Riverdusk

Heck, would like to see war mace and stone melee too.

Honestly you could play illusion with no secondary at all and it'd be pretty good. It is what makes me wish it was available for dominators. You wouldn't have a lot that would be affected by dom, but it might be fun to combine it with an assault secondary.

Most fun I had with it recently was confusing Frostfire and watching his own pets kill him. Mission complete.

Can't speak to entangling aura, but choking cloud is literally the same power with a different animation so it should work the same. The lockdown +2mag proc in choking cloud works well enough that I'm going to keep it in there. Can't say I've tried damage procs in it yet. Edit: This is on my ill/rad, so I need all the extra control I can squeeze out of it. 🙂

QFT. Only real advantage /rad has in that combo is the +rech from AM (big help for illusion). I personally prefer rad a bit over traps for more general team gameplay and it just plays "smoother" to me while still being amazing at AV killing. But if you just want to be the best AV/GM killer you can be, ill/traps is hard to beat. Another amazing one is ill/cold that I'd probably rank a bit above ill/rad for the task. But I'd still have to give the nod to ill/traps just because traps has the immobilize. No worries about AV's running all over the place.

Yes, I can't imagine not taking both, but I'd agree deceive would be my choice to keep, if I really had to choose between those two. The ones I dropped on my illusion/rad are flash, group invisibility, mutation, and fallout. Those are all more skippable to me.

Yep, I always take it on a controller for the damage more than anything. On a dom I skip them.

I remember the meme from the old live days of "accuracy has been nerfed" because someone would claim that after every single patch. 😄

What critters are noticing this on? Some have immobilize resistance (vazh, warwolves, ghosts, etc.). Or is it on a variety of everything?

Arcane bolt is my goto now. Activation time isn't great, but at lower levels when you don't have many powers what else are you going to do with those gaps anyway? As an illusion I'm not often in melee so I also figure by the time I'd run up to melee them with boxing or air superiority or whatever, I could have easily gotten a bolt off and something else too. Other option is temps as suggested. As a dark you don't have any -defense powers to help you hit with them, but you can go to the P2W vendor and get the temp buff power that gives you a +tohit buff for up to 8 hours at a time. At lower levels it isn't too expensive, so I always stock up on all 3 of them myself.

Personally I'd never do a storm that didn't have access to an immobilize (either in set or in an epic), so no illusion/storm for me. It isn't the knockback so much as it causes things to run away too much for my liking (tornado and lightning storm both have a "run away" fear affect). Some people like the chaos though, so you might enjoy it. Illusion/dark and Illusion/rad are probably my two favorites. I use /time too much on my masterminds where I like it better, but ill/time is amazing as well no doubt.

Was thinking, illusion would be the one of the sets that'd require more swapping around than the others to work. Your idea would be the simplest and would be fine imo. However, I'd probably go with keeping consistency with the other sets by having phantasm at 18 and move Phantom Army down to 12, sliding group invisibility down to 6 would be the other swap needed in that plan. Fun to think about anyway. Edit to say "one of the sets", some others like dark and earth that don't currently have the aoe hold at 18 would need a bit of extra swapping.

Not sure if this was ever reported in any other threads, but I've noticed a LOT of the power info texts are messed up now (not just for this patch, it is this way on live now as well). Mostly with double entries of effects, but sometimes filled with things that the powers don't actually do. None of it seems to actually translate to actual game performance (Charged armor certainly isn't actually giving my tank 70% s/l/e resistance all by itself), so not a high priority, but I find it confusing. Another example is static shield is saying it is giving tohit resistance among other things that it doesn't actually give. This is affecting more than just electric armor and more than just tanks. I noticed it on Willpower and invuln for scrapper too on just a quick check. Most people probably just use hero planners and don't even look at this info, but I do quite a bit.

Per the Jan. 23rd patch notes it should give you a chance for +end now. I don't think it worked before. "Boosts > Performance Shifter > Chance for +Endurance: Should now have a chance to grant the caster Endurance if used on an offensive attack." I'd probably test it to make sure though. Put "healing received" channel in your active tab and it'll show it there if it is working since that channel also shows endurance "heals".

