Lazarillo

I'm all for reworking SS to not have Rage, honestly. Heck, it's the main reason I want to see Scrappers with the set, at this point.

I feel like...balancing around +4 is kinda janky in the first place? Then again, I don't run anything at +4 unless I'm on a team with a decent amount of support. Personally, I find the combat far too tedious. To that end, it shouldn't surprise me that MMs would be the same. FWIW, I run my MMs at +1/+2, same as all my other characters, and the downshifted minions (who thus are at +4) seem to do just fine. And when I take my MMs onto those teams where I'd also be doing +4 on, say, a Scrapper, they continue to do well. As it is, I'll kinda echo Greycat's sentiment, at least with regard to offense: There's also Supremacy, which exists in part to make up for that shifted difference. Now, granted, pet survivability gets trickier, since one stray hit can ruin a pet's day if you're vastly outleveled. But again, the same can be said for, say, a Controller.

The balance is whether it's so grindy it hurts demand. If nobody wants to bother with the system because nothing's worth the cost in the first place, then also, that means there won't be a bunch of suckers "driven players" keeping the market price for Aethers nice and high. And then they end up no good to the rest of us, either!

I've done some testing with /Dark and /Savage because I'm trying to come up with a good combo as well. /Dark feels right thematically but I haven't been able to put together a build I like for it. /Savage seems a very solid combo, but for me, unfortunately, is /Savage and I really hate the janky frenzy/exhausted mechanics. Other stuff I'm looking at: /Thorns - Looks great on paper. Redraw might get annoying though. Spines and Thorns needs the No Redraw option, stat. /Elec - Might be fun, but has more KB than I'd like. /Psi - Good, thematic, and solid, but I worry a little about pairing two Psi-based sets due to enemy defense/resistance issues.

A Demons/Pain Mastermind that I was planning to start a little while back (even pre-bought the enhancements for it and everything) is gonna be Necro/Pain instead, probably. Also, an Illusion/ Dominator of some flavor. I haven't settled on the flavor, though. Thematically, I like /Dark with it, but I'm having trouble coming up with a build I like.

I feel like Phantom Lore pets should have this option, too, but I'll take it wherever I can get it.

Following up on this previous comment, I did do some testing and...it's fine, I guess. The wraiths are so short term that they don't need much survivability, and in some ways, I guess, trying to time and sync things was a pain anyway. So a small nerf, but not in a way that's going to be a major issue. Also, I notice that the buff icons for the spirits were changed from a stacking thing to separate ones for each of the blasts. I still woulda liked the rings, but I'll settle for that. Overall, the set's looking solid and I'm excited to play it on "live". ...as soon as I figure out what I can do about the build's Endurance woes, anyway.

I'm not sure what to think of the lower duration/recharge on Soul Extraction. The Necro/Pain I was using to test had things set well so Extraction and World of Pain came back up at the same time, and the wraiths got the benefits of it, therefore, too, which was nice, because they could get killed on their own, in addition to disappearing if the pet they're linked to goes down. From memory, they weren't too sturdy when I missed the windows. I'll have to do some more testing and see if this ends up being as much of an indirect nerf as it looks like it might be.

I look forward to selling any Primastics that drop to people dumb enough to want ugly costume replacements, I guess. If it spikes prices in ways I can use to fund more alts, all the better, although I wonder if the market will bottom out just as quickly as people realize that the grind isn't even worth beginning?

What happens with bodyguard damage when you Smoke Bomb? Does it still get moved to the pets? 'cause if so, it's probably manageable. However, BG damage probably shouldn't break their ability to land a crit if they haven't attacked already. If it does, that probably needs some adjustment.

I mean, probably more or less the same as the Primal one. The body she was using prior to getting fridge-d was her original one, which doesn't age while she's at the wheel of someone else's body.

Not a typo (unless they decide to change it back). Cleave is now a ranged attack with a very small AoE (very small) , rather than a melee cone.

I dunno that Dominators a buff per se, but the general way the AT is set up around feast or famine depending on if you build for massive Recharge (and thus, Permadom) or not, and how, relatedly, they're the only AT where alignment actually makes a pretty big difference, means I feel like, as a whole, they deserve...looking at. But a balance pass for their inherent, as it were, needn't straight up be a buff or nerf in purely objective terms. 'trollers seem fine, to me. I see a fair number of people looking down on them, but they're always welcome on my teams; they're excellent support when played even half-decently.

It does, although in my general experience, that's a fairly minor boon, since it only means a use for Boss-tier enemies, really, and Deceive, Phantom Army, and Domination all provide such use as well.

