Naraka

Not entirely on topic but an observation I noticed when I was running my DA/EM Tanker through Croatoa: Fir Bolg do not move while stunned. They all just politely stand in my Oppressive Gloom and never wonder away or even stagger around.

If you're fighting mobs of higher difficulty, then your team must be prepared to face higher difficulty mobs. If you are getting destroyed because your build isn't situated to handle higher difficulty mobs then *lower the difficulty*. The devs didn't put in a difficulty slider for show. As for faceplanting on a given set-up or not, that's anecdotal. I'm sure there are plenty who have played on certain builds or ATs that seemingly shouldn't be capable but managed regardless, that doesn't mean said AT/set-up is fine just like you faceplanting doesn't mean said setup is broken. I personally have a Poison/Dark defender who also has the capacity to faceplant if not careful, but she can also reduce mobs to uselessness with a combo of stacked effects and control thanks to both powersets. Dealing with alpha strikes isn't something a build is suppose to inherently be able to deal with. That is purely on the player. Want to help deal with an alpha strike on your Poison character? Pick up some stealth and drop a poison trap in the center of a group. Boom. All the minions are pretty much controlled and the effect will persist for some time. If you want complete safety, there's also Phase Shift or IOs. EDIT: Also, if I'm not mistaken, Poison also has a debuff that decreases the amount that foes can resist their debuffs. Weaken pretty much nerfs high difficulty foes from resisting your effects like controls, debuffs and their own buffs. So there's also that...

There have been various suggestions about improving Poison. I think a lot would aim to give the set's "splash" mechanic to some more of its powers but overall keep the same radius, namely because if it just had 10-15ft radius AoE debuffs that remained as strong as they are, it would be a very easy set to maneuver around, especially with how fast the debuffs recharge. Giving Alkaloid, Antidote and Elixir a small AoE splash that had reduced effect would really aid in it's team support. Here's the thread for reference: As for your suggestions... Poison is actually a very safe support set to solo. Even on teams, you're mostly chilling dropping traps and spitting poison under the radar. It can easily stack -30%ToHit and -50% damage, coupled with the slow, mobs just don't have the opportunity to put pressure on you unless they have mez. I don't really mind this as I don't feel like babysitting people with heals anyway if I'm playing a debuffer. Sure, Dark Miasma has a nice heal but it's finnicky and requires you stand next to the one you're healing. I like DM but I also like Poison and one aspect of that is it doesn't have a "real" heal. If I had a real heal on my Poison character, people would expect me to use it lol. Just use your debuffs to turn the foes into runny nosed toddlers instead. This is true, but I feel the short radius is the cost for the potency. Speaking in terms of debuff radius, stuff like Melt Armor and the various toggle debuffs have radii around 15ft but they come with their own penalties (Melt Armor is on a long recharge, the toggles can be dropped and can only be applied once at a time). A power like Envenom is extremely potent and versatile and its shortcoming (small radius) can be overcome by slotting a rech in it so you can apply it to more targets. Could be right. I do like Neurotoxic Breath myself, which is why I'd like to see a bit added to this power as is. My personal suggestion for the set along with the splash effect on the buffs, would be like an "incubation" mechanic that basically resets the duration of the effect of Envenom and Weaken if they are already affected by it. Put a chance to reset their durations in Neurotoxic Breath and Poison Trap and give a 100% chance to reset the duration of Envenom/Weaken in Paralytic Poison.

Why not? I'd assume we all have some ideas of our own or opinions on what some ideas might be for such powers. Was thinking of posting a few more ideas but I'll just hold off to give others a chance. I think the only exception I'd give is to Stalkers. I think BU works perfectly for them. You could give some alternate effects for their AS from Hide instead.

@malonkey1 beat you by 4 months.

You're talking about sounds, not animations. The animations for Shock Therapy aren't all "seizure" animations. In fact, it's only Energizing Circuit that actually causes that animation and you're likely only using it in combat since it's such a short-lived buff. The other powers use a more generic "pop an inspiration" animation. If anything, a better argument for changing the animation is that all the other powers in Shock Therapy are "inoffensive" except that *ONE* power so why not change it?

