drbuzzard

I made the point during the beta that the set lacks enough melee damage powers to be a proper blapping set, but has 2 AOE powers well suited to that. The set came across as confused as to purpose to me. Of course by the time the set was in open beta they probably didn't want to revamp the whole thing. I suppose some people might enjoy it, I just know I won't bother playing it.

I'm 100% behind this. I've made suggestions somewhat relevant to this before (believe I suggested doing away with the limitation of the 10 for 10 shard to thread swap per day). Shards are a relic of the original incarnate design where every tier of slots would have a different form of salvage just so things would drag out as long as possible. This isn't the case here at all with veteran levels, so this relic of that era might as well just go away. Oh, and as an aside, I simply don't understand people complaining about judgment being too powerful. I have to wonder if any of them have actually teamed with a blaster before. A blaster who likes to nuke can have theirs up ever 40 or so seconds doing appreciably more damage than Judgement. Heck, my archery blaster drops rain of arrows which does about the same as judgement every 17 seconds. Heck, Sentinel nukes are pretty close to Judgement in damage and I have those up on all my sentinels in the low 20 second range. Judgement is 90 seconds of recharge which cannot be reduced. The only big advantage to Judgement is target count. As for other suggestions, interface is really odd and may need some rebalancing. A number of the secondary effects are practically negligible, and degenerative stands out head and shoulders above the rest. Personally I'd like it if the others got a boost instead of swatting degenerative. Hybrid- the Support option is exceedingly weak. It is really out of whack with what the rest of them do for you. I think I did craft it on one of my alts, but I know better now. Even on a defender you can just do better with melee for example. I know the dev team is cautious about too much stacking buffs/debuffs, but this is incarnate, and effectively this power amounts to being a trap which wastes threads and salvage.

Be nice if there was a way to use energy without giving up a slot for KB>KD, however it is what it is. If you're just soloing, you can do without that, but on teams scattering targets when you aren't a particularly big damage dealer will be frowned upon. I will say that IMO the only bad secondary is ice. It's just the red haired stepchild of secondaries where by and large the rest are pretty damned solid. Bio is damage king, but will take some work to get defenses up there, and also will be be served by using the autoclick on ablative carapace (or some other way to keep it up all the time). Way bio is, you might just as well stay in offensive mode since it's all about the damage (25% damage enhancement and some bonus toxic damage which is a variable % depending on the attack). Fire has one damage boosting toggle which gives 10% enhancement and then possible fire DoT. Electric, radiation, SR, and energy aura all give recharge boosts. I consider that a form of offensive boost myself, if not explicit. Ninja allows a damage boost from hide, but only then.

Oh it's certainly workable, it's just very unpleasant. With combat teleport, the things which made it too unpleasant to bear for me to play, have be mitigated. Yes, the design certainly is a bit of a mess, but many of the suggestions I've seen would make the set unrecognizable.

Oh, and before everyone jumps on the 'stone armor needs love' bandwagon, I'd like to get some runtime in with the currently godly granite using combat teleport. I've tried it on test, and let me tell you, it really changes the ballgame.

I'll put in a vote for assault rifle like the rest. It's set which hinders itself, lacks anything really good, and the special power tier 9 is simply awful. Heck, they had the mercy to cut the animation time of rain of arrows which was already better, but Full Auto still leaves your behind hanging in the breeze. Not really sure if an emergency buff is sufficient though. Perhaps make the cones about the same dimensions, make M30 knockdown, expand ignite (and I'd still skip it), cut animation of a bunch of things (M30, Flamethrower, FA). That would be comparatively quick and make the set bearable. I got an AR/Dev to 50 back on live way back when. I wouldn't touch that set again with a 10' cattle prod as is. Sonic blast needs some mercy. It has too many 'attacks' which don't do squat damage, and the attacks it does have suffers from way long animations which ruin DPAS. Heck the only good attack in the set is sentinel screech, and the rest of the poor ATs don't even get that. On paper it looks AOE heavy, till you notice that 2 of 3 cones don't do any damned damage. Quick fix: Add damage to all the cones (perhaps just dump the damned sleep), and cut the animations till you have some decent DPAS powers in the set. I think there's simply too much concern about resistance debuff to be quite honest. When one considers it as a damage boosting effect, you must remember it suffers from the purple patch debuff in addition to the damage debuff, so unless you're fighting even con critters, it's far less potent than a straight damage boost.

