rhodox

I have musculature slotted, and the Dire Wolf's damage should be over 100% even after diminishing returns in this instance. My regular wolves are reporting damage bonus correctly at well over 100%. Not sure if the issue is with the Dire Wolf itself (seems like it's the wolf itself though) or the Mark of Supremacy/Edict of the Master IOs but it appears to instead be splitting the IO and incarnate damage bonus between damage and resist damage. Slotted are Superior Mark of Supremacy Acc/Dam/End, Superior Mark of Supremacy Dam, Edict of the Master Acc/Dam, Edict of the Master Defense aura, Call to Arms Defense aura, and Ice Mistral's Torment Cold proc. (Total before alpha and diminishing returns should be 106%, or 139% with my current alpha.) Removing the musculature alpha doesn't seem to fix it either, the damage from the IOs is still split.

They're not really validated, it just gives you a reason to maybe consider them if you have the room when before they were gimmick picks at best. Sandman in controller sleeps doesn't make them GOOD, it just makes them kind of interesting in that you can, if RNG likes you, use them in a different way. Getting double duty out of a power like this is a good thing! Giving new life to 'bad' powers by letting the players use them in new and unusual ways should be the exact sort of thing the IO system should be encouraging more, not less. Any time you can expand player options in interesting (not mandatory) ways you create more variety which I would think would be healthier for the game overall. The proc didn't by any means make the sleep control powers must-takes (far from it) but it at least made them maybe-takes because it gave you a somewhat-effective new way to use them. I'd honestly like to see more procs that provide those sorts of alternate-use options, like force feedback, gravitational anchor (giving a hold to an aoe immob is a game-changer), or overwhelming force in some builds do now, right now they're few and far between.

At a 50% heal I'm still not sure it would entice people to take the AOE sleeps, but also in my experience you don't get these kinds of heals, ever. Using it in x8 groups my experience has been generally in the 15-25% range if used on the full group, which is...still not great, but at least occasionally useful. How it worked on live was useless. How it works currently on the servers isn't breaking anything, and opens up a couple options for increasing survivability on controllers and dominators if players feel like gambling every time the power fires, which at least encourages some build diversity. Even if the IO was granting a 50% heal every time Salt Crystals was used, that would mean, best case, a heal equivalent to a couple hits on a squishy, every 27-30 seconds, on a perma-dom dominator, which requires it to proc on TEN targets each time it is fired, using a power largely seen as ineffective in team situations, instead of hitting attacks or hard controls. It could be changed to fire 100% of the time and it would still be utterly pointless with this change, because as it stands, a single 50hp heal is unnoticable. To put it another way, at a 100% proc rate, on a perma-dom dominator using salt crystals immediately every time it refreshes, but with the power only firing once per application, its effective healing over time is slightly better than one-third of a single tick of natural player regeneration, assuming the player has zero powers or IOs that increase regeneration rate whatsoever, and an empty slot in health.

As someone who used Call of the Sandman in Salt Crystals on my earth/savage dominator, I'm completely baffled by this change. I don't want to feel like I'm being negative for the sake of being negative here, but I do want to share my experiences with the proc: Salt Crystals is largely seen as a skip power on almost all earth builds, and for good reason - most aoe sleeps are terrible, particularly in team situations. My experience with the power slotted with this proc, is that if things are utterly dire, sometimes, if RNG likes me, it functions as an emergency stop-gap heal on a long recharge that might buy me a couple seconds for an actual control to recharge and properly handle the situation. Best case scenario, I was typically looking at a 15-25% heal when and if it decided to cooperate, and that was firing it into the middle of 1-2 large team groups. The heal, individually, is so minor that unless you got lucky with a big set of hits it was hard to even tell if it had even activated, and even then, a lot of the time it wasn't enough to stop a squash anyways. If it becomes single use, the effect becomes so anemic that you may as well change it to something entirely different than it is now, because that slot would be better spent on just about anything else. I'm not sure who this change is for, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone complain about this IO, and honestly, in terms of things that you can do with various combinations of IOs and powers, I'm not even sure how this got on the radar, it just feels weirdly and arbitrarily punitive for the few people that already picked these 'bad' (aoe sleep) powers, because the IO almost, if you squinted right, gave you a sort of reason to maybe take them.