Parabola

Perspective is a funny thing. It's been a long time since I played through goldside but I remember feeling quite differently about the good/evil split between resistance and loyalist. It feels to me that goldside is set up to emphasise that there is no inherent correlation between following the rules and being good. That makes it very hard to map the goldside alignments to the rest of the game (which operate on a more simplistic moral scale) but it also makes the writing quite a bit more believable. If I had to map the alignments my take would look more like: Resistance (Warden) = Hero (taking a moral stand against the system) Resistance (Crusader) = Rogue (stepping across that line between freedom fighters and terrorists) Loyalist (Responsibility) = Vigilante (good intentions but keeping dodgy company) Loyalist (Power) = Villain (dangerously close to fascism) I feel the Praetorian alignment system is a lot more about 'who you are working for' than the main games 'who you are'. This seems much closer to the real world. We like to hang on to ideas like there being good and bad people but we're mostly all just people, and are capable of both good and bad depending on circumstances. Anyway, enough philosophy! I like the idea of integrating Praetorian characters more with the wider game though.

It is? Interesting. I suppose it would make sense to pair up those precious few pure psi defence set bonuses so they also grant toxic defence. Mind you I've always thought that psi/toxic is a bit of an oddball pairing on the res side. Smash/lethal; fine, both physical attacks. Fire/cold; also fine, both elemental. Nrg/neg; kind of still makes sense but more of a stretch. But psi/toxic? Mental attacks and toxic waste being resisted by the same thing? I can see why they paired them of course and I'm glad they did but it just seems odd to me.

I've always thought that drop rates should have a bonus in teams like inf does so you don't miss out on lots of loot when teaming. As you say you get massively more stuff if you solo set to as many mobs as you can handle. There is no difference in drop probability between a -1 or a +4 either so as soon as any toon of mine has any kind of aoe they move to something like -1×3 and go from there.

Squishies is simply an accepted generic term for those AT's that do not have armour sets. Believe me I am well versed enough in playing them to know how tough they can be. You can choose to not use the term if you like but others do and will. If sidekicked characters are engaging spawns with the rest if the team rather than doorsitting they are in a position to attract aggro. If the damage dealers run off it can leave people with the bosses aggro'd to them. They can run after the rest but the bosses will follow and they don't get any choice in the matter. It isn't about choosing to clear up or taking on challenges that are too big, it is about being stuck with them. Anyway, this is pointless. We seem to have different views on teaming etiquette and that's fine. As you say we are all free to leave teams we don't like. Edit: Apologies to the OP for the thread hijack!

The bosses don't stop attacking just because the damage dealers run off. It's generally not optional to have to deal with them. Also, 'those doing the work' is a very narrow way of looking at things. Squishes are contributing too no? Buffs and debuffs are still part of the game?

I'm going to guess you are talking about the cool animation for these sets?

This is fine as long as those leftovers aren't +4 bosses that the squishies are ill equipped to deal with. All too often I see the damage dealers all racing each other to the next spawn so they can vaporize minions leaving really tough enemies behind. I think partly to blame is that it is easy to tune characters with only mass aoe in mind and completely forget that hard single targets also need killing. Just about anyone can wipe out minions, particularly with rolling judgements, people who are prepared to dig in and beat down the bosses actually make better teammates imo. The absolutely worst example of this kind of thing is when you get a couple of incarnates sidekicking up a load of lower level characters and they start doing the same thing. They forget that those bosses that con at +3 to them are +5 to the others. They can't be bothered to kill them but their teammates might not even be capable of doing so. Btw, I'm not saying that I think you are promoting a selfish playstyle here. You are talking about leaving the odd scattered minion runner and that's fine. I've just seen too much of the sort of thing I describe above and am a bit scarred by it as you can tell! Forgive the rant :).