Have to agree. The speed improvements to BS and TF, along with turning the fairly useless stun into an OK AOE is a vast improvement.

True, but I like playing it so much, I keep testing anyway.

Yeah, that's utter BS. If you don't know the set in the least bit, you are not qualified to make an argument. I fully admit I don't play EM currently and have not bothered on HC. However I now have 3 alts waiting for this version to go live. I have tested it a fair bit, though not as much as some.

Fair enough. I was wondering in a general form.

Yeah, I figured that, but I still don't know who they are calling out.

I'm unclear on your meaning. Are you talking about people bashing the current state of affairs on HC, or bashing on beta? My first villain (back on COH live) was an EM/EA stalker. That's what I recreated and tested on beta. I've got a reasonable idea of how EM plays on HC since I had my main villain and my main hero (fire/em tank) both nerfed into goo with the EM changes back on live. I think the changes on beta are great. The version not on Beta I can't imagine bothering to play ever.

Ok, copied my Shield defense/dark melee tanker to test, respecced and gave it a try. The build was made to get very close to perma soul drain, and it is within a few seconds -3 iirc). Defenses are over capped positionally, and resistances are pretty good with 90% l/s and around 40% for most of the rest. It's very durable and does high damage. On live I have energy torrent for an extra AOE. On test I respecced out of energy torrent and into the new Touch of Fear. It was a nice upgrade. While I lost the ability to cause trouble at a distance, generally a tank is in the center of things so a ranged cone is hard to get value from. In my case the fact that ToF was a targeting AOE mean that the IOs could just transfer between the powers on the respec. Incarnate was agility radial, hybrid assault core, void radial, degenerative core interface, knives of vengance core. As I've played this character plenty enough, I went straight into the solo ITF test at +1x6 (though I could have done x8 just as well). First mission was simple enough. ToF was a significant improvement when I had to clear out flunkies because they would just mob me. The PBAOE nature made it stack well with the wide tanker cone of shadow maul. It's funny, when I read the stats on it when respeccing, I felt it looked rather weak, but with all my inherent damage boosting and the fact cycle, it made for reasonably fast crowd clearance. I'm quite sure dark melee won't become any farming AOE flavor of the month any time soon, but it is a significant improvement. So cleared that mission, and went onto mission 2 running it speed style, smashing crystals and ignoring everything else. With fairly good stacked defense (with excellent defense debuff resistance) and resistance I wasn't in much danger at any point. The siphon life was plenty to stay healthy. Smashed my way through that pretty fast. On to mission 3, clearing the unstoppable EBs would take longer than I liked, but the Minos went down fine and the cyclopses just had to run out the power. The console took a while to beat down, though I was never in danger. The AVs were also no real trouble though I ended up with both on me as well as the aggro cap worth from the platform. This was a benefit though since it fueled against all odds and soul drain. Beat those down in a reasonable amount of time. I still wish ranged pets from lore had the sense of a squirrel and would stay at range. In mission 4 I figured the main thing I was testing was the Touch of Fear change so I started on the towers and cleared one of them. It went quick enough with the fast cycle of SM/ToF and added sprinklings of shield charge. On to the courtyard and Rommy. I cleared the couryard, again faster than before because of the ToF upgrade, and then accidentally pulled Rommy while collecting the EBs. Now the near autohit attack from the nicti actually meant I had to lean on the siphon life a lot, but it was sufficient . Eventually I beat down Rommy, but it took a while, and that was enough testing for the night. Playing on a tanker the AOE changes to shadow maul were lessened and the touch of fear change worked rather well. I was able to beat down crowds faster than before, and without nearly as much positional issues as when I relied on energy torrent. It was a fairly minor change (only 2 powers) but it had a notable performance improvement in crowd clearance. I give it 2 thumbs up. I will say I'd probably agree that PBAOE IOs would make more sense in the power, but it didn't impact me in a negative fashion.

