drbuzzard

Have a lvl 50 traps defender. The set certainly has its good and bad sides. I'll go by power: Web grenade- pretty much worthless. I suppose I'd consider it good on a defender because you can skip it and pick a useful pool power. On a secondary I pity people. Not sure what I'd do to fix it. Maybe make it AOE, adding damage isn't worthwhile since every AT that has access gets a low damage scalar anyway. Caltrop- top notch power. Don't really see a need to change it. Triage beacon- good enough solo or on a low level team. Once teams are actually powerful, it pretty much sits until you fight an AV or something which will be in one place for a while. Otherwise it does squat before the team moves on. The idea of letting it follow isn't bad. Acid mortar- great power, but suffers from the general set issue of limited use if a team is moving fast. Then again a lot of the debuff sets suffer from that. The fact that you can focus on recharge and have 2 out at once is quite nice. FF generator- I'll echo the above comment about it being too slow and dumb. However when it works it is nice. Poison trap- solid power (other than the fast team thing, but just assume that in general) Seeker drones- Lots of people love this. I'm a bit more meh on it, but I do take it and use it. Not sure what I'd suggest, maybe up the speed some. Trip mines- a wonderful solo power, pretty iffy on teams. Nobody particularly wants to wait for you to set up an ambush. However if they did, it can be really deadly. This is actually quite nice on BAFs for the prisoner escape phase (or covering Nightshade's body when you fight Seige). Time bomb - worthless crap. Took it way back on live, and respecced the hell out of it. Even the suggestion of giving it the Omega Maneuver treatment won't help because OM is crap also. I suppose some of the gun drone suggestions aren't bad. Again a power with the upside of no loss in skipping. Traps isn't generally appreciated, but people in the know understand how well it debuffs on hard targets.

I think people do overstate the necessity of hasten. I have around half of my builds as melee ATs, and very few of them have perma hasten, as honestly it's of limited use on them when I really run the numbers. Now there are certainly builds that need it (or at least want it a lot), and I have it on those. The investment to get there is fairly intensive and can be exclusive of other goals.

Actually they get controller level buffs from leadership.

Though the prevalence of bottom feeders in the market means that if you don't happen to be lucky enough for there to be a nice high outstanding bid waiting for you, you will end up selling for well under market value because there's a lot of lowball bids sitting around waiting to take advantage of the situation.

I'll get on board with the making of field medic into an auto power. I remember when I first saw that power existed and got excited to try it out in practice. What a letdown that was. It doesn't remove interrupt from aid self (why? I don't know), and would take a whole lot of leverage to get anywhere near perma. I have one character with medicine pool, and I respecced out of field medic ages ago and don't feel any loss whatsoever. It would also be nice if it helped with interrupt on aid self.

Doesn't that go without saying?

As I like flight, it's pretty rare I take combat jumping (I like flight a lot). Leadership is a massive endurance hog, so I take it on well below half of my builds. I don't do speed pool unless I see that perma hasten is necessary to a build. What you're saying may be true to people who just hunt up builds on here and never make them themselves, but in general 'nearly every build' is pure hyperbole. Heck, the game would be so much easier if everyone took leadership (not that it is hard, but still, more boosts makes it easier). Heck, I'm rather shocked you didn't rant about the evils of fighting pool. I'd say that's more common that leadership for optimized builds.

I am reasonably certain the code requires periodic regen nerfs to remain stable.

EM is fast animation and quick strikes? Are you playing pre nerf EM or something?

Given that aggro is a function of enemy AI, I really don't get why people keep suggesting things which simply are not compatible with that. Sure ask for a higher aggro cap if you like, but asking for level or AT dependent AT is never going to fly.

Actually a 50 can't do that, as enemies are capped at 54 (outside of certain incarnate trials with enemy level shifts). A 49- however certainly can.

