Draeth Darkstar

While you guys are tweaking the Leadership visuals, a NoFX version of the toggles would be a godsend. I hate those little spinning icons. Tangentially related, taking the little spinning icons FX away from the Pet Aura IOs would also be amazing, especially since there's no way to get rid of them short of having a second build for aesthetics.

👀👀👀

You might want to re-read the OP. Time is a good set. It's not the best set, it's far from the worst set. It's fine as it is. Cold and Traps are much better offensively and worse defensively. The outlier is Force Fields, which is a pure concept set now.

IMO, this is way more of a problem with the TAOE sets that already existed being weak when compared to other damage sets than one of these new sets being too strong. They're both toward the "meh" end of damage sets now that Bombardment lost it's Ranged defense and that's the only especially good set bonus in Shrapnel.

You're really making my point for me, here. -25% Res and -31% Damage is already considered a weak power when it's only effective on a single target, and -Res is probably the second best debuff in the game. A power that has -31% Damage as its only effect under most circumstances is unbelievably terrible. The Discharge power of the Galvanic Sentinel is the same Discharge power that was in the first version of the set. All it does is -Dam and -End, not even -Recovery, it has a low summon duration, no other powers, and it eats your Static stacks when you summon it. It's completely skippable. If you want to debate the rest of the Electrical Affinity set's effects, you can take that to the Focused Feedback thread, as you already noted yourself, that's not the point of this one.

The only powers I'm comparing here with notably longer recharges also have either similarly longer durations to match or are literally an order of magnitude stronger in effect without considering the 255 target cap vs. 12.

...Are we playing the same game, here? What powers, exactly, do you think Electrical Affinity is competing with? It has: a chain heal worse than every other AoE heal a chain +Endurance power that's worse than Accelerated Metabolism an absolute joke compared to Recovery Aura, Speed Boost, and Transference a chain Damage buff that's worse than Siphon Power and Accelerated Metabolism and an absolute joke compared to Fulcrum Shift and Overgrowth a chain Absorb buff that's a joke compared to Wild Bastion, the only other power with that effect. If these mechanics don't change, this set is going to launch as the worse Support set in the game, maybe second to Force Fields. Yeah, as is, Electrical Affinity is setting itself up to be a pale ghost of Nature Affinity, covering a lot of the same ground mechanically but doing all of it worse. Faraday Cage is really its only pretty good power right now, but it's also stationary, which essentially makes it Sonic Dispersion, But Worse.

What other chain powers in this game are expected to fill the same role as circular AoEs with 255 target caps? Oh, that's right, none. The only other chain powers we have are expected to compete with offensive AoEs, the best of which in the game outside of Incarnates have 16 target caps, and those powers all have dramatically better effects per target than the average AoE because they are unpredictable. Hell, the Incarnate powers make it even more transparent. Ion Judgment, the only one that chains, is the one that has an extra high target cap as its gimmick, because you can't predict what it's going to do after you fire it. It makes zero sense to make the supporting chain powers have a maximum target cap of 1/20th what the circular ones can do.

The ability for chains to hit oddly-shaped groups of targets is already inherently balanced by the fact that, as the player, you have absolutely no control over where it goes after you fire it. A chain that jumps in the wrong direction from what you wanted can very easily die off after a single bounce by out-ranging every other viable target. This might be a new concept for City of Heroes, but chaining support powers exist in plenty of other games, and it's as much of a drawback as it is an advantage. They really only work well on tightly clustered allies, which is the same scenario that benefits circular AoE heals with no target caps (read: every other multi-target heal in this game) far more. As I've pointed out already, 12 targets does not cover a team of 7 melee and a Mastermind, forget multiple Masterminds, Controllers, Dominators, anyone with Lore or Patron pets, or any of the myriad dozens of other pet powers in this game. It just was not fundamentally designed for supports with such limited scope of effect. There is no good reason to hamstring this set out of the gate like this.

Gotta say I disagree. If you want to nerf everything that eclipses Force Fields, you're going to have to nerf damn near every set in the game, certainly every Support set. Force Fields has been garbage tier forever - and I say that as a former 6-year Bots/FF main. Traps's Foce Field Generator has been outshining the entire Force Fields set since 2007.

If you decide to update your spreadsheet with time-to-drain values for a Defender, could you also add a comparison of time-to-kill values from a blast set with good DPS? What I don't like is the new set getting only -End for its offensive support mechanic and the focus of two of its powers (one of which you will be forced to take on anything but a Defender) in a game where -End does literally nothing in the majority of situations presented by its default gameplay loop. The argument that building your entire character around sapping Endurance and then playing by yourself so that you actually see it do something before your terrible DPS can catch up to your EDPS does not change that fact. When TTK > TTDrain, Drain contributes nothing to you. Every set that has Drain as its main secondary effect pays a heavy price for it, they get few or no other secondary effects and bottom-of-the-barrel DPS. That's not a fair or balanced dichotomy.

