TygerDarkstorm

Seeing the other feedback here from people saying they've noticed an increase in performance from their Bots MM's tells me that it's pilot error on my end that I had borderline opposite results, lol. It probably doesn't help that I don't have a lot to compare my beta attempt to from live since I haven't played that toon much since it hit 50. I am thinking that while Bots/Nature is decent, it's probably not the *best* performing primary to pair with Bots in terms of soloing large spawns of more diff mobs or something (e.g., trying to go x8 on Malta even with a level shift). So far the main benefit I've had over some of the other reports here is that, so long as I didn't get mezzed and could keep the faerie patch up, place my bots on go-to in it (I have it slotted for end mod), they didn't seem to have quite the endurance issues. I feel like with how good maint. drone is, that the baby Bots/Cold MM I have on live will become more potent; might be one worth testing and bumping up on beta to see if it feels better to me. And heat loss should help the bots w/ endurance.

Perhaps I am just a terrible bots player, but I don't know how I feel about the changes. I copied my Bots/Nature over to beta and equipped her with some IO's since she's not built at all on live and got wrecked on the final mission of the Scorpion arc - mission was level 46 and I had left my settings at +4/x8 from radios I had been running (and I have a t3 level shift thingy). Decided to leave it since the Malta inside were then even level to me. I didn't take any of the personal attacks as I just wanted to see what the DPS of the bots felt like. I got my ass beat... handily. Now, I'm not gonna say it's because of the lack of -regen from the AssBot; I'm fairly sure it's my lack of skill as a player and not knowing how to build a toon. I thought I had built in some decent mez protection in my set bonuses, but I was constantly being mezzed and frantically trying to keep my bots up on their feet, leaving barely enough time to use my attacks from my epic pool, let alone if I had had any of the pulse rifle attacks. I kind of sort of got a strategy going, but if I got mezzed at all, even the second or so needed to pop a break free would be enough to start causing cascade failure for my pets to stay up. I ended up giving up because I need to go pick up my daughter and to let some of my frustration cool down and come back to rethink my diff settings and strategy. I couldn't tell if my bots' damage had increased or not; my fault for not playing the toon regularly on live I suppose. Slightly more relevant feedback: I like the new Maint. Drone dude. I dislike that he can't obey any sort of pet command and thus follows me when I'm trying to go pluck a mob and dart back to my faerie patch/bots setup, but that's a minor issue. His showing up in the pet window doesn't bother me either because I'm used to using that window for many other pets that function in that same manner (e.g., Illusion pets, Traps "pets"). I use it to monitor how the drone is faring so I know when I need to resummon it. Slotting definitely still feels tight, especially for someone like me who already struggles figuring out where to put things. Reading the feedback, I thought it would feel more opened up, but oof, it's still tight without maintenance drone being able to be used as a mule like in some of the other sets. I tend to be more of a team player than a soloist, but I will come back to this at some point and see if I can't get it working as I like to learn. I don't like to do AV/GM solo stuff typically anyway, so I feel I will probably be okay with not taking the personal attacks and losing the -regen there if I can get my bots to stay on their feet and do damage.

Depending on the time on Saturday, I could join you guys on Brainstorm for a Yin test as well.

They do; I noted it in my feedback as well. 🙂 Nice visual indication and it looks cool to boot, lol.

You might find it worth your while. 🙂 I certainly found the set far more enjoyable to play and seeing Shocked! start flying around (alongside Scourge if you're a corruptor) gets to be quite fun.

Erm, what? The changes made to Elec Blast recently, especially the addition of the shocked mechanic, has bumped Elec Blast up quite aways. I want to say that on... was it @Bopper's blast comparisons the new Elec Blast moved to like A-Tier? One of @Voltak's top end HM defenders is an Elec/Elec Defender.

Thank you, I suppose damage is the word I am looking for. 😛 It's such a neat assault set, but even paired with powerhouses like Plant, it just plays so... meh. I do wonder if an Ill/Rad dom might be fun though.

