Coyote

It's not fishy, and it doesn't invalidate your theory that the pseudopet in Spring Attack isn't accepting any enhancements. You're seeing FF proc because the activation power (the one that teleports you and summons the pseudopet) is triggering the FF proc upon you. It's a separate power and it seems to be taking enhancements and thus activating procs. But then the pseudopet is summoned, and that's not taking enhancements... so it's not activating knockback procs upon the enemies, thus Explosive Strike can't trigger (because it's triggered when a knockback power is activated upon enemies, not just activated). However, FF proc will trigger upon activating any Knockback power whether there is a target in the area or not, because it's triggering upon the user rather than upon any targets.

Mind is a set that is all ranged, and with a cone especially likes to stay away from mobs. With that in mind, I'd look for a secondary that plays well at range. IMO, Fire is best for that (and I'm running a Mind/Fire), but Energy is also good (damage is not that high, but you can slot Force Feedbacks everywhere and get perma-Doom status much earlier than normal) and Ice and Dark also do well at range.

The +Recharge affects the caster only... well, it probably affects the pet, but pet powers are flagged to ignore +Recharge bonuses, so that makes no difference. Knockback does stack if they trigger at the same time, but it's pretty irrelevant. You don't want a higher value of knockback since knockdown is preferred, and I believe that AVs have both resistance to and protection from KB effects, which will mean that you can't stack it high enough to break their protection. I have seen them get knocked down, but I think it's only when the purple triangles are down.

Controller D/D is not high damage but it's okay, and defensively it's amazingly strong. Dominator D/D trades off a lot of the defense, but much of it was superfluous, for damage. It's a fair trade-off... you don't get as much offense as you gave up in defense, but offense is usually more useful. Also, getting a Power Up from the assault secondary really turns a Fearsome Stare/Living Shadows opening attack into a big -ToHit debuff in addition to the damage. Sentinel should be a pretty strong pairing, Dark Blast works pretty well for them. I have a Dark/Nin build that's really strong, and while I haven't looked at /Dark for them, it should be fine... but if it has Oppressive Gloom, it's probably better paired with a primary that has a Stun power. I remember running a D/D Defender, like the Controller the defense was very high (Dark Miasma/Affinity are very strong defensive powersets). Damage was on the low side for a Defender, but she soloed AVs before the damage bonus from Vigilance. Add that in plus using procs for extra damage, and it should be fine. I really don't see a bad pairing for D/D. Heck, even Necro/Dark works ;). Dark Miasma/Affinity are very strong sets.

There is no -Res cap, I think, or it might be around -400% (doing 5x normal damage), but the Interface debuffs each have a stacking limit on the target. This prevents multiple users from stacking them indefinitely. IMHO, the stack limit is a bit lower than it should be, making it too common for teammates to have their Interface slots useless on a team where too many people picked the same debuff, but in any case, it's a separate limit on the stacks rather than specifically on -Res, -MaxHPs, etc.

For my build, I have PA permanently easily with the FF procs, but... I am considering switching from Agility to Musculature Alpha to gain more damage. This will make PA just about exactly permanent in a heavy fight (Storm and Tornado fired at maximum rate), but not otherwise. That's fine for me, as the extra damage is more useful but if you need the higher recharge then Agility is still a good pick for Alpha. Multiple interfaces are solid. -Regen, -Res, and -MaxHP are all good. I went with MaxHP, but I'm thinking of switching to the -Res option... -MaxHP may help more against AVs with most builds, but not necessarily with a damage-oriented build, where higher damage gets you more benefit from getting more -Res. So I'm going to switch to Musculature for more damage, and -Res to multiply it more, and see if that turns out more effective. The -Regen option isn't as good against AVs as the -MaxHP, but it does come with a side flavor of DoT which helps more in other situations. Note that any Illusion/Storm should easily cap the stacks on any of the Interface debuffs, so you're always better off going with the side that gives you a higher chance for DoT since you'll still cap out debuffs even at a lower chance. With yourself, 3 PAs, Phantasm, and 5 Tornado/Storms all making attacks that can generate the stacks, reaching the maximum stack limit is trivial.

