Parabola

Soul drain?

If I were going to go corrupter for this I'd go /kin. Fire/kin should be suitably glassy and connony for anyone's tastes.

My first character had Flurry.

I'm inclined to agree, simply from the point of view that this clearly isn't something that is ever going away. All the balance discussions and other arguments against doing it, no matter how valid, don't stop people finding kb an annoying feature of the game. We will go around and around this discussion forever and it's tedious. This is interesting. The question of course is how much the kb in a set like energy blast really adds to its power. Personally I've always found myself more frustrated by the unreliability of the kb in that set than by the kb itself*. I would play storm summoning with all the kb stripped out in a heartbeat though. * Edit: Of course that is from the point of view of soloing. I have found myself frustrated with teammates kb when playing melee like many other people.

Yeah this really was something different. I was in one place, suspended in the air. The enemy were gathered around a point some distance away, maybe 30 feet or so, and behaving exactly as if that point was where I was. They were melee attacking thin air without having me in range to target, most of them facing away from me the entire time. It went on for some time as I tried to swim towards them to take them out with aoes. I've been playing since eu launch and I've never seen this happen before. As I say I wish I'd taken screenshots.

Really? The loss of control was annoying but surely the fact that the enemy couldn't track where I was and were attacking an empty patch of air can't be intentional.

Just had a very strange experience fighting family redside. Whenever a singularity was summoned (by a primo(?) consigliere) I was lifted in the air and spent some time bobbing around. I had a little control over my movement but not much. If I could manage to swim my way right next to the singularity I could make contact with the ground and pummel the enemy. The strangest thing happened when two singularities were summoned at the same time and not only did I become quite stuck but the enemy seemed to get totally confused about where I was. It took me a while to work out what was going on but they were gathered around a spot where I certainly wasn't and were fighting as if I was there while I floated around and watched. I don't imagine this is intended behaviour? It was the family mission in the temple of the waters strike force and I was playing a bio tank if that's any help. Unfortunately I didn't think to take screenshots. My assumption is that this is to do with the changes that were made to singularity, perhaps the enemy shouldn't have the new version?

I'm not sure how this has become an argument about ptw powers. I've not seen anything in ptw that can compete with a primary powerset attack with its associated slotting. Anyway, the enemies in the early game are not tuned to face characters with all their powers. Fulcrum shift in dfb? It wouldn't work.

I didn't think the taoe component of siren's song was autohit, only the sleep? Also taking infrigidate and filling it full of procs gives a very satisfying extra blast with debuffs attached. Here's my version of this:

*raises hand* Me too! I care about difficulty and balance. Yeah I'm still here too. Trying to keep a lot quieter about it these days as there's only so many times I really want to be told I'm wrong though!

A criteria for good set design that I thought I shared with just about everyone is that every power choice should be meaningful. A set being popular because it does a couple of things very well doesn't make it well designed. People like sets with the odd skippable power so they can build in all sorts of other things and that's fine but they should be having to at least consider the powers they are dropping.

Yeah I don't rate kinetics as being a particularly well designed set either. Good at what it does certainly but too much filler and redundancy.

Poison is a very weird set in my eyes. Lopsided and back to front. Most of its functionality comes in just four powers and most of the rest are totally skippable. And it gives its hard target debuffs first (for all those av fights we have at low levels...), but it makes you wait all the way to the tier 9 for its general mob debuff. No set should have that number of skippable powers or be that backloaded imo.

This is exactly what killed my attempt at this idea and every /en blaster I've tried. I end up feeling like my attack chain is an almost endless series of self buffs with the occasional attack thrown in.

True but spines is so light on single target that ripper is it's second highest dpa attack (at base values)... Spines seems to be in an odd place overall. Given it's popularity for farming I doubt it's very high up the list for buffs but if you exclude the farmers they are thin on the ground indeed. Actually I seem to remember one of the original devs, I want to say Castle, saying something along the lines of spines being outside the boundaries of the design parameters, and if he did look at it nerfs would result. I wonder if he had it confused with Claws 🙂. I think my biggest problem with the set is that it feels like it should be doing something really exotic with the 'neural toxin' damage but actually lethal and toxic are heavily resisted. Also the rider effects of slow and -rech aren't nothing but they aren't the most noticeably useful.

