Riverdusk

Interesting. I've never gotten flack for steamy mist (or shadowfall or arctic fog that are similar). The only time it becomes an issue is after you rescue a hostage that you have to lead out you need to turn those powers off. Otherwise npcs can have a hard time following you (or anyone nearby) back to the door because everyone is stealthed. You might have run into that. I agree hurricane can be annoying (but visually and audially). Coloring does help a bit. Again though I have never gotten complaints about it for that, more just if you end up scattering mobs with it too much. I tend to use it intermittently, not constantly for both of those reasons.

Load up on 8 hours worth at level 1, at that point it only costs 1k per hour. As said, at end game you can earn more than enough inf to cover its cost or you can grab incarnate clarion. It is kind of just the mid game where it can be an issue (unless you have a bank of inf available from other characters).

Only AT I like electric melee on personally is a stalker so you still get a hard hitting single target attack to go with all that aoe. Electric/shield stalker is a classic. But all depends what you are trying to do with the character. Pretty much as you thought, electric would give you better aoe, katana would give you better single target (and some extra defense that is hard to get otherwise on a fire armor).

The amount of damage a beast/storm could put out I bet is amazing. It is on my list to try one of these days. Being able to slot the pet IO's in /storm is also so useful on any primary that doesn't have an extra "pet" to do that with, like beasts, bots, and mercs. Makes me think again that I wish you could slot pet sets into dark servant to open that set up as well for it. So annoying that you can't. I bet the devs original idea was they didn't want players to "waste" slots trying to improve servant's damage as it is so low and it wasn't its point. But now it'd be so useful.

Honestly one of the easiest and most powerful secondary's on a MM I've found is /time. It allows for a pretty chill playstyle while generally making your pets darn tough. Thugs especially as they really don't even need power boosted farsight, farsight alone should do well for them. Which is good since the devs have mentioned power boost as one of the things they are "looking at". Maybe your genius invented some kind of time control device. "Every thing has been foreseen and accounted for" actually sounds right on the nose for time even.

Tough for me to get too specific as mine is dm/SR and I also don't use mids for my builds (I use my own custom spreadsheet). Main thing is to make sure you get the two stalker ATO procs slotted (put the chance to hide one in your assassin strike, the "chance to recharge BU" can go anywhere). And as mentioned the guassian chance for build up slotted into build up. Those three procs alone make you a lot more powerful. If you aren't familiar with the stalker ATO procs you can find them on the auction house under attuned enhancements--stalker archetype sets. You can slot the "regular" non superior versions as early as level 10. They do tend to cost about 7-9 million a piece though so if you are brand new it may take a while unless you want to try your hand at playing the market. Travel powers are entirely up to personal preference, go with whatever is most fun for you. Also, most don't bother with taking placate anymore thanks to that chance to hide proc being better, so placate is entirely skippable now. Edit: Funny enough I looked and remembered I took mystic flight on mine as well (been a while since I played that character and I roll a lot of alts).

See now, I'd disagree with the above. I think it is a good combo and I think the loss of soul drain is overrated. The one caveat is of course as long as you have the stalker ATO chance to recharge build up going and a guassian proc in BU itself which is going to have a lot better uptime on BU than on soul drain. Sometimes you can even have double BU's and double gaussian procs going. I played a Dark/SR stalker all the way up into the vet levels and had a blast. Can't say that I was taking out a spreadsheet and tracking it, but BU was recharging often enough with the proc that I didn't feel there was really a whole lot of difference between it and soul drain. Especially when you consider you need a big group of mobs to maximize soul drain and the animation time is pretty slow for it compared to how quick BU is to use. BU of course is also available for your initial strike whereas soul drain is not. As to something else you mentioned, if you've been gone for a while you may not realize shadow maul got a nice buff and its cone is now pretty huge. Shield charge really isn't the only AoE you bring to a group anymore. On mine I also picked up energy torrent from the epic pool (and of course the incarnate nuke) and its aoe felt fine on a "normal" team. I'd definitely aim for one of the AOE's from one of the epic pools though, there are several options. Also, this may change as I believe the devs are looking at more buffs to dark melee. Their original idea was to buff dark consumption and make it another good aoe "nuke" type power. It was pulled. Since stalkers don't get dark consumption that'd be a big buff to the set stalkers wouldn't get and sadly I think it would then clearly be better on other AT's and the stalker version would get left in the dust. It is why I'm still hopeful they decide to buff touch of fear instead (like changing it to a "chain" type power and add damage to it), which would help the stalker version as well.

As has been pointed out, corrupters do have the better base damage, especially at higher levels once the AT scales start to kick in, NOT at level 1. If you are solo though and have vigilance going the damage difference mostly kind of disappears. Then it comes down to the bigger reason, procs. You can proc up a defender to do better damage than a corrupter, honestly even while on a team and without the vigilance boost. You could say, "well the corrupter can proc up too", and you'd be right, but the defender tends to have more room/slots for procs with their buff/debuff numbers being better. Defenders don't tend to have to chase as many set bonuses to reach most people's goals. So it is easier to build a "proc monster" as a defender typically. You are then outdamaging a corrupter and you have better buffs/debuff to go with it. There are exceptions of course like ice blast not being bad for a corrupter because rains don't tend to proc very well and at the same time do scourge well. Or kinetics where you can try and take advantage of the corrupter's higher damage cap. But in general it is the one situation where I can understand the call of some that procs should be subject to the AT damage scale. Personally though I'd rather see corrupters get a bit of a boost, and the easiest one is to up the health point at where scourge kicks in as that is kind of their cool "thing". Heck, you could even limit it to just upping the scourge chance only while solo to offset the weirdness that defenders now solo better than corrupters do.

