CoeruleumBlue

You get damage from Soul Drain and whatever other self-buffs and enemy debuffs you have in dark DPS sets, you don't just spam your big attack over and over. I know most players in this game just want to attack over and over and that's why we have all the new sets like Street Justice, Savage Melee, Water Blast, etc. giving you stacks of some type of damage effect but people end up hating Stalkers in general because they just want to button mash without thinking, and also hating other archetypes like Controllers, Dominators, and Defenders, but since those aren't DPS there isn't as much of a need to prove they work. They're even trying to make Sentinels build up stacks for fighting in combat now, even though most of the popular builds that aren't Electric/Electric are based on using things like the stealth procs from Ninjitsu. So yes, I'm going to continue proving dark sets have good DPS by actually playing them so they don't get rid of the DPS on every set that isn't "you consume your 3 stacks of Battle Rage!" or whatever.

I personally wouldn't change Opportunity to not work out of combat or stop nukes from critting. As of now, the only valid use for Sentinel is basically as a nuke AT somewhat similar to a ranged Stalker and even then it seems weak at that, especially since Stalkers can already get ranged attacks in varying ways. Making Sentinels so they constantly have to be firing off attacks and their nukes don't even work is just going to make them way worse based on everything I've heard from Sentinel players about how to play and build Sentinels, not better. The most popular way to play Sentinels seems to be just for the endurance drain on Electric Blast but that role seems better served by Defenders, who can give basically everyone armor already and get extra endurance drain from a lot of the support sets. The only unique niche for Sentinels seems to be as a nuke AT that has armor to help you survive between the nukes and possibly give you procs to make them stronger like with Ninjitsu or Stone Armor, and even that I heard would have worked better if they had control sets instead of blast sets as primaries, but that's only something I heard once. Everything in this change seems like it'll make Sentinels worse, not better. Maybe just up their damage to blaster levels instead of defender levels because they don't get manipulation sets anyway so they can't even fight in melee until they get Epic Pools or unless they take a lot of Fighting Pool but I would also rather just roll a blaster than run around using a bunch of Fighting Pool attacks all day, and they are automatically slower at stacking debuffs as well since they don't get any from manipulation sets or support sets. Honestly I think Vulnerability never worked with them anyway. Since many attack options for Sentinels apply debuffs, but Sentinels don't get any other debuffs, I think I'd just make it so the debuff automatically applies to enemies they attack and stays on them until the enemies die, the Sentinel dies, or both. Then it can apply to way more than five enemies and it would make sense for the Sentinel to have armor in case they get too much aggro doing that.

I was with you until you said we'll never see it. Weapons/shields do need to be tied to the powers in my opinion, just like Arachnos Maces don't give you options for nightsticks. It's good to have more options but those options need to exist in a world that makes sense, not a free-for-all. For example, someone mentioned having wands and weapons as an origin point for powers. Why? If you have a wand or weapon you need to have a story behind that, and there needs to be an explanation for why you can't do various things with it. I still do personally think it's bizarre my Mind Control/Darkness Affinity Controller has an Arachnos Mace, can't hit anyone with it, and did the Captain Mako story arc. Honestly all the Arachnos arcs bug me because Arachnos is literally fascist, and even if I play it as infiltrating them like with the Hellions arc at the beginning of the game, there's no real reason my character should just randomly have a mace she can shoot people with, but can't hit people with, and Focused Accuracy that also has nothing to do with the mace that I just like because it's clearly an ESP type character and I want to max my ToHit and Perception and not care about ToHit debuffs on a character like that, and I already have all the armor. The patron unlocks being bizarre is why we can't just let people do whatever. Doing a Captain Mako patron unlock and getting a mace that doesn't even look like an Arachnos mace because I used a different mace design and different colors just because I want a -DEF debuff somewhere and Darkness Affinity and Mind Control don't have them, and I also get the best toggle for that build, is already bizarre, because patrons were uncoupled from the unlocks already. So like options with or without swords, hammers, etc. for all of them, sure. But the issue is still keeping things in line with what you're representing. The game is already not great at that all of the time, the devs are rightfully careful with the game they inherited (these problems are almost never their faults, they are understaffed on a game which only got a license earlier this year and survives solely on donations.) More of us should consider becoming devs, I have, but first I've been trying to recruit people from different demographic pools since I think that will also fix some of the issues I see like treating literal Nazis as just a campy bad guy the same as all the other campy bad guys you could fight. Honestly superheroes and pulp stuff do not have to be camp, though if someone wants to just make a character with a campy persona and super sparkle powers that's great, but that's different from saying Nazis are just another campy enemy, which also ties into the problem of patron pools really ending up having nothing to do with the Arachnos patron unlocks anyway.