I wouldn't be against altering some melee self-buffs to be more thematic but I'd also caveat that to aim the direct of said change to keep the buff "in set". Powers like Combat Readiness works in this regard, giving you Combo lvl 3 upon clicking it which is an in-set bonus. If Energy Melee gets the changes that Energy Assault got, it's BU could be changed to give it a lower +dmg buff but a constant "Charged" effect for its duration. What that charged effect does will mostly depend on what the powers within the set are changed to do. The OP's Iaijutsu change to Katana's BU I'd likely limit to only Katana Powers rather than a generic +dmg buff or +crit chance buff. This is thematic since you can't perform Iaijutsu with a Mace (mace mastery) or a fire blast or some such. Making it so, for example, Golden Dragonfly has a wider arc but no +dmg or adding +lethal damage to your next Katana attack would be a good consolation if the damage bonus was tone back some and the majority of the buff was centered only around your main attacks.

I normally do the same. Back when people were discussing Dark Armor, I had to make a DA Tanker just to see. END costs seem high because he's running 4 extra toggles that are outside of DA but it's still manageable and seeking IO bonuses I normally don't look to (namely +Max END) is kind of refreshing. That being said, I don't have the time to run an Empathy character at this time. Someone above mentioned that some ATs and powersets are build for teaming moreso than solo and I'll agree. Rather than making Empathy more soloable, just make it better at team performance. Any buffs to it in that regards will likely make the set better at soloing for the soloing ATs such as Controllers and Masterminds.

I'm all for this. Ultimately, though, I have no issue with players having control over what they see on their screen. My problem comes when they are trying to control what I see on my screen and if I want my sentient Raiton ninjutsu surge electricity through his ninjas and allies, possibly even painfully so because he's not a human therefore doesn't care what effects he causes to them, then that's my business. Having UI options to turn those animations off, while hugely cluttering and would likely be lost on normal players who wouldn't even know the option exists if it did, could be something to strive for. Here's hoping the OP will roll something together to help those that might need that mod. It might take some assistance from other modders to make it easily installable to other systems but is likely a more reachable solution than weighing it on the devs to do it.

I feel that would be a whole other suggestion. I like the idea of second plane fighting, and giving mobs a means of shifting between them gives them a means of surviving a volley of AoE as well as emphasize ST effectiveness but there'd be a whole other realm of discussion needed for that. This wasn't really elaborated on in the OP, though. One aspect that you're overlooking is the mez resist/protection that is rolled into it. Sure, Maneuvers is 2x as Hover but you're also applying that defense bonus to a team within 60ft and the other toggles come with taunt, placate, confuse and fear resistance to you and allies and with the prevalence of mule power picks, it is a stackable effect that is often stacked on teams. Leadership, in and of itself, is a rather broken concept for a pool power option that likely needs to be revised, not buffed. Like those that use and run leadership only benefit from their own toggles but not other iterations of it from your team but those that don't take leadership benefit from all copies. Maybe then, lowering the cost would seem fair...but having a team all running leadership for cheap and reaping huge benefits seems like a lapse in concept. You didn't mention stealth in your OP but I wouldn't be against trimming the END cost of that power. Weave I think is fine but I'd probably trade the Immobilize resist for defense debuff resist (just a little, like 18%). For some, it's the only access to global END reduction outside of incarnate powers. There are a few END Redux set bonuses which would be an avenue to build around vs always building the same way (+rech, +recovery). Also, are you kidding? Endurance reduction fits perfectly with acrobatics. If you're acrobatic, normal movements aren't going to tire you as much. I feel it's a lot more thematic than just +resistance which can be explained away in a variety of convoluted ways but ultimately is the same as a "shield" which isn't what being acrobatic is about. Also, thinking about the ATs/combos that will aim for acrobatics, you've got your Dark Armor guys, you got your backline support and/or frontline bubblers and they are likely running various expensive toggles or have fewer slots to dedicate to maximizing their attacks. Also also, considering you presented 2 other suggestions for +resist pool powers, it'd be putting way too many builds into the realm of capping resistances far too easily. Capping resistances isn't something you should put in the hands of every build. Yeah, IOs do that but exacerbating the problem isn't a solution. At the very least, keeping the status quo would be better than slathering more +res options (and more mules for those +def uniques) throughout the pool powers.

