Parabola

While this one is likely highly unpopular, it has some merit. It would be the best way to control power creep. It would eliminate the need for complicated ppm changes. Its very simple to both use and convey to players. I would personally hate this change but it would almost be worth it to see the absolute meltdown it would cause. No, in fact it would totally be worth it. Where do I sign?!

Yeah it's something I've suggested before. The AT's that generally benefit the most from procs tend to have low damage scalars and those that need to slot full sets for survivability tend to have high ones so there is an appeal to the idea it would balance things out a bit. Whether it would work in practice or not is anyone's guess though!

My take is that I enjoy both building for procs and more regular set based IO builds. I can certainly see the argument that certain powers are working too well with procs or are working in ways that weren't originally intended. I suspect that any dev action is more likely to focus on changes to individual powers rather than a sweeping change to the PPM system simply because of the impact of the latter. One thing I would really like to see addressed is the debuff and mez procs that are currently not serious contenders for a slot that can take a damage proc. Several of these are so underpowered they are essentially traps for the unwary player and others are just of very limited value. Many just need values buffing but a couple could do with being changed entirely. Top of this list for me would be the procs that add a random chance for knockback, a couple of times I've wanted to 6 slot the Stupify set for the ranged defence but I haven't been able to because it would break the power to have that proc in it.

I wouldn't be all that up for changing what levels different tiers of power are granted, that is part of the progression of the game and it changes dynamics between AT's that share powersets across primary and secondary. However, I do think there is always a case for looking at individual powersets and asking if the powers are laid out in the most appropriate way.

Well no other control set has a control power in the tier 9 slot rather than a pet. Therefore it seems reasonable to say that mind has mass confusion instead of a pet. Mind is an outlier set in many ways; no pet, no mass immobilize, extra single target attack and importantly no reliable means of setting containment. This makes direct comparisons against powers in other sets tricky other than to say mind as a whole lags behind and needs some love. I think you've misinterpreted my comment a little. I'm not being defensive about seeds or saying that mass confusion couldn't use a buff. But I am saying that even reducing mass confusions cooldown to match seeds isn't going to fix the set as a whole because mass confusion is in the tier 9 slot and mind control needs a reliable high availability control earlier than that. Yes, exactly. Powers should be compared against others that are designed to fulful the same role rather than happen to use the same effect. Seeds is very powerful when compared to other mid tier high availability control powers and maybe should be balanced accordingly.

I don't really think seeds and mass confusion are directly comparable powers. Sure, they are both confuses but seeds is in the 'high availability, bread and butter control' position and mass confusion is what mind control gets instead of a pet. Now seeds is a very good control and might indeed be overpowered but that needs to be determined by comparing it to powers fulfilling similar roles in others sets: stalagmites and flashfire for example. The most glaring problem mind control has is that it lacks a good option for use as a bread and butter control. A non-pulsing sleep doesn't cut the mustard nor does a fear. But adjusting mass confusion won't help this as it's in totally the wrong tier. That isn't to say mass confusion couldn't use a buff but how to balance it against pet powers is beyond me. So yes, seeds might be overpowered and mass confusion might be underpowered but they aren't in direct competition with each other and I wouldn't balance them as such.

In my head I know this as 'the fix for the luck charm problem'.

Not that you've said otherwise but just for clarity it's worth saying that the -tohit only affects the main target not everything in the aoe. The way they have built the new touch of fear is interesting. It is effectively two powers rolled into one. The first is a single target fear and -tohit and the second is a damage over time aoe that carries no debuffs. This helps to explain some of the proc behaviour but there are still some oddities like the fact it checks melee aoe procs using no area factor against the main target. Here's some analysis I did on the power a while back: On tanks? Absolutely. I now run my dark melee tanks (and I have 5 of them) with only shadow maul and touch of fear for aoe and they grind through +4×8 spawns just fine. It helps if you have something like a damage aura or a proc bomb from the armor set but it's not necessary. I've recently run a sr/dark with only those two powers for aoe and it did fine. I'm less convinced about touch of fear on other AT's though. Without the area bonus it really is a small aoe and they don't get much more damage out of it to compensate. All the recent tank and dark melee changes have combined to make the set really sing on this one AT. In fact I rate it as the best melee set available for tanks right now.

It is a thematic fit but it wouldn't benefit all powersets equally. Forcefields and empathy don't need any more reasons to not get picked... I am in the camp that thinks corruptors could do with something but I'm not sure this is it.

