ForeverLaxx

Aye, Team TP was my go-to power for taking my pets with me on my Necro/Poison MM back on live. Being able to take the entire army up the side of a cliff, or over a bunch of pillars in Oranbega was far preferable to just letting them lazily path their way to me and probably pick up the entire room as aggro along the way. It also helped as my guy was a Tankermind, so being able to jump myself and my pets into the middle of a spawn sped things up considerably.

I'm throwing my hat into the ring of "don't like the movement change", like other posters here. It just seems like change for the sake of change, slowing people down who were already slower than players with a "real" travel power. Not to mention it ruins some of the RP/Character theme/Identity of certain character builds. I liked that my Nin Sentinel didn't need a "real" Travel because of Ninja Run. He's still slower for crossing entire zones compared to someone with SS + CJ/SJ, so what's the reason these powers no longer stack? Because they "were never supposed to"? That seems like a weak reasoning to nerf what's effectively already unpowered to me. If that change goes through, and there's no way we're getting it reverted, then I say the powers that used to be stacked should be buffed to compensate in order to retain that same feel, at the very least. I'd prefer the powers go back to stacking due to animations being part of the concept most of the time, but I'll take the powers getting buffed as recompense instead if no amount of people being upset is going to do any good.

I'm going to be the "weird guy" here and say Combat Teleport could probably have both a ToHit and Defense component. Either effect works as a thematic choice but if the bonus is small enough on each I think it can have both without being a balance issue (and if it is, just make the effect unstackable). While it's true that this would basically make it "yet another defense/LotG proc mule" I don't see why that's necessarily a problem. Superspeed sort of gets around this issue because of Hasten, but Fly and Super Jump (especially SJ) get picked specifically because of their ability to jam in LotG procs on their introductory powers (and Fly even gets to have two of them should you get Afterburner). Giving Teleport a way to provide this same benefit, like the other OG travel pools, adds some parity to what is the clunkiest, most unwieldy, and thematically cool mode of travel. Teleport, and Combat Teleport especially, already come with a near-requirement of the usage of binds or macros to actually use them effectively... I say just throw them this bone so people who want to teleport aren't also forced into more travel pools for easy LotG proc access.

I love that backhanded "buff" to the ranged immobilize/hold in TA followed by Psi specifically getting called out as keeping the 80 range due to it's primarily ranged nature. I fail to see how TA is any different in that regard.

And frankly, I wouldn't want Energy Melee to be both the ST Burst and ST DPS king. Burst King is where I wanted it, and while these changes do that (I still hate being forced to open every fight with TF whether I want to or not), it's much more palatable that I can use Bonesmasher without restriction like before.

And more and more interaction with this patch feedback process I'm reminded that I'm not a fan of the guy and his "take it or leave it" attitude. I get he's a developer or whatever, and I'm used to things in an Open Beta state being mostly set barring major bugs or minor usability tweaks, but frankly I don't care if he wants to deflect that criticism. They announced this change under the umbrella "get into melee you dummies" update to Blaster Secondaries and I'm going to view it that way. I don't have any interest in arguing this because my feedback is that I don't like it. I'm probably shelving my Archery/TA if this goes live. I can barely stand playing Dark Blast with all its wonky cone ranges and arcs; I'm not going to play a 100% ranged character at two different ranges based solely on changes implemented by someone who thinks that playstyle is "too safe" or whatever. I'm constantly jump-kiting with this character already and having to bound in before bounding out means I should just play a jump-kiting Blapper instead and actually kill things faster in the process.

I'm never going to get behind any change that "encourages players to get in melee" with a set that has no reason, incentive, or desire to be in melee range. When your entire set is additional ranged damage with control on the side, why do you feel I must be closer to use it? You even made the controls weaker, so they're less reliable at keeping things away from you, a character built around the concept of pure ranged damage. That's what they're trying to do with Tac Arrow and I abhor that direction.

I've become so accustomed to the UI as it is that I rarely have issues navigating it. That said, a friend of mine that won't play the game due to his utter hatred of MMOs as a principle was endlessly frustrated by the very tiny, often easy to miss buttons that close a window. This is compounded by those buttons being the same color as the window and his complaint was that it wasn't even clear that was a button at all.

