CrusaderDroid

It's a fun fantasy, and I like the idea. I just don't think this implementation works - without the support from your secondary, you're left with pets that you can't buff, and unbuffed pets that you can't heal are going to die pretty fast at nearly all levels of content. Worse still, if you want to keep the pets up as they're dying, you're losing time getting animation locked into resummoning your pets. While you're in that animation, you're dealing 0 damage with your blast set. With support sets, you have large cooldowns and fire-and-forget effects, so you don't really take a hit to your effective output. You basically need to give the AT entirely new pets that are significantly more self-sufficient to make up for your inability to support your pets. That's significantly more work than changing a few powers here and there. I don't think it's a practical idea, accordingly.

Cuts both ways. OP's post history includes an impressive slam at the devs by denigrating them as mere modders. I'm not of the opinion they get the benefit of the doubt any more, especially when they're shotgunning a bunch of threads all over this forum with no thought about why anything they say should be implemented, which in turn pushes other threads out of sight.

All you're really doing is reinventing Street Justice for no reason. You haven't even provided a reason why this would be a good idea beyond "I AM TEMNIX, AND I APPROVE THIS MESSAGE". Who in their right mind would see your post, see all the effort it would take, and think "ah yes this is clearly what I need to do, Lord Temnix's word is truth"? Stop spamming this forum with your bad posts.

Besides the easy meme - this isn't really doing anything other than "MOAR DAMAGE!" against a very specific set of enemies at a very specific time, coupled with a focus on pseudopets for raw damage. I guess there's the interrupt gimmick, except if you played the game you'd realize Interrupt refers to the time in your own power where you can be interrupted, not the other way around. I guess that's another easy meme.

I can't emphasize enough how incredibly rude and disrespectful this is, not to mention outright dismissive of the new content Homecoming has added. You won't get anyone's ear by openly insulting the dev team.

Minimal FX requests are always worthwhile.

Kind of a useless endeavor, then. You're calling the set OP, but don't really have any useful criteria for that classification. Shield Defense looks a lot better in practical conditions. ...yes, and? I don't even know how to argue with this. There's no criteria, no value judgment, no comparisons. It's just a statement of fact, and we - or whoever else you're trying to convince, at any rate - are expected to read this and instantly understand "ah yes, two attacks at once, this is clearly over the top, how dare they"? I don't know what you're trying to accomplish here. This is objectively bad argumentation, and you haven't suggested any fixes for the set. The time spent on this would be better used making a Shield Defense Tanker and going out and having some fun in the game. ...well yes, I hope pets do this. I would hope that, in general, game designers recognize it is okay and in fact desirable for players to feel strong when using the tools given to them. I really do enjoy the flip-out over the pet's damage contribution when no numbers are given, the damage is listed as "minor" in the description, and there's no practical way to boost the pet's damage higher by yourself because you really don't want to slot a very killable melee pet more than you need to. I guess you can argue that a bunch of melee characters bringing their own pets on top of Kinetics would be a lot of damage? -RES is nice and all, but that's why you can slot this in with Achilles' Heel and Fury of the Gladiator and Annihilation (made possible through epic pool picks). It's great, but if you're serious about doing damage you'll have several other ways to stick it on. It isn't the end of the world for the pet to be able to apply -RES to one target - especially when two of those procs are for AoE powers and can hit multiple targets. The hell? No, seriously, the hell? Back up, drink some water, and come back to this and think this through. Neither of those are remotely comparable to each other beyond being T9 powers. They're on entirely different ATs doing entirely different things to entirely different groups of targets. Why would this be even remotely relevant to the conversation? Well, yeah. There's that "stating the obvious" thing again. This doesn't actually explain why any of this is bad. If anything, all of that is a prerequisite to make the thing work in the first place if it's supposed to fill in for a T9 power. Also, we're running off Tanker numbers here. Every other AT gets worse defensive numbers, which hurts both the AT and the pet by extension since the pet's running off both your auto powers and its own numbers. You could make the argument that maybe since the heal isn't as important, you could replace it with Animal Companion at an earlier level with less defensive power packed into it, thereby giving it more flexibility in its power range. (Sentinels have modified armor powers and Stalkers give up one power for Hide, so it's entirely likely that neither of them will get Animal Companion, either.) At the same time you want the heal because Panacea and Preventative Medicine are really good sets that you should be trying to slot whenever possible. The actual function of the heal is less important than enabling slotting heal IOs. I can see an argument about the to-hit debuff being excessive, but I'd want to see it work in action before declaring it OP. Test servers are great for seeing things happen in the wild. It really isn't untouchable though? If it was, Shield Defense's higher defenses in pretty much every scenario with a teammate would make Shield Defense the best armor set in the game, since by definition it can boost its defenses even higher. Given that people run things other than Shield Defense, and especially given the presence of Bio Armor, I don't think this would even budge anything, pet or no pet. Not that the pet matters. If you're solo and doing +4/x8, you'll hit the aggro cap, which means the pet draws aggro from the rest and rams into the terrible issue of not having any other way to boost its defenses enough to hit the defense soft cap, while getting no DDR. It'll die and take its 7.5% defense buff with it in short order. If you're solo and doing anything less than +4/x8 and crushing it...good for you, I guess. What's the point of 6.3k posts if your parting shot is a straw man that ignores the rest of the text after that? Like, this has to be some of the worst arguing I've ever seen on the internet. Arbitrarily narrow criteria for what qualifies as OP, a seeming lack of awareness of game systems and the meta and even just regular non-optimal gameplay, restating information as if that by itself can win the argument...Whatever your goal is, you're failing at it - not just because your arguments are weak, but because they're so weak that everyone can see how weak they are and judge that you shouldn't be taken seriously at all. @Trickshooter, you have my unequivocal support for whatever you make in the future. I think the set's a little shaky - way too close to Shield Defense in terms of values, not really pushing anything new between T1-T8, and the pet being generally suboptimal - but I like the theme, I like what you're trying to do and have done and will do, and I think there's plenty of space with what you've got to fix that up and make it better.