Here's my claws/bio scrapper (designed to use barrier):

Lore wise I can see the desire for more options but mechanically many of the options we currently have are poor and could do with being looked at. If 5 of the current 8 choices are largely ignorable (as is the case for several AT's), adding extra pools seems like it should wait behind buffing the 5.

Bio will do more damage without doubt but ea is probably more sturdy. They are very different sets so it's difficult to compare directly, each will be better in different areas. They also fit very different themes so you might want to check out how they look before deciding, it's all very well choosing purely based on the mechanics but you will spend a long time looking at the result. Not sure about gm soloability I'm afraid. I'm curious to know what the challenges beyond gm soloing are though given the 'at least'!

In my opinion claws is best on scrappers and tanks. They make the most out of follow up which is the key mechanic of the set. Brutes are ok with it but the low base damage scalar hurts them a little. Stalkers get a gimped version that has given up too much in the conversion. Secondary is largely whatever you fancy. Claws is end light, has some mitigation in shockwave, is largely self contained (no real need for additional attacks) and follow up helps with accuracy as well as damage. As such claws doesn't need much from the rest of your build other than some recharge. For scrappers I favour the taunt aura sets so energy aura would be good as it also provides recharge, end tools, a heal and good defences. You can't pair claws with shield which is a shame as that combo would be pretty devastating on a scrapper. Bio is another really strong pairing, this works well on either tank or scrapper (very offensively focused tank).

I was itching to say just this. Gathering for buffs is a bit old fashioned these days. Position yourself half way between the melee guys in the spawn and your backline and just fire them off. Anyone who is way off on their own fighting stuff clearly doesn't need the support anyway. They come around often enough that if someone does miss out they'll have another shot soon. But you know when they'll certainly not be recharging? When you are holding off using them to wait for everyone to stop what they are doing and come and give you a hug :).

A somewhat related thing that bugs me a bit is that there is no option for extending whole body auras to cover the wings. Having your body on fire but with the wings poking out the back looks a bit odd for example.

Claws isn't exactly light on aoe damage with spin and shockwave on rotation. The problem in very fast moving teams is that people with ranged attacks will have wiped out the dross before melee can really get set in position. There isn't much that you can do about this beyond embracing the role of hard target specialist which is more valuable to the team anyway. Clear speeds are dictated by how quickly the bosses and above can be defeated, not the stuff that gets melted in the opening salvo.

Yeah. It shouldn't need pointing out how unnecessary the hostile and insulting posting is but apparently this is where we still are. Lets be grown up about this everyone. So, onto the subject at hand. I can understand the feeling that KM does not need down tuning overall. My guess is that the devs are coming at this from the point of view that they want powers to be working consistently to make it easier to implement and balance changes in the future. I know from firsthand experience what it's like to try to manage a system where various components behave differently so each change has to be tested individually against everything under the sun rather than being able to make any broad assumptions. Consistency and normalisation make it so much more possible to roll out changes without completely unexpected things going wrong. To mitigate the crit chance reduction bumping up the radius on Burst to 10' to match the other stalker pbaoe's would seem to be a reasonable ask. Any shaving of animation time would always be welcome but Burst isn't an outlier in this regard compared to the others. As others have mentioned there are wider problems with the set such as Concentrated Strike really not being worth it on any AT and Power Siphon being a slightly disappointing mechanic (the latter not affecting stalkers obviously). Given that stalkers really need to be doing very good single target burst damage the problem with CS does potentially impact them more than most. Also recharging build up isn't all that great a benefit given how often they get this anyway from the ATO. If CS could be adjusted into a proper heavy hitter, maybe with normal crits, the set would be in a much better place. Oh, that'll be really useful on my current Energy Aura scrapper - thanks!

Ah, good news that it's on the radar. While we're on roughly the same subject could I request another couple of adjustments be looked at? Hunting Council in Steel Canyon is a bit of a pain because they spawn so rarely by themselves and if they do it tends to be individually. Trying to get some hits in before the 5th Column wipe them out in the battle spawns is something of a race against time too (also a particularly prevalent problem in Boomtown). The 5th Column are so much more powerful than the Council it can be frustrating watching them get murdered repeatedly before you can get stuck in.

