Lazarillo

Just a small note here, since it's honestly less important than the AR and DP discussions, but I will note that I put my Water/Energy Blaster on beta last night and bummed around with it a little, and it was fabulous. I'm a friggin' water machinegun now, thanks for these. Okay, now back to letting people more versed than I figure out if the DP change is worth it or not.

I mean, I agree on that first point. That's why I don't see why it shouldn't be a Faraday Cage sort of thing with a no-stacking recharge, that doesn't move. It can be placed as needed, when needed, and without having to be overly concerned about janky AI movement choices or an unusably-long Recharge power. Rain powers are fine when they're just rain powers. But this is set-critical. Imagine if Super Reflexes changed Practiced Brawler so that its effect was provided by an invisible FFG. You could, but why, when there's a much less janky solution?

Your not supposed to keep up the power the whole set is based around?

That just feels like a whole other issue. If it moves on its own, you don't have control of how/whether enemies end up inside it. Which is fine on a power like Creepers, but I wonder a bit when it's the main gimmick power on a set that revolves around a gimmick.

My general thought just from looking is that Storm Cell's recharge is too long, given the general way the set seems built around it. I feel like a faster recharge, but with summoning a cell replacing an existing one (a la Faraday Cage) would be more appropriate. It would also keep the set's main filler AoE more consistently useful. I'm also somewhat dubious on all the -End, since End drain wasn't good enough for Electrical Blast, why add it here without actually giving it the same benefit Elec Blast gets too?

I just had a wild and crazy idea, an idea for a revised Super Strength for Scrappers: Tier 1 - Punch Tier 2 - Haymaker Jab is generally considered an easy skip due to its extremely low damage. Remove it from the early powers, but it'll be used a little higher up with a new function. The previous t2 and t3 powers can be carried up one each, as they're both not far off from t1/t2 powers in other sets anyway, so no real changes would need to be made. Tier 3 - "Smash" I was trying to think of a decent name, but a lot of the basic stuff's already taken. This would be a melee cone attack with damage comparable to punch, just a little extra, early AoE. For the animation, maybe something like the one for Power Crash or even Bitter Ice Blast (see Vanden's avatar for how cool those could look with SS), or Cross Punch if a snazzy new animation were demanded. Tier 4 - Jab Jab is moved up to a higher tier, keeping its quick animation and low damage, but upping its Recharge, somewhat, and making it a Follow-Up/Blinding Feint workalike, or alternatively a Rib Cracker workalike. This would also override the existence of Rage in the set, replacing the power said to be rather problematic for Scrappers with a weaker equivalent that allows more damage/accuracy by working it into the attack chain. Tier 5 - Hand Clap Particularly with the added cone in t3, no changes need to be made here, I don't think. Tier 6 - Confront It's a Scrapper set, it gets a single target taunt. Let's continue. Tier 7 - KO Blow KO Blow seems to be often said as the other power that's problematic as it would be potentially too damage on a Critical Hit. My thought here is to remove all Critical "damage" from this one and instead make it sort of a gimmick-crit. KO Blow, on a Crit now lives up to its name: it instantly defeats a minion or LT (something that an attack like Greater Fire Sword or Seismic Smash would do with a crit already), as well as a boss below 30% health or an EB below 20%. This would be slightly more powerful, but in exchange, KO Blow crits would have no effect on Archvillains/Heroes/Giant Monsters/etc. Tier 8 - Hurl Tier 9 - Foot Stomp Just like the first two tiers, the final two really need no changes, and could be proliferated to Scrappers as-is, I think.

I mean, people seem just as tired of DC movies these days (then again, I got "fatigued" of Marvel/superhero movies like 10 years ago anyway, so this is mostly an outside-looking-in perspective).

Okay, here's my hack. I find it really improves my game experience. First, I delete all small and medium ones (and/or disable them from dropping at P2W). Then, I group them all up by type in my tray. Groups that are related (such as purples and oranges) tend to be close to each other. There's always a wakie in the bottom right corner, because I'm paranoid that if I alt-tab out of the game for a second and hit f5 to refresh a page (something that's never happened in something like 10 combined years of playing the game), it might accidentally hit in game and ruin this plan. This is what I call a wakie block (mini-hack!). Anyway, once I have my groups, and it looks nice and pretty, and this is the key part: I NEVER USE ANY INSPIRATIONS AGAIN. I mean, I would, but I might need them for something more vital later. I wouldn't want to waste them now! Plus, the pattern in the tray is so pretty...

I'd imagine few things quite ruin a Longbow Agent's day like standing around, minding one's own business, and all of a sudden your buddy bursts into flame.

Cremate has an extremely nice guaranteed knockdown, though, that's not really going to factor into Trapdoor times, but makes a hell of a difference when you're trying to deal with enemies that can pop problematic powers.

Whoops. I probably had three different ways to explain it in my head at once and they ended up intersecting. That's usually how it goes. I corrected the explanation, thanks.

If you want more "flair" from your Darkness, rather than simply "the toughest option that uses all Dark-tagged sets", you might get more mileage out of going with a Dominator, then. The big trick is that your primary defense is going to come in the form of offense. Gotta lock down those legions first (with all sorts of suitably impressive-looking coils of darkness and whatnot), then they can look upon your works and despair.

That's not really what I meant, in and of itself. But in building for extra defense in or not, those debuffs can also send one into negative numbers and make attacks hit more frequently. In my experience (my main /Dark Brute is Energy/Dark, FWIW), that doesn't mean much when I'm seeing defense debuffs augmenting, say, Lethal damage, because Lethal damage pings off my character anyway. But when enemies are doing them with Energy attacks (again, looking at high-level Paragon Police Department, especially, or Clockwork, or groups that use Praetorian weapons such as Resistance, Warworks, and even the occasional high level Family), those cascades mean more hits build up from stuff that does like 5x the relative damage.

So first off, props to /Dark Armor, on Brutes, which is honestly pretty great. It's solidly easy to cap damage resistance on it, particularly using a Cardiac Alpha power that will also solve most of its Endurance woes (but where doing the same on the tank, a lot of it gets wasted because you go up to and above those resistance caps, in some ways, too easily). It does suffer a little bit in the late game against the high amount of energy damage a lot of groups churn out, particularly when you've got them also adding defense debuffs to those energy attacks (PPD, Clockwork, even Praetorians), but on the flip side it's also one of the few sets that can protect itself against every status effect in the game (lookin' at you, Longbow and KoV, with your Terrorizes). So on the whole, best single Dark set, IMO, and I love it. But since this is specifically inquiring to being 100% Darkity Darkdark, does DM also hold as strong? Well, it's still a solid choice, and there's some synergy between the sets. It's not my favorite melee set but is probably good enough when you consider pairing it such a nice armor set. Toss in Soul Mastery's Darkest Night (another big end drain, but again, if using Cardiac, that helps a lot), and you're going to be looking at all around a pretty tanky combo. The question becomes, is "tanky" what you want from your token edgelord character?

This is because the "heroic" ATs only originally got APPs, and the "villainous" ones only got PPPs. Furthermore, the original sets of APPs matched the original options available to their respective ATs. Defenders didn't get Ice Blast until much, much later. So Defenders had an Electric APP from the start because they had Electric Blast from the start, which was later proliferated to Corruptors, and Corruptors had no Ice set because they had patron-themed powers instead, including Mu Mastery, which was later proliferated to Defenders. I'm not saying I wouldn't be for more APP options, but for better or worse, there is a logic to why this specific option isn't available, at least.

I like Illusion/Dark a lot. It's pretty ranged oriented, you stick the phantoms in the fray, then stand black and blast. And one thing to consider with Illusion/Psi is that a lot of Illusion uses Psionic-typed attacks, too, so you end up more likely to run into mobs that can stonewall you. Dark gives you more versatility.

In fairness, I'd say the same about anyone who'd grind out the "content" they produced for it the natural way, too.

I mean, it existed in the depths of the code when the game originally closed. At least one community has enabled it and completed the animations and whatnot (although it does feel like HC avoids implementing those sets to avoid complaints of ripping off or the like, however inaccurate that would be).

It can help, particularly with Nightmare farming (which shouldn't have to be the most efficient way to get the badge, but is...alternate suggestion: make earning Dreamwalker not stupid), because if the third GM is one your group already has, you can quit without having to fight it, and save on time.

Water Blast's major issue comes down to the implementation of Tidal Power in general. Not only, as noted, can a miss throw things off, but since new stacks don't replace/renew old ones, it's far too easy to accidentally end up firing a power with a lower combo level than intended in general (that Water Jet also has the whole lockout thing due to the original devs' grudge against recharge builds at the time prolly doesn't help, either).

I already made one point in this thread, but what the hell, I'mma add another: Minimal/NoFX option for Clarion Destiny (and Barrier, I guess, but especially Clarion).

Accounts for fewer contact missions than you might think, and doesn't keep them from getting left permanently unfinished in your tabs.

Not the attacks. The animations. It'd be no different (presumably! Standard Code Rant applies!) from how, say, currently, a Succubus (from the Demons Lore pet) or Ember Demon (the MM pet) can hurl a fireball at stuff without having to use Pyronic Judgment, specifically. Are you unfamiliar with what Vorpal Judgment looks like, perhaps?

You know how when you use Vorpal Judgment, it summons a shadow/skeleton "clone" of you to do an attack animation on each enemy? Duplicates could use similar animations, to make duplicates of duplicates for their attacks.

To borrow from an idea I once saw for a multiplicity MM pet set and its "blasts", rather than have exact matches, set it up so that their attacks summoned more "duplicates", using the Vorpal style animations, perhaps.