By random cosmic fiat, or something, I've also been futzing around with Illusion/Savage today. I've run a few missions, leveled to a new tier, run, leveled, etc. And I feel like based on the trek up, I pretty much agree with all your points. Only maybe disagreement is on Phantom Army, which, since Dominators are already "Go massive Recharge or go home", kinda give a sentiment of, at least in high-end builds, no real reason not to shoot for Perma-Phantoms. That said, if the AT ever gets looked over, it's actually kinda nice feeling like they're helpful but not make-or-break. As for Spectral Wall, I'm kind of in agreement with others that it feels...underwhelming, I guess? Like, Immobilizes can be kind of knockback-esque in terms of usefulness to me. Maybe not that situational, but it's not something I'd want to overuse in the first place. Phantasm is kinda useless due to fragility, but I feel like that's...kinda par for the course with Dominator pets? I dunno, they've always come across to me as kinda gimmicky at best. Also, Flash feels very outdone by Gleam, which is pretty speedy on Recharge, much faster to activate, and seems to have a pretty big radius when used from range. Maybe give the Flash animation the same treatment that was given to Short Circuit (since it's the same base one)? It's...fine as-is, but I feel like AoE holds should almost feel like nukes, and give a real "hell yeah" feel, which I'm not getting from Flash right now. Beyond that, I'll have to futz more with other combos, I think (in part 'cause I forgot I like Savage as a concept but not so much in terms of how it plays). Maybe Thorns next...

Now, I'm not necessarily arguing for weaker zombies, but, um, check the values of those resistances. Vahz, BP, and event zombies have negative resistance lethal. As in, they're weak to it. That said, enemy zombies are not, as was noted in this thread a little earlier, IIRC, wearing friggin' plate armor like the Grave Knights, at least, do. So one would think that would at least do them some good.

I mean, it's a lot of damage, but it's over the course of 45 seconds... In a set where the only real gimmick is MOAR DAMAGE.

Pitstop is definitely going to be where the biggest changes are (well, that, and the equivalent Silver Mantis, Redside). You from access to tiers 8 and 7 of your primary and secondary, respectively, to 9 and 8. Tier 9 primaries tend to be pretty game changing on anything other than a Tanker, and probably have the most power-creep-iness. On the other hand, tier 8 secondaries tend to be game changing in a more positive way, since several ATs are fairly late-blooming when it comes to getting attacks (aforementioned Tankers, again, as well as Dominators and Defenders). So it'll probably depend a lot on what ATs you bring. I'd be happy to help out and bring an alt along if our schedules allow for overlap. Do you put test runs in the LFG channel? (On another note, I think SBB will probably be the next biggest difference, and would like to give it a try, too. Might even try LFG-ing it on beta later this evening if folks want to investigate.)

Another small request, but also now that the blasts in the set are being more emphasized, can Necromancy get Soul Noir customization like other versions of Dark Blast?

I don't think balancing IO effects around IOs really means anything for the game as a whole being balanced off SOs though...

The nerf only affects IOs, though, based on this. Or do SOs have proc rates I'm unaware of?

IIRC, the justification had to do with the standardization of characters to mission level. Back in the day, everyone went in a mission at whatever their present level was, and exemping (and sidekicking) was on a one-to-one basis. So if you were a level 50 teamed with a level 26 and a level 28, you went into the mission, picked one of them, and your level would be the same as which one you picked, with no extra powers (thus, you'd always want to pick the 28). TFs, granted, were an exception. Anyway, when the system was changed, there was concern that people wouldn't want to join teams where whoever the highest level character wasn't also the leader/mission holder, so the changes were made to be more friendly to lower level characters trying to start PuGs, by allowing the higher-level characters to not have to handicap themselves as much. That said, I'm not sure that issue ever really materialized, and I do think removing the "bonus 5" again would be a decent, if unnecessary, compromise if people are really that concerned with exemplars "ruining" play. As it is, I'm fine with the leveling changes anyway, especially for certain ATs that are frustratingly late-blooming (Tankers and Dominators, for example).

