Lazarillo

It's not simply that it breaks Hide, it's that it breaks Hide while not giving the benefit normally associated with breaking Hide (that is, a Critical hit), and it's not like Stalkers need the gap-closer since they can just jump in normally while Hidden.

I recall reading (though it's been so long that I've no idea of a source, I'm afraid), that Praetoria's arcs were originally conceptualized as late game content, then changed to be new starting zones, which is why the difficulty can be pretty murderous to low-level characters. Of course then, in a double twist, the Resistance who were never properly scaled down from 40+ stuff got scaled back up in some of the late game arcs, and they're just relentless when you do get to higher levels.

Derp, sorry. I feel like it's still worth making a selling point, though and not just as a small aside in an attack chain layout, though.

One other nice thing about Kinetic Melee on a Stalker (unless HC changed it; I haven't tried the set since the game came back) is that Burst always deals a Critical Hit when Hidden, unlike most Stalker AoEs. This means you're packing a consistently usable area attack about on-par in terms of damage as a Corruptor nuke (albeit with a much smaller radius). Not exactly to be sneezed at.

The Sentinel version, FWIW, in my experience does show the tick if it heals you...just not when you're at full health. Actually, this, to my mind, would probably be the ideal answer (though it might still not work for Panacea or Absorb, which is where more of the annoying little persistent numbering shows up...hopefully those could be coded the same way). At least then it would just be mixed in with all the other combat numbers. Though the difference of opinion is why I think just a "numbers on/numbers off" toggle through the options menu or Null might also be a decent solution.

So there are a bunch of powers (and even one IO) that constantly give a teensy amount of health or Absorb rating every few seconds: things like Soothing Aura, several of the Blaster sustains, and the aforementioned IO from the Panacea set. Probably a few others that I'm forgetting right off the top of my head. And it's annoying to just always have that little number appearing above my characters' heads. Is there any way it might be possible to hide those, at least when out of battle? Or at least make it an option (heck, I wouldn't mind if it were an all-or-nothing thing with visible numbers entirely, if that made it easier to make it optional, at least).

Honestly, no, probably not. It's probably not exactly "working as intended" that you can use bind trickery to pull this sort of thing off. But that being broken is probably not an excuse to break things further.

I'mma gotta /jranger this. The number of auto-powers wasn't low because there weren't as many powers to make auto, they were low because there were plenty of powers to make auto, and that's not what the game was designed for. If you really gotta do it, there are bind file setups for that.

So as per topic. My build at 50 is already pretty solid. I'm trying to decide between three potential options, and I'm curious what others might think: Option 1 - Musculature - Duh, it's moar damej. The Defense Debuff is not unwelcome on slash, but more likely I'd go Radial for a little extra endurance and because I think the Run speed bonuses might even let me swap out of my travel power. Option 2 - Cardiac - More Endurance would let me run Focused Accuracy pretty much always, which is nice but probably excessive compared to Musculature if I'm being honest. The Resistance bonus is rather nice because it'd bump my build up to the cap on Smashing/Lethal from its current position of about 70%, which in practice means about 20% less damage. And actually...for Claws, I feel like Range is kinda nice to boost Focus and Shockwave. So there's a wide range of benefits. Option 3 - Intuition - I'm actually leaning most towards this, but I'm not sure how well it'd work in practice. No, wait, really! The Radial path has the damage (and Def Debuff) from Musculature, and the Range from Cardiac, but at the sacrifice of any Endurance bonuses. Still, unless I run Focused Accuracy all the time, I'm not sure I need it. It's a weird little combination that could almost work, I feel like, though I'd not get any real benefit from it until I hit the Rare tier (but I expect that won't take long, by the same token). I don't focus on any one type of content, so I'm not, like, building with farming (or anything else) in mind, or the like, I've just found this to be a pretty talented generalist, and want to continue that reasonable "general" aspect.

In endgame content, I could kinda write off +4 being an accident. For an on-level group starting a Synapse? Honestly, if I zoned into that first mission and saw a see of purple with no advance warning, I'm not so sure I'd feel guilty dropping right there and then. But I'm always the type that with TFs or similar, I start low and figure I can scale the difficulty up if things are getting too steamroll-y. Somehow, I've managed to avoid the infamous +4 Synapses that I seem to hear about a lot but haven't experienced since the game came back (I do think it happened to me once way back in the day, though).

The difference is that EM already has 5 other attacks that do the job of "single target hit". It doesn't need another. Stun needs something that only it can do, and is weak because it animates so slowly. Moving it to the fastest hit of the set gives it a reason to be used, particularly if the Magnitude of the stun is upped so that you can even knock a boss out of the fight effectively, without having to rely on stacking many attacks and/or the RNG factor. Giving ET the current "Stun" animation moves its DPA higher than anything Brutes can get except for Freezing Touch (which is a DoT), and the self damage is already negligible as a "cost", so I feel like it's a fair trade off. Reverting it completely makes it more than triple the DPA of any non-Freezing Touch hit. There's no way that's a realistic expectation without some sort of drawback.

I feel like an attack that fast with a high-ish-but-manageable-Recharge is probably a little...excessive if it can be loaded out with procs, which defeats the purpose of trying to make it more useful as a mitigation tool while also (total 😛 )focusing on it as such a tool. Without a damage component it loses access to any damage procs at least, which is my thought in this suggestion. Disorient sets get Knockback, Immobilize, and ToHit Debuff procs, which, at least, maintains the "vision" I'm thinking for the power.

