Omega-202

I don't really think that's necessary. The pure travel pools already bring some really strong benefits to incentivize taking the over the origin versions. TP can slot range enhancements while Translocation can't. In that regard, it is already faster. Fly helps give you access to Afterburner, again making you faster than Mystic Flight, while also giving you 2 spots for Luck of the Gamblers (hover and afterburner). Super Jump is in the same set as CJ (saving you a pool slot) and the rest of Force of Will is generally pretty bad, so there's clear incentive to take SJ over ML. Speed of Sound has no stealth component while SS does, giving you full stealth when used with a stealth IO, and SS is in the same pool as Hasten, the most commonly taken pool power (again saving you a pool slot). If anything, I've always felt the Origin travel picks were the more "convenient" choices to unlock the top tier powers and if you really wanted an optimal travel power, you'd go with a travel pool because they give you better options.

If it helps, you really don't need to ever use slow AS, and if anything, slow AS is usually a poor use of your Hide crit. With today's fast paced, AoE focused metagame, it's usually better to use your opener on your strongest AoE, even if you only have a 50% crit chance on it.

It's kind of a known finnicky thing with slow AS and slow snipes. Pretty sure its always been a thing since I1, as I recall it being an issue on my baby Energy Blaster hover sniping his way through Perez. You might think you're not moving, but for some reason, the game thinks you are and the animation gets interrupted. It's part of the reason I don't use the slow versions any more, now that fast AS and snipes are a thing.

You can be really durable with Invuln. I'm just short of 45% typed defense to all but Psi and have very solid resists to S/L/F/C, but E/N/P/T are only in the 30%s. Plus Dull Pain is stupid good. The +tohit is nice, especially with a Kismet on top to make fast Zapp hit harder. The only real issue is endurance, so make sure you account for that elsewhere in the build (Impervium 4slot helps for the +end, on top of all of the usual suspects).

Simplest and easiest boost to start would be to give Tesla Cage the Freeze Ray boost. Same for Screech in Sonic. It's crazy to me that FR got a boost to its single target DPS and Sonic and Electric (who needed it more, despite the existence of Zapp) got left out. Cottage rule makes most of the other suggestions proposed here less likely, but I think adding a "chance to chain" effect to the tier 1 and 2 attacks is a relatively clean and easy boost that seems doable. Up Cage, add the chain and then see how it adds up compared to other sets.

Do it and show us the builds if you believe it would work out that way. Give us a build for each that hits 50% defense, and similar resists and show us what you can do with the extra slots. I can't see where you're going to squeeze out any significant damage on your Tank that you couldn't match on rhe Brute.

The only benefit with that idea may be that because you are forgoing recharge slotting and bonuses, you could go with 4 proc, 2 50+5 Damage in all of the attacks, with Tactics etc, providing your accuracy. I don't think it would actually be competitive with a more standard Soldiermind or Crabbermind build. You can already have two "3 proc each, 95% damage enhancement" single target attacks + VG and make a full chain out of that with a high recharge build, so I don't see what a 9 attack proccd chain would do for you. Just wastes power picks.

Why not? That's what the game is now. And anyone not at the point of playing in that space isn't going to give a rat's ass about the marginal benefits between Tanks and Brutes. To the second question: no, equity is a mess between all ATs, but its a hell of a lot closer for Tanks and Brutes than everything else. For 99% of content that's not 10+ endgame bosses, the durability disparity is a non issue and therefore Brutes still come out ahead.

Again, I'm not really getting this whole "my Brute is too squishy" argument. What content are you playing where your Brute is struggling to survive? As someone who constantly runs off and solos in ITFs and has soloed Dark Astoria missions on the full spectrum from squish ball Corruptor to Stone Tank, I can't fathom what content is consistently dropping your Brute to the point that it's a problem worth considering. In a different thread, just to prove a point on the difficulty (or lack thereof) in the current state of the game, I checked to see just how tough my Invuln STALKER was, and the answer was "10 lvl 54 Freakshow Tanks wailing on him at once" just to make him need to pop a few greens and run. If that's what a Stalker can do, what is threatening your Brute?

Those times have a standard deviation of ~100 and a 90% confidence margin of error of ~75 for each set. They're really not showing us anything worth putting any value in, especially with the fact that its not even apples to apples in terms of the missions.

This, and essentially the whole premise of this thread, ignores the fact that survival is binary, whereas damage is not. Does it really matter that your Tank has 90% resists and defense cap and your Brute has 80% resist and defense cap when neither can be killed by anything short of Hamidon? Hell, I have Stalkers and Scrappers and Crabs that can solo face tank most of the game because of IOs. In the end, if the lack in toughness isn't enough to change the binary state of Living to Dead, that extra durability is meaningless. To the point of the thread: As long as Brutes can be built to survive 99% of what the game has to offer and still outdamage Tanks, then no, Tanks weren't overbuffed. When we have Blasters doing 4/8 solo ITFs, Brutes have no reason to complain about the defensive disparity with Tanks.

Ok, so the first part of my earlier statement below is wrong, but the second part is correct? Yeah, you might finish off an enemy a fraction of a second earlier, with the old timing, but in the grand scheme there's no difference in DPA as a whole. "If that's true, its all just a cosmetic thing and when used as part of a chain, the end result is the same."

Very odd. I had never noticed the difference. If anything, the old animation looks unintentionally short and jarring. I wonder if it was bugged in some way. EDIT: just saw Powerhouse's comment. If that's true, its all just a cosmetic thing and when used as part of a chain, the end result is the same. The animation was just badly sequenced. If you look at the "new" versions in the comparison gifs, the damage numbers pop "early" compared to the actual impact.

