Naraka

I feel the divide here is the misconception that the combos highlighted by the system is outlining the meta-game goal of max performance. You can use whatever skills you calculate to be maximum but the combo system is meant to give bonus effects, not max performance. Tangent: I find it odd how players could be so concerned with how bad-A their character looks standing still but only ever bother using the attacks that barely have animations because they're mostly only concerned with performance.

I dunno, TW is most fun when you get prime time unloading. It's least fun when mobs die quickly that I have to reposition or left putting down onesies and twosies. The obvious psychological solution is to just make mobs flow endlessly and stack but you'll just be frustrated when you can't. I suppose I often take the bad with the good. The good is also just the fun in watching my character swinging that weapon aroundv or running around with it wielded. The bad being it's clunky by design compared with a normally sized weapon like a katana or staff.

Do you dislike playing Brute? I couldn't imagine being able to function well leveling up or even in any team capacity with that mentality. As far as combos as a whole, I guess I'm in that odd outlier that thinks all combos and styles are good it's just some are better than others. I might not play Dual Blades as often as other sets but I wouldn't want the set reduced or look at the function with disdain because power sets, like most games, are like ice cream or food in general. Just because I don't want a flavor right now doesn't mean I won't want to have some later or even if I don't like the flavor, someone else likely does. If it's okay to love, it's okay to hate. With regards to new sets, the OP highlights an important point in that there are only so many ways to dress a set. Without extra features from unique mechanics, there's only so many combos of damage types and secondary effects and even then, many of the existing damage types and secondary effects provide precious little in the field of "uniqueness" to justify the set existing. Concluding on the subject of gameplay, fun factor and strategy, it's no secret the game is limited on naturally building difficulty which limits strategy. Requiring the player to successfully perform to maximize their performance is a common gameplay loop while requiring the player to be aware of their surroundings and the enemy is the other. The latter is not as prevalent, especially on teams, so the former is likely going to be the only portion you're directly concerned with. I'd say, those that don't like interacting with various combos simply don't want obstacles in maximizing their performance which is understandable but foolish since it's practically the only loop left that makes the game categorized as interactive. I think the best approach moving forward, both with current combo sets and new sets, is to iron out wrinkles that could make the combos too clunky but don't be too concerned with inconveniencing the player if the hoop has a reward. Further still, I'd like to see more combos similar to Dual Blades (like a ranged boomerang set) but I think it's also important to introduce sets with mild combos that are mostly background like Rad and Psi melee. Shock Therapy did this well, being mostly a background combo functionally, but don't be afraid to make something more involved.

Buff/debuff sets are the most varied sets in the game so their effectiveness is often going to lean on play style, build and preset combination. Poison is a more active debuff set that can stack a lot of effects if the fight lasts that long but the beauty is going to shine when you pair the set... Just like the rest of the sets. I went poison/dark defender because dark has a lean towards prolonged fights and safety. Throwing out a Blackstar opens up to them put down a trap or start dropping resistance or spreading out those slows/disorients. It's got some melee ranged powers to chain if power is going to be the goal. The only contention you run into with sets is if your expectation for every set is the same this ultimately playing the same.

I noticed how you left out one of the other defining aspects of "energy" powers in this game: knockback. But I'll agree with Aurora_Girl on this and say Energy Control would literally be Gravity Control. Even ignoring the strong conceptual ties to gravity, the aura created by Gravity Control's powers are very shiny and energy-looking and could be conceptualized as the user controlling a coating of energy to shut down enemies. Your pet is even a ball of energy. Now if you'd like to create a set suggestion around energy, that might be more entertaining as you could show us how it would differ from other control sets similarly to how posters have made suggestions for Light Control despite Illusion Control existing.

That type of perception isn't limited to just Regen tho.

Do you have the formula? Also any variables like transmission medium that isn't a cerebral synapse. I'm not even being that pedantic. I'm sure there has been in-game lore about the study of mental powers since characters like Mother Mayhem had a while branch of medical professionals that end up creating such meta-humans. It's not something I look for but I wouldn't put it past the writers to make some tongue-in-cheek references to the slow "thought projectile speed" of the game because it is a rather unique style of mental powers in CoX. On the other hand, most other media portray mental powers as near instant when, in reality, thoughts are certainly not instantaneous.

