Parabola

I've rolled an ice/traps on a hunch that there is some good synergy between them. As you say traps provides mez protection which ice really welcomes and the chunk of defence doesn't go amiss when hanging around in melee range either. But it's the fact that ice is a largely hands off primary that I think will work so well with traps. You lay down ice slick, run arctic air and immob everything - the rest of your time is free to lay down traps with their long-ass animations. All the traps work well placed right under the noses of the enemy and I'm hoping that the good defences (planning to go with mace) combined with arctic air will allow successful toebombing. The worst part about it so far is the number of click to drop powers - I have them all set up with powexec_location macros but it makes my trays really untidy and it's a bit hard to follow which powers are off cooldown when there are so many. I wish it were possible to have the macro button do the recharge animation that normal power icons do. Also why can't ice slick take a ff+rech when earthquake can?

I am a massive altoholic and lived in fear of the naming policy for months without realising that it hadn't in fact come into force. Each month I would log into dozens of characters in rotation to keep their logout time down - I was also a little hazy on what the different cut offs were ... When this does get implemented would it be at all possible to have some indication at character select of what the rules are or if we are getting fancy could there be some kind of warning on characters that are approaching the cut off for their level range? I will say that I predict the response from people finding they have lost names due to the policy to be ... well lets just say 'not pretty'. I'm not saying I disagree with the policy in the broad sense but rather you guys than me in terms of dealing with the fallout :).

That would rob it of utility, particularly from a proc point of view. If it didn't take knockback sets you would miss out on the ff+rech and one of the two damage procs it can slot. I wouldn't bother taking it in that form. The need to slot a knockback to knockdown is a single slot tax to create a very useful power, a price I'm happy to pay.

Sure it could be buffed but the point was really that it isn't a bad power that is in need of a complete redesign. If I was being really greedy I'd ask that it was given some token damage purely so it could slot the pbaoe damage procs.

I wouldn't be keen on handclap getting changed into a damage cone. I know the standard 'we don't balance around IO's' applies but knockback to knockdown changes handclap into a great power. In combination with a FF+rech and a pair of damage procs I have used handclap every time it's recharged and I'm facing at least two enemies since i've been able to put the slots into it. The procs have a really good chance of activation and it gives me mitigation and a little damage during the rage crash. Hurl however isn't a power I could ever see taking in it's current form and looks perfect for turning into a cone or adding some splash damage.

Yeah, my Elec/Mental who I I've recently run to 50 agrees with you. The snipe change has been huge in sorting out the single target attack issue elec had and as blasters we generally have really good options in the secondary to fill out attack chains. Frankenslotting short circuit works wonders - I have 3 efficacy adaptors and 3 from a pbaoe damage set (I forget which) and it works fine as both an attack and a drain. It's an aggressive playstyle; I live (and die) in melee range firing off a chain of aoe and hoping drain psyche will keep me alive until the enemy are either dead or drained, it doesn't always work but it's really fun. On more than one occasion people have been impressed by what she can both survive and kill.

Totally agree that there are a lot of wasted sets. Most of the low level sets are hamstrung by a combination of poor enhancement values and pointless bonuses. Hands up who here has slotted a set of bonesnaps? It's partly the same argument as that around TO's, DO's and SO's; the lower tiers seem pointless in today's game. We are heavily slot limited at low levels so there seems no need to also be forced to use underpowered enhancements in the slots we have. This creates a rush to get to at least lv22 and the early enhancement system is largely ignored. I would like to see a revamp of most of the sets to give each at least one useful thing they do better than any other set. An example off the top of my head would be to change one of the taoe sets to have significant range enhancement to make it the go to set for cones. Individual bonuses could also be looked at to ensure thier usefulness. +damage is one that seems to lag behind and is generally considered not worth building for. The primacy of +rech and +def is largely based around the ability to stack really meaningful amounts of it. If we could stack meaningful amounts of other bonuses it could really open up character building. The low level sets definitely need some love. They need to offer something, ideally something worthwhile to the slot poor levelling character. One way might be to redo their bonuses completely with things like meaningful +acc and +recov. Things that low lv builds are desperate for. They would still tend to be dropped later on due to the low overall enhancement values and lack of the more end game tuned bonuses but they would at least have a niche.