Here's mine. I built for tox/psi res on top of the usual stuff. Neg def isn't quite to soft cap but energy drain sorts that out.

I suspect this may set a new forum record for thumbs down reactions.

Remember though that resistance only resists resistible resistance debuffs. If the debuff is flagged as not resistible then you are going to suffer the full effect of it regardless of how much resistance you have. However, a buffer over the cap will still be useful to give you some leeway in that scenario. As previously mentioned the whole topic of game balance is very complicated. In many respects I don't think the original designers did themselves many favours in this regard. Much of the game that we know and mostly love seems to have been something of a happy accident of dodgy design decisions working out well in the end somehow. I imagine a truly balanced version of the game would have diminishing returns built into just about every mechanism and therefore operate within a much tighter range of parameters. But making those sorts of changes seems unlikely at this stage!

Trick Arrow (defender primary)/Trick Arrow (controller secondary). Lots of procs and a couple of pool attacks later and it would be a monster.

Complaining about a free server and comparing it to other free servers that nothing in the world is stopping a person from joining instead is really bizarre behaviour. As said above HC are going for 'as live' stability, other servers aren't. People just need to pick their poison.

☺️ I imagine that if nothing else it will be the potential that irradiated ground gives for afk farming that will drive changes. The devs have already expressed reservations about that 'activity'. I'm remembering the reactions the last couple of times the farming community felt targeted by changes... I wonder if the devs have considered changing the auto fire ability so that it can't be placed on a power with a damage component? *Ducks behind cover*

I can almost hear the rage quitting already.

Thought I'd have a crack at what this might look like if I played it. More damage but less defence (I don't bother much on Rad). I put in repulsing torrent and between that and burst there should be a decent amount of soft control, and the ff+rech procs will help recharge things like power siphon and radiation therapy.

I'm something of a dark melee on tanks advocate and if it's a straight choice between the two I can't recommend going brute. The aoe sizes is a factor (and an important one with DM as it really benefits) but an even bigger factor is soul drain and how it interacts with damage scalars. I advise anyone making this choice between tank and brute for this set in particular to build sample characters in mids and then have a look at what soul drain does to their relative damage levels. This highlights a general point about where brutes and tanks are; tanks benefit disproportionately more from moderate damage boosts. Sure, if you are at the caps like when farming the brute is still more damaging, but at more regular levels of +damage the tank often outdamages the brute (and hits more enemies, slots more procs and is tougher). Trying to pin down a sensible level to set fury to as an average is of course a variable in all this but it takes very high levels of fury indeed to compete when soul drain is hitting more than a couple of enemies.

No problem. The Ice Arrow slotting turns it into a fairly damaging attack as well as being a hold but slotting it purely for hold is a perfectly legitimate way to go too. I always build for recharge pretty much regardless of the character. Being able to cycle your best powers more quickly is never a bad thing. This also takes care of damage - +damage bonuses don't really offer a huge amount in comparison. For blasters the next priority is always some sort of self protection. For an all ranged combination like arch/ta going for ranged defence is a natural fit. On that subject, you've taken mace for your epic which may be for theme but if it is purely a tactical choice then it might be worth considering other options. The thing is that with ranged soft cap the s/l/e defence won't really be doing a huge amount for you. I've taken mu for charged armour so I can back up the ranged defence with a bit more s/l/e resistance. Also the spiderlings look cool but they are unfortunately not very tough. Another note is your endurance slotting. Blaster sustains (eagle eye for ta) give twice the base recovery that stamina does. A lv50 pure end mod enhancement in a sustain gives more recovery than anything else you can slot in a single slot, including the panacea proc. I've not played a blaster yet that I've managed to run dry with just a pair of end mods in the sustain, a panacea proc in the health base slot and a performance shifter proc in the stamina base slot. So you can save yourself some slots for use in other areas. I'd also consider your slotting in explosive arrow. The winter sets are very expensive and this isn't gaining you a huge amount in this build. I like to get a kb->kd in here to avoid scattering nicely bunched enemies and a couple of procs to beef the damage up. The sixth slot has a force feedback +rech in it in my build (I leave these out of mids because they distort the numbers but they are well worth slotting). Have fun with it!