Shin Magmus

This thread is about the Ancillary / Epic Power Pools, and we should be giving feedback along the lines of how to make those powers better for all players and how to bring underperforming pools up to the level of the others: i.e. how I mentioned that Build Up's 10s dmg buff will be worse than Spirit Drain's 15s dmg buff (and it's also an attack, another advantage) in 99% of cases... so Build Up should have the same CD or slightly lower CD than Spirit Drain. We should be trying to get numbers adjusted to make it so players have a meaningful choice (the ideal, not current) instead of only having one good choice for a function (Spirit Drain dumpsters Build Up and Soul Drain right now, cleanly killing Ice Mastery and Soul Mastery). Yet another Cottage Rule fight is just so stupid... and even if you use semantics to make it seem like the new Telekinesis(TK) breaks the Cottage rule: the old TK was a literally broken power that didn't even help teams in almost any context. Trying to herd enemies with TK was several hundred times harder than trying to herd enemies with Hurricane or Force Bubble, for objective mechanical reasons based on how the power worked; Old TK sucked ass. The biggest problem was that fringe enemies would "get away" from the target of TK and that broke all the work you were trying to accomplish. Now fringe enemies are "pulled towards" the target of TK, so in a way you can use it how the devs on live probably wanted you to. This is one of the only really good changes we're getting in a sea of mediocrity so don't fight about that power.

If the devs don't correct the course of this set, and keep it similar to how it is right now, you're going to want her to pick Water Blast. Then at least the enemies will always be "Wet".

Just as an aside, a bunch of the new ATTACKS are perfectly fine, but new buff and utility power variations in Recharge time are downright stupid. Corrs/Defenders getting their iconic and somewhat broken Soul Drain nerfed to Spirit Drain is at least understandable... so hey now it's still a damaging attack on a 120s CD that gives you a buff objectively superior to Build Up. "Oh hey look, they're also letting us just take Build Up in Ice Mastery. Let's just check the numbers and-" Build Up has a 180s CD compared to Spirit Drain's 120s. This is objectively wrong and bad design. Nobody will ever take Build Up. If these 2 powers had identical CDs of 120s each, then Build Up would still be the inferior power 99% of the time but it would at least be usable as often. I have an Ice Blast Defender and I'd love to take Ice Mastery for theme but not with a 3 minute CD Build Up and a 9 minute CD Hoarfrost. Nobody is going to take those powers, and I can't honestly believe any of the devs think that we would.

I'd say try Doms more but I understand why someone would prefer Controllers. The main reason to play Doms, aside from better attacks overall, is that none of their damage is tied to Containment. So take Mind Control for example: Terrify is a fearsome AoE attack but also a good Opener to start fights... however a Controller would never want to Open with an attack. They'd be losing out on 50% of its potential damage, so a Controller would want to use a different Opener, then use an AoE Immob to ensure Containment, then use Terrify 3rd: this is very very silly. It basically results in the optimal damage flowchart for Mind Controllers to be Mass Hypnosis -> immediately waste that power and break all the sleep with Terrify -> now the fight starts but you have no more ways to set up Containment so you're gimped for the rest of the fight. Compare that to playing the same set on a Dominator where you just click Terrify and get all the damage you were ever going to get; No stupid setup or dumb combos required... just damage. Some sets are infinitely more pleasant to play on Dominators because of this. It highlights an issue with Controller damage scales + inherent as a whole, but that's unlikely to be fixed or changed at all in the near future. Since most Control sets were intelligently designed around their inherent: the issue is not apparent on nearly all Controller primaries. In fact, it only really matters on Mind Control, and now Arse Control: just 2 sets. Illusion can't really set up Containment but the pets also can't proc Containment damage: therefore the weakness is less apparent and the DPS loss is less significant.

This actually incentivizes me to fight them more. I have a question though: how much does this change the sub-group of Dimensional/Rocket Council who spawn on some PI story arc missions and who are different from the "regular" Council who spawn on PI Radio missions? Spawnsets are something I genuinely don't really understand and never looked into, except noting that random grey-conning enemies sometimes appear in otherwise even-conning enemy groups because of spawnset issues.

Also, the bug was already reported, but Sleep Grenade's patch canceling on initial target death makes testing Arse Control's performance just that much harder. It means you have to both know the bug exists and also play around not-killing certain enemies like pre-buff Rad Emmission toggles. I also think it's weird this bug is even possible because the power summoned a patch in build 1 and does again in build 3 but isn't ground-targeted for some reason: and ground-targeting for these types of powers is objectively a buff in how and where you can place them. Enemy-targeting only makes it better in one specific way: which is increasing proc rates via silliness of the game's code. Hot take: if Arse Control was a better set, we wouldn't need a proc-nuke attack to try and make it work. Sleep Grenade that can't be proc-bused, but that works correctly and can be placed preemptively, would be a buff: then just add more damage to another power to compensate. To put this in a more damning way: I'm slotting both of the Sleep powers in Arse Control with damage enhancing sets, Slow enhancing sets, and damage procs: because they work better that way. I'd look at that from a dev perspective as reason for change.

If the jack of all trades box of powers had a stronger debuff in each one or more total debuffs in each power, then the combined sum of all the debuffs would be good enough to have an impact even when the controls fail. Doing this really would just be simple numbers tweaks for the devs. That alone would improve the pairing with any other debuffing set like Traps or Poison, as well as giving it some kind of identity. The movement slows need to go way up as of right now though: especially if the weird conditional Immob they added remains impossible to proc for most builds.

I guess I could've posted this weeks ago, but I do have some experience with Control sets outside of angrily posting on forums. This is my Control Page with my current lv50 CC Archetypes. Dominators: 1 - "Shin Magmus" is an old-school Fire/Psy/Fire Farmer who now runs the regular Warrior and Council maps in PI. She has a 2nd PvE build but it's so hilariously strong that it's almost not fun to play... almost. 2 - "Glacial Spear" is an Ice/Thorn/Ice Dom who can stack more autohit AoE movement slows than any other Dom: and who has the ST Immobilize in Chillblain which is often skipped. This character specializes in preventing enemy movement, including AVs, and is good at preparing areas ahead of ambushes or known spawns to force them to "herd themselves" by coalescing on the leading edge of a powerful slow field. This build completely outclasses Arsenal Control in its current state. 3 - "Mentaculon" is a Mind/Sonic/Fire Dom who is a Mentok Expy. She is the most powerful at debuffing enemy Resists and is a support character. I've already respecced back into Telekinesis ahead of the patch and will be teaming exclusively on the character as she's not built for soloing even though Mind Control is known for it. Controllers: 1 - "Lethal Lava Larissa" is a Fire/FF/Fire Controller who just jumps into melee after setting up Containment, and goes Force Bomb -> Fireball while racking up HotFeet damage. This is a strong contender for my favorite character. 2 - "It's Not Real" is an Illusion/Traps/Mace Controller whose build is completely focused on fighting AVs/GMs and that's it. This is a one-trick-pony. 3 - "TIME-Z0NE" is unsurprisingly a Grav/Time/Mu with Fold Space who uses Combat Teleport and recalls Singularity into the middle of the spawn with herself. This specific character trope is done to death and I'm not the first person to spam Wormhole and Fold Space onto Singy. Fun gimmick but low individual damage. 4 - "RICHTER RAMPAGE" is an Earth/Nature/Stone optimized for FUN with tons of redundant attacks out of Earth Mastery and several Nature powers skipped. The crux of the character is being tanky via the buffs I do take, then jumping in to stack Entangling Aura with my other Holds while I click ROCK BUTTONS AND GO BRRRR. This character has a 2nd build that is more traditional and has heavy focus on Nature as well as full Leadership to be a dedicated support Controller for Hard Mode ITFs. *Fixed spelling errors*

Of course not. I typed the comment that is the OP: but only in the Feedback Thread. A moderator moved it here and picked the name of this post for me.

Nah I have Intuition Radial alpha and I forgot to switch off the Global tab to the Combat tab.

Such a list on Controllers would be tricky because they have to build and slot *one way* to be able to have enough Recharge for their Opener to be up and ready every spawn, or else they die... but they have to build and slot *another way* to purely maximize their possible damage and speed up fights: which can speed up a fight too much and result in it being harder or impossible to get the Opener's Recharge low enough to be up in time for the next fight. Such a list on Dominators would also be fairly meaningless, since they can get 80-95% of their potential damage on many set-combos from just their Assault Set and their incredible assortment of Epic Pools. In a solo scenario, if your Opener(s) are on CD: you either wait or you die. In a team scenario, you can just click damaging buttons as soon as the meathead melees run in. So when Controllers are on teams, they can use squishier builds with higher damage potential and lower recharge, which can skew the results of which set clears fastest heavily. Alternatively, the best damaging Control sets deal disproportionately high damage via just a few powers such as HotFeet and Carrion Creepers: so it's easy to maximize the damage slotting of those powers without making compromises elsewhere in your build. That's why those sets keep pace in endgame and why they make Controller as an AT feel much less shitty.

My initial impression is that Arse/Storm will be one of the only good ways to get the Immob because they're tying it to Wet, not to immob powers. So unfortunately, it's one of the only ways to make Arse Control *feel good to play*. As for Dominators and their options... get fukt? Chilling Embrace in Icy Assault and Thorntrops in Thorny Assault at least give you an extra slow, and that might have to be enough. ...but I don't want to play Arse/Storm, so I am trying to make Arse/Traps work.

I understand that's how it has been and I understand that this situation is frustrating because I'm extremely frustrated right now. However, unlike the last few times, I thought I should at least try a little harder this time to try and get the new powerset to not be another dud set (that nobody plays).

No, Jack, the devs implemented it that way for a reason. By making the Tier1 and the Tier2 both Sleep powers, it made taking Sleep unavoidable. That was actually by design, so that the person on the team with the hard-on for Sleep could force anyone trying this set to try Sleep in a push to make the playerbase like the effect more. The inherent problem of allowing a noob to start with a 45s CD power, and the second inherent problem of NOT allowing a Controller to start with a Hold or Immob for some sort of guaranteed Containment attack chain... were both ignored (initially).

Please don't get into an argument about that Hard Mode math, I see it coming. I agree that it ends up taking 2 Doms + a 3rd *Controller or Dom* but the math is more than that and the number you need to hit is more than 10. It's 13 total mag protection on bosses so the number to hit is actually 14. It's so totally not the point of the thread though; The only note is that Smoke Canister will not help you hit these totals any more than Seeds of Confusion will... and in fact Smoke Canister will reliably do worse.

Here is proof that I'm testing and doing the real work at endgame that needs to be done. I'm still working out exactly how to build an Arse/Traps for this but focusing slots and effort on Arse Control itself to both determine its (lack of) power and to not let my secondary set carry the test. I'm also not going to run on [currently] easy Council or do redundant low-level testing that's already being done by other people... so I made a fully IO'd and Incarnate'd build and took it against some Carnies (I've tested a few harder groups like Arachnos as well) at solo +4/x8 but it's +3 cus of level shifts. This took considerable time by the way. Here are my thoughts yet again: Having to rely on stacking slows is just a clunkier, more click-intensive version of being able to keep the enemies all permanently immobilized. I've also decreased my peak damage potential to add some extra Slow enhancement into Sleep Grenade and Caltrops. Even with all of that said and a focus on baiting and pulling enemies into my patches and my kill-zones, then trying to keep them from leaving said kill-zones, this is a slog. It would be a bit better in a team context of course, but only because I kill slowly in my "role" as a Controller by CC'ing and dealing next-to-no damage while I rely on my team to deal the damage for me. The problem is the same as it's been this whole time... why would I click like 4-6 powers to sortof create the situation I want when I could pick other Controller primaries and get the same result in 2 clicks. Those sets (Plant Control, Fire Control, etc.) not only achieve the meta end-state I want as a Controller in fewer clicks, but they also provide more damage within their set inherently. So you start to click the "kill stuff" buttons sooner because you didn't have to spend as much time clicking the "please don't run away from me and out of my patches" buttons.

I AGREE WITH THIS FEEDBACK. Wet Arse Control is a-go: send it.

Out of genuine curiosity, how often would you say you log onto your Seismic Blast character. I get that they aren't your main. I have over 20 lv50s that "I like" but only 2 or 3 I'd ever call my mains, and some of them go for weeks or months without play because I play this game in surges and take breaks. But I've also permanently shelved lv50s that I don't really like, and stripped them of their IOs. Does your Seismic Blast character fall into the "shelved" category or do you still like it enough to dust off from time to time? This is just for anecdotal data.

Well yeah I can't change their goals. If their goal really is to specifically add mediocre sets in order to prevent power creep, and intentionally make new sets so weak that there's no desire for players to "upgrade" their existing characters to the new sets: then obviously they are nailing that. No argument here.

The only reason I would play this blighted set is also because it fits the concept: we are in agreement. But my concepts would be Natural characters using: > Arse/Arse or Arse/Martial Doms > Arse/Traps or Arse/Trick Arrow Controllers I don't believe any of those 4 builds are inherently very good at all, and I strongly feel that TA and Traps extra slow powers and sole sources of an Immob, even a single target one, would be *carrying* Arse Control. I don't have a concept for a "Smelly Wet Arse" Arse/Storm Controller to shoot a cloudburst grenade into the atmosphere, out of their gun? I genuinely do not want to play the Immob-less set we are getting, and I also genuinely *believe* that Arse Control will languish in relatively underplayed obscurity a mere 2 months after the set is released, as the 3rd dud in a row following Symphony Control and Seismic Blast.

Truth, which is why Storm Summoning as a set is commonly played on Controllers because they have AoE Immobs that make Storm work better. It's basically a circle right: to not give this set an Immob, but then sneak in a conditional Immob that works specifically with the powerset that needs it... like a roundabout way of admitting what the core problem is across Controllers, and the secondary problem is specifically with Storm Summoning, then adding a band-aid so it doesn't come up. A Band-aid solution is better than no solution... but why would my Natural Origin Gun Controller magically conjure a bout of Freezing Rain?

In response to that, simply answer one question for me. Why would you want to play the Arsenal Control that we are getting, over any other Control set? Just give me reasons why you'd play this set over Ice Control or Plant Control or Elec Control or Mind Control.

Almost every psuedopet does have a significantly increased base acc beyond x1.0, up to x1.4 in some cases. Gonna have to agree that powers like Smoke Canister need this in order to be of any value vs high level enemies and on Hard Mode. People testing this set fighting +0 enemies at lv10 are not noticing this weakness.

No, I'm not 100% sure. Well, I think it scales up in a pattern like bosses at 2 star, bosses and luits at 3 star, and all enemies at 4 star, but I was specifically musing about how Controllers are "supposed" to be useful on 4 star Hard Mode. 4 star is the most difficult and therefore the most worth discussing and being concerned about, and 1 Controller or Dom with 1 Confuse power can't do anything with it on 4 star ITF: and I have tested and verified that. There are specific Confuse-Weak enemies on Hard Mode ASF but they are best handled with Single Target Confuse powers on a low CD (like Deceive) and not by a 90s CD Confuse power like Smoke Canister (until the devs nerf Smoke Canister even more prior to release). Here's an image for reference.

They don't let dissenting opinions into the Closed Beta BTW, so that's not even real advice. The idea that there's an Open Beta but even on the first day of the time period, our feedback is worthless because the devs have already decided against making any "big" changes is worthless. That statement (both from at least one dev on the Arsenal Control Focused Feedback thread and another commenter here) translates to "your feedback here has no power so just keep your mouth shut and take what you get."