In both comparisons, you use Aim before the old one. For the sake of parity, what does it look like if you pop Aim before the snipe now? Is it possible that the Aim animation (which in my experience is interruptible shortly after popping it) is masking the animation in the old version?

With enough recharge, you're fine with CI, AS and one of Charged Brawl or Havoc Punch (better DPA vs more reliable assassination stacks and better Hide crit payoff, your choice), and at 40+ you have access to Zapp or Moonbeam to jack up your DPS. At low levels, fill the gap with Kick/Punch if you need to.

It has pretty good DPA and on paper is pretty attractive. Personally, though, I find lining up melee cones to be very awkward and ended up dropping it. Between Lightning Rod, TS, CI and Ball Lightning, I never miss having Jacob's Ladder.

I usually go with 1 lvl 50+5 Accuracy and the Cloud Senses proc. It doesn't add a ton of damage, but its something and does add up. Pet procs will only trigger on powers that can be enhanced with that attribute and all of the DS powers are Tohit Debuff enhanceable, so all of his powers gain the proc. You could use him as a slot mule if you prefer. 4 slot Basilisk, 5 slot Doctored Wounds or Panacea, 5 alot Glimpse of the Abyss all give a recharge boost. But generally, I dont find that he needs more healing, hold duration or fear duration.

Obviously the damage is "bonus". The point is the complete and total lockdown of a full spawn, bosses included, with a single power, and if you have spare slots (which my current Ill/storm has plenty of...somehow) you can do damage to half of them and grab a nearly guaranteed recharge boost from it. And due to the high recharge, its basically always available to use and can save teammates by giving you some breathing room for a few seconds or stopping a boss from popping a power (Paragon Protector MOG for example). Also, don't overlook how much the KD helps teammates maximize their AoE. If you plant a full spawn on their butt, your Blaster teammate's Rain of Fire is hitting more of its ticks. I'm not saying its a great power, but if you're forced to take it, then might as well make the best of it.

I'm going to throw my hat into the "defending Gale" side. I have no idea where you're getting your recharge numbers but you can get way more uptime on the FF proc than that. And as said by others, you don't need to use it every time its up if you have better things to do. And if you are worried about the damage, I've been messing around with triple damage procced Gale (+FF and KB>KD and an acc IO) and its not bad at all. There's a 21.5% chance for each damage proc to land, which gives you a 48.4% chance that at least one will trigger on a each target and a 13.8% chance of 2 triggering every time you cast it. For a power that can perma juggle a whole spawn, bosses and all, with one of the widest ranged cones in the game, its not bad, especially when you're consistently hitting 10 nemies per cast. For 10 enemies, you're getting 6.5 damage procs, and a 75% chance to proc FF on a stupidly low cooldown, with full enemy lockdown.

I'm glad that this is something that can be done (kudos on your ever more impressive game knowledge), but I don't see a compelling reason to do it. It would be a net nerf to certain powers in an AT that is in a really good spot right now, and personally, I feel like it's counter to the Stalker "flavor". When I play a Stalker, I want to feel the big chunky hits when I crit. "You'll hear two sounds: me hitting you and you hitting the floor" is what Stalkers mean to me. Spreading out the front-loadedness of certain power's crits is the opposite of that.

See, I always took his powers to be a combination of mutant enhancement (Bile Spray, Knockout Blow, Shark Skin, Artic Breath, Hibernate) and Coralax based psionics (psychic shark projections). I never thought that they were straight up magic.

I honestly don't think it would take that much to fix the set. The real issues are Shout, Howl and Screech, in my opinion. Shriek and Scream's less than stellar DPA is balanced by the debuff and can be left as is. Howl should get its animation dropped to ~1 s with a ~7 sec debuff (down from 2.33 and 9.83 respectively), Shout can go down to 1.3 s with an 8 s debuff (down from 2.67 and 10) and Screech should just clone the revamped Freeze Ray damage and animation values and drop from 13 to 11 s debuff. Do those, then see where the set sits and tweak more if needed. Edit: with caveats that you'd need to look at all the shenanigans that were done to Sonic in the past where it was taken off of the standard AT damage scales. Can't remember off hand what they did back on Live, but I recall the devs borking with Shout's damage in some way to make it not god awful. But my memory may be playing tricks on me and that might have just been in PVP, where they tried to balance DPA based on animations.

Yeah, I get that. Maybe balance that with reduced duration on the debuffs. That way we don't have to get into changing AT scales or anything, we increase the "speed" and DPA of the set and don't overpower the debuff aspect. The biggest feeling whenever I play a Sonic character is that the other set doesn't feel like it matters because all of my animation time is monopolized by Sonic. My Sonic/Energy Blapper never really has time to bother with Blapping because they've been Shouting for the last week. My Sonic Defender might as well just be a Howl/Shockwave/Screech turret that uses their primary once an hour because they dont have time to do anything else. It does make me consider giving a Sonic Sentinel a go due to the passive nature of armor sets, but talk about undertuned combinations....

From an efficacy POV, this seems like a great boost to the set. But, in my opinion, it doesn't address why I, and seemingly others, don't find the set "fun": the animation times. This seems like a work around instead addressing the core problem. On paper, this would help bring the set up to par for Blasters, Sentinels and Corruptors but the terrible animation times just make the set *feel* sluggish. I'd rather the set get an animation time revamp, dropping the animation time of Shout and Howl, and taking a look at Screech's damage and animation.

No its really not. Have some self control and just hold off on leveling until you have a convenient time to do so. Generally, I find it more than a bit inconsiderate when people hold up TF runs in general to go level, especially with how quickly most low level TFs go. Unless you're grabbing Speed Boost, just wait until its over.