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.

But if the enemies you're looking for aren't moving, this is useless. This is still useless anyways, it's not a stealth game. Just mash tab if you're trying to find targets. I'm thinking it's probably easier to git gud than it is to expect the volunteers to add entirely new audio engineering and programming to accommodate skill issues. Even if we remove dev effort as a valid argument (and tbh we should always do that - a good idea is good regardless of time investment), this isn't a horror game either, and some of those sounds are too quiet to be heard well. Not just that, but if you're listening to any audio at all, it's probably going to be your powers going off all the time, along with the rest of your team. If finding things is that hard for you, stop playing by yourself and announce in LFG you're making a mission team. It's pretty easy to find glowies and NPCs with 4 players, let alone 8. Whatever. Most maps aren't big enough for this to be an issue, and if you have a certain amount of glowies as an objective, your map will reveal the location of the last one. Of the maps that are big enough, their location tends to be relatively fixed or predictably set, e.g. 80% of the way into the map. Try a Savage Melee/Shield Defense Brute. You get two charging attacks, it'll be fun. It'll also let you do most of this without the need for a bunch of code to satisfy one player who can't look past their own experience to think about whether other players would appreciate the same things. How loathsome. Now misclicks or curious clicks can waste two loading screens' worth of time on random. Even if you were to go looking for this deliberately, since there's no quality control you're just as likely to get FIRE FARM CATASTROPHE 2.1 as you are a story that might resemble something related to your current zone.

A few questions. 1. This thread's still open? 2. You still post here? 3. You still want to commit to bad ideas in doomed threads?

I like it. Pistols looks forgettable but can slot Achilles Heel if your primary can't do it, and all the rest have a good use on their own merits. Nice and simple, and with all existing animations, so there's not much that stops it from getting in. Cool!

If we can't just have pets inherit all non-proc set bonuses, I guess this would be the next logical step, which would allow creation of a new enhancement set type for the pet buff powers.

Pretty sure we don't and never will. Thorns is generally a bad mechanic in pretty much every game - playerside it's either a write-off or completely cracked, while enemyside it starts at irritating and goes up to hard-counter. The best uses of it have been limited windows in PvP environments, e.g. Rammus in League of Legends. Also, a Thorns power is totally getting used for farming no matter how good/bad it is. The devs don't really like farming - I don't like it either but they will kill sets just to keep it down, which is a little scary.

Well, I gave a nice description of what every power is supposed to look like...so I guess those would be the visuals? I'm not sure what else you would call descriptions like "slash in reality", "jagged spikes burst from portals", or "cause a mass of tendrils to lash at all enemies around you".

Okay. I'm operating under the assumption that animations aren't a concern. Tier 1: Scrape - Attacks the target with a summoned, ethereal claw. Deals light lethal and negative energy damage, and reduces the target's defense. Realistically you only take this while leveling. Tier 2: Sever - An incredibly quick animation attack that causes a slash in reality directly on the target with a small gesture. Deals lethal and negative energy damage, and inflicts a 20% resistance debuff on the target, which wears off by 5% every 2 seconds. Tier 3: Flood - Open a portal from your hand and flood a 180 degree cone (so, a semicircle I guess) with deadly air from whatever realm these eldritch nightmares call home. Deals negative energy damage and slows enemies hit. Rather long recharge compared to similar T3 options. Tier 4: Grasp - A tendril bursts from the ground underneath a target and grabs on to it, crushing it and slowing it. Deals a significant amount of smashing and negative energy damage over time. If the target was already slowed, Grasp deals increased damage and immobilizes them instead. Tier 5: Mania - Increases your to-hit and damage for 20 seconds. The bonus is lower than Aim at first, but increases every 5 seconds to end at 140% of Aim's normal bonus for the last 5 seconds. Tier 6: Offering - Jagged spikes burst from portals and strike at a single target, dealing high lethal and negative energy damage and reducing the target's defense. Costs no endurance, but damages you on use. Tier 7: Ritual - A very non-typical sniper attack that carves out the area around the target for transmission into the same realm as these eldritch creatures, dealing significant negative energy damage to the target and enemies near the target. In combat, its quick snipe only targets one enemy. Tier 8: Torment - Haunting voices of madness infect a single target, dealing negative energy damage over time and reducing their resistance steadily over time, starting at 5% and maxing at 15%. Each time the damage ticks, it attempts to spread to two other enemies nearby. Tier 9: Dismissal - Unseal the ground beneath you and cause a mass of tendrils to lash at all enemies in a ludicrously large area around you, dealing heavy negative energy damage and pulling them all to your location while knocking them down. This is the best I can do, where it's less "fancy magic" and more "you're actually tag teaming with horrific eldritch beasts beyond our comprehension - or you ARE one this whole time". It's got some varied effects, and tries to bring some innovations to the table, e.g. Sever's strong-but-fading resist debuff, Mania's ramping power, Offering's health cost instead of endurance cost, and Torment's infections.

