Shin Magmus

It just seems to be a design decision that has inertia at this point. Changing it would be a massive buff to all sets with these powers, and that seems to be a bridge too far (for now). AoE Antidote and Thaw would be the strongest ones because those powers AREN'T DEAD PICKS since they can mule Resist set IOs but they also provide significant Slow/-Rech Debuff Resists: Thaw provides more and it will hard-cap your stat in most cases. Making that AoE would be pretty stronk...

Arse Control is an overcomplicated set laden with pointless conditional statements that secretly disable aspects of your powers, but only if you read the CoD entry or are tech-savvy enough to understand why. It has severe issues setting up Containment vs all but the easiest enemy groups, and legitimately no viable Containment on AVs due to lacking a ST Immobilize as part of the attack chain. The AoE Immobilize is one part of the issue but the ST Immobilize is a huge part of how Controllers fight AVs. The devs clearly designed the set for Dominators with almost no thought given to Controller issues. It will never get an Immobilize: I was there and I know that they'll never relent. That said, one solution is reevaluating how Containment works as a whole to divorce it from the need for Immobilizes in most contexts. It's definitely possible to fix Containment, which is like correctly putting the "horse before the cart" and addressing the real issue. There were ideas to make Sleeps and other statuses have better Containment uptime (I know the plan, I know anything and everything I want to know) but those didn't make it into the latest update. Maybe next time?

I think it would be fun for the Minotaur in the Fog to have a random, very low, chance to spawn with a dramatically increased model size and collision. Make him spawn BUT BIG and physically trap teams in hallways because they can't get around his fat ass. Call this "Ultrawide Minotaur."

The Labyrinth is a great proof of concept for anecdotal evidence of just how few casuals read Patch Notes at all. It's very funny.

Nice Fix.

Let the waves of saltwater from Marine Affinity wash over the salty masses as they enter The Labyrinth of Fog... and get slaughtered.

At this point I should admit that I'm not super interested in playing this set on release, but it seems fine and is a solid mid-tier set that boosts both survival and kill speed "enough". I think it just doesn't appeal to me outside of theme, and it's not overtly powerful enough to displace my existing supports. It's way better than Empathy, and I'm going to surely appreciate the constant benefits of powers like Barrier Reef and Shifting Tides when tons of players are spamming Marine alts after the patch drops, but I'm just not feeling it. Kudos to the animation team on some of these powers though: fishtastic.

I understand this complaint but Disruption Field in Sonic Resonance is the other ally-anchored toggle and that one doesn't even have the option to anchor it on an enemy like Tides. In both cases, the actual anchor for the power will be a melee AT on your team. These are powersets that are not really built for soloing... and MMs are the niche edge case where sets like that still really benefit a solo player. It's a support set available to support ATs and so I probably won't solo at all on my Marine Affinity character: I'll just have a teammate to slap it on, who closes into melee range faster than any pet.

I appreciate the changes to Shoal Rush becoming a better Slow if people need one, Whitecap -res durations being standardized, and **Barrier Reef** (win) not needing to be resummoned quite so often. The set feels better to play at least. I think that even with the changes, a lot of people will skip Shoal Rush because it basically demands a lot of slots (and a lot of procs) to still be very useful: but certain solo Defenders and Corruptors will take it just to make it more feasible to use a combo like Rain of Fire + Tar Patch to prevent enemies from leaving: that combo is now Rain of Fire + Tide Pool + Shoal Rush. Realistically, it feels like enemies can't get away which is how it should work.

...At least it's better than Empathy still.

I genuinely don't know where lv50 (reward-granting) Warriors spawn in-game.

Has there been any word on if the reward scale (xp/inf) of Warriors is going up in tandem with these buffs? I know this was retroactively applied to NuCouncil, so I'm just asking.

So to start: the Labyrinth of Fog Raid zone is extremely cool, but players complain about it not being easy/solo-friendly/casual enough when the closest analogue to The Labyrinth would be Hamidon in The Hive: it literally has LFG League queue support in order to facilitate more than 8 players at once. This new content is to have something else "at endgame" that is fun and profitable for well-built characters: so the playerbase can do things like Advanced Mode TFs and Labyrinth runs instead of sitting in AE farms. This new content is not for you to succeed at with 3 friends and half-assed builds. I thought the description in the patch notes was very clear, but I guess it wasn't. I'll reiterate my thoughts about testing content like this: I'm excited to get big leagues for it on Live, but I don't expect any reasonable way to test it on Open Beta at the scale that it was designed for. Trying to get enough players together to test just this, in my timezone, just won't be possible.

Whitecap is AoE -res so nobody serious would skip it at endgame, since -res is basically the most valuable debuff to teams. The main target of Whitecap takes -30%, and stacked with Brine that's another -30% for -60% total (on Defenders). You'd probably respec back into it in the real game, especially since it can proc FFB +Recharge on cast as well.

Yuh huh.

How exactly do the +res, +def, +maxhp, and +absorb all not help in survivability.

Slow sets/enhancements in Shoal Rush... Defender: Yes. Corruptor: Yes. Controller: Yes. MM: No. I just tested them all right now and nothing in-game prevented me from slotting a Slow SO into the power, except on MMs. I also unslotted the procs on my Defender and re-slotted them with no issue. While you guys are at it, Shoal Rush is a movement Slow power that's missing the -3.5 maxrunspeed flag that all good Slows have, and this power is also sort of a sidegrade to Infrigidate: which does have that flag. Its omission is very weird and the power already looks like a skip *if* you aren't proccing it out, so giving it parity with good Slows should be fine.

Count me among the people who want the icon on Whitecap changed. The frame is literally wrong if it's an enemy-targetted power.

You guys aren't able to slot Slow sets into Shoal Rush? I bought procs to test them out (since this power is a skip if you aren't proccing it) and I was able to slot Impeded Swiftness and Ice Mistral procs into it: so it accepts the sets for me in-game.

Yeah I appreciate the set's ability to really patch up MMs, it seems like it's probably the best mix of specific things that MMs want. There isn't a consistent source of AoE +Max HP in the game yet so that seems to be it for MM pets.

Wellspring's stat buffs have their own name in-game, which is listed as "Barrier Reef". That's both a more clever name and a more thematic one, as Wellspring grants Absorb and Defense buffs. It's basically Force Fielding you. Was this power called Barrier Reef at some point and you guys changed it? Change it back if so: Barrier Reef is genius.

If Blarf asked me to, I'd burn down this entire world and then myself... Blarf is the only one fit to survive.

Is there a reason that Whitecap, a forced "teleport the user to a new location" power using a common ground-targeted power icon, isn't ground targeted? Whitecap has to have an enemy selected and it forces you to move to that enemy's location. This is inconsistent not only with the power icon, but with every other power in the game that is a teleporting attack including Shield Charge, Lightning Rod, Spring Attack, Savage Leap, etc. Even if you wanted to go directly to the enemy: it's trivial to create a macro or keybind that performs this behavior. Why?

Labyrinth of Fog looks really fun, but it's gonna be annoying to test League-based content on Open Beta sadly. Might have to wait for the meat of the testing and feedback on that new feature to resolve until it hits live and more people take a crack at it. I hope to get a lot of playtime out of it though.

It's July 4th, you're gonna get guns and you're gonna like it! GUNS AND AMMO, BOOM BOOM EXPLOSIONS!