I'm interested to know what you have in mind here? I've been playing an /EA brute recently as I am a sucker for sets that aren't well loved and I'm not finding too much to dislike so far. It has a decent spread of defences; yes it has a psi hole but it's not alone there. It has a strong taunt aura that does +rech and who doesn't love more of that? A +end clicky, a few minor resists including some useful exotic resists against slow and end drain, solid all round mez protection, and even a self heal (that admittedly comes a bit late). The tier 9 seems a little pointless (not that I'm there yet) but again EA is far from alone there. I assume the sticking point might be the stealth toggle but DA has one of these too. It is perfectly possible to softcap without it if you really don't want to take it and that is with brute modifers. I've found I've enjoyed the extra utility of being able to stealth the odd mission. And of course the set is pretty too :). Actually, joking aside it really is pretty. I'm running SS/EA and with the default palette the rage glow and hasten glow blend in with the armour toggles in a very pleasing way. I thought I'd hate the stealth covering up my costume but when he fades out leaving just the maelstrom of orange glowing effects it looks awesome.

CP, as ever it's fascinating and useful to read your thoughts behind the changes. I'm wondering if it would be a good idea to include these thoughts as a matter of course with any patch notes? That way the discussion will hopefully be more focussed on the implementation rather than getting stuck on the perceived intent. As for the changes in question I can't see how I will notice the lower damage cap on my brutes. My farmer is always levelling an alt and so has a reduced flow of insps, she's never hit the cap to my knowledge. And out in the 'real world' the damage cap is an even more theoretical concept as my brutes tend to solo. Even in a teaming situation with enough buffs flying around to hit the cap, everyone is going to be doing so much damage it's hard to imagine how the brutes losing a few percent off their orange numbers is going to matter. It makes perfect sense to me that an AT with survivability and aggro control shouldn't under any circumstances out damage an AT whose only purpose is raw damage. It doesn't make any sense that someone sitting at the character creator thinking 'I want to do the most damage' would then pick an AT that can reach most of the survivability of a tank.

Hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper.

I suggested something similar a while ago when I was running quite a few pug's and was bored with radio missions. I have since discovered that at any level you can do a tour of the starting contacts in Atlas city hall to be introduced to a group of contacts appropriate to your level. This is really handy for any character that has burned past the early levels in the AE building or using DfB. This only works the once though - once you have been introduced to contacts and have out-levelled them you will need to talk to them individually to get the next contact.

Burn baby, burn. 🙂 No but seriously fire farming allows you to cap def and res while also using the most offensive secondary. You can happily s/l farm but you are going to be doing it with a secondary that doesn't provide the same damage.

You don't have to be farming to be fighting multiple enemies - even on x0 you fight spawns with 2 or 3 and sometimes more mobs in it. On toons with any sort of aoe I always crank up the team size for soloing as it is more efficient to be fighting multiple easier targets than fewer hard targets (I'd like to see a greater incentive to build single target killing machines in the game but that's a different conversation).

I'm sorry but this just isn't true. Melee damage is 7, not 0. All AT's in this game get damage, all AT's can solo. The idea of a non damaging meatshield may be your definition of a tank but it isn't the definition of a tank used by this game.

I don't understand this argument at all. If these changes go live you won't be forced to change a thing and your tanks will automatically be a bit better. You will then have the option to improve on that as and when you'd like to respec. The min/max endpoint moves around all the time surely. Even without the devs changing anything in some cases. For example have a look at the work being done on optimising the use of procs in the ppm world. There are probably many a defender/troller that have been respecced to take advantage of the new understanding, i know some of mine have. I don't see anyone telling them to knock it off because they feel compelled to respec to the new min/max at all times but at the same time can't be bothered to do it.

Really interesting to read a bit of background from CP about the thinking behind these changes. I get the arguments about what a tank should and shouldn't be but we are where we are with this game. This isn't the kind of game with a rigid trinity. One of the many massive strengths of this game is everything can solo. Therefore everything has to have meaningful damage and as stated the longstanding design goal is for tanks to have 75% scrapper damage which they seem to be currently falling short of. Anecdotally I love my melee characters in general and want to love tanks more than I do but I find myself rerolling tanks into brutes far too often. A bit more damage and bigger aoes will hopefully change that. Given that damage is a big part of the threat equation wider and greater damage will also help tanks perform the classic aggro holding role too. If the concern is tanks stepping on the toes of brutes I don't see how they are going to overlap more than brutes and scrappers and no-one seems too up in arms about that. Since all the AT's have been thrown into the same bucket and given the need for everything to be able to solo it's very hard to see how all the AT's can be given completely distinct roles. There just aren't that many different ways to go about the business of arresting mobs. Numbers can and I'm sure will be tweaked but broadly speaking I accept the reasoning behind these changes and can see that they will make me want to play more tanks. So that's a thumbs up from me.