Seems so.

As much as I'm for the removal of the command (granted, I never used it anyway), this really does highlight a couple issues. First is obviously the in-game methods of travel and their overly convoluted and bloated nature. The addition of two more powers to this system doesn't alleviate that problem unless those two powers make the other options redundant, which from all reports doesn't seem to be the case. This will obviously need to be addressed in the future. The other issue is more a playerbase one and not one I feel will ever be rectified. I feel as if too many players, and I bet this will be echoed on a much larger scale once the patch is live, believe that they're owed a perfect analog to the command due to how long it existed and how "integral" it became to their play experience. I personally don't agree with this sentiment, particularly because we've known for over a year that the command was going to be removed eventually and these people really shouldn't have based their play around its existence. That said, I feel there could have been a better implementation of the command "replacement" power by instituting a single, interruptible power with 5-10 seconds of activation time with a 30 second - 1 minute cooldown that summoned a base portal much like how one is summoned now. I just don't understand why that wasn't implemented instead. The tech for interruptible activations exists, so why could it have not been applied here in order to consolidate all the other cumbersome methods into a single convenient power?

The damage is roughly the same when you compare like powers to each other, but the problem with Dark Blast is that much of it is spaced out over time as a DoT. The way the game is designed, DoTs need to be faster or have larger tics if they want to feel competitive to more traditional burst damage powers. Unfortunately, Dark Blast is still stuck in the past so it has low tic, long lasting DoTs instead.

As far as your listed hierarchy goes, I'd put KnockUp around the Fear level of control as they do very similar things, particularly if you have a spammable KnockUp like Air Superiority. Normally these are limited to a single foe, but you can juggle enemies from full to dead and they'll only get maybe 2 attacks off in retaliation. I'd put Knockback in the same boat, but it loses points due to its reliance on positioning and map layout if you don't use the KB -> KD IO.

I'm not asking for IO performance on an SO budget. I just don't want unusable chains to become the norm unless I'm pushing 200% global recharge. You can keep your condolences.

Maybe so, but that was what they liked to say. Keeping certain T9s from being permanent stopped the entire previous suite of powers in the powerset from being outmoded and made sense to me (though it's why I don't play Stone Armor -- it breaks this by design for some reason). In a post set bonus world, I question the need to keep those powers on such long cooldowns anyway. You can't permaHasten without sets anymore, sets totally eclipse old permaHasten anyway, and people build so much +Defense that they don't need those T9s unless they're being used as set mules. That's about as far as I've let set IOs push my boundary of "don't play if you can't optimize" because so far it hasn't stopped me from enjoying the game. When I have to make tricked-out builds because a set was "designed" to only be functional when optimized is when I step away and never come back. But I'm getting off topic and leave it there.

I'm just pointing out that this "reigning in" effect doesn't seem to function in practice, if the words of players are to be believed. If the goal was to keep ET in check, then either it's not working as intended against the foes it matters on, or it's not really the reason Focus exists. Three word rebuttal: Balanced around SOs. The base values are always supposed to be balanced around SOs as that's where all the formulae are derived from to determine power baseline functionality. If we start hamstringing and stripping down sets because of potential set bonuses, then this game will have died for me a second time.

Well, the value of which you want depends on the foes in question. A melee-ranged knockback power won't work on the guy standing across the room that's spamming holds (though granted, you're a Blaster so you do have at least one primary Blast to deal with it). The Sonic Thrust power is certainly better for melee enemies, though, but that's to be expected.

This doesn't make sense to me. According to people here, keeping the Focus mechanic up "without even trying" seems to be saying that Energy Melee always has instant Energy Transfer when it wants it. If that's the case, why have the Focus mechanic at all except to boost a cone AoE that could just have more targets by default and not be a wasted power pick otherwise? If the goal is to keep ET "on a leash" by tying it to TF's recharge + animation time, then I don't see how the same effect can't be replicated by just leaving ET at its old 20 second recharge and keep the sped up animation, decoupling it from TF and achieving the same functional result. All that really does is let people use ET to one-shot LTs or whatever faster and hardly does anything to change a chain against bosses or tougher enemies. Is it really such a big deal that EM could delete a single LT in 1 second every 20 seconds when everyone else is blasting so many AoEs the only things left standing are bosses anyway? Or would this "warp" the chain so badly that people just stopped taking TF entirely and you thought that was a problem?