Most of the set is prety bad. Lotus Drops is a surprisingly good power if you slot it with damage procs. Due to the long Recharge, you have higher than normal chance to activate the procs, and you end up with surprisingly high PBAoE damage from a non-nuke (about 350 for my build). The two Powder Powers are just great. But that's about all, and not only do they lack other GOOD powers... several of them just seem unusually weak for what they are supposed to do. A Build-Up replacement that functions like a high-recharge Build-Up, but for only one attack? Ugh. A weak Tier 1. Smoke Flash had potential, but it's left too weak. The two single-target sword attacks are likewise too weak to make them worth the risk of entering melee. Overall, a couple of powers make the set playable, but it's clearly lower tier.

Damage numbers on Dominators look pretty good to me. They compare to comparabe damage numbers on Blasters. They lose out on: Aim/BU and Defiance, nukes. They gain on: safety, +Damage from the ATO. So if you want to look for damage, I think that I like sets that can slot the ATO in an attack power like Fissure, use that to leverage higher damage, then leverage the FF proc to fire a repetitive AoE chain for sustained AoE DPS. They won't do up-front burst damage like true damage ATs, but their sustained AoE DPS can be solid. When soloing, they do fine. On teams, you don't get to care if you built up a +Damage bonus for your second set of attacks, and that second set recharges fast, because with all of the AoE in the game, it's just your first salvo that really counts. This is really just another part of the City of High AoE Damage that we're in at high levels: sustained DPS only matters when soloing or duoing, otherwise the burst damage clears the spawn except for bosses.

Dehydrate is a must-take. I slot it with 3 Thunderstrikes (though for a Blapper, Ranged Defense may not be as useful so 2xDevastation may be good also), 1 damage proc, 1 Achilles, and 1 Theft of Essence. Water Jet is a good power, not a great power. In most builds I would suggest taking it, 3xThunderstrike and then damage procs. No Recharge IOs in either of these powers to maximize the procs, and let the Enhanced feature recharge it for you. But for a blapper who has the option to use higher-DPA melee attacks... it may be reasonable to skip it.

After making a Plant/Savage I wasn't sure I wanted to run another with one of those sets, but I really liked Savage... so I've started a Dark/Savage build. This is my version:

But... but... but... having your emote interrupted when you are jolted with lightning IS appropriately in-character roleplaying!!! This is actually GOOD for your roleplay! Now, stay in character and tell the offender to stop electroshocking you or you'll.. you'll... um, throw a snowball at them. Or tap them lightly with a bat.

Good but minor changes. I can't test now, but I really think this can be a solid set for a Mastermind, because they don't mind as having to be animation-locked into their support set for most of the time... their primary doesn't have that many click powers that they use in a fight. The stats are not great, but okay. However, for Controllers this may be a bit of a problem since they are busier. Still looks like a usable set, but not as good. With the solid AoE -Recovery this could pair with Electric Control and be an excellent AoE sapper, shutting down mobs via sapping and using an AoE Immobilize to prevent them from running away. Couple it with some up-front damage from an AoE confuse and then some animation-free damage from pets, and it can work. I can see it solid with Fire, Electric, Ice, and Earth. But for a Defender/Controller, it feels like it's going to be very clicky (which is obvious), but it's not really rewarded for the difficulty by having higher ability than other sets. Since the main problem lies with characters who put out their own damage directly, I have a suggestion: have the stacks of Static grant a chance to perform an Energy bonus damage on all direct attacks from the character. Kind of like a personal +Damage (note that +Damage would also work, this seems "cooler"). This way, the characters who have to work harder to balance the use of the electric powers with doing damage via blasting, get something to balance out their damage for all the time spent on the electrics.

That's exactly it. I LIKE that the set is clicky, making you decide how much you're going to spend on using it to its max versus saving time for other actions. But the problem is that you have to click a lot just to get a level of effectiveness that seems like it should be normal. I would like to see the durations and recharges increased so that you don't have to click as much, OR the buff/debuff stats increased so that you're getting more out of spending so much of your animation time for them, like Kinetics is currently. Compare that to Poison and Trick Arrow, two other clicky sets backed up with average debuff numbers, and we see that generally they're not considered very good.