Uh...okay. I guess I can give this a shot. I mean, it's a T1 power. I guess having a damage debuff on that goes a long way to making it worth considering. We don't have "magic damage". I'm just going to pretend it's Negative Energy damage instead. Oh no nevermind apparently we get T2 powers that have AoEs. Just strike through my prior text above. I can't tell if this is a PBAoE attack or a targeted AoE attack like Fireball. If it's the former, you are ejecting multiple enemies out of range of your melee attacks, which is an interesting decision. If it's the latter, this is abjectly terrible, as you want to keep hitting the same group with AoEs, but the random knockback chance means you break up the group on hit, which forces you to pay the knockback tax for enhancements by slotting KB2KD. I don't understand what "stack quickly" means in this context. By default, a power only really activates once. This might visually look like ten blasts in a row, but it's still only one power doing its predetermined damage. What about it is supposed to stack quickly? I'm pretty okay with the idea of something that keeps buffing itself against the same target though. The core idea could be pretty cool when applied to something else. The problem with applying all of these random debuffs as a T4 power that can be accessed fairly early is that you don't have the power budget to make them have values worth a damn. The only thing the debuff roulette is good for is slotting a bunch of random sets since it'll qualify for slows, confuses, and whatever else it can apply. This also feels bad to use no matter what. Sometimes you'll high roll, but most of the time you're going to get some fairly useless effects, e.g. slowing melee-range enemies or weakening minions with nothing useful to debuff. Wait, where's Aim? Pretty sure by T5 we're supposed to have Aim on a blast set. This is fairly unremarkable. It does damage, it reduces healing. You take it, lament its good cooldown and terrible ability to hold procs, and use it on the big bosses that regenerate a bunch of health. Actually an interesting idea - applying crowd control in an area around a target instead of the target itself. Feels like there could be a lot of fun in that setup - maybe we copy Winter Wyvern's ultimate from DotA 2 and trap a guy while confusing and taunting all his buddies into pounding on him. On here, though? This is an unusual amount of mezzing coming from a blast set. I think it's okay on its own, but we've got knockbacks, the debuff roulette, and now the fear. Fairly certain there are other avenues of debuffs or added effects that can be explored here. Oh dear. At least the imagery is cool. The amount of mezzing in the set is out of hand now though - we're starting to rival control sets, but with the damage to back it up. Theoretically, anyways - we ARE missing Aim for some reason. No real comments here. I'd have swapped this with Chaos Wave personally so Chaos Wave's debuff roulette has room for bigger values. Classic PBAoE Blaster nuke. I think there's room for something more interesting than just knockback, and room for a more interesting name than Eldritch Nova, but the fundamental principle matches up with all the other blast sets. Anyways, the set has a large amount of AoE effects and way too much mezzing. If you kept it as is, it would have to lose out on damage to compensate for the mezzes, which would make Blaster users feel bad using it. ...wait, hold up. Why is there a tenth power?! @KingCeddd03 Serious talk: when you post threads like these and go out of the ordinary, you need to be up front about what you're doing, why you're doing it, and what you're expecting to hear from people. I have no idea why you made 12 powers instead of 9 for a set, you haven't posted any clarification yet, and there's nothing to suggest anyone should do anything other than take it at face value. I'm not really impressed by "randomness" as a hook for anything, least of all in a game like City of Heroes with fairly determined effects on powers. At least at...T10?...this has room for big debuff values. The same problems with Chaos Wave's lack of reliability plague this one too. ...explodes into what? Confetti? It's a big single target hit otherwise. Not much to comment on. This really bugs me because it's breaking the general conventions of the archetypes just to make the set feel special. Since Blast sets can be used by Blasters, Corruptors, and Defenders, we are giving all three of them access to pets through this power, when they don't - and shouldn't - have pets through their powersets. I also wish you were more specific with "multiple debuffs". There are so many different statistics you can debuff in this game, even down to esoteric stuff like endurance costs, jump height, and toxic defense. Multiple debuffs doesn't communicate nearly enough information to make a judgment about whether this is good. In summary: A couple of interesting premises that would work great on a control set Not actually bringing too much that's new to the scene No central theme - effects are too random, sometimes literally Way too much mez for a ranged damage set Why are there twelve powers. Needs far more detail from you - what you get out of these threads is about equal to what you put into them, and this doesn't look like you put in a lot

I think it's possible. The proc is just an autohit power I think. Very easy to add the knockback resist as part of the effect. I'm not opposed, I just don't think it'll reliably solve the problem. You're still at the mercy of proc rates, while knockback tends to be much more reliable in going off.