I don't have much to add here, but from my brief bit of testing on a level 29 Fire/Rad Scrapper kitted with basic IO's: Thank you for giving this powerset some love. This character has been shelved for a while because it just felt dismal to play even though I liked the concept. Attacks certainly have a bit more crunch/char to them and feel like I'm doing much closer to proper scrapper damage Can't comment to the defense debuffs yet since I don't really have the slots available to mess with them yet, but hope to soon Something still seems a tad off. I feel like the previously mentioned suggestions of speeding up the dots might help this. I feel this will improve the flow of the set (at least at the mid-lower levels) as well as leave out less risk of you trying to determine if you should expend end on another attack or not or if the mob will die from a DoT.

I realize that those of us posting in these threads are but a tiny fraction of the playerbase, the general consensus thus far to the FF changes appears to be lukewarm at best. I have never been much of a Force Fields player, so I'm hesitant to test these changes since I have no real means of comparison for them on live, but from what I'm seeing from many others here whose opinions I respect, these do not seem to be the direction many players wanted FF to go, and I have to agree. I wholeheartedly agree that FF should provide some sort of absorb somewhere, maybe in one of the shields applied to others? Idk, but it seems fitting (having absorb, not necessarily where I mentioned adding it). Adding the DDR component I've seen mentioned somewhere would be great too (or more of it than what they did add). The -res tacked onto Force Bolt and increasing the CD on it feels... idk if lazy is the right word... uninspired? I am of the opinion where I want powersets to have something that makes them stand out some and give you a reason for picking them. Making FF be Cold Dom Lite does not do that. I realize that not every community member suggestion is gold, but there have been some high quality suggestions that garnered a good amount of support for sets like FF that it feels weird to just see them ignored entirely.

This is honestly what I was hoping the single target immob they added was going to be (AoE immob instead of single target). I don't mind keeping the stealth because it has its uses. Though I understand potentially why we didn't get an AoE immob since I do see forumites frequently mention how it gets lower-level/new players killed and messes with clumping mobs around the tank.

I thought about Ill/Martial myself, but /Martial just feels so bad on doms, imo. It's lacking something that makes it feel like it has some oomph to it compared to some of the other secondaries (though it's probably better than /Elec and /Thorny), but maybe Illusion will be the primary it needs to shine a little more.

This is how I'm looking at it. I specifically rolled a Traps Defender on live instead of a Corruptor because I wanted to be able to skip web grenade because it's nigh on useless without the /Devices treatment. This means my low level /Traps MM's can now take Caltrops instead and have something more helpful to contributing to killing/arresting mobs than fuddy duddy web grenade. Though admittedly the addition of powers coming at earlier levels threw me off some on first read. Maybe the people lucky enough to run groups on Beta can hopefully test and report how it feels in the level ranges most impacted? By myself I don't seem to notice much of a difference on the 2-3 characters I copied over in the 26-30ish range. They certainly don't feel game breakingly overpowered--I faceplanted on at least 1 of them multiple times.

No more KB -> KD tax for bots either, which should help alleviate some of the slotting as well. 🙂

Not yet. I need to play around with the slotting some more and maybe respec her. The auto enhance feature is also crap; I did it just to do some fast testing because I need to get some sleep, but it definitely doesn't provide optimal choices. When I have time I'll get in there and swap out those enhancements as well and see if that helps. And hope that others will also test these changes, lol.

My initial thoughts in my brief testing tonight: omg please, please look at the MM end tax, especially for Necro These changes are really cool, even though I didn't have any specters appear that I could tell, but soul extraction has a pretty massive end cost, and we're supposed to be utilizing our primary attacks plus secondaries? Ouch Not all of us gild our alts out with attuned IO's, or even basic IO's and such, so someone that hasn't built up a lot of inf to slot their necro character is going to struggle with balancing the primary attacks with everything else For those who have auditory sensitivities, Necro is now almost as loud as Demons, though only in combat--that life-steal noise added into the second upgrade is pretty screechy The zombies are pretty tough now, but kill speeds still seem a bit slow (granted, that's at level 28 with basically nothing slotted up yet because I hadn't added to the toon after copying it to beta; just wanted to see the changes before I went to sleep). Yes, I know all the sets can't be amazing Overall the changes seem nice, soul extraction is really fun. I look forward to messing with it more.