Because one is made of metal/wood while the other doesn't follow natural laws of physics or understanding?

But that's all they are regardless of having or not having resistance. Requiring more time to defeat enemies is kind of the point unless you'd be fine with literal practice dummies for mobs (and for a lot of builds, that's all they are because they don't have much time to use their powers). Anyways, someone mentioned the concept of enemies being weak to confuse. I think there might be enemies that have weakness to KB but not sure about other mez. Would be interesting to make a foe difficult to hold but easy to confuse or something like that. Another prospect I pitched was giving mobs powers that either suppress while mezzed or maybe weakened afterwards... Like if you put a mob to sleep for 3 sec, they have a passive that stacks -res on themselves. The point would be to introduce alternative methods to engage enemies rather than the standard. You could just charge at such a foe but they might take a lot more punching to take down than if you put them to sleep and blew up the hard targets one by one after they were asleep for a few seconds. And the above is mostly just briefly thought it hypothetical to demonstrate my point, not a direct suggestion.

I find Sonic/Psi Def a fun combo. Just bubble the team, get my -res going from ranged and plink at tough targets. Solo, most +1 mobs don't reach me before they get psi'ed.

I was actually going to post how it would be a neat mechanic if there was some kind of power that would "freeze" your next few projectiles for a few seconds before unleashing them all at once. Probably not something to implement since players only care about speed and AoE but it certainly has is used when you're trying to burst down a pesky target. Psi Lance is one of my favorites of the set. If changes were made to the set, I wouldn't want it to be made faster as it doesn't actually make the gameplay faster or more responsive, but rather less impactful with not much commitment in your use of powers.

This mission is a nice change of pace. Depending on what kind of loadout your teams have will change how you approach the mission. As mapped out above, there are 2 paths the pumpkins run through to get to the escape. To priority is clearing anything so you can push out to the mouths of those 2 paths. You split the team so you get equal coverage on both but if your team is lopsided, you might have to make a more "scout and report" strategy where you're communicating where the runners are instead. A buffer is going to be bouncing around to refresh the team, a controller or debuffer might aim to act as goalies to slow down the seams, a ST focused character might scout and draw in more groups, the tank may focus on purely herding for slaughter and the nukers are just getting rid of everything as quickly as possible. But as described above, top priority is pushing the assault to the mouths of the paths that lead to the henge. There, it's easy to move back and forth between the openings and you have space to lock foes down before they get close to escaping.

Lol I think you're jumping the gun. Throwing around terms like "proves" is just as hyperbolic as your view of posters saying "Regen is fine". I'd have said something more like "that's supporting anecdotal research for adding improvements to the set". I could flip the logic and say a set that can do the mission with SOs only and solo is too strong and should be nerfed down but I'm not taking one circumstantial test as proof. That said, I certainly think Ice Patch would have bridged a lot of gaps for practically any armor set in such a situation. Is Cross Punch providing that much burst damage and mez? I suppose I'm one of those old hats that like to keep situation powers in my pocket for instances like this rather than going all in on offense which doesn't suit Regen. And Burnout is just not available often enough for me to ever want to pick it up (I'm also not a huge fan of hasten so I don't even get that often). Speaking of Burnout, I believe I heard suggestions to improve Regen's Revive by giving it a similar effect to Burnout but only for your Regen clicks. Using it while KO'ed would mean you're put back on your feet with all your heal/regen clicks available again to start anew and using Revive while alive would refresh your Regen clicks but put Revive on a x2 recharge...something like that...it would still be a niche power...not sure how OP that would be in the grand scheme of things.

While I can understand your clarification, one could argue that this also exists on the AT level. While all blast sets don't have snipe attacks, the changes to snipes was a power creep change. Same with removing crashes from nukes. The changes to Tankers could also be argued for power creep or the HP increase/inherent changes for Stalkers. With regards to the Regen set, buffing the set isn't technically power creep but buffing Regen to be at or near Bio would be power creep. You used the example of Kinetic Melee (lol, I see what you did there). Kin does need help, I don't think anyone is arguing that... But buffing kin to be equal to TW would certainly be power creep. It's going to be a case by case thing here. Buffing Regen with some niche utility and maybe a bump in mitigation by making Revive more useful is different from buffing Regen to compete with Rad or to change it to Sent Regen. The concept of Power creep kind of relies on a logic fallacy, but if there's provable evidence to back the assertion, it's not as much a fallacy anymore.