But it's in the context of removing a power and replacing it with an attack. Just because I see propositions playing into the hands of meta-gamers doesn't mean I'm also in favor of replacing one flavor of power for another flavor. I guess there could be some semblance of hypocrisy in the overall post but there is very differing context that you'd have to overlook to get to that conclusion.

This has nothing to do with improving pool powers. You don't make pool powers better by making them not needed. What would -Res IOs enhance? The -resistance? Only if the vast majority of powers that lower resistance get shaved to take into consideration that they can now be enhanced to their full effect. Also, +res while intangible? What does that even do? You use Phase Shift so you don't get hit anymore. Why not just make them free? Or better yet, why not have them increase recovery while on? At the end of the day, people run these toggles and build to not notice their cost, why remove aspects of build considerations? Making a build is suppose to be about choices and sacrifices. Removing sacrifices removes choices. So we can make up -res IO sets but not +mez protection IOs? Or maybe you're running out of ideas so just look at what everyone plops in their build and strap that onto powers people don't often take? Here's a different idea: Give Acrobatics a slightly lower END cost, make the END cost unenhanceable and add a global END discount to the power (like -20%) so at least when you're picking up Acrobatics, you're getting a unique effect rather than an effect another power pool already excels at. A Placate IO set!? Who would bother except people using the power as a mule? Why would we want to push for mule powers rather than just making the powers themselves attractive for some builds? Personally speaking, I think they should just remove the ToHit check from Pacify and Provoke completely and let the powers function as is, but that's just me. Not a fan mostly because the changes are either aimed at filling out all the checkboxes of a meta-build (I feel, if you want to have a meta-build with capped def and resistances with high rech and min/max DPS, it should require effort and planning, not just grabbing any handful of powers and putting some slots in). The changes to Teleport is ultimately unnecessary. Yeah, you can roll TP foe and Recall into 1 power and maybe add in a new power in its place, but why would you need an AoE attack? Who would even take it?

The "slight breeze" was in conjunction with people floating around on their tip toes which likely *would* be knocked over by said slight breeze. The difference between a Knockdown and a Knockback don't have any prevalence on the strength of said power but the power itself and its purpose. So the magnitude of knockback isn't really being discussed in my post, it's the accuracy. Wind isn't some wall of force (there's a different power for that). Tornadoes can completely shred a house but leave a neighboring house completely untouched. As for my explanation being a post-hoc, I will restate that I'm explaining why it *CAN* make sense in the face of arguments saying it makes *NO* sense. I'm sorry if you made an absolutist statement that I completely destroyed but I tried to be civil about it. Now, you can decide to rescind your argument about it making no sense and continue advocating for the removal of the accuracy penalty (I have no problem with that) but it you decide to double down and state it makes no sense and/or Gale needs not only it's accuracy penalty removed but get a bonus AND get extra buffs ontop of that, well...I'll just have to argue the contrary.

Emanation points (with regards to something like your first example) and syncing the audio impacts. An example of the latter, the new Shadow Maul's impact sounds are more out of sync with the animation than the old animation. Not saying the old animation was perfect, but the punches synced up better to the duration you were punching for. Same deal for if you swapped Shadow Maul for, I dunno...Jump Kick's animation but the damage is a DoT but you're only kicking once. The former would be having Laserbeam Eye's effect emanating off of KO Blow, having 2 beams coming out of...the air that you then punch up? There's definitely limitations. Personally, I enjoy unique thought out animations that require concept consideration vs lego animation work.

How many people go around gliding along the ground on their tip toes waiting for the next slight breeze to knock them to the ground? I'm certain you've been hit with plenty of strong winds that only caused you to waiver at most. Some might argue that is "knockback resistance" but I'd just argue that balance, as a concept, both realistically and conceived in a roleplaying sense is more fluid than the whole mez protection/resistance allows. Merely the act of separating your feet into a wider stance is hardly "KB protection". Accuracy is likely a mechanic to emulate that the air, as a fluid, will strike people differently thus have different effects from knocking them down to touching them but having no affect or even completely missing due to other means like shields, windbreaks or interacting differently with matter. The only other method to emulate that would be giving Gale that enhanced accuracy bonus because "it's air" but only a chance of KB when it hits and I nor anyone here would ever want that. That all said, I'm not arguing to keep Gale's accuracy penalty, I'm arguing of the concept of how Gale functions now against arguments made that try to explain that it somehow "makes no sense" that Gale has low accuracy.