Even if pets didn't count for jumps, the chains would burn out way before getting to them in any multi-group content, which is a serious weakness no other support has to deal with, aside from just not being able to support a whole league, full stop, like every other support set can - with better powers.

This is an amazing proof comparison - and you even compared Electric's underpowered damage to its own drain speed to do the proof. This is exactly what I'm talking about when I say that the other sets are clearing through mobs way faster than Electric is draining them, even solo. Electric is clearing through most mobs faster than draining them, and it's one of the worst blast sets for damage output.

Or they could just not make the gravity version do a knockdown when it ends? Might look a little weird to have the targets develop catlike reflexes and always land on their feet, but... it'd be far from the weirdest thing in this game.

The problem with this argument is that, while yes, Electric solo is better than Electric in groups, everything else is still better than Electric solo. It takes longer to drain all those mobs to 0 END than it takes most things to kill them, which is only even more true compared to Electric Assault's (and Electric Blast's) underwhelming damage output.

My feedback remains largely the same as the last version. Problems A 12 target cap is too few for a support set in a game where it's common for 1 player to be bringing 7+ targets and group content to be 8+ players. Endurance Drain isn't worth the power picks for, whether it's a pet doing it or me is immaterial. The only power in the set that provides an effect that's in any tangible way better than the other supports is Faraday Cage, and that effect still isn't good enough to give this set a niche to be chosen for, especially when its weaknesses are so, so glaring. Losing stacks to rez people feels bad. Suggestions Effects that scale with Static would be more in-line with the gameplay of other sets than a target cap that scales with static, more predictable and less frustrating. The majority of the powers need to have target caps comparable to the other support powers with similar effects or they're just bad. The offensive powers need an effect that makes the powers worth picking, much less actually casting - like -Res or -Regen. Faraday Cage would be much more attractive as a toggle. Chain powers should start from the caster instead of having to bounce back to the caster.

So is it intended that Gaussian's procs on the caster, not the target, when using a power like Forge that doesn't affect the caster? 'Cause that seems awkward and makes my Thermal Mastermind sad.

I do expect altering the behavior of every NPC in the game's powers to be way too much of a major change and too much work to do. I'm also not convinced that the AI is smart enough to deal with Endurance management. I think the idea of a scaling Scourge-like effect would be quite cool conceptually, but in execution I have my concerns about how well it would actually work with the breakneck speed of the PVE game. Most enemies die with near-full Endurance in my experience.

There's currently some lively discussion going on in the Focused Feedback thread for the new Electric support set, most of which is about the set being underpowered. There are a lot of reasons for that being discussed, but one that keeps coming up over and over again is Endurance Drain. It's perfectly thematic for an Electric set in this game to have its offensive power focused on Endurance Drain. Every single one of them does... except for Electric Melee. They're also all widely considered to be the very bottom tier of power... except for Electric Melee. This is not an accident. Endurance Drain has, never in the entire history of this game, ever, ever been good. It takes longer to drain the Endurance bar of most enemies than their Health bar, and before it's totally depleted the bar, Endurance Drain does nothing. This is compounded by the fact that any enemy that'd actually be worth Draining - AVs, GMs, raid bosses - is so resistant to the effect and has so much Recovery and such trivial Endurance costs for their powers relative to how much they have, that it becomes functionally impossible for it to do anything against them. In order to make a new Electric set that's actually good and fits the mechanical theme of the other Electric sets, that mechanical theme needs to be systemically updated to contribute some tangible value to the sets that have it. Or, forget about balancing the set around Endurance Drain the same way that Electric Melee did and give us some new powers with the impact of Lightning Rod.

The number of Support powers that can only support part of a team is a tiny, tiny handful compared to the ones that can, and none of them are in sets that have no other powerful team-wide support. Nobody's picking Empathy because Fortitude and Adrenal Boost are that mind-blowing, they're picking it because Regen Aura, Recovery Aura, and an AoE heal make a solid foundation of unlimited-target support, and Fortitude and Adrenal Boost add some nice icing to that cake. Again, there is no support set that is gated on maximum allies in this game because it doesn't work like that. A single team can hit 56 friendly targets without using a single temp power or cooldown-dependent pet. If Kinetics is allowed to permanently damage cap them all, I see absolutely no reason that this set shouldn't be able to give them all a measly +20% damage buff.

That's neat, and all, but it still doesn't address the fact that every other support set can support an entire team and all their pets, and this one can't support a full team and half of one Mastermind's pets... forget League play. Effects that scale in power with Static would be a lot more playable and less frustrating than target caps that scale with Static. It's just not a mechanic that meshes well with the Support role in this game.