Hmm, the scrapper should do better on radial. Wonder what radial uses for the damage base to double. Well maybe better. Hard to say with both a good damage scalar, but also follow up.

As it was, not using barrage at all, I did stun the AVs outside of their purple triangles just fine. I greatly prefer the current arrangement so I don't screw up my fast ET animations. BS is best kept as a damage tool, not a stunning tool.

I never take placate. There's pretty much always something you can pick which will be more useful. Stalkers don't need it to crit anymore.

That's odd, one would think that the presence of follow up would make the double hit that much more appealing since the proportional amount gleaned from Hybrid core would be reduced.

Ok, decided to take a tank for a spin last night. Made up a dark/EM tanker. The build didn't try to be a 2 bit dom, so I skipped the 2 mez powers and the rez. Had fighting pool and flight (simple because I like flying). Defensive focus was pushing resistance as high as possible. Had capped l/s/psi/neg E, fire/cold without tough running (this is with defensive buff and core cardiac up, so might miss a few of those with the def buff off). Energy was OK at 60ish. I went with dark since I'd not tried it on a tanker before, my old experience with it being on a sentinel. Whoa doggy, that heal is something else. Yep, it eats endurance like it's going out of style, but I built around fear of that huge endurance cost, and it didn't really cause me any grief. As mentioned before I did Cardiac core, and piled on energy mastery EPP with conserve power (which I never had to use) and physical perfection (slotted with +end perf shif, and panacea proc). Since I'm big on caring about DPAS (someone may have noticed this), I didn't bother slotting up barrage or putting it in my tray. Everything else from EM was taken and slotted up. I even took build up, which is rare on my tankers, but I was scared of the end cost of running assault (which given the current numbers is one of my favorite options). Incarnate was cardiac, cognitive, pyronic, assault, and vanguard radial since I figured I'd want a lackey who could debuff regen and not die. So I got it all thrown together and slotted up then tried out the Cimeroran city wall. This was a piece of cake. Build up with whirling hands and power crash would mow down the lvl 50 minions and maybe leave a lieut alive. Moved on to the 'prove yourself' mission and did that at +4x8 so see how the armor set would fare. As mentioned, that is one hell of a heal. Yes, I'd get beaten down, but pop the heal and you're topped off lickety split. Recharge on the heal is quick enough that I had no issues. Perhaps if I was fighting energy damage heavy foes, it might be an issue, but I never had trouble. Even collecting a couple of spawns at once didn't really faze me. I had a minimal number of toggles running and heavy endurance discount so I never had endurance issues even though I didn't pick up the freebie accolades. Ok, time for a test run solo ITF. Things were set for +1x4 (so things were at least even level, and so I'd have enough targets that the 'kill this many' missions wouldn't be a pain. Plowed right through the first mission with no issues, though I did skip the ambush since I was a bit skittish about the energy damage. Yes, I'm a wuss. Went on to the second mission and did it speed run style, just smashing the shards and moving on. This would get a bit hairy at times with a couple of ambushes chasing me and EBs pounding on me while smashing crystals, but the amazing heal kept me from pushing up daisies. On to the next, started at the bridge and pretty much just general hopped up the hill, though I did some clearing on the way if groups got aggroed. Also, you just need to clear surgeons regularly. They are like roaches. This was where cognitive was handy since it would help put down the cyclopses without me having to wait for the unstoppable drop. Smashed the console without too much difficulty, though all the robots and energy blasts meant I did pop barrier for the last wave. Then I moved up and pulled Requiem down and beat him down. I made use of assault for this, but it wasn't much trouble. Chain was something like TF>ET>BS>EP>PC repeat. Total recharge boost was only in the 80s. Perhaps I'll figure out a better build and get perma hasten up, but PC isn't too bad DPAS. Requiem fell to this easily enough. Then it was time for Rommy, and I popped the radial Vanguard lore for him, which made it all easy enough. Not sure if it took more than the lore duration, but either way, I didn't run 2 lores, so it wasn't too long. Then the last mission. Ick. Went straight to the courtyard and cleared it. Then I cleared the EBs. Moved on to Rommy, and made little headway beating on him even with lore up. Decided to shift tactics and went for the nicti. I was able to beat them down using assault and lore. Survival was never a concern as the heal was always available, and getting 1.1k heals per target means no issues. Eventually I got all the nicti beat down, then I focused on Rommy. Bastard started healing on me without anything there to heal. No, not regen, there were visible green numbers and I couldn't see a surgeon anywhere (could be I missed it, but I looked). I kept at this for a while but gave up eventually. So what did a learn - dark armor is pretty damned good because of the heal. You can get all resistances high enough that if you don't get slowed a bunch (oh yeah, that's when the second mission got hairy, I'd get slow and then was desperate for the heal to come back up) you will not die. But that's not the point here. The test lesson for beta was EM now has a solid attack chain for beating things down, and is sufficient for non cheating AVs. It's also good enough for AOE, though certainly not king in that area. No, I didn't try out barrage, but the DPAS is so awful, I can't bring myself to touch that crap.