Cupid's Crush already does that so they could probably do it with every other enhancement set in the game pretty easily if they decided it were a good option for balance.

I keep thinking we need more devs, but ever since I ended up seeing someone's not accurate but not offensive to me American Indian medicine man character (Disclaimer: I'm not an American Indian, so my opinion is not the most important one,) seeing the Māori looking guy on the loading screen all the time, and designing and actually publishing a Māori guy character with a pounamu patu weapon myself but not feeling like I have the guts to really play him, I keep thinking I can't just send in a dev application until we have a wider base of developers. I really don't want it to turn into stereotypical radical feminist/radical in general DEI stuff and just start saying "no you're a straight white dude so you can't be a dev" though, that doesn't seem right at all. Quotas will probably just turn into reverse discrimination which seems bad to me too. However, independently of that I thought hey, I'm going to go try to recruit from ROBLOX spaces, they have too many devs and we don't have enough. Anyone under 14 would probably need some kind of special permission to help work on development, but many ROBLOX devs are over 14 anyway. Here they could actually get paid instead of barely getting paid to develop games like a sweatshop that extends to the first world. Then I thought, incidentally, aren't many ROBLOX devs also in the same countries sweatshops are, and even the ones that don't have sweatshops per se are poorer countries, like how the Philippines stood up to ROBLOX? I thought, maybe the problem with recruiting is just the pools we recruit from, if we recruit from often underprivileged groups like ROBLOX devs, we can probably get more diversity of viewpoints without ending up reverse discriminating against straight white guys, and we can maybe also become "Universe of Heroes" or what have you if we get enough people using the base builder or other tools to make maps and we have more cities, which is something a lot of people have been wanting for a long time even though any rebranding along those lines would also need to be approved by NCSoft now there's official licensing. So now I'm recruiting from the ROBLOX dev pool and if anyone else would like to help with that or can think of anywhere else we should try recruiting from, please tell me or just try for yourself even though I think telling it here would be helpful, thanks for your consideration!

Let's go get all the young adults and maybe some of the kids who are being exploited by ROBLOX, recruit them, and pay them fairly!

Personally the Huge one isn't even called Huge Male even if that's what it is in practice, so just have a Female Heads and Male Heads is my opinion. That also makes it easier just to make giant robots, rock monsters, plant monsters, etc. and not imply that they're all men just because they're giant, they don't need the Female Heads or Male Heads. (They might have genders or might not depending on whether it's a giant monster or just a robot, but it's very silly to imply a giant robot or giant monster with a thick wide body is automatically a dude when I can already just make a giant metal thing, giant rock thing, or giant plant thing and give it no face or an unreadable and nonhuman face.)

Yeah can't they just flip them around? Though I really want flipped versions for the Fire and Ice Arms, get some more lava and crystal arms for my 30 whatever rock characters who will probably be forced into a joke group called the 30 Rocks now (Jk.)

Yeah and there are lots of things that should be on the female body type too that are just nonsensical, for example, the skulls cape mantle in Occult that's only for masculine. Maybe it does look relatively more masculine than the other option, but you can already have gigantic shoulderpads on female characters, some kind of voodoo wizard cape is way less overkill than that and I actually wanted to use it before. That one seems especially silly since it doesn't even involve making a new model, it's just a pattern.

I have never used ice melee so Psi/Psi. Just kidding. Don't ask random people what to play, just ask if there are major problems with something you might like to play, or possibly ask if someone else likes playing something you would like to play and if they have any neat tricks. Asking random people what to play will just make the game not very fun in my opinion.