Yup! But big +recharge numbers in tier 2 isn't really a thing - hence my initial suggestion that Quicken get bumped later down the line so it has more room to be big. Either way, swing big! Nerfs are easy, if they're even necessary. Yeah, no. It really doesn't. Random-target roulette buff isn't particularly desirable for several reasons. You don't have clear feedback if this is even doing anything. It might catch allies that need it, or it might catch a pet that totally wastes it, or it might catch an ally who is about to drop in 2 seconds and there is no longer anything to be done to save them. You don't have any fine control over this. You turn it on and pray it hits someone in need of assistance. This lack of reliability means nobody on your team can expect to benefit from it at any given point in time. You can't really play around this without sabotaging yourself. Trying to manipulate range by moving around to target exactly one person requires flight (not possible in many indoor maps) or exposure to significant amounts of danger which all available ATs are poorly suited for dealing with. Any attempt to mitigate these flaws - say, by making the tick timer 2 seconds or so - defeats the entire purpose of this roulette. At that point, it's just a really slow, janky aura, and its inability to reliably affect everyone is a bug, not a feature. About the only mechanic I could see it be workable would be if it was a heal instead of a buff. It wouldn't be a particularly great heal, either, since you could just ping your full health ally five times in a row while your Scrapper dies next to you. You're better off with either a one-off buff on all allies, or a toggle aura that continually affects everyone. Undertow is working off a proven model, which is fine. It's also the first thing I'd cut here since you can get this elsewhere and it's not really breaking any new ground. I don't say cut as in "this is bad, drop it", but "this is taking up space that could be used by something more unique or with more value" - it happens frequently with drafts, and that's okay! As in you're passing up on defense debuffs because they're too common. Hence, "don't sleep on defense debuffs". They're a very useful tool, not just for the obvious mechanical effect of making it easier for everyone to hit things (VERY useful in lower level, pre-full build content where people have lower to-hit numbers), but also for the enhancement sets that come with it. Achilles Heel's proc enhancement is generally a good thing to have on every character whenever possible because -RES is just that good, and that needs to be slotted in a defense debuff power. Low endurance cost isn't the win you might think it is, unfortunately. Other supporting sets such as the S-tier Kinetics can negate endurance as a consideration entirely, and players are generally expected to solve their own endurance problems themselves with their builds. I wouldn't try to use low endurance to offset lacking certain bonuses or having lower effects. This does mean that "less for less" doesn't work. I don't believe that every power needs to be equal though - I think it's okay if Restorative Mist happens to cost less than the others anyways despite being the same power level. It really isn't a big deal. City of Heroes doesn't have enough space to accomplish this. Just go with your heart. Oh, if you're going for humor, just slap them with a 50% movement slow for 1 second. Job's done. The better question is "why does the cleanse have to have a downside at all". Other sets don't really have an issue with this, and the alt cleanse in this very set doesn't bother. The one that does - Pain Domination - only does so if they're close to full, and can quickly heal back that 10% health anyways. Is it supposed to be an offset for removing damage debuffs? Are you sure you really need that offset? I think it's part of the "this is too good, I need to turn it down" trap. If you delete the downside, or just merge it with the other cleanse, nothing's going to break. The set gets a really beefy ultra-cleanse that totally purges every possible debuff known to man and several only known to kheldians - awesome! This is generally applicable for everything in the world of game design. You always start strong and then tone down afterwards if necessary. Arguments over whether something is OP or not are much better than crickets and silence because it's so weak nobody cares, and when it comes to selling your game to your audience, you want big strengths you can point to. Starting weak just risks not having any clear direction. That's really bad - if you don't have a direction to go in with your design, there's nothing you can do to save it other than to start over. If you go strong, it's obvious to everyone what you're trying to do, and everyone can work with that. It does take some practice though. Not really an intuitive thing. Once you're aware of it, though, it's rather liberating. You can swing for the fences without a care. I'll take a look at these soon! Being able to help other people with their craft is why I take the time to write out these big posts. Best of luck.