This used to be the case but they changed it back on live. The ddr in active defence now isn't affected by enhancements (mids is wrong). The power can be double stacked to get twice the ddr though. Not just a small budget in terms of inf but also in terms of slots. SR gives a ridiculous amount of freedom for the rest of your build. It makes a fantastic base for proc builds needing so little help from set bonuses to acheive it's potential.

No that's what I was saying. It's slightly less powerful but still good in my opinion. Mechanically it fills a niche as being the only all ranged manipulation set too. I had hoped that the inevitable rebalance was only going to hit esd arrow (which was clearly unbalanced vs controller mass holds) but the other changes are liveable with.

Damn I forgot arch/ta. Yeah that's my favourite matched pair. I27 took a little gloss off of it but I'm still a big fan. I can't think of another secondary I'd rather pair with archery and tac arrow works with many primaries but archery is a really good fit.

Fun topic. I too tend to avoid matched pairings though. Apart from the 'too obvious' thing it's funny how often matched pairs don't actually synergise as well as mixed pairings. Some other pairings like various flavours of fire/fire can suffer a bit from being too much of one good thing. Of the matched pairings I have played my dark/dark tank takes some beating (literally and figuratively).

Controllers I imagine.

This would be where I'd start. Many of these toggles have dreadfully slow cast times making them unworkable in a fast paced team. Of course said team might not need these debuffs in the first place but that's a different issue.

Something seems to have gone a little wrong here. There is a preview function that is worth checking when you are using forum exports from mids to make sure the formatting looks ok. Also there doesn't seem to be a question or context of any kind to this?

There are two types of people in this world. Those that carefully arrange IO's in set order in powers, arrange mixed slotted powers so that any groups are to the left (in order of how many are slotted from each set) and single procs are to the right and hate having to use unattuned IO's because they look messy in a mostly attuned build. The other type of person is simply wrong :). And yes, more than once I've spent the money to attune a proc that dropped for me just to tidy up the enhancement screen. Actually I have to fight myself to not attune purple sets. It hurts me that they look so plain!

Yeah, I like the idea and would use it. Tracking down the plaques for history badges is a pain even with vidiot maps as it's so easy to miss one and you get no indication of which one you've missed. I'd suggest a single contact per badge who gives a chain of missions that direct you to each plaque. You could even weave a door mission or two into the chain to spice it up. You could end up with a series of mini story arcs ranging across levels appropriate to the zones the plaques are in, that give a merit reward as well as the history badge. That would give an incentive to take this path while still allowing the badges to be collected directly using vidiot maps.

I'm of the opinion that damage type diversification is an underrated benefit of proc use. The raw damage numbers are of course the main draw but outputting a broad mixture of damage types smoothes out many resistance based bumps in the road. When I'm presented with a choice of procs I'll always go for the mixture that gives the widest variety taking the base damage type(s) of the power into account.

The good news is that it is perfectly possible to solo those end of tf av's. The bad is that it might not be easy to do it on every character. If you are prepared to buy yourself a stack of envenomed daggers from the pay to win merchant then that opens the field up considerably though. Tf's all scale to team size so if you are set to ×1 you won't have to wade through hordes of enemies along the way (although that takes the fun out of it as far as I'm concerned). When you get to the av you just need a certain level of survivability and a certain amount of dps to beat them. The daggers or other -regen powers lower that dps requirement considerably which helps a lot. Generally for survivability you want to be reliant on self affecting things such as defence or resistance rather than enemy affecting debuffs such as -tohit, as av's heavily resist most debuffs. Inevitably this means that the easiest way to go is generally melee at's such as scrappers, brutes or tanks. However there are various support type combos that can do the same, rad/sonic defenders and ill/cold trollers are famous examples but there are many others. If you are worried about whether your chosen character has what it takes to defeat an av and you don't want to only find out at the end of a tf then you can test it. Build the character on the test server and try to solo a pylon in the rwz or fight an av in an ae mission. The pylon test isn't an exact analogue to an av fight but it's good enough in the sense that if you can down it then you are likely to be able to down an av. They do have a lot of kb though which can be a pain depending on your level of protection. In general I think it is reasonable for soloing tf's to be limited by the ability to beat the av at the end. The field of characters that can do it is actually pretty wide, I've talked about the easier options but I remember reading someone soloing tf's on an empathy defender so pretty much anything is possible!

