macskull

I don't know where you are getting your numbers, but you might want to apply your first sentence to your own post. The only set that can even be kind of competitive with Fire for raw damage output is Ice, and that's with a lot of procs and a lot of recharge from buffs or set bonuses. If the only thing you are looking at is the absolute damage an attack does then sure, Fire is only a little bit better but... animation time is a thing that exists and it's probably the biggest reason Fire is the best set out there if you care about damage. Damage isn't what matters - damage per animation time is.

Fire Blast's secondary effect is "more damage," so in essence every other set is trading that extra damage for secondary effects. In Elec's case, it's a very binary secondary effect which is completely and utterly useless until the enemy's endurance is at zero and their recovery is floored. The set lacks real single-target damage because it gives up an actual T3 blast in exchange for Tesla Cage (which is addressed on Sentinels at least). The snipe changes helped, sure, but they also equivalently buffed every other set with a snipe, most of which already had a T3 blast. Voltaic Sentinel is also a pretty awful power which doesn't help the set out either.

Dominators got a sizeable secondary set balancing pass in late 2019. They could probably use some more tweaks to eliminate the reliance on permadom, but as far as archetypes go in this game they're not in a bad spot.

PvP's not super active at the moment but at least leveling and building a character is way easier than back on live. You can get to 50 pretty quick, an entire build costs about as much as like half a purple set did back on live, and you can buy PvP-only versions of all the accolade powers from arena/zone vendors.

I would argue since mez protection powers were intentionally left out of the "short-cooldown single-target buffs are now AoEs" change (and in the case of the one buff which gives mez protection and was made an AoE the mez protection only applies to the initial target), and considering the back-and-forth discussion about the changes to Rune of Protection and its impact on mez protection for squishies, this is something that probably won't happen.

SoonTM.

Was doing some digging after a question on the Discord and discovered that in PvP Stalker Focus and Shockwave are incorrectly using the ranged_pvpdamage modifier table instead of melee_pvpdamage, resulting in an attack that does about 60% of the damage it should. It also seems like the Scrapper version of the power, which correctly uses melee_pvpdamage, is incorrectly scale 1.1799 when it should be scale 1.459.

Off-topic, but I would guess the reason the IO set change is happening is because there are probably some more global enhancements a la Winter's Gift or Synapse's Shock which are considered to be too powerful to slot into the different versions of prestige sprints players have access to for free.

Agility lowers proc chances, which when you're at the damage cap is the only way of going faster.

If you're flying, you're doing it wrong.

I don't think the "feature or bug" discussion is really relevant as unless someone manages to dig up relevant forum posts from 10-11 years ago we will never know with 100% certainty which is true. Additionally, what might have been originally intended as a "feature" in the context of the game at the time might no longer be true given how much things have changed since then. That being said, the reasoning for the change matters far less than the effects of the change. KM is a middling set with the main appeal of getting a single-target attack chain early (additional bonuses for Stalkers are a faster-than-normal fast-cast AS and the higher crit rate from hide on Burst). Outside of that KM is plagued by slow animations, a T9 that can't crit in exchange for resetting BU/Power Siphon, and (on non-Stalkers) a BU replacement that by most measures is inferior to other sets' BU replacements. Reducing Burst's hidden crit rate nerfs the set for the only AT with an appealing version of the set and doesn't solve the problem of the set being mediocre.

I'm also opposed to the Burst change but wanted to address these: Stalkers are the least-popular non-epic AT (by which you're implying "popularity = effectiveness" but that's not really true because if we used the same logic then Empathy would be the best support set when that's clearly not the case) but that's at least partly due to two factors: The huge QoL buff that turned Stalkers into absolute beasts happened late in the game's pre-shutdown life so many returning players aren't aware of it The description and apparent playstyle doesn't appeal to players who don't know what the individual ATs really do The only ATs that have higher melee damage scales than Stalkers are Scrappers and Dominators. Scrapper melee scale is a little more than 10% higher than Stalkers get and Scrappers don't get reliable crits most of the time, and Dominator melee scale is only 5% higher than Stalkers but they only have access to 2-4 melee attacks depending on their secondary.

