Shin Magmus

Player-1, I've spent significant time on these builds and this testing to get you data that shows Seismic Blast underperforming... not relative to the best sets in the game, but relative to Psychic Blast. I picked this exact comparison because of the below reasons: 1 - Both Seismic Blast and Psychic Blast have 1 TAoE and 1 Cone, and the TAoEs both knockdown(up) allowing the same sets. 2 - Psychic Blast is explicitly not Fire or Ice Blast, which are the best sets in the game and are apparently viewed as outliers by some of the devs. 3 - This is the most important reason: Psychic Blast was very recently buffed and adjusted. This means that Psychic Blast has been brought up to a higher power level "viewed as acceptable" by the devs. I am comparing these 2 sets in good faith. I did runs on the test server on GalaxyBrain's Office AE Map, on +3 / x8 (because +4 is kinda hard for most solo Defenders if we're being honest), and did multiple runs on both characters, selecting my personal best for each. The builds are Pain/Psychic and Pain/Seismic, and they are nearly identical to each other on purpose. I do not use attacks outside of the Blast sets in order to keep the comparison fair, although I do buff myself with Spirit Drain and debuff with Anguishing Cry. I also specifically avoid using Judgment or Lore powers, because they add large influxes of flat damage that partially equalizes performance across all ATs and powersets. I don't want to test how well a build is carried by Pyronic Judgment and Banished Pantheon pets; I want to test the merits of these 2 Blast sets against each other. All that said, I do use Red and Purple insps but in equal measure and with the same starting insps and drop rules. I also have all 3 START vendor "Amplifier" buffs active, but no other external buffs. This stuff is mostly so I can function and not die. I personally think both of these runs are pretty good too, having cut my times down a lot over the course of many attempts on each character. Psychic Blast: 6:26 Seismic Blast: 7:25 (15.2% slower) Now that I've done the legwork making these characters, I can produce more tests and more data if you want to see just how much Seismic Blast is underperforming. You just let me know what I need to provide, in order to get this set the buffs it deserves. I stand by my points in my original post, and I've edited it to add these videos up top.

If that is the case, maybe Sentinels should be given an Inherent that matters? I mean if this is how the content plays out, then the Sentinel raison d'etre, as well as one of their ATO procs, is worthless outside of EB/AV/GM fights? Does it feel that way to you?

Citadel TF always starts that exact way. I know things about the game... I play it a fair bit. I actually do try to warn people now to not waste their TT.

This always makes me laugh. It's also funny when they do a SG Base power even though the next mission is in Talos or IP: and an Ouro portal takes you right there in just as many clicks but less movement.

TFs are mostly fine the way they are. Because of QoL feature creep: there are so many "cheater" ways to fast travel in this game now that a lot of players reflexively use Ouro/TT/Long-Range-Teleporter/SG Bases and literally do not know how to manually travel to their destination. In addition, all actual travel powers are roughly 35% faster (when enhanced) than they were in the past with the exception of Teleport. I think Teleport's range was not buffed, but it's by far the fastest travel in a straight line regardless. You can get from Point A to Point B so quickly that the idea that you actually "travelled" is hard to believe IMO. I just don't see the issue I guess. TFs that *actually* involve a lot of travel (such as Dr. Quarterfield) routinely take 1/4th the time on Homecoming that they took on Live when they were first added. What are you suggesting exactly, moving all the doors for such a TF to be the same rock in The Shadow Shard?

I just want to add that the Vulnerability power, much like Domination, does require to be clicked by the player. I realize that this seems like a silly thing to point out, but anecdotally I've teamed with at least 10 (I lost count) Sentinels of varying level ranges who completely failed to ever use Vulnerability at all over the course of a TF. In some cases I'll bring up the subject in a tell, asking if they know what Vulnerability does and how to use it. OP is right that the game should do a better job explaining this. Eventually though, I just stopped caring about the AT enough to even try to help people with it. They can just be present as Sentinels cheerleaders and I'll do the work: I accept this status quo. Maybe they respecced and used /cleartray, and didn't know you have to re-add the power. Maybe they just don't know what the power does. Maybe they had an older Sent and didn't respec: so they never even knew what changed. I can't know the reason, but I can tell you that people don't use the debuff.

Anecdotally: none of my characters have the Medicine pool, and none of them ever will (in its current state). If you want to Support better, not only are you looking at the limitations of only having access to 4 Pools tops, but also the competition for Medicine. Evaluation the other pools puts all of them ahead of Medicine, but let's examine why... For anyone: be they Support AT or meathead melee, the absolute best power you can take to help keep the team alive is Maneuvers. Hilariously, Maneuvers also affects yourself in just one pick (Aid Other / Aid Self require 2 picks). This locks you into Leadership, which contains other very useful buffs for offensive purposes, and utility such as: perception / protection from confuse / Vengeance for when a situation gets dicey / 2x LotG mules for your IO build. After that, there's another strong pick to keep one person alive very well with Spirit Ward in Sorcery (a good pool with other stuff to offer besides), and a more niche but not bad pick with Experimental Injection in Experimentation (this power grants an ally buffs not unlike having doubleHealth + doubleStamina, but it also grants mez protection). Taking Leadership + Sorcery is already 2/4 pools, and assuming that you have Hasten that's 3/4. Your last pool will usually be reserved for some degree of proper combat mobility: meaning Combat Jumping -or- Hover + Evasive Maneuvers -or- Combat Teleport. Skilled players do not move at turtle-speed, so they will have one of their pools be specifically unsuppressed combat mobility. That's it: there's simply not room to even consider Medicine until it becomes better than those other options. I'd take any buffs suggested or any buffs at all to Medicine as a pool. It's in a dire spot when the S.T.A.R.T vendor powers are so strong. While I mentioned none of my characters have Medicine, they ironically all have an Ally Rez anyways because I bought the temp power from S.T.A.R.T. I saw the point that this power is disabled on certain content... but if you're doing that, Medicine's Rez definitely isn't going to be very useful either.