This is my Power Bludgeon (originally it was called Chain Blade) set in an attempt to make a Dual Pistols style set with ammo swapping for a weapon. This should probably also get a Manipulation set for Blasters and Assault set for Dominators sometime. Possibly one cosmetic option for this would be whip attacks, but at least we can have mace stalkers with a shield now if this is possible to tweak. Chain Slash - Melee, Damage(Smashing/Special), Foe -DEF/Special Chain Hack - Melee, Damage(Smashing/Special), -DEF/Special Chain Spin - Melee Cone, Damage(Smashing/Special), -Knockdown/Special Cartridge Swap - Change Secondary Damage/Effects Bludgeon Feint - Melee, DMG(Smashing/Special), Self +DMG, +DEF(Smashing/Lethal)/Special Confront/Taunt/Placate - Ranged, Foe Taunt/Placate Cartridge Shot - Ranged, Damage(Smashing/Special,) Disorient/Special Vengeful Bludgeon - Melee, Damage(Smashing/Special,) Disorient/Special Crowd Control - PBAoe, Damage(Smashing/Special,) Knockdown/Special Power Cartridges: This changes the weapon's ammo and secondary damage type to Energy, Psionic, or Toxic, and the secondary effects to Endurance Drain, -Recharge, and -RES. In addition, this changes the secondary effects on various attacks: Bludgeon Feint: Energy: +Recovery Psionic: +ToHit Toxic: +Regeneration Chain Spin/Crowd Control: Energy: Sleep Psionic: Knockup Toxic: Immobilize Vengeful Bludgeon: Energy: Hold Psionic: Fear Toxic: Hold Cartridge Shot: Energy: Hold Psionic: Confuse Toxic: Hold

I like psi/psi. Psi Melee has two good PBAoEs and the boggle is fun since it doesn't break stealth, and can be stacked with Aura of Insanity to let you actually confuse people. I would also put at least one Cupid's Crush somewhere, either in the Aura of Insanity or somewhere else if you want to put more procs in Aura of Insanity yet have the full set of Cupid's Crush. I personally can't stand Ice Melee but that's just a matter of taste on my part, and I'm not telling anyone they shouldn't play Ice Melee. Staff is OK but I don't like that the Stalker version gives up the modes personally and still secretly hope they bring those back or make some other weapon with modes for Stalkers, since the mechanics on things like Staff and Savage Melee are probably not any good for Stalkers anyway since they require you to just keep attacking. I've started doing some Dark Melee Stalkers because of someone who said it was good on Scrappers because of the Soul Drain and the fact it does actually have one good AoE that's always up in addition to that so it should be good on Stalkers too since it doesn't require you to just keep attacking to make it work unlike Street Justice, Savage Melee, and Staff. Honestly probably anything you normally like that doesn't rely on repeated attacks is probably good on Stalkers so just pick what you like.

Here is my first Dark Melee Stalker I played doing a DFB! This is just Dark/Dark to show myself Dark Armor is also good on Stalkers despite all the PBAoEs, and to show other people how it works in case they're wondering Dark Melee, Dark Armor, or both on Stalkers.

Here is an entire Hellions Arc on my Dark/Dark Blaster, Blue Ink while people in General are also discussing comic books together. Interestingly a Psychic/Dark Blaster shows up during the cavern section with me since I have one of those too, but I decided to upload a video of Dark/Dark before uploading Fire/Dark or Psychic/Dark so people don't think only the Darkness Manipulation set is good and Dark Blast set doesn't work on DPS characters. I love Dark Blast but before now I've only played it on Defenders because I was under the impression it would be bad on Blasters. This is my first Dark/Dark Blaster video, going all the way! Since the topic of this thread is Dark DPS powersets and not just me playing them, you can post yours too! It's probably good to sort into low level/high level/and max level Dark DPS though so the title was probably perfect. Maybe the person with a Dark Melee Scrapper who talked me into Dark DPS actually being good will post some videos of their dark DPS characters at various levels too. Let's all shine a light on the dark (DPS!)

On Everlasting I had a discussion with someone about dark powersets and DPS characters because of the widespread conception that dark powersets have terrible DPS. That person was quick to have a long discussion with me personally about how dark powersets actually have great DPS if you use them correctly and encouraged me to make the ones I was interested in making. I said I would post videos once I did, so here's my following through with that even if I didn't pinky promise or anything like that. Though neither of these has progressed much, here's my Dark/Dark Stalker doing a blueside DFB and my Rad/Dark Blaster doing Praetorian missions: