but one is a T3 blast in a set with about the same amount of AoE powers while the other is just a stun: Cosmic Burst Beanbag Damage 132.63 12.51 Cast Time 2.07s 0.9s Stun Mag 3 3 Stun Time 9.54s 11.92s Recharge 10s 20s End Cost 10.4 10.2 Range 80 60 Comparing the two, Cosmic burst does animate over x2 slower than Beanbag, and has a slightly shorter duration stun, but it carries half the recharge time, +20ft of range, similar End Cost... and over x10 damage. Beanbag is faster to come out sure, but it does not really compare to Cosmic where it has the same mag stun for a similar duration that can be applied more often, and then on top of that deal WAYYY more damage and even a secondary effect of -Def on top of that (and from further away). Yes, these are two different powersets, but it sort of highlights the issue from the OP. Some blast sets have mez "attacks" that are jam packed with effects like Cosmic, while others get Beanbags. Why not toss the latter some love to where they can really compete for a pick like Cosmic Burst, Lancer Shot, etc can?

You attack argument lots, and not back up with fact

"How do you do, fellow kids?" The points about how often the powers are picked are entirely valid and carry far more weight than the language used to describe them.

RIP that 1 peacebringer Cookie to the person who finds it

This is awesome stuff, great job everyone!

Although when they tick end they always get plenty if they arent a minion, can we actually confirm they just need "not 0" to cast?

I can plug in defender values as well for comparison later. As for the enemy recovery, the issue is that all but minions have well over 100 endurance, recover end in %'s of endurance like we do, but still have the same end costs per power. A boss with 200 endurance still only needs 8 end to toss a power out, equaling 4 end cost for us. They then recover 2x as much end as we do per tick... so yeah

The range helps, but the vast difference between 30* and 90* is not going to be accounted for.

My thoughts: 1) Midnight Grasp could do "Splash DoT" around the target you hit, say in the same radius as Thunder Strike (7~8 ft) and able to hit 10 targets. This would spread an additional 67.05 damage in a crowd (SO damage enhanced), or 108.35 damage when you have Soul Drain (per Mids). With a single Recharge enhancement, you would be able to toss this out every 11.25 sec, or every 7.38 sec with hasten. Compared to the 1st iteration of the "new" Dark Consumption, that could toss out IIRC 250ish damage every 54 - 38 seconds with 2 Rech SO's / hasten. Lets compare these at base damage and at reg / hasten recharges: MG = 5.96 / 9.09 AoE DPS DC = 4.63 / 6.57 AoE DPS While the burst isn't much, the DPS is there over even the nuke DC of build v1. 2) Dark Consumption could have stayed as the Build V2, but with the close-range sweet-spot. In my testing, the v2 build would really only wipe out enemies if I poured a ton of damage into it. If it were to be redesigned again, I would think buffing the "sour-spot" v2 damage to be 9-12ft radius would be nice, and then keeping a 3ft radius "sweet-spot" for bonus damage would work great in tandem with a splashing MG. Enemies touching you would be wiped out for sure, but that is a much smaller amount than would take a decent chunk of damage from the larger sour-spot. The new Shadow Maul and MG with AoE DoT could then easily pick off survivors, but still offer time to be hit back as a balance.

Making GFS into a sort of Shatter-Clone would be amazing. That and making Fire Breath wider overall. Actually, lets compare it directly to Frost with Scrapper values. Fire Breath = 108.4 base damage, 2.67 cast time, 10s rech, 10.19 end cost 30* Arc, 15ft base range = 2.66 area factor Frost = 110.1 base damage, 2.27 cast time, 11s rech, 11.02 end cost 90* Arc, 10ft base range = 28.54 area factor The two are nearly identical in the damage and rech/end cost departments, but Frost animates notably faster and has nearly 10x the area coverage if my math is right! The area covered is a huge factor in having foes actually hit by the power and lets Frost more effectively leverage it's damage output over Fire Breath. If we want to keep the ratios the same where Fire Breath is 50% longer but narrower, the Arc should instead be 67.5* to cover the same area as Frost overall.

I don't have direct feedback yet, but the Power Transfer set lets you get the most mileage out of Thunderous Blast!

Yes there is: Damage 😛 Stacking damage from teammates will kill enemies and leave them unable to attack you back The problem here is that all these examples require heavy investment of End Mod Enhancement in order to "work", which takes away from the ability to slot for damage. Thunderous Blast is a nuke that should be able to kill first and foremost (at least minions). Side note, enemy rank does not matter for end drain outside of AV's who resist end drain as IIRC all -End powers drain a % of their total and not a raw value. The AoE's can be potent for this purpose but they cannot do it by themselves even when slotted. The nuke of the set has to trade damage for the ability to drain, which is a questionable tradeoff but it could be valid since whatever is alive is now unable to attack you and is badly hurt, though you could also slot for damage and just kill them instead for similar effect. Yes, it is certainly a unique secondary effect (joke answer of damage aside), but that does not make it overall great if the way it stands out is that it needs heavy synergy or unique slotting to "Work" when every other secondary effect or comparable status (Holds / traditional Mez, and defeating enemies) doesn't need to synergize in order to have immediate safety, if not immediate effects. Thinking on it more, there may be something we can do with -End to make it more user friendly... On all except for AV's (cus resists), adding up 100% end drain will effect all ranks equally regardless of their total endurance pools. So, the same amount of draining powers will drain all ranks in the same time. When you look at the HP values though, they don't add up in the same way. Looking at how each rank of enemy compares to the last, we see that LT's have x2 the HP of a minion, but 1.4x the endurance. Bosses have 3x the HP of a LT, but again 1.4x the endurance, and so on. The other way to look at this is that a Minion has 1/2 the HP of an LT, and so on.... Lets look at blaster Elec Blast. The first two columns show the Damage and End Drain %'s per power. At a glance, its kind of hard to compare. Lets fix that! Since we have the base HP values of (Even Con) enemies, we can apply the base damage of the powers to the HP the same way that the end drain applies to their End. Broken down by rank in each column, a Green percentage means you deal more damage per hit on that rank than End Drain per rank, proportionally. Yellow means you are equal, and Red means you deal less damage than you drain. At base, it appears that most elec blast powers are better at dealing damage than draining on Minions and LT's, the two most common ranks you fight, which encourages going for damage rather than end mod. Against Bosses and above though, all the powers drain faster than they damage! Lets boost damage by 95%: Same deal here, but now we see two Bright Green values. That means you 1-shot those ranks with said abilities, making the drain moot. More or less the same as before though. Lets say you use a single small Red Inspiration, and AIM: On a Blaster at least, the more damage you gain the more and more the end drain part gets pushed aside, except for on SC. Lets compare to 95% end mod enhancement to be fair: A bit better, but still meh on minions. Lets compare 95% on both ends: Same as the baseline, though the nuke just deletes most of a spawn now anyways, while also draining any survivors to 0! Come to think of it, lets check out the new IO Set values.... (link to values: here   ) Synapse's Shock Power Transfer In all of these examples, it is more often more effective to invest into damage than into drain it seems, outside of fighting tough targets. Well, at least on a blaster! Given this, it often appears that drain is not effective vs most enemies going by volume as you can often just wipe the mob out faster. Having 2 elec blasters on a team will have these same ratios too, where you deal double the damage and double the drain, leading to sort of the same dilemma. What may help here is actually adding in a flat amount of -End per power on top of the % Drain, at least to make them all equally useful. Seeing as minions are the ones that really are not affected, lets use them as a base. If we were to equalize the difference between the Damage % and the Drain %, we would need to add the following "Flat drain" to each power shown in the rightmost column: Eyeballing it, it looks like we could probably just add the "Flat value" of the % to all these powers, maybe up to -15 at max, and it could even things out? An overall boost for sure, but comparing to the base it is still similar for targets that you had a favorable drain to damage ratio anyways, while being much better for the reverse. Lets say that the +Flat End is unenhanceable: SC and Ball Lightning are now solid combos within the set itself to drain minions! It's also just shy for LT's, but lets check if the flat amount is enhanceable: Assuming you can enhance both, you can use those two powers at full enhancement to fully drain all but EB's. This requires a lot more enhancement juggling, so idk if it would be too OP. It could also just be a flat amount on each power and that'd work too. I won't bog down the thread with more pictures.... as upon typing this I realized I've sort of bombarded you all lol I think this could be an interesting direction to take in PvE at the least to make end drain at least more effective while not being too much more potent compared to how it performs currently.

Unfortunately, since it does damage it won't be autohit 😕

If it is a long DoT, boost the damage back up a good deal because regeneration will occur during that time. I get that there should be room for counter hits, but 15 sec is a long time and will allow for enemy health regen to fight the damage. It should be enough to kill a minion straight up if you have to wait that long for it to tick down and allow them to hit back.

The comment about DoTs is on point... having them all sped up by like 2x would be groovy

Eh, didn't get the chance to try it.