Where? All I see is the defense debuff, the heal debuff, and the "special" debuff that makes other debuffs stronger (which includes -regen), but no actual -regen effect from Acid Arrow itself.

I do too, but PC is bad without the charge and if it's still bad after spending the charge, why does PC exist at all other than to homogenize the set? I would just prefer the charge mechanic not exist at all, put ET at the reduced cast time without restriction, and see where we go from there. Clearly the set is "balanced" around the TF - ET combination so shouldn't it be balanced without it?

Yup, you just refuse to understand. I'm not responding to you any further because it's going nowhere. I've aired my displeasure over this change and it's clear you think my displeasure is meaningless because I would "use those attacks anyway so who cares". Who cares that I must use TF before ET or PC to make using those two worthwhile, right? Who cares that some guy obsessed with minigames decided to ruin the flow, fluidity, and choice of EM's combat chains to shoehorn in a half-measure that should be a full-measure? Who cares if we don't like it since it's happening anyway? Most of the time, the forums are a fine place to discuss ideas. Today, in this thread, it's clear that people like me just need to "keep quiet" for some reason.

It doesn't matter if I'd click the button anyway because it's telling me the order in which I must click my buttons if I want the set to perform at a level it should without having everything laid out in a specific order of activation. That's the problem and it's clear you'll never understand. I know that EM is not going to be changed back to a combo-less system because someone on the dev team must think that ET deserves to be awful unless we engage with his inane minigame, and I'll still play the set because I value concept more than numbers, but that DOES NOT mean that I like what the set has become. Much like the original nerfs to EM, people still played it while complaining about it and I'll remain in that camp. Energy Melee is no longer Energy Melee to me. It's now just PomPom Punchies, but only if you punch in the proper order.

And that's the problem. I'm being told what I have to do in order to get the changes that should just be active all the time. I'm being told how to play the set, in a set that never used to work that way. It's no longer the EM I knew and is now an imitation with rules, hierarchies, and priorities shoved in to get in the way. It's no longer the set I picked.

Yup. See, I can do it too. Come off it already. We don't like it and we don't care that you do like it. No one's ignoring the "benefits". The people upset, myself included, are upset that EM doesn't feel like EM anymore. We're now being forced into a rote pattern laid out before us with no room for individualization or customization. It used to be that you could fire up EM any which way you wanted due to the fast animations and high damage on everything you hit with barring TF (and Whirling Hands, I guess). While it's true that that method of play is still "better" than it used to be, ignoring the mandated minigame puts you behind everyone else playing the set for no reason other than because you "want to suck for some reason". It's no longer a build-your-own-chain like it used to be. You now must use Power 9 before Power 8 is worth it, or you must use Power 9 if you want Power 3 to do anything valuable. Why this is hard to understand, I have no idea. I have never liked enforced combat patterns that actively punish you for not engaging in them and I don't care if ignoring them after these changes still puts me "above" where I was before the changes because the set isn't good enough that way either.

Based on the initial discussion thread, your opinion was far outweighed by those who share mine, and whether you realize it or not, you are "speaking for everyone else" when you insist on being so dismissive to the people who don't like this direction. You're essentially making the argument that because it performs better then the set is fine, regardless of how it feels or looks. It'd be as if I took Titan Weapon, renamed all the powers to Energy Melee analogs, changed the weapon to glowy pompoms, and declared EM was now "fixed". It's not EM anymore. It's an imitation.

I really feel like Acid Arrow only gained a healing debuff because they didn't want to give it a regen debuff like many people asked for. It's almost useless in PvE content as very few things heal in large enough amounts to want this effect whereas debuffing regen would be universally helpful. I have no idea why this angle was chosen.