This lets a player softlock the mission if they AFK or just don't cooperate. Missing badges might suck, but at least you can still move forward with the content in the current state - you only need to worry about badges once. Greycat's suggestion is more palatable.

Huh, nice summary that proves my point for me - it's too close to Shield Defense, so it should get some changes that move it away from Shield Defense. It definitely shouldn't be reliant on the pet to bring so much defense - the pet starts off with 50% uptime on its base recharge, and while it can't draw aggro, it can still die or aggro something away from you, which lowers all those bonuses with the pet. You also really don't want to slot the pet with anything but recharge, and you can't boost its staying power by any means, so once all the big AoE stuff comes out your pet dies fast and takes a chunk of your defenses with it. You also don't play Shield Defense, and it shows - Grant Cover doesn't work the way you think it does. It grants defense debuff resistance and recharge resistance (Shield Defense does not get +recharge) to your team, which is both unique and incredibly powerful - recharge resist is nice, but giving your own team DDR of all things goes a long way in keeping everyone else alive when they can build or gain defense but can't build DDR. That it also grants a whopping 11.25% defense (assuming Tanker) to the rest of the team is incomparable amongst armor sets - Shield Defense is absolutely amazing as a set because it's the only armor set that buffs your team, and it does so to a huge effect with just one power. You've also left out Phalanx Defense, which buffs your own defense for every ally nearby. Even one ally increases your defense past this Wild Instincts set WITH the pet - it's a 3% increase in defense. Your comparison assumes a solo player, which doesn't mean much of anything when so much of the content revolves around teams. If you have even just 3 teammates in range, Phalanx Defense adds +9% defense, bringing Shield Defense to 29% defense all around, while Grant Cover returns 11.25% defense to the team to keep them alive longer. It has a chance to knock down enemies, a DoT is not particularly meaningful damage by itself, and while the resist reduction is nice, that's about the only thing that can keep it relevant. It's still a pet that wants to engage in melee on a set that can only provide it some 25% resistance. Unlike Masterminds, the set has no way to boost this pet's damage or survivability with a support set. Unlike Controllers and Dominators, the rest of the set isn't set up to make enemies unable to fight effectively. It isn't that having a pet in an armor set is inherently bad. It's that this pet is borderline useless - it's tying up part of your survival package to staying alive and wants to be slotted for maximum effect, but by definition you can't do anything to boost its staying power, it doesn't come with anything that helps it stay alive (ranged attacks, debuffs, self-buffs), and the -RES power means you want to let this thing go loose and attack your target instead of staying next to you and buffing you. As a bonus: all the DDR is on toggles, not the auto powers, so the pet, despite having +defense, has nothing to protect it from defense debuffs. It needs a total rework - thematically, having your pet wolf/tiger/panther/eagle get in there and fight alongside you is awesome, but it's so easy to kill and leaves you with a large gap in your defenses when it dies. Specifically: You lose -7.5% defense if your pet dies, is on cooldown, or is more than 30 feet away from you. This drops the set's defense below Shield Defense in your comparison. It isn't OP. Even if it was, at least it'd be playable and enjoyable. It's a predominantly PvE focused game - unlike PvP, where OP picks tilt the meta into something unenjoyable, the worst thing that happens here is that Tankers with this set get picked a little bit more often if you need to choose between two Tankers for a team slot. On an active enough server, the passed over Tanker is getting to play anyways, and on a smaller server like Reunion, you don't really get a choice on the Tankers to begin with - you take what you can get. It's also not generally a difficult game to begin with. Buff sets take everyone up to near godly levels with stacking resists and defenses, and this is before we get into many toons that can +4/x8 