Personally I think they need to since procs have come to dominate over actual damage capacity of sets. They really do distort the hell out of things. But yes, I do think they will address them at some point, and it will make a lot of the guides here outdated as many are very proc focused. For the moment though, I do throw some procs in here and there, though I usually aim more for set bonuses for recharge or defense.

Built up a TA/Rad blast defender yesterday and gave it a bit of a test drive. I did a simple rounds of clearing the walls in cimerora then doing the prove yourself mission from the repeat mission guy (+1x8). I can't really say I got a proper feel for the total debuff capacity since I wasn't fighting any AVs, and much of what's in there really needs a hard target. Mostly I used a lot of disruption arrow and oil slick. But as to why I included this excerpt- there's simply too many location powers in the set now, and it will make playing it a royal pita. That would be one of the reasons I didn't use a whole lot of the powers because of the bother. I had them, but rarely deployed them. Oil slick arrow was on the shift+lclick bind, so I used it whenever it was up, and I will willing to put on disruption arrow, but I just skipped the rest most (tested all at least once, but for actual use- not really).

Ok, tried out the new changes on my Em/EA stalker. Ran the Rammiel arc on +1x8. I had no difficulty plowing through it all. Changing Bonesmasher so it doesn't consume the energy thingy is quite helpful, and it makes it much easier to just chain things as they are available instead of being careful. Putting the consumption into barrage works for me, since I skip that power anyway (and I really don't value the stuns to any appreciable degree). I was able to beat down Echo of Minos and the Honroree very quickly. Sometime I'll probably build a EM tank, and then barrage will be annoying, but as with all T1 garbage powers on tanks, I'll just not slot it up and leave it out of my tray. The mandatory T1 powers on tanks is irritating, but it's just part of the game. A switch might be nice, but I won't hold my breath. Some people actually like barrage, though for the life of me I don't get why.

Nice thing about that elec hold, vs. fire which lacks one, is it allows a good number of damage procs if you want to play that game.

Archery is a kind of a dud on sentinels since the standardization of nuke recharge means that rain of arrows, which is normally (on every other AT) a 60 second recharge, goes up to 90 second recharge on sentinels. The single target stuff is OK, but archery as a set is always made by the fast recharging RoA. I'll second the elec/bio- it works quite well, and while it was mentioned that you run stupid fast, it also makes you hover at flight speed.