My only slight complaint about page 2 is the change to the spawning rate in atlas park. I have a tradition of running the three little 'saviour of atlas park' arcs on each new toon and I've never had to take so much time hunting down the right mobs. I was running a new toon yesterday and was having to stand around waiting for mobs to respawn several times because they'd been cleared out. I'm not sure I really understand what the problem was that this adjustment was designed to fix? The only thing I can think of that could be even slightly annoying was the bit where you have to click the three glowie boxes with arachnos respawning around you but surely moving those boxes slightly further away from the spawn points would be a better solution? Anyway, I love the travel power updates. The sorcery rework looks interesting, I'll be giving that more attention on future builds. The snipe changes make sense to me, it seems sensible that the extra range should be a product of the 'real' snipe not the fast version. Oh, and chalk me up for another vote in favour of combo mechanics in general. They make the game more interesting in my opinion. Also, I strongly suspect that people would react very badly to the adjustments certain powers would experience if the opportunity costs of being involved in combo mechanics were removed. Removing the combo mechanic from energy melee wouldn't leave us with fast energy transfer on permanently for example, that would be ridiculously op.

It's not so much a case of 'too many procs' as 'too little other slotting'. Some powers and AT's are better set up for heavy proc use than others. If you need to be chasing 6 piece set bonuses to make a build work then the too many procs threshold can be 1. If you have mitigation, end use, recharge and accuracy/to hit covered elsewhere in your build then 6 becomes a possibility. Whether proccing out is worth it or not is always a very individual question, you have to take the wider context of each build into account. One tip: I always do the lv50 damage io test on any power with multiple procs in it. In mids replace one of the procs with a lv50+5 pure damage io and look at the expected damage compared to what it was before. If the proc wins out then great but if not I know I've neglected the basic damage enhancement values (or the power was unsuitable for proccing out in the first place).

Invisibleish?

My testing showed that they do only affect the main target. Melee aoe procs and the taunt proc affect everyone in the aoe but to-hit debuff and fear procs only affect the primary target. What is really interesting is that the primary target gets hit with a higher proc chance for all procs including the aoe ones than the other targets in the aoe. The primary target gets proc chances as if the power was a single target attack - everyone else has the expected area factor applied to them.

Oh - yeah mids had a bug for the longest time where the perfect zinger proc was set to the old flat 20% rate rather than 3.5ppm. This was just in mids - in game it went over to ppm at the same time everything else did.

Yes the purple proc was elsewhere in that build but it would work nicely in ToF. The Perfect Zinger proc works exactly like any other 3.5ppm proc as far as I know. It was certainly returning numbers similar to those of the melee aoe procs in that testing. There can be issues around enemy resistance of course but one of the benefits of proccing out a power is diversifying it's damage types. That testing was with a tank - as I said at the time I assume it would work as well for a brute but I can't be sure. Sadly scrappers don't get the option to slot it anyway. In other builds I have tended to two slot the winter set for the slow resist and then four slot with procs. On a scrapper there isn't such an obvious fourth proc unless the purple is available. The -res pvp one functions as you'd expect so that's an option. I didn't test any ATO procs so can't really comment on that specifically. But given that they are damage sets I would be surprised if there was any particularly odd behaviour from them. When you say the 'chance to improve crits' proc do you mean the +50% crit proc from critical strikes or the other one from scrappers strike? The scrappers strike proc isn't really a proc just a flat increase on crit chance across the board and can be slotted absolutely anywhere in your build and still function.

Some testing I did on this:

That was my thought. You'd want them very low key but would still want to be able to identify who was being affected.

Yeah I love the theme. Sort of the leadership pool on steroids. Creating vfx that are fitting could be something of a challenge though!