Coyote

Greenpeace Commando 🤣

Can we bring back Statesman as a zombie? Maybe Aurora knows some magical ritual.... 😛 He can be Hero 1's sidekick follower after that.

Personally, I'm looking at Galvanic Sentinel as a 1500 HP ball of Absorb effect, with the Absorb shield put on it. It draws aggro with a fast-spamming AoE debuff, you can add more aggro to it with a Stun proc, and if the character is slotting the two +10% Resist IOs it can have over 40% Resist to everything. This will hold up a high-level boss for a bit, saving T1 henchmen from being one-shotted, and help keep aggro off the character if you're a Controller with a single non-AoE pet like Earth and Ice. It should have uses just as a resummonable Absorb effect for extra safety, besides the -Damage debuffing and ability to act as the source of a chain so the character can heal or buff himself. I do think that an increase in Duration may make sense... 10-30 seconds on the base duration would probably be fine.

I don't know about Brute/Scrapper forums, though I believe that Electric Melee is considered a fine AoE set with low ST damage. I am sure that the set on Stalkers is considered fine, balancing solid ST damage (weak for Stalkers, but that's still good ) with one of the best AoE sets for Stalkers. Stalkers generally kill things fast enough that they don't care about debuff effects from their attacks anyhow, so unless it's a Hold or Knockdown usable against Bosses, it's all about damage with them.

1: I like the spreadsheet and the heavy use of math to argue the strengths and weaknesses of a set. I think this is the right way to consider balance... sure, players don't have to PLAY that way. But this is the way that designers have to balance powers. 2: However, I do think that using Blaster stats may not be the right argument... they have higher damage but not higher End Drain, so it's clear that they would probably have a higher advantage when slotting for damage over End Drain, than Defenders or Controllers (for other draining sets). 3: I'm not sure if it's a good design or a bad design, but the draining powers aren't even across a set. You have some powers like Ball Lightning that do damage and little drain, and then Short Circuit that does comparable damage but far higher drain/-Recovery. Generally, even if you do slot for -End, you won't slot it in all of the powers. 4: Sapping builds very rarely function based only on the end drain of their primary. Usually you back it up with Power Sink, or Power Boost, or a secondary that also helps drain. While this is true with regards to damage also, there are some sets that help more with sapping than with adding to damage. So, again, sapping may not be a viable playstyle just because you have an Electric X set, but might become viable with the same set, if backed up by some specific sets. Now, what I take from these points as a conclusion is: sapping is viable, but not automatically so, depending on powerset combinations. Damage can be discussed for a blast set regardless of the secondary, usually... but sapping really cannot. The difference between a character build for sapping and not built for sapping is greater than having a high-damage secondary vs a low-damage secondary.

How about Shocking Awe?

I like Electroprojection. It sounds like something you'd see in a comic book talking about what a hero or villain can do.

I think Ice/Electric/Fire. Electric is best as the secondary. That puts you into blapping builds because its strength is melee-range powers. So while both Fire Blast and Ice Blast are excellent primaries, you don't need the higher damage of Fire, but having two Holds from Ice is really helpful. So Ice/Electric as the base. Pyre is one of the better epics, and brings another Hold for the character, allowing you to play a bit like a Dominator, hold everyone immediately and smash them with the fast attacks from Ice and Electric. Also, Bonfire helps Ice Storm and Blizzard do more damage as mobs fall down while trying to run out of their area.

I just beat Dreck as a +3, and some other AVs, using Lore pets... if he didn't have -Def, with my capped Ranged Defense, I could tank most +3 AVs at range and slowly beat them down. The regeneration from the Tree, Melee Hybrid, and Surge of Power (alternating the last two as much as possible) makes it usable against AVs. Not one of the better soloers, but not actually gimped. Well, granted, much of it is held up by capped ranged defenses... but I was also worried about handling AVs, and it turns out that it can't handle some of the tougher ones (Lanarru spanked me viciously), but easy to moderate AVs aren't that much of an issue. And few are really going to be an issue if you are willing to drop to +1s.

I think Dark/Savage MIGHT be stronger because of the ability to start with cones and teleport in for Heart of Darkness/Rending Flurry, but... when I made my Plant/Savage, I couldn't stop playing him. I usually level up multiple characters at a time, and that was the only time that I just stuck about 80% of the time on one character to 50. Having to use only one power (Seeds) at the start of the fight and then go in and RIP FACE OFF until the spawn is cleared just turns the character from a Dominator to a mez-oriented Scrapper. Or a mezzing blender 😄

OMG, Feral Charge, how I 😍 you. And combined with the animation of Vicious Slash, you're not merely teleporting into the enemy's face, you're also RIPPING IT OFF for them. Can you say... Face Off? *chorus of groans* ... I knew you could!.... and there you see, how Savage Melee does AoE damage even in forum posts 😄😝

To note, I've had no Endurance problems using Agility Alpha, because I use Ageless (as an Illusionist, not that much mezzing is coming at me, and getting powers up faster is more useful than Clarion's mez protection, especially with Rune of Protection in the build). With Ageless, you can do without Cardiac, although I do think that you need one or the other in most Storm builds.