I see those every once in a while. Not just build but even to the point of powersets or entire AT's. I kind of brace for it every time someone asks "how is <x> powerset", usually on help channel. Just recently someone was asking about how was willpower for scrappers and I said it was pretty good. Someone proceeded to respond strangely somewhat aggressively "stop giving them terrible advice, WP is horrible on scrappers. " I just responded, "worked great on mine" and left it at that. For a while there anytime someone asked about sentinels there would be people on help raging on how horrible they were. That seems to have died down a bit at least.

I wouldn't necessarily be for "remove it entirely" either, but I'd certainly be in the camp of "don't waste anymore time on it" That'd be my "alternative".

Just a slight correction, WP has 17.3% DDR at level 50 for a scrapper (from heightened senses). Close to none, but not none.

Storm I think is actually a good match for them. Adds extra control, extra damage, and since the pets are all ranged hurricane works well to help keep them safe. Regardless if they wanted to do a quick and super easy improvement to mercs they could literally just swap out serum for gun drone. Thematically fitting and at least a place to put the pet IO's. Not that it is the greatest power in the world, but the bar is set pretty low with serum as the alternative. I'm also all for a more in depth rework though of course if they want to commit the resources.

Same. Beasts seem to get a wider variety of opinions about them more than most other primaries, including some saying their dps is terrible because their attack chain is buggy. Nice to see them tested like this. From playing them I also got the sense they were actually pretty good.

Very nice write-up. This isn't quite true. Necro pets don't have to die in combat in order to get a ghost. You can get a dead pet anytime you want to use soul extraction on, you just need to use /release_pets instead of dismiss. Then it leaves a body. Of course that ends up releasing ALL of your pets, so it really is something only to do at the start of a mission or in between battles and then as mentioned you have to resummon and upgrade everything again. I tend to just use it at the beginning of missions (and get a guaranteed lich ghost) as the ghost does hang around for quite a while. Even with that it is definitely clunky and I do agree I wish they'd revamp it.

You can also be just about as lazy with SJ as you can be with fly when you want: /bind J "powexec_toggleon Super Jump$$++autorun$$++up" I always liked SJ, but have to say I liked it even better when I found that bind. It can be fun, but sometimes I don't want to bother with it or want to give some of my fingers a rest.

It'd also allow you to make the dad joke of how you love hot dogs.

Weird, I see it work all the time slotting it in deceive on my illusion controller and it seems to last a decent amount of time. Haven't specifically kept track of it, but I'd say maybe around half the time I see the purple confuse bubbles spread to 2 or 3 other enemies and it seems to last probably 8 seconds or so base (about half that when I go up against +3 or +4's of course). Even if my anecdotal memory is being generous it still sounds a lot better than your experience. Maybe the aoe penalty is hitting it harder than it should. Also doesn't blinding powder only have a chance to confuse? In my experience it doesn't work unless the target actually becomes confused. So for instance if I use it on a boss I've never seen it trigger or spread that I remember until the 2nd cast (when I stack it so that the boss actually gets confused). Flat out misses of course also fail to proc anything. Not sure what mag blinding powder is either, if only mag 2 then now you'd be down to only a chance against some of the minions for it to actually proc. Personally I love the proc in deceive. It is no seeds of confusion, but definitely makes using the power useful enough again that I more regularly do so (kind of like how I used it in the lower levels of my character). Without the proc, in the higher levels I tended to only bother using the power in edge cases.

Or it is actually bad design.

I do think Jack Frost is underrated a bit. He got some nice buffs from where he was originally including chilling embrace and 25% base defense against most things. Heck throw in the 2 +def pet IO's and maneuvers and he'd be close to softcap. Add barrier and he pretty much would be even at minimum. With some investment you can make him one of the most sturdy pets for a dom (along with sing, doggo and stonie), and doms often have trouble keeping pets alive. He also has a lot of nice attacks, does good damage, and also has his own hold attack.

Yep, first one I thought of actually. Having hunt missions often is boring enough, having hunt missions only counting in certain "neighborhoods" isn't challenging or fun, it is just annoying and tedious. Sad thing is this was a zone and mission arcs that were designed and added in issue 5, so I think they really should have known better by then.

I'd definitely say if you don't want AA or want to play more at range, earth control would be your better alternative. You basically get stalagmites (a ranged aoe stun) as a major control method rather than AA (along with both having knockdown patches). A stun that also potentially helps set up /energy's special feature better (as it triggers by hitting stunned enemies).

Yep, I think ice/psi would be a solid combo, at least as solid as anything can be with ice. 😉

Lets get rid of one of the few mobs that give a tiny bit of challenge to a small subset of powerset combos? I'd vote a hard no. I'd suggest the opposite. If anything we need more mobs like sappers in other enemy groups. Anyway, sappers are laughably easy to deal with by the vast majority of powerset combos. Get enough ranged or energy defense and sappers miss 95% of the time like most mobs. Run one of the myriad of armor powersets that have endurance drain resistance and you also laugh at them. Something like a stalker can sneak up to them and take them down in one hit before they can even move. If your melee powerset has any sort of hold, stun, or knockdown they also shouldn't be a problem. Most blasters or even corrupters and defenders can snipe them down from range or at least debuff them. Controllers and doms laugh at them as the sappers are instantly confused/held/stunned. As others have pointed out they were already nerfed to be limited to one per group from people complaining about them in the past. Sappers are seriously overrated. Really the toughest thing about them is just spotting them, so I could maybe see making their costuming more unique. Of course you can also just use an enemy targeting bind for them. Honestly they should be made boss class since they are limited to 1 per group. That'd make them more interesting again imho.

Yes.

Problem is people use it to avoid becoming dead.