Dixa

It should, because powers do not start their recharge before the animation finishes, the animations can't be cancelled and you can't use anything else until the animation time completes.

huh. The base damage being higher makes sense because of their animation times and end costs - when looked at in a vacuum. Claws still has the best pbaoe spin move (almost twice the damage of whirling smash) if you will and Dark probably has the best short range cone now. the base damage on rend armor is way, way too high. The rest of the powers are ok. Momentum is what screws everything up. it basically removes the animation times that balance out the base damage and end costs. it's a STUPID design decision. recharge, base damage and endurance cost AND animation time since recharge does not begin until after the power has animated must always be taken together when determining power and powerset balance. you cant just look at one or two of those on their own. remove momentum, lower animation times, end costs and lower damage on rend armor which is the real outlier even for it's base animation time. I don't know what else they could do. momentum takes a full second off of rend armor. from 2.3 to 1.3. momentum is such a force multiplier that just 'tweaking' the damage alone is not enough to give it parity with other sets like battle axe or war mace or the other big hitters. if you math it out, rend armor does nearly the same damage over a minute and dps with a slightly higher end cost than knockout blow with one stack of rage baseline, all powers unenhanced. both powers have near the same animation times but knockout blow has a 5s longer cooldown and NOT EVER taking advantage of momentum. that's not ok. and if you aren't starting your attack cycle with rend armor so it's taking advantage of momentum, it just blows everything in the game out of the water and does more damage and dps than a double stacked rage knockout blow over the same duration.

you could make either work with either secondary, but not cheaply. thugs is the better choice, and pain dom is the better secondary choice if you are limiting yourself to just those two options. time is the BEST choice however, and you can make it purple.

poison traps -regen only lasts 10s btw. it's not reliable.

I dunno. what makes TW crazy is not so much it's base damage but how it can just bap bap bap bap during momentum. more about animation time - or lack thereof.

so getting one to 50 I can say it's for sure no thugs/time until you get a patron immob this set makes mobs scatter like crazy which can make it hard to keep your pets in the bubble and close enough together for your chains. the real stars of the set are the shield, the heal and the end restore powers. target the arsonist for everything so he gets the biggest shield and biggest heal. 4/8 fights take a bit and the pets do run out of endurance. chrono shift does ok with this, but the ea end regen does it far far better. but it's still no thugs/time unless you are fighting packs of mobs with copious amounts of both tohit buffs and knockback.

would love to see some builds posted with rad/wm or rad/tw

I would very much like to see a solid rad tanker setup with capped resists, paired with whatever is the highest damage secondary available to tankers (for av killing but still decent pack clearing)

so nobody ever fights crey or their malta packs have no gunslingers?

when someone asks about meta, they do not care about theme. they care about power. raw power and raw power only. nobody has answered the OP's question properly. I don't play brutes so I can't answer it, but he wants to know the META primary ie. the highest dps primary in any situation that's not SS.

any numbers/pictures using insulating circuit slotted up for heal? I would like to see how much of the bar it's covering for t1's, 2's, 3's and you.

solo malta x8 packs is what im thinking of

demons does go best with thermal as it maximizes their resists, gives you decent debuffs and -regen which can be made perma. I will warn you though that it's an extremely slow starter and if you can swing it, slap it on a 2nd account and use your main to level it up. but once you get going the only thing you really have to fear is bosses with high knockback as demons are prone to be stuck in ragdoll physics until you resummons them at times. the KB protection is the only thing EA has going for it in my opinion the rest of the set is very underwhelming overall as the numbers are tuned too low.

kin works on thugs as well without the drawbacks fortify pack gives. it will also do more damage because the damage is on tier 2's for aoe and the tier 3 for single target - and the bruiser destroys all other mm pets when it comes to single target damage. it is however a later blooming set and the tier 1's have zero resists base so they will die a bit no matter how many increased densitys you stack or auras you have. you can also fully max out their damage, accuracy, procs and other things they do without making any sacrifices because you can just use 4 to 6 slots in gang war to hold all of the uniques while placing SA's buildup in the bruiser.