Step 1: Swap the Energy Punch animation. Use, say, the Bitter Ice Blast animation instead (see Vanden's avatar on this forum for how awesome that would look as a melee power). Step 2: Swap Stun's animation for the current Energy Punch animation. Increase to Mag. 4(?). Remove damage component, making it into a quick, heavy disabler that can't be turned into a proc monster. Step 3: Swap Energy Transfer's animation for the current Stun animation. Increase the self-damage component to compensate for its insane DPA. Step 4: Swap Total Focus's animation for the current Energy Transfer animation, so it'll look like an actual "Total Focus". Don't do anything else with it. Step 5 if you're feeling nice: Make Whirling Hands an AoE with hits that are small AoEs, like Beam Rifle's Refractor Beam for Sentinels. Voila, Energy Melee is peachy.

I'd always thought this was a neat idea, but was, like, "yeah, but how would the blasts work", and then you come around with your Vorpal shadows idea, and frick-frack it's perfect. CANIHAZPLZPLZPLZ?

Your version is not all that different from my own ideas. To me, I think the idea of utilizing "phantom" Psychic damage would be thematically appropriate for most of the pets' powers (if not all, even), and I think the sort of chaotic feel of "Illusion" should mean that all the pets should have the ability to Confuse enemies baked into at least one of their attacks. The way I'd break the powers down: t1: Spectral Wounds - Low damage attack. More or less same as the controller version. t2: Phantom Army - They'd have to be changed to take damage. Like the original decoys, they might use random animations but be functionally the same. Mostly melee with a default ranged attack for just in case (a la Ninjas) t3: Blind - Mid damage attack. Swap the Hold to a Sleep or a Stun, lest it be a little too strong, though, I suspect. t4: Typical first upgrade t5: Flash - PBAoE, like with Blind, change the Hold to a Sleep or Stun, add a small amount of damage to give it parity with other MM sets. t6: Phantasm - For bit of a "special" mechanic here, the second Phantasm would still be an invincible decoy, but its "life" would be tied to the first Phantasm. Ranged focus. t7: Group Invisibility - Long duration click power that Hides and grants defense to the MM and all pets. Pets attacking from Hidden status would do no extra damage, but their first hits would be able to apply a low magnitude Confuse. t8: Spectral Terror - Same general look, but is mobile and can fly around now, and has both damage and controlling powers. Ranged focus. t9: Typical second upgrade

Honestly, I'd like to see "No Redraw" be fixed to be less janky before it was added in as an option in more places. Right now "no redraw" just means no animation plays at all when the weapon appears. It gives an awkward, twitchy sort of look to the weapon sets that ruins the feel. Make it work right before expanding the unfinished product.

I have a hard time with this sometimes, myself. Frequently, especially with the melee sets, there's one power that I think looks awful that's really vital to playing the set to its full potential, and, similarly, a power that I really like the look of, but the use of it will make me notably less effective. I can enjoy playing for concept, but having the voice in the back of my head telling me I could be "better" sometimes ruins the fun. I have less trouble when it's something cool but weak than the other way around, as though I'd love to see some sort of balance pass made so various "weak" powers would be at least brought in line as alternatives, so to speak, at least there's, like, hope there that it could happen.

Oh, by any chance, do you mean all the Paragon employees that got the boot?

It's also the one I'd absolutely expect. This sounds like the sort of behavior we should have come to expect from them.

Okay, yeah, this would be nice, too.

Trying to make it optional just feels like it's adding even more rigamarole for a system that already exists, as noted, in the form of "chuck an extra fireball at the next mob over".

It seems like a convoluted suggestion for something that can already be achieved by smacking multiple mobs yourself, though, with the added negative effect of bringing about potential aggro cascades on people who don't want them.

I mean, in practice, would this really work? There's already an aggro cap, and I'd imagine running at x8 is getting you very close to that (and if not, you can just rush multiple groups). As Vanden said, this just seems like it'd result in aggroing the whole map, and not everyone is built to handle that sort of thing. If you want to fight multiple mobs at once, well, just do so.

I just want PBs to be able to Foot-stomp again.

Appreciate the tips. I had figured a more balanced approach to defense would be stronger (hence, for example, the use of Multi-Strike) since this particular Dominator does pretty much everything except for Seeds and the initial Feral Charge at close range anyway. I figured getting everything to 20% (and thus, soft-capping with a medium purple) would be more useful than one aspect to 32.5%, especially when I don't tend to carry small skittles anyway (I prolly woulda Gaussian'd in Spot Prey, yeah, but wasn't sure I had a good path to turn 2 slots into 6, although some of your other ideas lead me towards that possibility...). I also generally never bother trying to Perma-Dom before 50 anyway just because it seems kind of like a waste before it's possible to add an Alpha-boosted Hasten. Still, they're possibilities to evaluate. I had forgotten, though, that Domination protected against Knockback, too, so dropping Acrobatics does seem to be in the cards at max level if I can manage Permadom, and similarly, I hadn't thought of Feral Charge being used as a normal part of the attack chain instead of a pool attack altogether, since its gimmick seems to be, well, the charging aspect and I hadn't thought it would do "competitive" damage right in stuff's faces, too. However, it might...I'll have to re-evaluate when I get to 38.