That... could be quite fun. Use Levitate to start them going up, then keep Feral Charging UPWARDS!!! Up, up, and away!!! To the Moon, and Beyond!!! Hey, maybe you can use a Hellion and Feral Charge your way to the moon! No, wait, they won't last long enough. How about a Fake Nemesis? It can be your Fake Rocket Pod! 😁

Yeah... it can cover them, it's just a large drain on both Endurance and animation time, because it has a fast recharge. So... you cover the team, but you're firing it off every 12 seconds, which will get old really fast. Frankly, I think that a lot of the arguments saying how "weak" powers are have really missed the point. It isn't that the powers are weak statistically, it's that: 1: With relatively short durations and short recharges, you can re-buff fast... but have to throw out a lot of powers in a minute to keep the team fully buffed. 2: For that reason, the Absorb shield is great... you get a strong shield that you can refresh FAST (15 second base recharge, 5 seconds with slotting... that's NUTS). This shield is ridiculously strong if the target is getting beat down. I mean, with a 500 pt Absorb going up every 6 seconds or so, and added to the Heal, you can tank over 150 DPS with just Absorb and Heal, or help someone tank. Fast recharge on Absorb powers is great. But imagine how animation locked you will be, doing this. 3: So now, with all of the buffing and healing, you're blowing out a lot of Endurance, so now you need to use the +Endurance power. OFTEN. 4: Okay, now you're buffing, healing, and regaining Endurance. When do you have time to do anything else, like blast? This may work for a Mastermind set, not so well but not terribly for a Controller... and terribly for a Defender. You don't have pets who DPS for you, and the animation time of the buff set is eating up over 50% of your attack time. This is the real problem with the power stats, IMO. They are fine by themselves, but soak up all of the animation time, similar to Kinetics. But on a large team, Kinetics is better... and on a small team, where this set looks to be strongest, you're expected to provide more of the DPS rather than just being a support character. It's not a good design for a Defender, and I can only see it working with a few Blast sets that have really fast animations: Dark, Psy, Fire, and Ice.

I'm not sure if this kind of hyperbole is useful. The heal is a mix between single-target and AoE. It has more target limitations than AoEs, and heals less than single-target heals... but heals more targets than the single-target heals, and heals for more than the AoE. This is clearly a better power for smaller teams or soloing, than the AoE heals, and worse for teaming. And it's better for soloing, obviously, than the single-target heals, though not necessarily better on teams. All of the powers mentioned except Transference seem to have other weaknesses or changes compared to the +End power... not 100% uptime, or +Recovery rather than +Endurance. It looks like it will play out very similar to a weaker Transference, but note that Transfusion is also a FAR stronger heal than other AoE Heals, because you need an enemy mob and need to hit with it. Probably for the same reason, Transference is probably a FAR stronger +Endurance power than other +End powers that don't need an enemy and can't miss. So, really... it looks like it was designed to be balanced with Transfusion. It's possible that Transference/Transfusion get too much of a bonus for their chance to miss, but that's a question about Kinetics design, not about this powerset. The damage buff is comparable to Siphon Power and better than AM except for the target limits. And that brings me back to the point about the Heal... it's stronger on smaller teams than the competing powers, but doesn't scale up to larger teams as well. This is a deliberate balancing point, and while it's possible for a player to state that they care more about how a set performs on large teams, that doesn't mean that they should ignore the idea of how a set functions when soloing or on small teams. The interesting question is the chaining logic: if it doesn't stack, will the chaining prioritize targets who don't yet have the buff on them? If so, then it's a very good power since you can easily get the Recharge down and throw it in different directions to cover a team with +40% damage... if not, then it's more awkward on anything larger than a small-medium team.

I like that. Apparently, alliteration always adds argumentative appeal.