First, I agree that the set needs to be renamed, please. Overall feedback: I love electric powers and I think this set fills a needed conceptual gap in the game. Chaining electricity is cool from a thematic and aesthetic standpoint. I do not like the implementation. Support sets in this game need to be able to support very large numbers of targets and this one just does not do that. A variable, finicky target cap that maxes out at 8 and requires micromanagement will make this set endlessly frustrating on mid-sized and larger mission teams and essentially useless for multi-group content. At high levels every player has Lore pets, many have Patton and Control pets, and some Masterminds can exceed this target cap alone. This is compounded by the fact that all of these chaining powers have diminished effects per target hit and the player has no control over who gets hit at all, much less in what order. There are also way too many powers that require an ally target. This set is essentially unusable solo at a total of 3 powers that don't require an ally target. A set that is bad alone and bad with more than a handful of allies is not filling a niche that needs to be filled. Even if these were consistently all the best support powers in the game by the numbers, I would never play this set as it currently exists because of the targeting. Power specific feedbac: Shock: Please change this to the T2 power. Being forced into this power on a non-Defender is going to be as bad as Force Bolt and Gale. It could really use some -Regen or -Resist. Single target end drain is not worth a power pick in PVE. Rejuvenating Circuit: Needs to be usable without a target and have no target cap or a much higher one with no diminishing effect. Discharge: Honestly worse than Shock, I would still never take this power. It needs a very strong offensive debuff if it's supposed to be worth losing Static charges. Empowering Circuit: This is kind of like Forge, which is okay, I guess. I'd be more interested if it affected the caster. Faraday Cage: Would be much more usable as a toggle. I can't see myself ever bothering with it as a ground effect. Too situational and too annoying to make work with pets or groups. Insulating Circuit: Aside from my overall problems with the targeting scheme, this seems fine. Defibrilate: The idea of losing my Static charges because somebody else messed up and needs a rez feels terrible. The utility of an AoE rez isn't worth the tradeoff. Dark Miasma's is worth using even without someone to rez around, this power isn't worth using over an Awaken. Energizing Circuit: This is just a sad, sad version of Transference that I, again, can't see why I'd ever use as-is. I'm not about to monitor other people's end bars for them, and even if I were I can't pick who it hits. Amp Up: If this power was a big AoE buff, it would be worthy of being a T9. As is it's too situational and it costs too much in the situations it's good in for me to ever want to use it. I'm sorry that this feedback is so critical. I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade. I think the set is a good addition from a conceptual standpoint, but I really, really feel that the execution needs to be taken back to the drawing board. It's a super busy, click heavy set that is seriously lacking in mechanical payoff for all of the effort it expects to have put into it. It's weak for soloing and weak beyond 8 friendly targets, and it doesn't have especially powerful effects in it even under its rare, ideal circumstances. I just can't see why I would ever pick it over anything but Force Fields, and that's really not a good place to be.

These changes look like an amazing start to making Pets and Henchmen less frustrating to work with. There's a lot more that could be done with Pets, and, especially Mastermind balance, but since that's not the focus of this patch, I'll just say that I have two suggestions that would make a major impact without getting into the nitty-gritty of set-to-set balance: Pet levels. They need to be the same as the player, always. Back on live, the Mastermind pets going to -1 and then -2/-1 level for minions / lieutenants was done in CoV beta as a cutesy thing to mimic NPC group level scaling, and never changed despite years and years of people saying it sucked and made Masterminds scale terribly against high end content. The live devs did eventually make things more fair by giving the minion and lieutenant pets a +2 / +1 extra Incarnate Shift so that Masterminds weren't literally unplayable in the endgame content, but this change really needs to be made game-wide and the Incarnate Shift removed instead. Pets, especially Henchmen, are too fragile. A huge part of this problem is the aforementioned interaction with the Purple Patch; the other major component being that ridiculously massive damage AoEs are extremely prevalent in high level content. Just about every major MMO now has a mechanic that causes Pets to take reduced damage from AoEs due to their relative squishiness compared to a player to direct attacks combined with the fact that AI is not smart enough to avoid AoEs and it's too taxing to try to make a pet avoid them as a player. City of Heroes really needs this mechanic. Badly. Playing a 40+ Mastermind against +3 or +4 content often devolves into an endless cycle of resummoning pets and rebuffing them literally as fast as the power recharges, only for all but the boss to be dead before you've even finished the power chain - and this is with either Defense or Resist capped pets. If I build for my pets to hit these caps it should mean something. It takes a lot of power and IO investment to do that just doesn't pay off the way it does on other ATs. In regard to the ranged pet AI changes affecting half the Demons, I to some degree agree with the above posters that it's generally better to keep your pets all together and this seems like it'll make that very hard, but at the same time those pets genuinely do not perform well in melee (partly because of aforementioned squishiness problems), so it's a bit of a wash as is.

If you're all looking at fixing Containment, are there plans to make it work with Sorcery/Enflame, Storm, Traps, or other pseudopets? I've always hated the fact that /Kinetics is the king of damage contribution (even solo, where buffs should matter less) over a set like Storm that's totally offense oriented.