the -maxhp matters for all boss fights higher than +2 especially for the mm primaries with horrible single target damage like mercs and bots.

unless you are married to super jump, the ideal way to do this is to get within 40 of the pack then teleport yourself in while in bodyguard. your pets will follow quickly but will usually stop and unload before they actually get to you due to bodyguard being triggered. bring break frees. your pets should be on defensive follow or goto follow and within supremacy range for bodyguard unless you are doing content that you find trivial. if yoru pets are in any other combination you do not get bodyguard. all pets do have better and more consistent attack chains I've noticed (noticed, not analyzed) if left on aggressive. but you are also a wet noodle in this state. watched a few vids of a beasts/ff recently. pets always in aggressive. he was trying to show off his build in DA. he died 3 times because he was not in bodyguard. he died. his pets were still alive. that's shameful and wastes your time running back and having to resummon everything.

you can fire defib without a dead target right? the aoe sleep would be nice I should think.

being bots trying to get ALL of those uniques in without gimping your damage in some way is practically impossible. this is why thugs and demons reign supreme - all 6 auras can go into gang war/hell on earth. remember you can see your pets attributes by right clicking on them. it's at the bottom of that menu. bots have horrible single target damage. bosses die very slow even with the -regen from the assault bot. the only reason to take any attacks at all outside of demons is if you are bored and i'm sorry but EA is too busy for that, or because you want to slot the FF chance for recharge procs.

maybe. weave is a good spot for another lotg or defensive set. tough is a good spot for the resist based unique io's. but honestly the only time I die is when the pets die.

all teammates are minions imo.

the duration on shock and discharge is greater than their recharge and I have yet to see any evidence they self-stack.

do you mean if you cast empowering circuit then do insulating, they won't get the absorb shield? that would be a set-breaking bug. anyone can confirm?

i'm starting a two box thugs setup. I was going to go thugs/time and thugs/ff (2nd thugs is on a completely different machine and it needs to not require much interaction - and the dispersion bubble would plug the cc protection hold in time which is the only thing that kills thugs/time usually before you get incarnates) then I decided I would go /kin and /ff for the juicy, JUICY damage cap on enforcers and the bruiser. god im' getting moist right now just thinking about it. I am now considering replacing the kin with ela, but maybe not after reading the entire thread. some of the powers don't stack, it's not much +damage at all sure as hell nowhere near what a maxed fulcrum shift will do, /kin also solves yours and your pets endurance problems and the /kin heal is much, much larger and will heal every target for that amount, the t9 seems like it's useless. if it actually gave a damage proc or damage aura to your tier 3 pet that would rock but nobody has even talked about that so it must either be negligible or non existent entirely. the only thing that intrigues me is that absorb on such a short cooldown and the cage preventing knockback, but would the absorb hit all 12 pets? can I buld up enough static to make it always hit all 12 pets with regularity? I always move around with team teleport so keeping them all in might not be a big issue but it is a much smaller radius than dispersion bubble and ffg which sometimes don't cover the entire breadth of an x8 pack either. killing fast is a form of defense, and I I don't know at this point if a thugs/kin+thugs/ff with that fat fulcrum shift (and increase density) or a thugs/ea+thugs/ff with the absorb (taking a bite out of the autohit aoe's in the game) would be better or worse when it comes to taking on ALL game content. although having faraday cage and dispersion bubble may actually make it impossible for 3 gunslinger bosses to hold you, and faraday stacks with the resist aura io's to give your tier 1's a bit more survivability. thoughts? oh and I also downloaded the new mids reborn listed in this thread and tried to update to show the power. it says no updated required, does not show the powerset on any AT and I don't feel like paying for winzip to use the extended version. why couldn't they just use .zip it's bloody built into windows 10.

faraday only has a 10s recharge right? and do the ea powers really cap out at 5 targets? that seems stupid as all hell given we have SIX pets.

ff, sonic and traps offer cc mag protection. mag 5.19 immob/hold/stun protection, not resist. the only one that won't be detoggled by 3 gunslingers is traps.