The post you quoted had quite a few ridiculous statements, but you could look at this from the opposite point of view - take Fire Blast, which lacks any real secondary effect outside of "free extra damage via DoTs." If that's your starting point, then every other set gives up damage in exchange for an actual secondary effect, and of those secondary effects end drain is arguably the worst because of its binary nature.

This is identical to how other caster-affecting movement buffs operate (Inertial Reduction, Accelerate Metabolism, etc.) so this seems like WAI. I'm going to jump on the "this change is not good" bandwagon here and attempt to appeal to reason - I believe Powerhouse has said Kinetic Melee is going to be looked at in a future update but we have no idea how far away that update is. It could be three months, it could be a year. I don't think it's a good idea to remove one of the few appealing aspects of Kinetic Melee now with the intention of working on the entire set later. HC has already proven they're capable of seriously improving existing sets once they get attention but it's far more palatable for Burst to get adjusted in the context of changes to the entire set than it is to see Burst get "normalized" for the sake of normalization.

It's fixed in the patch that just went to beta.

It is possible to have a set be balanced against other sets while still having something unique about powers within that set. Regardless, this change accomplishes the opposite of bringing the set into balance.

Unrelated but I am curious what you are getting at here as S/L attacks still follow the same standard damage formula as non-S/L attacks.

Larger radius, 8ft is seriously tiny Faster animation Make Concentrated Strike not suck, the animation time is awful and giving up crit damage in exchange for recharging Build Up is 100% not worth it Speed up Focused Burst Keep Burst the way it is, let the set have its "thing"

Well at least the people who were complaining about it in the Page 2 patch notes thread will actually have something to complain about now.

Once again, this change you are talking about did not happen.

Did you even look ingame before posting this? Nothing about Burst changed. Also, PvP is far from a balancing point - it's been explicitly stated by multiple people on the dev team that they are 1) not designing powers around PvP and 2) not going to let PvP stop changes from happening.

Apparently the change to Blaster max HP happened during one of the I24 beta builds, so it wasn't a Resurgence/Homecoming change. I don't think it needed to happen period but I guess it was part of an overall adjustment to Blaster survivability in I24 and those changes had zero consideration for how they affected PvP because 1) they were still in beta and 2) I don't think anyone on the dev team cared about PvP by that point. The PvP community has been trying to find a good way to handle the increased Blaster HP but it's something that will probably take a bit of new code to figure out. There were some changes to Blaster base resistances in an early build of this update but they got rolled back because they didn't actually result in an appreciable change because of how DR works. If HP maxmax (i.e. the AT's HP cap) had separate entries for PvP and PvE this would be simple, but that attribute isn't separate.

Rad Melee Stalker changes need to specify the changes are PvP-only.

The range change for fast snipes is annoying for sure, but I'd argue it's mostly because you're used to a certain behavior that's changed. It bothered me while I was testing it too but at the same time I understand why a power that functions as a standard ranged attack should have the same range as a standard ranged attack. Blaster fast snipes still get the 50% range bonus so odds are good your next snipe will get the range bonus from the first one.

I'm a bit confused why anyone should be apologizing for the Scrapper epic snipes, which are now correctly affected by crit chance modifiers and are no longer stuck at a 5% crit chance. If the complaint is "I can't fast snipe from 150+ feet anymore" then... eh, whatever. Invisibility still functionally exists and I'm not sure why anyone would be using it except for concept purposes (and you can now customize Stealth with an "invisible" theme to cover that one) or for stealthing missions (in which case Stealth + stealth IO in a prestige sprint will exactly replicate its effects while still providing a benefit when in combat). "You should fix this completely unrelated thing before working on something" is a really poor argument. The market bugs, while annoying, are easily worked around. PvP balance issues, not so much. Pretty much everything PvP-related that's been changed in the last two big updates has been things the PvP community's been asking for and was low-hanging fruit for a dev with a bit of free time.