solo. If the set was OP, it's not really much of a bump to anything - even without incarnates, the IO system can get a lot of characters to a pretty OP state. About the only thing that would make this a little silly is if it could trivialize Advanced Mode content - which it can't, that damn pet is going to die horribly while eating your heals, and the set isn't bringing any powerful enemy debuffs or large amounts of +absorb or damage buffs. About the only argument you can make is that the pet helps when you solo. Cool. I'm glad the set can at least take care of itself when you can't or don't want to find a team. Otherwise, most of the points where the set excels (+regen, +regen resist, +perception) don't really mean much, and the major points that do matter generally fall short of Shield Defense. It needs some work to get it away from Shield Defense and offer something unique and new beyond the pet.

This isn't really a helpful post in general, but this is a repeating pattern in your post - if all you're doing is restating the effects without actually explaining what's wrong, there's pretty much no way the poor guy's going to know what they actually did wrong. In this case: while the power's kinda overloaded on extras, the intended focus - the melee defense - is on par with Tanker Shield Defense's Deflection. It's a defense set, so it could use some DDR - just maybe not at that value if it's going to keep the movement speed bonus too. (This also doesn't explicitly state it grants recharge, either.) Case in point: I don't see how this is supposed to be bad. The set is primary defense with more or less a token amount of resists split between two powers. It really isn't the end of the world if this one power is better than Resist Physical Damage if the rest of the set can't keep up with Invulnerability's overall well-rounded defenses and resists. Like, if we accept the premise that we can't have any individual power be better than any other individual power in another set, even factoring in overall set strength, we basically can't implement any new sets without making them hideously underpowered and consequently unfun. You cannot possibly be trying to sell me on Perception being the game-breaker here. Never mind that people in your team will run Tactics (which grants +Perception Debuff Resist anyways), the amount of times having a big Perception range is going to be helpful in PvE could probably be counted on one hand. Since you can have separate effects for PvP, you can nerf or remove the +Perception in PvP anyways. Once you get past that, it's Shield Defense's Battle Agility, except with +to-hit instead of +DDR. Not exactly the harbinger of doom here - the defense values line up just fine with Tanker's Shield Defense. Fairly certain all these numbers are running off Shield Defense anyways. Your next toon should be a Shield Defense toon, then. Shield Defense's Active Defense covers all of these debuffs, and more, including Terrorize, Confusion, and Knockback. This is not overly strong - you're just missing context on Shield Defense. It's True Grit. It's literally the same effects as True Grit. Shield Defense, again. You're comparing the wrong sets here. Like, my actual critique here is that the set is almost a palette swap of Shield Defense, now. I dunno, maybe because people will actually use this instead of the typical T9 powers that have horrific debilitating crashes that everyone skips? It's not even good, either. No AoE, no mez beyond a chance for knockdown - this thing's only output is ST damage and a buff to you, except that it can't draw aggro off of you. Since it siphons half your healing, you're basically handicapping yourself by summoning it - any time you need your self-heal, you've lost half of it to your pet that can't even peel for you. I still like it because it's unique and different compared to all the other sets. It's still bad - your team can do ST damage just fine, and while -res is always appreciated, you're more likely to have -res from your primary or epic pool through Achilles' Heel instead. The set's not OP. It just needs to not be Shield Defense with a few values swapped around. I think Relentless is the easiest thing to excise - after that, I wonder if you can split up the mez protection from Wolf's Endurance amongst other powers to make room for another new power. I think you want more enemy-facing debuffs on this set to really make it pop.