I did some very brief testing by digging out an old Bots/Poison that I'd stowed away. Just a couple small notes, mostly focused on Maintenance Drone: 1. Bots/Poison is not a Mastermind Combo I have a knack for. 2. Bots seem pretty hefty despite this. 3. Maintenance Drone takes Endurance Modification Enhancements and sets, but doesn't actually restore Endurance. This is presumably a carryover from when it was Repair (which did)? 4. Speaking of Enhancements, how about letting it accept Recharge Intensive Pets sets. Come onnnnn, it does damage, technically... (that one's pie-in-the-sky, admittedly) 4. Can Maintenance Drone be attacked/damaged? I don't think I ever saw it lose HP to anything other than its own healing, but I'm curious. 5. It also feels like the Drone would work better as a "click and it's summoned to my location" rather than having to place it, a la Force Field Generator (or Soul Extraction). 6. I redundant-healed with it and Alkaloid more than a few times. Probably means Bots will work best with Secondaries that don't use much/any healing themselves. Traps, or Cold maybe?

I made a Fire/Axe Tanker to mess around with the changes to both sets, set to 50, auto-enhanced, and turned up enemy numbers. My overall take on the Battle Axe side of things: Speedier ST attacks: Lumping them all together here, but they're nice. Piggybacking off my initial response, Beheader's still kind of needed, I suppose, to keep up a fluid attack chain, so it being kinda wimpy is...acceptable. Less fun, but acceptable. Axe Cyclone: Neat. I'm not sure how much difference the tractor effect really made for me, since on a tank, most stuff wanted to get in my face anyway. I saw enemies pulled in close a couple times, but I don't feel like it made a huge difference. That said, I figure it's probably not supposed be huge. So this feels solid. Pendulum: I don't have much experience with Battle Axe on live, so I'm not sure how well the change from a cone to an AoE works. It felt perfectly useful, though. Cleave: This, I think, is kind of interesting. First up, it's solid in terms of oomph. But the combination of range and AoE creates an interesting result, where it can used very easily for one or the other, but not so easily for both. With enemies around me, I could hit it on someone up in my face, and it'd smack down a few other guys nearby too. If I tried to use it to punish someone a little too chicken to get into the mosh pit, or who ran away, I had that option, too, allowing me to stay put, but generally meaning there was no one else near enough to the enemy to get caught in the blast. I actually really like this "multitool" aspect. Suggestion: Swap the animations for Swoop and Cleave. That's my only wish. Everything else is solid, but as noted in a previous post, I dislike how two attacks with mostly the same function have such similar animations (Swoop and Gash). I feel like Swoop looks more like something that would produce an attack with Cleave's effects anyway, so that would both give some nice differential, and kinda capture the feel better, visually, IMO (granted, Cleave looks less like something that'd do Knock-up, but I can handwave that as hitting them so hard they bounce off the ground).

I made a Fire/Axe Tanker to mess around with the changes to both sets, set to 50, auto-enhanced, and turned up enemy numbers. My overall take on the Fiery Aura side of things: Phoenix Rising: It's a fun gimmick power. Not much more than that, but given that's all it's ever really been, and the gimmick is more accessible now, I'll take it. Consume: I've just never found this a desirable power and the changes don't make it look any more desirable, so I skipped it. Nothing I encountered made me think "man, if only I had it". Healing Flames: I...couldn't tell the difference? It certainly doesn't feel as fast as advertised, but maybe this is one of those illusions created by the way animations interact anyway. Temperature Protection: The reason I chose to test against Council, since they have a fair amount of KD/KB among the puppies, bots, and grenade launchers. Overall, I was still on my back a few times, but I wasn't getting juggled around every mob, nor do I think I ever got knocked back. So I think, as a neat gimmick idea, the protection is cool. However, when I think about playing more...practically, any KD is bad, so I'm still gonna have to deck out some -KB enhancements, and this is likely to get lost in the shuffle. The Regen buff felt noticeable. A couple times I went to hit Phoenix Rising and couldn't 'cause my health came back too fast. Burn: On this one, I did make one change to the auto-enhance, subbing two Recharge for an Accuracy and an Endurance, respectively. Still kinda redonkulously good. Turn it on, and I see a bunch of enemies around me more or less immediately drop. It's up every fight, and still costs a pittance of Endurance for an accurate, high damage AoE. Honestly have zero beef with the nerfs; even with them, it feels hella powerful. Possible suggestion: The only thing that comes to mind right off would maybe be to "compromise" a little on the Burn nerf for the people who are upset by it, and make Consume into another effective "attack" to stack the two together, or some such. Compare Consume to Power Sink or Energy Absorption, which have 1/3 the Recharge time for comparable effects. Knock down Consume's Recharge comparably to 1 minute, scale it's damage up (even with, like, a 250% buff, it'd still be weaker than most if not all other AoEs available in a Primary or Secondary), increase the Endurance cost a little to compensate, and you end up with a power that's worth taking, and that compensates for losing damage from Burn, while also making using the set for damage a little less...afk-friendly.