I genuinely didn't even consider this. I know it's possible to add Trainer NPCs to trials because they exist on DFB for that reason. It's been so long since I've joined a MSR on a non-lv50, that I forgot how important that mid-raid training session was when you hit lv50 on them. Great suggestion all-around: it should be simple enough to add one somewhere in that little vanguard base where we all spawn in.

Add the toggle if people want it, I don't see the same issues that some of the detractors have said. Find me in-game on Shin Magmus, say hi if you recognize me from the forums. I socially interact in this MMO.

The range feels fine to me. I usually buff my team/league proactively and prevent deaths instead of responding after someone dies, so my rezzes don't get used very often. All my characters have the START Temp Power rez though though and I can use that just fine.

The code of conduct actually says to solve problems at the lowest level with those exact systems: just don't team with that person / kick a player who is griefing the team / use the ignore feature in-game, on forums, and on Discord if someone is harassing you etc. If people instead routed every interpersonal issue up to GMs (volunteers, as you noted) that would just waste their time.

It's almost comical how much of a contrarian you are Rudra: you just popped in to say the literal opposite of what everyone else is saying. How bout we agree to disagree and request to have more options available to the player. Just imagine it: 2 concurrent raids: one in an instance led by the people here requesting it, and one led by Rudra where all the "blacklisted" players are allowed in and nobody can be "elitist." Great, Everyone wins.

+50,000 pts. This is why player notes and ratings exist.

What FupDup said: The ideas for each pool were already laid out (and generally, I think the templates are good). We just need someone to find time to sit down and finish them.

I made a pretty extensive Buff/Rework thread for Empathy as well, but the main issue with the set really is just how underpowered it is compared to almost every Buff/Debuff set introduced after it. Sets as old as Empathy (FF) and otherwise extremely old (Sonic Resonance, Trick Arrow) have also been buffed and/or reworked on HC. Empathy alone has never been buffed in any way, and this shit is still baffling to me. I do not understand why Empathy still has received 0 buffs: not even a simple numbers tweak here or there. I'd be happy if any of these suggestions made it into the game: just so the set can suck a little less.

Seems to me like Sent Scramble Thoughts should match one of the 2 better versions of the power then, I agree. The Snipe replacement is probably always going to suck though: because the variation in animation time and DPA on Sentinel-only Snipe replacements is wide and random. I thought that was going to get addressed when they did the rework to the AT: but it wasn't.

On one hand, this is a solid suggestion and it clearly would fix a lot of issues with the event: as seen with the surge in Instanced MSRs happening. Necessitating an invite to an instance will de-facto remove bad actors and trolls from being able to get in, once they are sufficiently blacklisted. On the other hand, this never happens on Everlasting. This behavior is why you can't pay me to play on Excel, where shitheads even feel the need to "hide buds" and grief Hami. Trolling losers naturally flock to the area with the biggest playerbase: so the easiest step to avoiding them is to just go somewhere with fewer victims, targets, players.

You know and mention that Psychic Blast just got a balance patch not this last big patch, but the one before. They did already speed up the animations on Mental Blast, Psychic Scream, and Psionic Tornado (some of those changes now apply to Epic versions of the powers, but none of them apply to Fortunatas). So the slow set you're complaining about actually used to be even slower; this probably represents the highest that the Powers Team wants to buff it, given that they have also created Scramble Minds and re-tuned Scramble Thoughts (on Fortunatas) and settled on those cast times. I wouldn't hold my breath expecting the sets to ever get buffed again.

Yep, +1: Fix text bug.

I encounter this bug fairly often, I'd say it feels like at least half the time. But I've never once "lost" to GWW on teams of any size, because I just throw more Envenomed Daggers (-regen). He's often the worst and slowest GM to kill with this bug though.

It was only going to be changed, during some of the Beta test patches. It got Beanbagged back to the way it was, sorry.

... that's the destination you pick for where you want to teleport the target *to*. Next question.

The spawns are definitely using the wrong attribute somewhere, causing level-less enemies to spawn with level50 HP. Advice: lowbies can all go home.

Yeah I didn't even mention that Seismic Blast is locked out of most of its effectiveness if you ever have to leave the ground, whether you like Hoverblasting or because you actually need to do so for the content (like Seed of Hamidon). I mentioned in passing jumping to temporarily disable Seismic Shockwaves, but didn't bring up the weakness that you can't even get the effect ever if you're not grounded. Thanks for bringing that up Amra. The top-tier Blast sets that currently outperform Seismic Blast handily, also do not have this ground-only weakness: which doesn't make much sense from a game design standpoint again. Things with weaknesses or limitations are generally supposed to have a strength in exchange, in order to balance out having the weakness in the first place.

I don't want to go too far into this as a side topic, but Sentinels are very unfortunate to be a victim of this bizarre design rule: and you also noted how powers like Full Auto and Rain of Arrows have to be changed on Sentinels to compensate. My purposed fixes to bring Seismic Blast up to par, mostly treat it as a regular set and disregard Sentinels because there's no fixing them. We are post-buff/rework on Sentinels but they still underperform, still have that weird Nuke rule, still have intentional nerf powers like Chilling Ray, and still have no actual role on teams. It's safe to assume that the devs are happy with this level of Sent performance (since they chose not to address these things while making sweeping changes to the AT), so I've given up hope on Sentinels ever getting improved and just don't play them. It's hard to care about them anymore, sorry.