Parabola

Care to elaborate? What's the scoop on page 6?

I don't know whether to be impressed or terrified by this ...

There are quite a few powers in the game now that can be slotted for both End Mod and Heal. The Blaster sustain powers are the obvious ones but there are many other support and armour powers such as Soul Absorption and Inexhaustible that could benefit from being able to enhance both these attributes. So, I'm wondering if there is room here for a new category of IO set that can be slotted in powers that can enhance both End Mod and Heal. For maximum utility this new set would probably need to enhance Accuracy and particularly Recharge in addition to End Mod and Heal. Touch of the Beyond needs Accuracy; Drain Psyche needs both Accuracy and Recharge; powers like Chrono Shift and Painbringer need Recharge before anything else. Using @Vanden's handy dandy IO set designer I've come up with something like: Accuracy/Recharge End Mod/Heal End Mod/Recharge Heal/Recharge Accuracy/End Mod/Heal End Mod/Heal/Recharge This gives: Accuracy 47.7%, End Mod 91.78%, Heal 91.78% and Recharge 95.11% (after ED). I'm not sure what set bonuses would be appropriate. Ranged Defence would seem to fit the majority of powersets that have these powers. +Recharge is always nice too! If it simply copied the bonuses from Preemptive Optimization I'd be very happy. Struggling to think of an appropriate name though. Boundless Vigour?

I'd love to see Perez Park get the same treatment as the Hollows with a series of arcs leading up to a trial or tf. Boomtown is another prime candidate for this.

Wonderfully well put.

Don't worry Snarky, I didn't have much respect for you in the first place! (In case it needs saying, that was a joke.)

Well, page releases to beta certainly shake things up in the community. This time around I'm sad to find that I've lost a lot of respect for a handful of longstanding forumites who in the past I've generally thought of as reasonable people. On topic: The game wasn't finished when it was shut down. I24 wasn't out of beta if I remember correctly, and had the shutdown not happened I24 would not have been the 'that's it, we're done here, it's now perfect', final release. MMOs as a genre of game are characterized by continuous development and every change that is made alters the system; every change affects everything else. Therefore the task of balancing and rebalancing is a constant one, and this should be the expectation. HC made it very clear right from the start that they intended to run this game as close to a live, professionally run MMO as possible. They made no secret of their plans to pick up and continue with the development. If you don't like this, you are playing the wrong game, and the wrong genre of game.

Re the proliferation of power changes to the dominator assault sets. My hunch (and I have no evidence for this) is that the devs will be giving dominators as a whole a balance pass at some point. I suspect that might be the reason that various power changes haven't been applied to their assault set equivalents; that they want to address the sets and AT as a whole rather than making piecemeal updates. Just a hunch though.

🙂 Not going to say. But you whoever they are just better watch your their step!

I find myself checking the odd post from people I have on ignore just to check in and it's amazing how one note they tend to be. 'Yup, two years and umpteen updates later and xxx is still wanging on about exactly the same nonsense'. I think so far I've only taken one person back off ignore. They're in this thread actually.

Feel completely paralyzed until mids is updated?

Jump in -> soul drain -> shield charge -> touch of fear -> shadow maul -> touch of fear -> laugh maniacally. You want to be surrounded by enemies to saturate against all odds before firing shield charge. The single target chain is smite -> siphon life -> smite -> midnight grasp. Urrm, that's about it really ... Enjoy!

Sadly this makes more sense than a lot of what I've read here recently...

Errm no. I was responding to someone else who was worried about new players. Reread my post, I'm saying I don't think it's an issue, or not a new issue anyway.

My current build is something like this.

Dark melee is a set that can get to the point where it has soul drain up almost permanently. As higher damage scalar AT's get relatively more out of +dam buffs this leans towards tanks and scrappers getting the better deal than brutes. Tanks also score highly with dark melee because the aoe comes early and they get the big area buffs on both of them. I have run many DM tanks and they don't need any additional aoe when they can spam shadow maul and a procced out touch of fear (particularly backed by soul drain). I have no experience with inv (not a set I get on with) but have incarnated both shield/dm and bio/dm. Bio is a great set but dm in my opinion isn't the best pairing for it. Ideally it needs soft control and recharge, neither of which dm can supply. Shield however is a fantastic pairing. In almost every respect shield and dm complement each other creating a very tough and highly damaging toon. I have tried the scrapper equivalent too but at the end of the day I prefer the tank by far.