While I mentioned my Ninja/Nature MM initially, I actually copied my Ninja/Cold MM over to the beta. This character was only level 26 upon port, and slotted with a mix of IO's and SO's. That character had been idling on Dean MacArthur's chain in Sharkhead, so I decided to continue it on beta. The Good: Watching the crits fly is great; it wasn't widely known, but ninjas are technically have the highest single target damage, the crits will only add to that. Smoke Flash is fun to use now. I had it anyway for shiggles I think, but now I can actually see it truly being effective, especially now that it affects all of the henchmen. Train Ninja now puts the genin and jounin into the ninja run stance and gives them stealth, which looks super cool to go with the changes mentioned in the OP. The Bad: Maybe this is just player error, or because I am lacking the second upgrade, but they are still quite squishy in this level range (26-27). I am only playing at +0/x2 and I think I will have to turn the diff back down to +0/x1. I even added freebie IO's to try and help out things like Arctic Fog, Maneuvers and the shields to provide more def/res and I'm still faceplanting on even level content. They only seem to be able to handle one target at a time, so if you as the MM aggro anything more than that, you're the one taking damage, and even in bodyguard mode, I don't have enough ways to shake the mobs, and using Attack my Target breaks bodyguard mode. I will be interested to see what kind of a difference the final upgrade power makes (currently says Kuji-in Zen on powers tab in beta instead of the new Kuji-in Sha; haven't tried a respec yet, or hit level 28, to see if that name will change on its own to the new one). I also hope that those with better skill than myself will test these changes and report what kinds of results they get with them.

Okay, so far, I am in *love* with these mercs changes. I copied a bunch of my live characters over to beta as I had some that I wanted to specifically test. Now, with my Mercs/Traps MM, I have been trying to solo the Black Scorpion patron arc and have been failing miserably. I'm playing at +0/x4 and no matter how carefully I tried to set up all my tricks and traps and haul the crey to their doom, I failed miserably. My mercs couldn't do enough damage, I couldn't do enough to keep them alive... It was a mess. So, my first test was to test the toon exactly as she is in Live. So even without a respec into things like Serum or loading her up with some freebie enhancements (she's underslotted atm on live), I made it through the first wave that's right at the door entrance in the Attack Crey Lab mish. I'm not even sure I can put into the right words how much more improved the experience was that I wasn't running out the mish door nearly dead because I couldn't summon and buff fast enough to stay alive. I left them at these settings for a few spawns to keep getting a feel for it, started losing some mercs, but no catastrophic failures. After clearing the first floor I decided to respec the toon and provide it with enhancements. No sets or anything, just basic IO's like I do for my toons on live. Again, another marked improvement. Wow... I now properly feel as if mercenaries can properly contend with the other front runners of MM henchmen. Granted, I cannot tell just yet how much my personal attacks are aiding, but I went from feeling like I was going to delete this toon to now being very excited to play her and feel almost as powerful as my Ill/Traps controller does. Now when I leave shellcasings everywhere, they come with a side of actually arresting enemies. 😛

You must have posted right before I edited my post. 😉

Was this an intended side effect of the new power pick changes? I went to respec my Mercs/Traps MM on beta and now I don't even have the option to pick anything from my primary as my first pick? o_O Edit: It helps if I actually go through the respec process: The first pick at level "0" is from the secondary, and my second pick was also at level "0" where I chose my desired primary. Then it continued as normal.

Well now, this ought to make the Ninja/Nature MM I have running through Praetoria a whole heck of a lot more interesting to play. I have so many things I want to try out for this new page! 🤣

Fire Melee was actually pretty bottom of the barrel; despite being a fire power, it didn't have the oomph that things like Fire Blast do.

Think you might be in the wrong thread, mate. This is for Illusion Doms, lol Edit: Nope, it's me in the wrong thread. Ignore me. >_>

I pretty much only play on Everlasting, but thank you. 🙂 I love terrible and cheesy puns of all types, so I'm sure you'll see Mad Cow Disease and Bull Pucky around as my terribly-named bovine contributions. 😛

omg this is brilliant and I'm jealous I didn't think of it. 🤣