Very nice changes. What I like: 1: with a pet to target, it's possible to spam Static builders and get Static up regularly. This fixes one of the previous big problems of the set. 2: with the powers now chaining back to the caster, they're usable when soloing as a Defender. This fixes the other big problem of the set. 3: I'm not yet sure if the balance between Galvanic Sentinel's duration and cast time is good... but I'm not sure it's not, either. I mean, it basically replaces your own cast times SEVERAL TIMES, with a single summons that also allows you to chain. Clearly a net benefit, though it might still feel a bit too busy with just summoning it, chaining powers for +Static, etc, in order to build up some power. Compared to other sets that work simply without needing so much finicky power activations, this is an improvement... but probably could be improved more with a +20 second increase to the base (and therefore max) duration. What I don't like: Endurance Drain as a good effect. It's just not that good unless it's stacked with something to fully drain, at which point it goes from worthless to great. I would really like to see a -3-5% Damage debuff on all of the draining powers so that they do SOMETHING when they fail to completely drain a target. Obviously this debuff will be superfluous when a target is completely drained, but you want to see some effect from draining half of a target's endurance.

I like it. Affinity of the character for electrical effects. It works for me semantically, it works regarding fitting it with other set names, it sounds more like a set than a power, and it sounds reasonably nice. 👍

No, that just drains them, seasons them, and "cooks" them in hellfires for 1.5 seconds at 350 thousand degrees. This power actually consumes them. But they taste better when properly prepared, and that's why you go Soul Drain --> Consume Souls 😉

Dark: I would skip the AoE Hold, and probably the single-target Immobilize. The others are all pretty good.

Phantasm gets the bonus, but Tornado and Lightning Storm are untargetable pets that can't be affected by buffs and debuffs. Phantom Army decoys are targetable, but still unaffected by outside buffs and debuffs, so they would be "hit" by Assault, but unaffected by it in the same way that they're unaffected by debuffs and damage. So with just one pet and your personal attacks helped by Assault, I'd drop it, pick up a useful power like Flash, and move the slots from ST to it. But doing that will mean dropping Vengeance, which is a LotG mule, so... there are tradeoffs.

I saw a fix about the interface regarding Raids, I wasn't sure this was it. It's not a Raid encounter, after all. But maybe it really was only noticed much on Raid encounters because usually you don't have so many sources of damage on AVs when soloing? Anyhow, I hope you're right... I feel dirty for cleaning the floor with Siege just because he caught a bug 🤒

Ah, I see.... This all that it does. So the +Recovery AoE effect around the caster is not true AoE effect, but it's created by summoning a pet at the caster's location. Since neither the effect at the user (Self) or at the target (Target) do anything to Endurance or Recovery, the proc has no reason to be called. It's only the summoned "Heat_Loss" entities who actually do the endurance work who might affect themselves with the proc, but that doesn't help the character who is activating the power.

You're right, debuff and buff AoE powers that would seem to act like toggles actually ARE toggles. That's why you never see Sorcerors just standing around with a Hurricane on, they have to toggle it up. Same with Spectral Demons who have a Chill of the Night toggle, Ruin Mages who bring up a defensive bubble, many mobs with Leadership powers, and so on. Generally, if they affect other targets besides the owner of the power (whether as buffs or debuffs), they are likely to run as toggles. They can be shut off by sapping or by Sleep/Stun/Holds.

Update: After I mentioned this, Nihilii did some testing with a character using only personal attacks and found that the stacks seem to stack and fade at a normal rate. He couldn't get stacking high enough to see a problem, which may be why it hasn't been seen... if the stack limit is per entity, not many characters are using so many entities that it would make a drastically noticeable effect. Well, other than Thugs/Storm or Demons/Storm. Although I wonder if this may be contributing to some of the Pylon times that I've seen for those builds.... I used a Power Analyzer on my fire/rad/psi Sentinel to check this just now. Every attack she has is 1.32s or under, so she's likely close to the highest possible number of stacks you can throw on a petless character. Average -maxHP was -3900 (which fits with expected value against 30677 Pylon HP = ~12.5%). There was ONE spike of -4900 for a moment, but it was gone as soon as it happened.

Do you mind if I post your results in the bug forum thread? I haven't had time to go testing how the proc builds up without pets, but in any case I couldn't do it better than this since I'd just be trying to survive while using Boxing/Brawl to see how high it can stack.

Well, two things: 1: it is possible to flag debuffs as unresistable. So it could be an unresistable debuff. 2: even AVs don't actually have resistance to -Resist debuffs. That, and -Damage, are the two main debuffs that work upon them at full strength. Oh, and -Special, I think. In fact, I updated my suggestion in the Shock Therapy thread, to change the debuffs to a trifecta of -Special/-Damage/-Resistance, which basically ignores the usual resistance to debuffing except for special situations like some attacks that may be specifically flagged to ignore modifiers.

Heat Loss's direct power used by the character is not an End Drain power, it's a Pet Summons power. It summons a pseudo pet at the target mob's location. This pet then throws out AoE -End/+Recovery debuffs and buffs, so it's probably benefitting itself from the proc that you thought would help you 😛 I do wonder, though, because I thought that Heat Loss fired once directly on the target and the caster, which makes it usable at range, and the pet is used just for the "near the target" AoE effects. So I would think that the proc should fire once at 90% chance when Heat Loss is used, though not more than once since the initial cast is treated as a single-target power rather than an AoE.

Players also suffer no effects from End Drain until they reach 0, at which point they suffer some big penalties due to toggle dropping. NPCs generally don't suffer from toggle drops, but perhaps we can simulate that by giving them debuffs when they're drained to 0 (regardless of whether they regain End or not). Something like: 1: -50% Special for 10 seconds 2: -20% Resist (all) for 10 seconds 3: -20% Damage (all) for 10 seconds