Agreed that the sample size is lower than ideal, but I'm also one guy 😉 A bigger sample size would be ideal + from more people. I've posted the SO build in the prior thread, and the OG thread goes over the rules as well for anyone who wants to try too! I could also just do like 25~ runs or so to get as much variance as possible... As for IOs, that is also something we can try as a point of comparison though that is funky due to what could be slotted per primary set for similar performance., but it would be definitely worth trying.

0/10, no Teabag melee attack

I think the greater swords are a sore spot for both. In both sets, Incinerate and Freezing Touch are just flat out better ST attacks. Greater Fire Sword I think could definitely use a big splash of fire damage to differentiate it from the other ST attacks and cause more group chaos to enemies, that and make Fire Breath actually good with either a wider cone or way more damage. For Greater Ice Sword, maybe have it just be a better ST attack?

Testing Results V2 Link to OG post: I've run the V2 Dark melee through the same gauntlet as the V1, and saw a significant decrease in performance: One thing I didn't post last time though was my personal averages, isolating only my own runs against each other: Either way, it has moved from the upper half of melee sets to the lower half. But, even in this weaker state it is still much better off than it was! It is still 1:16 faster on average than my Vanilla DM runs, which is a MASSIVE leap in offensive power. It has dropped into the tiers of StJ, Savage, and Dual Blades which is certainly not a bad place to be but more on the "average" side. Given the set's raw utility this may be fitting. As mentioned before, there are few times if any I actually had my endurance dip below like, 75% when DE was available making the end scaling kinda moot, though it is certainly nice it has a higher "floor" to work with for all skill levels and builds. It does hit for significantly less damage though, and even with the buffs to SM's recharge and damage you can see the difference over time where in V1 mobs would be cleared, in V2 you have to keep swinging a bit more per exchange. Maybe tweak the base damage back up by like 5-7.5% ? The Shadow Maul change actually felt like more of a Defensive buff this time, as with better recharge I could more reliably spread -ToHit to cover myself in a mob. Overall i think that power is perfect right now! Running just SM though would be worse than SM + DE thanks to the raw burst damage DE still provides, even if it is less than before. On the whole, it is looking much better in-line with existing sets! It may need a smidge further tweaking to really hit the sweet spot for DE. If the damage is not tweaked upwards a *tiny* bit, then perhaps the recharge or area / accuracy could be touched instead. Side Suggestion - This is not on the table of course, but one thing that I noticed is that Siphon Life is a great ST power when you have Soul Drain up, but it just feels kinda funny that it doesn't heal more even when it is hitting harder. Would it be too much to ask if a portion of it's +Heal is enhanced by +Damage? 😈

No no, Ice Melee is way better because of FROST and FROZEN AURA. Both of these are superior AoE attacks due to sheer area of effect in the former, and a faster animation in the latter than FSC. From the scrapper testing on SO's at the least, there is a legit difference: Overall tests My personal stats from the tests Having the ability to not only safely take on enemies with a defensive secondary effect, but also keep them close with soft control + having more EFFICIENT AoE potential makes a big difference.

As somebody who's live main was an elec3 blaster, I agree that it can be very powerful when you stack them all up! That said it is likewise incredibly lackluster unless you synergize. Elec Blast by itself for example really doesn't do much in the way of quickly sapping unless you pair it with Power Sink to get the sacred sapper combo. Having it truly only be effective if paired with another drain ability I feel goes against CoH's theme of having things able to mix and match freely. Like with my prior Ice and Psy comment, yes they work better when paired thematically but their effects are still immediately useful + stack with other effects that aren't -Recharge. -End and -Rec really only pair well with more -End/Rec to sap targets which makes pairing up elec sets (well... honestly just elec blast) kinda dubious for effectiveness.

Which again, has to do with time. Sets like ice and psy have a similar effect where their -rech doesnt technically apply for a bit (after the target attacks), but it is still immediately there. I'd be happy if there were either some scourge like effect that elec attacks had with the remaining end of targets, or if there were some debuff associated with losing end that helps with immediate safety.

Thinking on it, the core issue with end drain isnt that it works, it's that it is slow to work. Yes, draining an enemy to 0 and managing to keep them there is essentially the same as stunning them. They can move, but they cannot use powers / toggles. However to get there it often takes at least 2 separate power activations at best where other forms of CC can do the job in 1. You also need -Rec on top of end drain to be worthwhile. It can be nice vs enemies that are mez resistant sure, but those are few and far between and you need special combos of powers to achieve effective drainage.

Anyone try out elec blast yet with these sets?