summers

A change to the baseball pitch attack animation (or an alternative animation) would be very welcome please! Otherwise I found the experience much more pleasant than my Live gameplay. It was smooth and flowing and it was immediately obvious that this is better.

I'd encourage you to try the powers out and see for yourself. Yes - a lot of AOE chains are just a few powers, but they have noteable gaps. Dark Melee won't play that way: TLDR: 45% of the attack chain is your one attack

I'm not who you quoted but my disappointment is just how spammy the attack is. It's on a lightning fast recharge and I will get very bored watching the same animation over and over again. As s soon as you are hitting two enemies you are getting value out of it so... you'll do that a lot.

Sorry we were just trying to be helpful!

I'm sorry I don't know which question of mine you answered? Does ET critical and do double damage?

I've tested the set on Brutes so I didn't know about this. Are you saying that ET crits? It looked like from the patch notes it instead heals you?

I can't help but agree. It seems everything has to follow a formula, but the most interesting ones are the powers that break the mould.

I think it serves a very practical purpose which reduces the likelihood of requiring respecifications with changes, as well as not upsetting paying customers who are positively inclined towards that particular power. My point however is more in the 'mantra' part, since you'll regularly find people who are vehemently opposed to any and all changes and become quite outraged by it. It's something to think about, but it should not stifle change where change is good.

If they were really balancing around SOs the Tanker changes probably wouldn't've happened, since Brutes don't have the survivability without them. I just feel there's a lot of mantra stuck in 2009: 1) Cottage rule 2) Balanced around SOs

Thanks for considering my feedback, even if I may not like the outcome 😄 Is there any chance it could get a more 'melee' focussed animation as an alternative?

Call me naive but I think this looks like a whole lot of improvements. I've seen a lot of negativity around it but I think the headline advantages are getting a little lost in the static/noise - and there's a lot of static (for example, -maxend and other minor effects that are meaningless except for possible procability). With that positive spin out there, in todays day and age of incarnate content, I think any debuff set is going to struggle for relevancy at 50+, and that means you want to bring -resistance as the key power. Onto the highlights! The headline advantages as I see it are: 1) Very fast activation times 2) Much stronger and wider radius effects The best change is: Disruption Arrow does -40% resistance with a 1.32 second cast. For comparison, Tar Patch does -30% resistance with a 3.1 second cast. If you wanted the slow, you can do both Disruption Arrow and Glue Arrow and still be up by about half a second in activation times, and have more and better effects. Yes - you can't stack Disruption Arrows, but I'd take the quick activation in 90% of the content over the stacking in the 10% (which is just an AV fight). For most content I feel I'm racing from spawn to spawn, and this power now delivers up front on a fast recharge for every spawn. For everything else? It's situational, but strong, and I'm okay with that. What more can you say about debuff sets? The meta is against them, but for <50 content this set looks very good.

That's true! I was testing on my Brute and the short range meant it didn't really matter

If anything I'd like the Energy Focus mechanic to have more purpose. Right now it's very arbitrary - you will seemingly always TF -> ET while it'd be nice to have a more meaningful choice.

I'm sorry that some people think using TF then EF is too much for them, but I'd rather that not let this stop a great change coming through.

I'm not terribly in favour of randomly adding Energy Focus, and the application is so limited that I doubt it will really matter much either. However, if it did go this way, Barrage is almost twice the activation time of Energy Punch so IMO the numbers are around the wrong way. It should have the greater chance. Also I just like Barrage's animation

I don't suppose you could proliferate a few Staff models across to Titan Weapons? I'd love to use the Polearm model and the over-the-top models are what currently keep me away. Thanks!

I'm not sure if this is mentioned, but is it intended that Power Crash deals so much more damage on a Stalker (18s recharge on the power) than it does on a Scrapper (9s recharge)?

I just played my Dark Melee Scrapper through a mission after taking the time to respec into Touch of Fear on the beta server. The character is otherwise a copy of my Live one, and is level 46. For mission clear speed, Touch of Fear is a vast improvement. I found that Shadow Maul is always problematic and changing the target cap didn't feel like a big difference since it's hard to hit 6 or more enemies in a 7' radius. I do have a complaint about the power though - it is way, way, way too spammy. It's pretty much the best thing to do for AOE in a rotation and it casts slowly and recharges extremely fast. This means the old buzz-saw melee feel of Dark Melee is quickly gone - instead, I found myself simply endlessly casting this short range animation and it was almost immediately monotonous. I really wanted to be doing 'melee' instead of casting (that's why I picked a melee character!), and I found that spending 45% of my time doing just the one casting animation was, well... bleh. It was unfun. Edit 1: Image added so you can see just how spammy this attack is! Two seconds of animating, 2.5 seconds of recharge. We're going to see this cast a zillion times for Dark Melee! Edit 2: Where did I get the 45% from? 2 second cast 2.5 second recharge (okay, it's really 44.44%, but wow... I felt it straight away when I started playing!)

Is it patch notes?

While it is absolutely true that Level Shifts are that powerful, I don't know if it fixes the problem we have, although maybe we define the problem differently. Right now I see the problem at the incarnate level is: Too much defence Too much recharge Too much AOE damage These combine to allow even "glass cannons" getting soft capped defences on their own at 50 and then being able to cycle massive damage, especially nukes, at very high recharge, in relative safety and without needing outside assistance. For a lot of content it's just racing between packs and nuking them in some way, shape or form. Level shift doesn't fix the defence problem; +tohit doesn't come into effect until you're fighting +6s. It doesn't fix the recharge problem; these are inherent to the character. Will it fix the AOE damage? It'll certainly make all damage worse, but it also makes all the debuffs and controls worse as well, which I feel are the suffering archetypes at incarnate level. I do like that the suggestion is bringing damage down, but it also brings down the support that I want to see become more valuable too. Maybe in practice it feels different, but just at a glance I wonder if it'll do what we want?

Oh look at this suggestion, this one looks very good!

I think that's intended? It's meant to show all the cards you have up your sleeve falling out?

I think it's worth noting that people who are working on game balance may not be also content builders; it may not be a zero sum game of effort.

I wish the cottage rule itself was taken out back behind another cottage to be shot. It makes sense that, as a general principle, it's nice to keep things at least a little recognisable to their original form to minimise bad feelings from people who are quite attached to those powers. But, as a rule, it's not a good one, and it stifles change where change is good. It is repeated as a mantra against good change. Each change should be taken on their own merits, not some arbitrary rule from someone who no longer develops the game. And serum has no merit. Dump it.