Ah, so you're saying my intuition was correct lol but yeah, energy is a pain for DA early on and it's refreshing being able to shrug off their electric attacks and drains but DA also has a moderate resistance to drains. I think one prospect not touched on about Elec armor is, if paired with something that drains END (later on, power sink), you can floor the END of those tough targets with the damage aura. Problem is, that is nearly unusable for other sets like early Savage Melee. Funnily enough, I've drained foes on my Elec/Regen and Elec/Bio stalkers too.

And this is an example of gaslighting, ladies and gents. Apparently I'm the one (the sole source!!!) that made a big fuss so I get to take all the congratulations for it. I'm so very grateful lol I still think you're being overly critical of Regen. In the side discussions about Electric armor, I was commenting about the difference mitigation attacks can make. While Regen does have to contend with all the attacks that make it through, there is a measure of control you can apply to make up for that (depending on your attack set). When attacks get past that, Regen can just head it off while SR has to hope it takes them low enough to get that res to kick in.

You probably spent more energy justifying your aggression than you did clarifying your statement. I told you why I didn't believe what you were saying (taking x% pool def from SR and Regen isn't the same) so it'd be on you to clarify why you think it would be equal. Talking about removing the res from toughness would be closer to being an equal gimp to the sets but that's just that one power... The more stacking pool def you remove from both, the more you affect SR than Regen. If you want to take subtext out of the use of audacity, it's more that you think I'm that ignorant of how stacking def works.

Yeah, my comparison was mainly on the route of 1 to 35. Early on, you don't even have the mez toggles on DA and if you do later on, you can turn them off mid fight to reserve END (tactically, you only really need them if you are trying to slow enemies from running). Further still, because of the way the resists are spread, you need to run those 3 toggles on Elec but you can opt to run just what you need on DA. There's also the prospect of ghosts early on in the game. Elec is getting eaten alive. Overall, I think I'm just more experienced with early DA than Elec but having extra tools to stay alive with Elec is good. For DA, you just need END to stay alive lol

I'm not sure what you're asking, exactly, but with those same rules, make sure to take Revive too and take death and travel into the equation.

Lol I think you're being overly critical of Regen there. It's no secret that taking away the ability to stack def on SR will hurt it more than Regen. Removing 12% def from Regen and 12%def from SR is not the same. I wasn't even being serious but the audacity to make the statement you did? Lol

My point is, if you want to go around chiding people with arbitrary qualifiers for accomplishments, it can be turned around against you. How about only armor powers. No Fighting pool or combat jumping/epic armor powers/etc. How about that?

Are you not just testing how much pool def you can stack?

If I'm not mistaken, Elec armor toggles are not as cheap as, say Dark Armor. Couple that with an early damage aura and you end up with it being cheaper to run DA early on than Elec. Yeah, Savage had an END discount but it also has a penalty built in as well. Sure, you can just not use your blood stacks or only expend them when their not full but then you're looking at fluctuating END discounts. Probably not something to rely on... It's only a moderate to minor bonus. I think important factors of leveling a melee character is kill speed, cc/debuff mitigation and animation speed. I feel Savage isn't that bad but it might be a bad fit for Elec armor to start off. I'm sure it gets better when you start proccing it later on but I was making an example of the set early/mid level.

I had a whole ordeal leveling a Sav/Elec Brute. He ran out of END, and his resistances mostly were just a countdown of how long he could last before he had to run or die. Having played out an Elec/Elec Brute and had a decent time with it, I thought the problem was Savage Melee... It was actually Elec armors early performance and needing mitigation from your melee set. Expensive toggles, low utility, resistances spread out and a moderate heal that was a grind to get to. Even after getting the heal, it only makes a difference after you can get some slotting going. Everything still feels expensive until you get the AoE drain. Eventually you can make it work but it feels mostly incomplete until around lvl 30.

Did they change SR yet so you can get a decent amount of AoE def before level 35 on Scraps and Stalks? [EDIT] OMG, I just had flashbacks of leveling an /Elec Brute. Utter garbage... Until you finally get your heal with slots in it ...