Right. The main reason why Nature Affinity "is a thing" while "no one mentions Electrical Affinity IRL", is because we don't have superpowers in the world. But in a world where people can manipulate electricity mentally or with weird and unique gadgets, having an affinity for electricity would be a good description of what they can do. It may not be a sexy, or unique, or especially evocative name, but the argument that it's not an appropriate name for the powers seems to me to fall flat. I've liked some of the other suggestions, but I like EA also, and I don't think it's an important enough argument to delay anything in putting the set out, and I doubt that the Dev team is also so interested in somehow getting just the "perfect name" that they will delay. I mean, we have dozens of suggestions already, unless many of the "Never Affinityers" can coalesce around an opposition candidate, I think that Affinity has built a commanding lead merely by being the one suggested by the Dev team.

I actually think that you'd have to call it Electric Kazoo 😉

I'd like gadget control. Gas grenades, tasers, etc. Swarm of drones as the pet.

My thoughts about the balance and power of the set: 1: Look at the power numbers first, when arguing if it's weak or strong. For example, it's annoying that the Heal power needs a bit of extra work to get it to work on the caster... and that it doesn't heal a full team. HOWEVER, the heal seems to be about halfway between a single-target Heal Other and a team-wide Healing Aura. So, with a bit of work, it becomes a heal that can hit a good amount of targets, but at higher strength than the usual AoE Heal. I'm not sure if this is ... good enough, but it's definitely something to consider when comparing to other heals. 2: The pet is really several casts of the AoE -Dam debuff, done with one pet summons. Plus an extra ball of HPs for the team that can take a few hits. For it, you give up control of where the AoE debuffs are being targeted, and it wasn't a great power anyhow. So, with the extra bonuses of having a pet that can take a bit of damage, I think the power is fine. 3: I don't like the Tier 1 and the Tier 9... T1 seems useful against AVs and not much else. How often does a single-target -Damage get used, anyhow? I'm not sure if the sapping abilities are worth that much, either. If it had some other minor effect like a chance to knockdown, chance to stun, chance to chain to nearby targets, etc, it would feel more useful. 3.1: Amp Up doesn't seem like a bad power, in fact it seems worth taking... I'll wait until it's available to Controllers to see, but if the +Special works on a pet's base auto Defense powers, it could be an interesting boost to Jack Frost or to the Demon Prince for MMs. However, other than that, I'm not sure it's really enough of a game changer to compare to most other Tier 9 powers. It makes me thing of EMP from Rad... good power, not bad, but certainly not something that you take a set for except in some specific rare builds. Not like Chrono Shift, Fulcrum Shift, Overgrowth, Dark Servant, etc. Basically, if you have it... and one mission you don't use it at all, I think the only sets that will really notice are the ones where it's boosting a +Defense power for a pet. Meanwhile, imagine not using Fulcrum Shift or Overgrowth or Heat Loss. Oh, and I forgot to mention... I hope that they prioritize the chaining for buffs and heals to hit characters over pets... you'd prefer to heal a character at 50% health than a pet at 30%, I would think.

Dark/Electric could work as a Blapper, mostly not using the cones, using the -ToHit, Hold, and Heal from Dark for safer blapping. It would be a single-target specialist mostly, however, in an AoE world.

Gift griefer!!! I hope you only do this on your villains, right?

You can't run multiple Stealth toggles, usually, so usually you can't benefit from the +Def from multiple Stealth powers. However, the exclusion is on having the powers activated, so you do get benefits from toggles (or clicks) that can be running at the same time, usually because someone else is running them, like Steamy Mist (toggle) or Group Invisibility (click). For example, an Illusion/Storm Controller would be getting +Def from Steamy Mist AND the +Def from Group Invisibility... but if they toggled on Superior Invisibility, then Steamy Mist deactivates. But the Group Invisibility bonus remains.

I'm not sure I understand the proc slotting in Call Hawk... as far as I can tell, a normal damage proc does less damage in it than a damage IO, at least until the damage cap is reached, and probably excluding a purple damage proc, because the power's base damage is so high. So it seems to me, that it makes sense to slot up damage first... I use 5xApoc for the set bonuses, but if I were trying to max out its damage, I think I'd go with about 3 IO slots to max out damage and maybe add in a bit of Acc and End reduction, and then put in the damage procs. Granted, the damage procs are up front damage rather than DoT, but the DoT is pretty quick.