What, the double exp in Reunion and the double exp from the vendor isn't enough? The Mapserver event showed us really fast what happens when people level up too fast: they have no idea how to play their character and end up being dead weight for awhile. Base exp may be too slow, but going all in on tons of exp bonuses means people won't learn how to play their character. That's bad for everyone involved. I think the existing set if you play on Reunion is good enough - you can outlevel really long arcs if you aren't careful, but you get plenty of time to learn your powers as you go.

Discuss the actual mechanics of the proposed set? Nah, let's just clown on the thematics! Surely that's the quality feedback OP is looking for! Unbelievable. Looks brutal. I like it. This one's weird since it's your only heal and it's a single target affair. I'd imagine with the natural properties of sound, you'd have an AoE of some sort, like Nature's cone heal. This is fantastic. The Charm mechanic boosting that defense up further is good stuff. Generally, sets should have something unique to them to set them apart from the rest. The sheer power on this toggle coupled with the mez resist is a great way to hit that uniqueness. This one is tricky. It's actually a really powerful buff since at max charm stacks it's got a big damage boost for your entire team. The problem there is, well, Fulcrum Shift, which blows this out of the water. This isn't normally a bad thing, except that it's a toggle constantly draining your endurance, and the taunt/placate resist is mostly flavor rather than useful. I don't think it's bad, but the optimal build probably skips this and hangs with a /Kin Corruptor. If you want to keep it relevant even then, it could grant resistance to damage debuff effects. (Damage buffs are always unenhanceable - there are no +DMG buff enhancements in the game.) I don't think support sets get mezzes like this, actually. Ah well. This is actually cracked because it's a mag 3 hold with 18 second recharge, giving you the perfect combination to proc this out with Hold's amazing set of procs. I like it, accordingly. Skip. Endurance only effects are generally forgettable if you're the only one that can use them. The vast majority of enemies will die well before your sole debuff can bring them down. It's different if you use Electric Blast or have allies that do, of course, but otherwise you probably drop this. If you're not okay with that outcome, you're best off giving it more universally applicable effects, such as -defense. (This is also single target in a set about music, which is still weird.) Obsoletes Tactics. Awesome. ...I just noticed all three of your toggles are upgraded Leadership toggles. That's funny. Still a good power. Woof. This holds a lot of procs. It's an all around good power, but that 30 second recharge coupled with some very fun proc options means this is also a hilarious nuke roulette. The confusion duration is so bad that it's not even appreciable when it triggers. Bring It up to 10 seconds as a minimum, especially at mag 2. Ooh, a debuff nuke. I like this - it's tailor made to flip fights in your favor. The only downside compared to a big buff is that the debuff dies with your enemies, so in most cases you get less mileage out of it than buffing your team. It's still great to have for those big AV fights though. Overall: This is a really fun set, with its big auras helping to keep it apart from the other sets. Keep up the cool work.

And that's the punchline.