With regards to the cones I don't have a problem with their shapes. Howl and Shockwave are identical in range and arc and Sirens Song is only 10' shorter which is easily adjusted by slotting if that's a problem. Compared to the Dark Blast variants with Torrent/Umbral Torrent at 80' and Tenebrous Tentacles at 40' there is really no issue with mismatched ranges. Extra arc is always welcome of course if a buff is deemed necessary but I'd first look at the cast times which are on the sluggish side for all three of them. For Siren's Song I'd maybe first try to make the sleep effect more useful overall before changing the power to another effect. Sleep powers are a little underwhelming across the board (with the notable exception of Static Field) and they all could do with being more useful when damage is flying around. Having a mag 3 area control power in a blast set is very unusual though and I wouldn't expect to see this buffed too far. Between Shout and Screech at least one really could do with buffing if not both. Shout is held back by its animation time and Screech by having next to no damage (other than the Sentinel version). Sonic as a set really needs at least one high dpa attack to take advantage of it's own res debuffing.

There is a spreadsheet with enemy damage types around somewhere but I would be careful attaching too much weight to that anyway. The problem is that showing average damage types across the whole game means the numbers are skewed by all the s/l that is done at low levels. Exotic damage is far more common at high levels than those numbers make it out to be. Also if you have 100 enemy types that do 50hp s/l attacks and 1 enemy type that does 5000hp psi attacks it looks like s/l is 100 times more common than psi but the psi is the one that is more likely to kill you.

Darkness Manipulation could benefit from a fairly extensive rework in my opinion. Moving the sustain to Death Shroud would help (it's probably unlikely they would give it -tohit as no other version has this) but there are many other problems with the set: Prenumbral Grasp: Joint slowest casting of the tier 1 manipulation powers alongside Subdual in Mental. Probably fine though as these tend not to be the most important powers. Smite: Very good dpa, possibly the best power in the set as things stand. Death Shroud: Moving the sustain to this would make the set far more user friendly. It would likely have to be reordered into a later slot if this was the case. Shadow Maul: This is the worst of the pbaoe powers from any of the manipulation sets by a distance. The only really comparable power is Ripper from Plant and that has twice the arc, casts faster and costs less end for only marginally less damage. And Plant has another pbaoe in Thorn Burst. One possibility would be to replace this with a version of Engulfing Darkness from Dark Assault to give a radial pbaoe (Blasters generally can do without spending time in melee lining up cones). Or if we keep this and add another pbaoe (see Dark Consumption below) then it needs the buffs to cast time and arc that the other versions of the power now have. Soul Drain: This just isn't an appropriate power for Blasters. Blasters are a burst damage, 'kill them before they can kill me' archetype, and this is particularly true if you consider how they play without IO's. The standard Build Up variants facilitate this by allowing the Blaster to spike their alpha damage, hopefully reducing the return fire before the enemy are notified. Soul Drain forces you to stand in the middle of the enemy and aggro everything before you can launch your alpha strike. Soul Drain is a fantastic power on armoured archetypes that can get away with being in prolonged fights but it isn't a good fit here. Replace this with a Build Up clone. Touch of the Beyond: If the sustain is moved to Death Shroud then this needs to do something else or be replaced entirely. Assuming we stick with the power in name then turning it into a ranged or melee hold similar to Positron Cell or Freezing Touch would I think be fitting and useful. Terrorize unfortunately doesn't have the stopping power that a hold does in the middle of a melee. Dark Consumption: If this set gets a toggle sustain then this becomes an even more peripheral power than it already is. Blasters don't need this kind of end recovery power and without that aspect this is just a very long recharge pbaoe with a tiny radius and piddling damage. Electricity Manipulation has Power Sink but that has a slightly different niche for sapping builds and is a better power in nearly every aspect. Dark Consumption could do with being replaced but I'm not sure what with. If we kept Shadow Maul in it's existing slot then a version of Engulfing Darkness could go here instead. Dark Pit: This seems comparable to similar powers in other sets and is fine. Midnight Grasp: Again this seems fine, the most directly comparable power is probably Future Pain which has higher dpa but costs more end.

Always interesting to get some 'what's going on behind the curtain' information. I wanted to say thank you for the extra effort it clearly takes to maintain the Reunion server for us EU folks (technically I suppose I shouldn't refer to myself as an EU person anymore but don't get me started on that nonsense!).

Mids is pretty accurate for average proc performance in most powers. The rule of thumb is that barring the odd incorrect value here and there any ordinary single target or aoe click powers can be relied on. Things get a bit more wonky when you talk about toggle powers and anything that uses pseudopets. Toggles tend not to be great for procs and pseudopets can go either way (some are outstanding, some not so good). But for a set like dual pistols mids is on the money as far as I know. It is a really good set for procs, one of the best in the game.