I quite like this idea. As I'm in no way a badger, this would at least make it easy enough to accomplish even if still a bit tedious. I have the vidiot maps installed, and it remains a bother to collect all the badges (that I rarely do, and hence I almost never have accolades).

Ok, built up a Dark/Sonic blaster last night and gave it a spin. I will admit I wasn't as thorough as I might have been as I skipped Strident Echo, Echo Chamber, and Sound Cannon. However I just followed my normal approach to making a build as I would were it live and then give that optimized build a run through some simple enough content. My approach was to load up on attacks, skip mezzes, and go for a resistance build based on Sound Barrier. I added tough from the fighting pool, and Charged armor from the EPPs. Only after I had things together did I notice that Sound Barrier only does smashing resistance, not lethal and smashing resistance. I found that to be rather odd, and perhaps the only place I've see that other than increase density from kinetics. After I tossed in a defense buff to avoid mezzes, my smashing was capped while energy and lethal were pretty high. I had alpha slot set up with resilient radial to optimize the resistance (and absorb). I did a test run in Cimerora. I started by clearing the city walls for a few rounds. This proved to be easy enough. The absorb shield coupled with the resistance was enough to make the wall parties of romans into no real threat. I suppose if I just stood there, I might have died, but as it was I had plenty of time to kill them all off, even with dark not being one of the strongest blaster sets (and I wasn't catering to its strength with a defensive build). I went on to try out some of the repeatable cimeroran missions on +0x8. This went well enough if I was careful and didn't aggro more than one spawn at a time. If I got two on me, I would die consistently. So impressions of the powers: Sonic Thrust: Dayum, that thing really flings a target. I was pitching surgeons off the city walls for distance and humor. Sound Booster: I only really used it as build up, so didn't notice other properties. Deafening Wave: Good area on the PBAOE, damage was OK. I would generally lay it down after blackstar in case the t9 missed. I suppose I should have upped the target levels to see how stacking the two on tough targets went. It would be a nice follow up to the t9 PBAOE nukes when fighting +4s. As I was solo, I didn't really want to do +4s. Sound Barrier: I was a bit dubious on this looking at the raw stats, but the absorb shield proved to be pretty damned good since it cycled so fast. Couple it with a decent resistance build, and you get a reasonably durable blaster. Of course I had no endurance issues. I had it slotted with 2 each of 50+3 resistance, heal/absorb and EndMod. Disruption Aura: I'm really just not a blapper at heart (All of my played blasters are range only builds), so this really only helped much when going in for Blackstar and Deafening Wave. Those who do blap will get more mileage out of this. Of course I'm not one to complain about adding 14% damage to my nuke. Earsplitter: This hits like a mac truck. This would be a power that would tempt me to blap a bit. I didn't really notice the hold effect since targets weren't around long enough to see if they were held or not. Overall Impression: Most of my blasters are /dev since as mentioned, I dislike blapping. For a ranged only blaster, this wouldn't really be a good choice, though for a blapper, it has some nice tools though it does lack a depth of melee attacks to make a chain. Granted I skipped three of the powers, but that was based on reading the stats. Neither Strident Echo nor Echo Chamber do good DPAS (damage per activation second), so I wouldn't take them under any circumstances on live (ok, maybe Echo Chamber on an Ice blaster to help stack up the holds). If your goal is to make a good blapping build, you need attacks with solid DPAS or you lose damage going into melee where it's dangerous. The single target attacks of dark blast, which are not even close to kings of DPAS in blasters were better than most of the single target attacks in this secondary (except earsplitter). Then you have sound cannon. A stun/cone knockback could be an OK 'oh shit' button, but it is counter productive to everything else the set is doing. If I'm taking this set to blap, and debuff resistance, blasting them away from me and making them stumble around is exactly what I don't want. I get the impression that you don't want another hold on Sound Cannon, but disorient is a bad idea there, and it probably would be better as a PBAOE. At least then you can throw in a KB>KD and keep them in one place for a little bit.