Found this very annoying as well, and I don't even use headphones. Some sets are worse than others, necro (as you happen to be commenting on) being the worst out of the sets I've played to higher levels. Another random one that is super loud (to show it isn't just a MM problem), soul drain from dark melee. Every time I fire that one off, ouch to the eardrums, seems to be twice as loud as any other power in the set.

Kind of mentions it here: https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Time As well as other things that are time of day sensitive.

Yes, just not near the same levels. At level 50 you'll be at about 35% def debuff resistance. If you take the tier 9 power you can get up close to 70%, but it isn't permanent. I'd say katana/Ninja has less of an issue just because you can stack so much extra defense with divine avalanche (at least against melee/lethal) when you need it to overcap and just absorb the occasional debuffs that might hit you. In exchange you get a lot more utility with a heal, endurance recovery, a confuse, and a ghetto travel power built in. Can potentially give you more build freedom as you don't have to spend power picks on a travel power and/or aid self. As previously mentioned, it also actually has some very nice psi resistance and psi can sometimes be one of the biggest weaknesses of a positional defense set. Shinobi also allows you to start every fight with an almost guaranteed crit (somewhat similar to a stalker), which is a decent damage boost, something often overlooked. Can use it to help take out a troublesome boss or annoying sapper, etc., or lay down something like Lotus Drops and get a sea of crits to start. Only drawback to the set for me is no taunt aura. Thematically it makes sense, but it means be prepared to chase down runners sometimes. Luckily it has a big +speed power in it so you can chase them down fast. Being SR you should already have a feel for that.

I always do Hollow arcs now. They aren't bad at all, and merit rewards are actually pretty good. Hey, you also get a nice badge if you do all of them.

Was thinking the same. Shadow maul, despite the complaints about it, is very much worth using, as long as you can hit at least 2 targets with it. This should make it super easy to do so. Soul drain having a bigger radius is a pretty huge buff and damage buffs themselves are now better with the higher base damage. Still won't be an AoE monster, but much more tolerable (and you of course can always pick up a couple of AoE attacks from epic pools and then have those now buffed with a larger easier to use soul drain).

Overall, great changes! Glad to see them live.

I could be misremembering, but I'd swear 02 boost used to be first a long long time ago. People complained about being forced to take a power that "only worked on others" and they swapped them. This was before poison set was a thing where obviously they changed their minds.

I'd move all the controller pets from 32 down to 18. In most cases probably swap the AoE hold to 32 (along with a significant buff to the aoe holds, overdue since blasters often now have better aoe holds in the current game.) In Mind's case, swap mass confuse to 18 (and also buff that).

Nemesis? There is already also tougher content in things such as carnies or malta. Problem is almost no one actually wants to fight them. They are too busy doing their AE fire farms or easy Council missions. Which is what always makes me question the theory that most people want a harder game. The way they choose to play the game now doesn't really show it. At the least you'd need to also look at the reward system and better balancing that as well in order to "encourage" most people to play the harder stuff. That would be a delicate task.

Too true, but it is a little weird though that the starting level 1-5 contacts don't give you their cell phone until you do several missions from them. Pretty much all of the contacts beyond that (level 5+) that you run into now give you their cell phone after completing just 1 mission for them. Not sure if that was done on purpose for some reason or just an oversight.

Exactly. I still do the starting contacts for every character I start. In fact I usually do a few of the the different Atlas Park building starting contacts. You aren't origin limited and can go and talk to anyone you want. I tend to always do Azuria's as one of them as she gives mostly easy Hellion stuff. Security Chief missions in my experience show up usually way before you run out of other missions from a contact. A lot of them seem to be level based. You get to the minimum level of specific zones and you'll then get them popping up in whatever (of the older original type contacts) you visit. Perez Park is a classic one, it'll start showing up once you hit level 7 for the old go "kill 10 CoT in Perez Park", which can be a real pain at that level. A lot of times you'll get stuck having to do them in order to get to other missions you might want from a contact. I'd love to see them just go away. Adding MORE to a generic Security Chief kill mission is the last thing I'd like to see. That'd make it (and the rest of them) even worse. Cool review though. 😀