Is there any chance of having customisation options for the colour of the fx on axe cyclone, pendulum and cleave? They are quite intrusive as it stands unless you happen to have a yellow theme (and even then axe cyclone is different from the other two).

But surely the inexperienced player is going to think 'waiting for my one attack to recharge is boring and there's another attack right there that I skipped so I'll take that next level'? Making terrible build decisions like not taking enough attacks and then getting bored with the game is just as much of a risk now I think.

Copied over my Rad/Rad tank and played a couple of missions. I don't have hard numbers but agree with many of the things said above. IG currently plays a huge role in smoothing out what is a slightly clunky set and although it it clearly not working as intended (and a set shouldn't be balanced around a bug) that is where we are. So, if IG is to be adjusted could we please have a look at what could be done elsewhere in the set to compensate? IG in its current form obviously supplies a lot of aoe damage but it also supplements the underwhelming single target of the set as a whole, in large part through the application of -res procs. In aoe terms I think the set can more or less live without the overperforming IG if it can apply contaminated reliably enough (I like the idea of boosting the ability of the IG to apply contaminated), but it doesn't feel good enough at single target. Shaving animation times could help, it is a fairly ponderous set overall. Another thought is that I've always been somewhat disappointed that contaminated does nothing for you if you are fighting a single foe. It feels like contaminated should make an enemy more vulnerable, perhaps by applying a -res effect or by removing the restriction that the primary target can't be affected by the splash damage.

Even the part about having situations where a toggle is draining end but providing no benefit? I kind of assumed that stealth type powers provide a reduced amount of defence while suppressed to avoid that happening? Would it be possible to suppress the end cost if this situation arises?

Of all the changes in the page this is the one I'm having the hardest time wrapping my head around. I'm just not sure what is being achieved by doing it like this. Making it so that one stealth power doesn't detoggle another is fine but why can't they stack? The stealth powers such as Stealth and Steamy Mist are useful sources of defence, why is stacking that defence more of an issue than stacking something like Combat Jumping with Steamy Mist? This also creates the problem that you can be running a toggle that is providing you with no benefit but is still draining end. If you run Stealth at the same time as Steamy Mist and engage in combat, Stealth is providing absolutely no benefit for its continued end drain (while Stealth is combat suppressed). Just to clarify a couple of things I wasn't sure about I've done a little bit of testing around this. Toggles like Steamy Mist do stack from separate sources (if two characters run SM they both get the stealth and defence stacking). Also if you have a power like Stealth that suppresses and are running a different toggle behind it the transition from one to the other seems to be seamless. For example you are running Stealth and Steamy Mist, while out of combat you have 9% defence from Stealth, when you attack you transition seemingly instantly to having 3.75% defence from Steamy Mist. Ally buff powers seem to also stack without problem. Character A running Steamy Mist casts Group Invisibility and Grant Invisibility on character B, character B is running Steamy Mist. A gets the benefit of 2 Steamy Mists and Group Invisibility, B gets the benefit of 2 Steamy Mists, Group Invisibility and Grant Invisibility. So it is only your own toggle powers that do not stack. This all seems to work but I don't understand why it needs to work like this...

This is huge. Apart from anything else this might be the change that finally makes dominators a viable proposition for me. And so many other builds. Put this live now!

This seems to happen for me most often if I'm breaking line of sight at the same time as activating the toggle. Like activating mid jump behind cover. All enemies around the anchor aggro as normal but the anchor sometimes won't until I approach them in plain sight. This definitely seems like new behaviour, I don't remember it happening in the past.

Try this:

If claws/nrg isn't taken swap me over to that. It's the strongest 'whole game' scrapper I've played by a distance. Edit: Here's my current build for this combo: It's designed to take on pretty much anything with as much resistance as I could cram in. And this is a secondary build with the intention of turning it into a kind of off sentinel. I got frustrated with those moments that the game really doesn't want you to be in melee and this was the result: