Lazarillo

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.

Ported a mid-30s Necro/Electric to Beta. Did a mission with my initial build (has Life Drain but no other attacks), respecced and added Dark Blast, did some more. Finally, bumped to 50 and gave it a try with my planned endgame build for the character (with a couple adjustments again for blast-y sake) and did just a little more than that. Overall thoughts: Nice! Necro feels so much more fun with Soul Extraction not requiring me to wait for a pet to have to die (and all the pain of resummoning and such that accounts for). I'm normally very much on the high horse of liking to make click powers perma, but I'm seeing close to 50% uptime and it's generally fun enough that way. I'm gonna try experimenting with a couple other secondaries, too, I think, because as things stand just having a friggin army of souls following me about makes for an incredibly fun MM and I like having excuses to get blast-y. A Demons/Pain concept I've been sitting on for a while might work even better as a Necro if these changes stick. Possible considerations/suggestions: With all the added blasting, Endurance is a bit more of a woe than it was before. This is not, inherently a bad thing. However, it does make me want to...ration a bit better. Would it be possible to use the power-tray ring tech to identify which of the three blasts does or does not have a Specter out and associated with it? That would help give a better idea of which powers might be a priority if I'm trying to bring a shade-y friend back out while also trying to keep my zombies...um...alive? Uh, let's just say upright. Also, this second one I'm not sure about because it's very hard to measure, but may bear looking into. With /Electric, specifically, comes the issue of Chaining powers, with target caps and diminishing effects. I noticed that as I had the Shades spawning, they were getting hit by the chains and, unhealable (and unbuffable?) as they are, the UNAFFECTED indicator was popping up, sometimes a couple of times on the same Shade. If the Chains are smart enough to not count unaffected targets towards their caps and similarly avoid the the lessening effects then this is not an issue. But like I said, it's hard to measure, due to limited duration and the unpredictability of the Chain effects. If some confirmation can be given on this it'd be reassuring (and if, say, the Shades do "use up" Chain effects, maybe it'd be possible to at least maybe make the Shades grant a little bonus static? Wouldn't solve the diminishing effects but would ensure that it didn't waste a hit).

Just for laughs, I made an Illusion/Dark Dominator and ran it through Positron part 1. Figured it'd be a decent test of low-level performance, and also let me see if doppelgangers were doing anything janky for the new set. In the case of the latter: I actually didn't see the Simulacra use a single Illusion power. Part of this may be the "binary" nature of control. If I went too easy on it, I ended up two-shot by its Dark Assault powers. But even when I could kinda keep the balance, it was sticking to ink-shooting and Smite, near as I could tell. That said, the balance was still a little tricky because when I pulled out Phantom Army... Well, Phantom Army is nice. It seems quite potent, and the controls do an excellent job in place of the taunts. Sending them in while I stayed Invisible generally meant alphas got eaten nicely, and pulling them out even when I got a little overwhelmed in an ambush, they started peeling the aggro off. It was a decent spike of damage, too, despite the auto-enhancers not actually putting anything onto them. Single-targets, the constant stun and KD spam really kept the Simulacra occupied, especially. I did pull aggro off Doc Buzzsaw, though. Sets get thrown into the mix and these guys get perma, they're gonna be damned good against anything short of an AV, but they remain decently balanced by the lack of uptime with normal enhancements, IMO. Also, Gleam is pretty.

Kind of a goalpost move from

I'm suggesting that saying you have to take more powers to achieve the level of stealth desired, when there's a 1-to-1 change of the number of powers involved, seems rather disingenuous, is all.

Ah, whoops, you're right. I missed that and thought they said that it was the stealth factor that didn't stack. Enemies that will see you through captial-S Stealth, will see you through all forms lowercase-s Stealth, regardless of how much you stack.

Can't speak to Hard mode mobs, but in those cases, I think the ideal should be, rather than SS, make stealth stack from different sources. You're supposed to be doing HM in teams, after all. Critters, as far as I'm aware, cap out at with bosses having 55 perception in normal content. Anything that sees past that (Rikti Drones, KoA, snipers, Rularuu, etc), just has automatic see-through Stealth and no amount of stacking is going to fool them. ...as opposed to having to take Super Speed over an equivalent power in your primary or secondary set?

Again, I'm not seeing why replacing Super Speed with Stealth doesn't just mean you're using the same number of powers, though (while also adding some bonus defense). Doubly so when Stealth has a lower Endurance cost. And as noted in the other response, you're aware that Stealth alone is maxing you out in terms of invisibility, right?

Running Stealth + Cloak of Darkness/Arctic Fog/etc to stack the Defense bonus, with Stealth alone giving you an effectively-max stealth radius. On current Live, Stealth alone already gives you effectively-max Stealth. You could drop Super Speed from that combination of three, and have no IO in Sprint, and anything that will see you, would see you even with all three. After this change, the same will be the case. Just to be clear, folks are aware that Concealment Pool Stealth got its effectiveness buffed up a few pages back, right?

I guess that's fair, but I feel like that's still...not really as bad as you're describing? No offense, seriously, but Sprint + Stealth IO has a lower endurance cost, so less "tax" anyway, and you get the full movement benefit in combat (whereas SS, last I checked, still suppresses)? You do have to add the IO, admittedly, so I see why there could still be some beef, but in that case, you can now run Concealment-pool Stealth alongside your other powers, which is higher than Sprint, but lower-cost than Super Speed, still, and in that case, adds Defense. So you get an option that you don't have on live (assuming you have room for another travel power in your build, admittedly), in addition to one that you already have, and feels more efficient.

Unless I'm misreading the note, or misunderstanding your claim, that shouldn't be the case. None of the powers in question had their Stealth potency reduced, so any set that needs a Stelth IO for "full" stealth post changes (Cloak of Darkness being one of them), already needs a Stealth IO for "full" stealth pre-changes.

Two very initial considerations, just based on the notes and what I've seen in the character creator. Any thoughts? 1. It's always kinda bugged me that Gash and Swoop are so nearly-identical in terms of animation (same goes for Pulverize and Jawbreaker in Mace). Any chance at all that one or both might get an alternative one, to allow them to be more distinct? 2. One of the set's biggest limitations has always felt like Beheader being kind of a red-headed stepchild due to the low relative DPA (in this case, an issue shared with BS). The base DPA was improved with this, but somewhat ironically, since all the others got better numbers now too, it still lags. Is there anything to be done for that, perhaps?

There are special sets enhancements in the game, two per Archetype, which can be slotted into any damaging primary or secondary power (or for Controllers/Dominators, a primary or secondary control power), give exceptionally good set bonuses, and have unique procs designed to help the various ATs at their respective specialties. For Stalkers, the procs are one that causes you to re-enter the "Hidden" state (without losing aggro though), guaranteeing that your next hit will be a Critical (usually best in Assassin Strike). The other gives all your attacks a small chance to immediately finish the cooldown on Build Up. These "ATOs" are Attuned automatically, meaning they can be used starting at level 10 and their stats scale based on your level, all the way up to 50. Once you hit 50, you can use an Enhancement Catalyst to make them Superior versions, which have even bulkier set bonuses and proc chances/numbers (but will still retain their powers if you Exemplar down to a lower level).

Not my main, but I have an alt like that. A Praetorian, named "Grroowlll", because the Powers Division admin that forced her to sign up thought they were being funny.