Couldn't you, I dunno, roleplay that the betrayal happened for some reason other than your will and you have to secretively imply this to Scirocco? He nods and then pretends to be upset with your "choice" and plays that part to keep up appearances to spying agents that are watching you and his' interactions? Could even have a humorous angle as he might be playing the part up a bit too strongly, so strongly that it might even sound not genuine, like an actor hamming it up too much. I dunno, maybe I'm just weird and I enjoy someone handing me a narrative script but kind of morphing the direction of the delivery more so than I like just reading a bunch of options in a "choose your adventure" story that all resolve to the same ending.

Some personal wishes are a "no body spikes" option for Spines/Thorn powers. You can keep them on the hands or heck, remove those too. And it's not because I think the spines are ugly or obtrusive, I just want to play the concept of a "knife throwing/slashing" set and I just like the look and feel for those sets' animations. Somehow de-linking the stance or swapping it with claw's stance perhaps? Another would just be opening up the color palette for some powers. Again, sets like Spines/Thorns suffer from bland color options. Other sets too but it's something that could probably be easy to do. As for the minimum FX options people are talking about, I think having a global options menu setting that disables a lot of overall settings of others would help appease a lot of people. There was someone that was really upset with Shock Therapy's "spasm" animation that one of the buffs triggered so having an option that just disabled soft-animation locks like those...heck, go full out and put an option to just have all character objects just T-pose for everything to cover all your bases.

Going an unpopular direction, but I'm running through with a DA/EM Tanker. It doesn't always keep everything stunned but it will keep a hard target (or several hard targets) stunned and ultimately focused down said hard targets while Death Shroud whittles down the soft targets. It's kind of the sister set of the Dark Melee combo but using the stun part of DA instead of the fear. I also have a feeling when DM is going to get a second pass (or before they bother trying again), Energy Melee will finally get the attention and I hope we can get enough attention to focus on ST rather than washing it over with the ol' AoE pushbroom to get it in line with all the other homogenized sets.

It's because it's more an exaggeration. To be frank, Dark Armor isn't any more "harder" than Invulnerability or Ice Armor. It's different, which is likely the key goal, but overall, it's not like DA is hardmode thus needing a disclaimer. Also, Dark Armor is for Stalkers too!! Lastly, the issue I have is that "baseline performance" isn't actually baseline. It's what *YOU* consider baseline. The set has a perfectly fine baseline. The issue here is you've shifted what "baseline" means and then make the argument that parity is needed while discounting the unique aspects the set does provide. I feel this whole line of debate has a disingenuous foundation that puts a more confrontational facet on the forefront which makes it harder to see others' perspectives. As for your last point, I don't think it's so much that what DA does differently it does badly (it doesn't do it amazingly but if it did it probably would make the set broken), I think it's that what DA does differently the meta doesn't want or care about. The meta doesn't want extra mez because no one wants extra mez. Unless you're a Dominator, the only important aspects truly desired are things that facilitate offense and defense can be shored up with IOs. Not saying that is what is being requested for here (but you could almost come to that conclusion with the requests for supplementary +recovery/END) but no amount of buffing its niche will likely appease the masses.