It's even worse than that. Anyone SKed to a team fighitng +5s would be a damned good approximation of useless since they would be fighting +6s and that's were the purple patch goes wild. You can see this one live fairly easily if you end up on a team below 50 fighting +4s since as is, you will encounter things which are the difficulty you set and +1 more than that value (so if you're on a 45+4 team, there will be 50s encountered). At +6 every drops off drastically (though it is pretty bad at +5 for that matter) to 1/2 of what you do at +5.

Not going to get into the debate about increasing the cap, but the number is a general one which can be changed. Over on WeHaveCake they set the aggro and AOE caps to 200 (which is the actual limit due to code).

Sonic is the only one of these I play, and I do consider it underrated. However, you are correct that it could use a bit of love. Liquefy, even on a perma-hasten build has too long a recharge. Honestly, while it is a good power, it's not anything close to an 'I Win' button, so the recharge is in the realm of silly (especially compared to a lot of the T9s out there). Sonic siphon, while I wouldn't skip it, is pretty 'meh' and could use a look. Perhaps the quicker animation like you suggest. That could help. Then there's sonic repulsion, which on its face looks like a dog, and should be skipped. However I teamed with a sonic once who slotted KB->KD into it, and dayum, that makes it into a great power. You put it on the same target as your sonic disruption, and you have a moving ice slick. It really is quite good. However, one has to know the trick, or it's a crap power.

Yes, it's a nice tidy solution for a number of issues, and also means one thing less I have to pay attention to clicking. I really don't like playing my Rad/SS tank all that much because of the bother of rage. You can't really run without it and be worth a damn, but paying attention to when to click it (and I avoid double stacking because I don't want twice as many periods of downtime) annoys me.

Given my druthers, I'd like it to be made into a toggle.

Perhaps they should transfer over the sentinel version and call it 'lazy regen' just so it's an option.

I am well aware of that. Though I have suggested people might like the other regen version to be made like sentinel regen.

Actually on a sentinel a big chunk of your survival is the toggle absorb shield, so it is more of the toggle and forget play style (which I like since I'm lazy).

Yeah, about time.

Funny thing is, I've found that sentinel regen is actually quite good in DA because it doesn't care about damage flavor, it's pretty much all just damage (I do have L/S resistance built up some, but nothing else. If things get hairy you pop a purple and on you go. It might actually be the best sent set in DA (though perhaps SR is better).

I was thinking a while back about how one would fix (rather in the sense of a cat) TW. So if we accept the premise that TW is balanced with SOs (which is debatable all by itself, but work with me), then the solution to making it a bit more balanced is to use the ability to cap the enhancement of certain powers (which is done in a number of places). You just tweak the allowable recharge on the powers in the set to be in line where one can get with SOs (or a balance point you desire). Arguably you could simply change the recharge to that SO balance point, and then make recharge changes impossible (even global). There's Victory Rush in game now which completely ignores all recharge bonuses, even global, so TW could be set up that way. It could still hit like a ton of bricks, just slowly which would seem to be the point of the set. The idea of helping the recharge on things, then capping it would be beneficial to any SOs users, but put a hard cap on the IOed out builds.

Don't know if any of you recall Repeat Offenders, but they were a coalition of buff/debuff oriented SGs on Liberty (? I think). They had SGs based on one powerset required for membership. I was in the kinetics one with a kin/archery defender way back when. They also had rad/*, dark/* etc. They would run teams of these guys (and there were a few build requirements for the SGs, namely the leadership toggles), and everything was steamrolled by a rocket powered steamroller. I wouldn't mind throwing together something like that, but heck I can't get a consistent sentinel team together for the MoITF challenge, so I don't have my hopes up. Personally I think a stacked SoA team would be flat out crazy good.

Yeah, TW does throw things off, but I understand it will be getting put in its place, so I think my stalkers as king evaluation isn't terribly wrong, just premature.

I think the world of IOs allows for a lot more ability to boost defense than offense, so I suspect brutes will come ahead in this to be honest. About the only trick in a tanker's favor is that assault for tankers now gets a decent value (controller level) of 15%, so I take that a lot and it helps with the higher damage scalar now.