I don't suppose this could work the other way with swordy versions of punchy attacks too? I'd love to do a fire melee/shield of some description that used sword animations for all it's attacks. In general these proposed changes are really something. If your aim is to get people to roll less brutes and more tankers I imagine this will certainly do it. I have a couple of brutes that would be immediately re-rolled into tanks if this hit live. My current Elec/DA project for one. I imagine tanks would become the default AT for DA overall - more end, bigger radius on auras and still the bigger defence/resistance numbers. My ice/ice brute too - there will be no contest. Is there any chance of a buff to the taunt in rttc though? I have a concept that really needs to be stone melee/willpower and fits as a tank but the weak taunt aura really puts me off.

Thinking way outside the box it might be fun to replace the damage with a minor -def effect. Then allow it to take def debuff and acc def debuff sets. That would give access to three procs allowing it to be slotted into becoming a minor damage aura (on a long tick admittedly) if that's what the player wanted out of the power. Thinking about it lobster, I'm not entirely sure it wasn't you posting about that combo that inspired me to roll one. I'd never played a dominator and I trawled the boards looking for something interesting and different to roll up for my first one. Somebody sold the synergy between these sets well and it might have been you!

Yeah this. I have an elec/ice that I was very excited to play with the changes to ice but adding damage to chilling embrace will hurt the combo a bit. The trick with elec is to try to control when you do damage and break the sleep (while the enemy still has end). So standing in the sleeping pack, knocking them down with jolting chain, then firing off ice sword circle and chain fences while they are getting up is my standard rotation. They are often asleep again before they can retaliate. Ice's lack of dot coupled with the extra debuff aura made it an ideal pairing for elec. If chilling embrace needed more buffing (and i was thrilled with the changes as they were) could it just have the -dam raised? If ice as a whole needs more aoe dam then could a little be added to ice sword circle instead?

You removed the slow proc? Going by your breakdown of the powers used by the patch I'd have thought that proc would be the star performer? Thanks for the analysis btw.

This is great work everyone. The burning question for plant lovers such as myself: what is the optimal slotting for Carrion Creepers (and the rest of plant for that matter)? :)

Thanks. I'll give that a go. I've used the same control layout forever, the idea of changing brings me out in a cold sweat!

I don't seem to be able to use my right shift key as a modifier in the keybinding anymore? I use the numpad keys 0-9 bound to tray 1 and rshift+numpad keys bound to tray 2. Please tell me this isn't permanent?

In an ideal world I would like to be able to colour the contaminated effect separately. I'm using the default colouration for all the powers but it would be great to be able to make contamination stand out a bit.

I've been running a few pugs over the weekend and I got to thinking about ways the experience could be improved. I feel like this kind of play should be the backbone of the game and should be made as easy, interesting and rewarding as possible. These are what I came up with: 1) Radio missions are certainly convenient but they are limited and repetitive. Would it be possible to unlock all the old contacts and add them to the 'find contacts' list? By this I mean all the old issue 0 run of the mill contacts who have the odd story arc but mostly have just loads of missions. This would make it much easier to provide a bit of variety in pugs. 2) As an addition to the above it would be great if all the hunt missions could be stripped out of non story arc content or at least have it arranged so that these old contacts will always have at least one door mission in the two missions they offer. I don't think anyone really wants to do hunts in the modern game. I'm assuming the hunts in the story arcs should be left alone as they are part of the story but they seem a bit pointless outside of this. 3) It would be great if the looking for group UI could be updated so that as well as being able to see if someone is leading a team (purple name) you can also see how many people are on that team. Some sort of flagging to say 'looking for members' would be ideal. Recruiting after each mission as people drop out is a bit of a chore and I imagine puts many people off leading teams. 4) I have absolutely no idea if this is possible but in the same way as there is a bonus xp modifier when playing on a big team it would be great if there was a bonus drop modifier too. My solo toons accumulate salvage and recipes at a much greater rate that my teaming toons - to the extent that deleting stacks of salvage is a regular activity. I know that they tend to be blasting through team size spawns and hoovering up all the goodies so it's not an entirely apples to apples comparison but some bonus in drop rates when in a team may help to encourage team play rather than 'teh farming'. This becomes particularly relevant when talking about the drop rates for purple recipes which is a subject that has been mentioned a couple of times recently. 5) In the same vein as the above it would be great if it were possible to pick up a minor merit awards for random team play. Task forces and story arcs require organisation and a time commitment from everyone involved and don't suit the kind of drop in, drop out pug teams I've been involved with recently. However, everyone loves merit rewards! Maybe some of the longer missions offered by contacts like the kill alls could grant a single merit to everyone at completion or something like that? I was originally thinking about having a 'time spent on team' timer that was linked to merit rewards when you leave the team but I have no idea of the feasibility from a technical point of view and it would probably be abused to afk farm merits. That's all I have for now, let me know what you think? Any more ideas to make teaming more interesting, easier or more rewarding?