This is actually kind of funny. It doesn't have a big glaring hole to energy...it's just not mid-to-cap resistance to energy. It still has 30%/24% resistance to Energy damage which isn't nothing. It's a solid base to build other resistances on top of if you choose to go that route. Also, it is rather strong to negative energy. I guess in this era, if you're not a flea's gasp from cap, it's not considered at all? And to compare, DA's energy resistance is a "hole" but Electric Armor's heal is "decent"? With slotting, it only reaches Regen's or Fire's heal AT BASE (50% heal on a 60sec cooldown w/ slotting vs 25% heal on a 40sec cooldown w/o). Mayhaps a bit of exaggeration is occurring? I'd wager it's the -ToHit since a lot of the benefit of the fear is limited to lower ranks (maybe bumping it to have a chance to affect Lts?) which most builds are set-up to obliterate quickly. On the contrary of the builds I'm working on (My Spines/DA Stalker and my new DA/EM Tanker), there is a bit of strategy to targetting. Targets tend to be the harder targets first then migrate down to the weaker foes which hopefully aren't doing too much in the meantime. Since DA was originally a Scrapper set, I'd wager that was the direction meant to take: kill the bosses, obliterate the fodder after. There's also strategy in holding onto the weaker foes to feed powers like Dark Consumption/Soul Drain, Dark Regeneration, and other mechanics like Momentum and Contamination aided by having more foes around to trigger the effect. Of course, this is ignoring the meta that has kind of always been a thing since early in the game's life: AoE is king. If you're not AoE'ing things down, you're lagging. But for my builds, the Stalker and my ST focused Tanker, it works hand-in-hand which might be why the set people view as having no synergy with it's thematic pairing, Dark Melee, is viewed so poorly when in reality, it was more a set to aid ST focused strategies. If I were making a pie-in-the sky suggestion, giving CoF a kind of "power boost" effect for fear powers + having 2 modes for the aura, one that suppresses until you're outside of combat for 6sec that basically places a PBAoE patch down upon entering combat that slows and fears and stacks mag with the always on aura that generates stacks of the "power boost" when foes are in your aura's range. It would particularly work well with certain Stalker strategies as well as kind of introduce other aspects of "hide in the shadows and then strike" philosophies that have roots in the set (I see you hiding in the corner, Cloak of Darkness). It also has thematic ties to "draining power from foes" other posters pointed to and it has a genuine different feel from other sets although it likely wouldn't be a meta-strategy since that mostly revolves around mob rushing and steady AoE DPS.

Taking in the context of the OP, it's plain to see the comparison they made was the function, not the aesthetics. Archery is a mostly lethal blast set with an original crashless nuke that has a smattering of fire damage. Assault Rifle is a mostly lethal blast set with an original crashless nuke that has a bit more than a smattering of fire damage. Beam Rifle has various differences like damage type, debuffs and mechanics that separate it from most other blast sets, even Energy Blast or Electric Blast.

Wasn't DA made during the era of 1 toggle at a time or some such? I didn't play back then but I would assume the utility was in choosing which effect you wanted to persist rather than trying to compound all effects of the set together. That being said, many have complained how Cloak of Fear and Death Shroud counteract each other, I'll remind you that Stalkers don't get Death Shroud and they have access to an AoE fear in demoralize so perhaps the focus on synergy shouldn't be dead focused on just the two powers' interaction but rather the tactics you're deploying. I mean, if you turned Death Shroud off and just ran Cloak of Fear, would you really be leveraging the effect that much more if you're spamming Spin or Whirling Sword? Or perhaps you're leveraging it enough because the effects of your other AoEs help suppress movement through effects like knockdown thus Death Shroud is adding damage onto that. To clarify what I'm saying is, if your goal is to suppress foes, why run Death Shroud? If you want to deal damage, some of the utility of suppressing foes is dampened but that'd be the case with most AoE powers used but you can still compound other effects like KD with both to achieve similar effect and deal damage. Expecting anything more and you're running into limitations of the terrorize mez effect, not Cloak of Fear specifically to which then it might be better to review the terrorize effect.

That's probably dipping your toes into a lot of other aspects of balancing the power that you'd be contending with. Would gutting the heal mean that you'd need more than 2 targets to top yourself off? And would that be enough to lower the endurance cost if it effectively performs the same? You'd moreso need to gut the cooldown than you would the END cost as a full heal or near full heal every 30sec contributes to effectiveness. Doesn't seem justified compared to heals like Reconstruction that have a 1min cooldown and a 50% heal but both also costing the same-ish END. I would say, adding a slight debuff to rech to it would be a nice opportunity if the cost doesn't seem worthwhile.

It's about purpose, not theme. You don't click Hasten to help you get from point A to point B, you use it to get your powers recharged faster.

This is a bad example. Adding damage to a power isn't violating the cottage rule. A blast with a decent mez is also not OP as some sets get that (looking at Cosmic Burst as an example). At worst, making Beanbag have moderate or high damage with a slightly toned down disorient (9sec instead of 12) might mean it needs to be shifted to a different spot in the powerset but that is what would be called a "buff". Those can happen to improve a set without drastically altering powers and superfluously changing power names.