Bossk_Hogg

WHAT?! You don't think a single target pet buff with a crash needs a recharge time of almost 17 minutes?

KB is a mostly detrimental secondary effect from an efficiency standpoint. It can certainly be fun, but primarily for the user, and this fun can often come at the frustration of your team. My suggestion was always to up the damage based on the mag of the KB. So at least when shit goes flying you know it got hurt.

They why bother with fire at all? Pick rad armor, bio, energy aura or any of the significantly better options. Fire armor gets Moten Embrace, which is ass compared to Fiery Embrace. Whee, my low damage sentinel gets a self only version of Assault! All sentinels basically kind of suck, but fire really shows how meh the AT is for anything but concept. Mediocre damage and personal survivability but nothing to leverage the latter towards accomplishing. You can play a really blaster at range and deal way more damage. TBH, my water/atomic is about as safe as any of my sents. The AT as a whole for me is shelved until they rework it. It's fun to dink around with until 32 or so, then just drags. This is what happens when you balance around SO's, as though blasters will die to a mild breeze in their direction, while ignoring the massive survivability that comes with tricking characters out.

No. I'm adult with a family, home, other hobbies and a full time job. I don't feel the need to ALSO work for my fun. The early days of MMO's really did a number on people, tricking them into thinking grinding was some worthwhile activity as opposed to a way to pad out subscriptions. I don;t know if its just Stockholme Syndrome, or some misplaced Puritan work ethic, but I'd prefer less drudgery in my leisure time. I think Everquest is still around if you really want to grind faction to grind keys to camp mobs to try and get a particular drop that 20 of the other herded cats will also want to roll on.

Rather than fully open up the epic pools early, I would prefer to see a variety of new pool power sets created to fill the gaps in what we are missing. A melee weapon power using the one handed attacks of broadsword/mace/axe etc. One 4-6 second recharge attack, one 8-10 second recharge attack, a shatter size cone, a PBAE and maybe a personal shield similar to tough. Maybe an elemental melee attack that can take different skins for frozen fists, scorch, havoc punch, etc. A minutions powerset with a single shot pistol, double tap, hand grenade, empty clip and passive kevlar armor as the T3. And finally an energy/elemental ranged attack. One of the reasons the fighting pool attacks are so bad is they have needlessly low recharge times if you actually slot them. No one needs Boxing to have a recharge faster than it animates. If the recharge was upped they would close the gap between picking an attack like that for flavor vs what you already get from your primary/secondary.

I mean, they might even stand up before the animation finished, so that seems a pretty reasonable minor perk.

I wish rather than shortening all animations, they would simply give a damage bonus for long ones, beyond what the standard recharge/area formulas allow. That said, I do think Shadow Maul could use its cone widened and it wouldnt really harm the set. Alternately, maybe make Dark Consumption or Soul Drain more like Dark Dwarf Mire to be used more like actual attacks.

I have a 50 fire/fire sentinel. More or less fully IO'd with superior winter sets, PVP uniques and some other purples. She's a great concept character, but mechanically is more or less useless, and I feel this extends to any /Fire sentinel. With /Fire, a lot of your damage comes from Burn, which puts you in melee range, along with Inferno and the epic attacks. At which point, why not be a brute and have WAY more survivability not to mention team utility? Hell, now Tankers now deal VERY similar damage to sents, have bigger AE's and larger target caps. Plus Fiery Embrace is significantly better than Molten Embrace once you get some global recharge. Hell, Assault is better than ME as it also affects the team. While the AT as a whole is underperforming, Fire Armor in particular needs to be examined. IMO, the only thing Sentinels are gods of are being a great AT to play while drunk or high. They pay too much a damage premium for the tradeoff of not having to move into position. And given the short range of their attacks and, as you note, lack of aggro management, you still have to chase down runners. I'd really love a defensive mode with a small mag taunt on their attacks.

Water/Atomic blaster. Force Feedbacks coupled with Metabolic Acceleration and Beta Decay often have me at the recharge cap in melee range. Geyser is a mag 3 disorient, which alternated with radioactive cloud means you mez everything but bosses easily. I skipped Steam Spray so no cones to bother fiddling with either, but its a solid attack as well. You just need good defenses to live in melee, but its so incredibly satisfying.

The cottage rule mostly applied to powerSETS, not individual powers. I'm sure someone liked fear being garbage and making enemies scatter, but the devs shouldnt be beholden to a few masochists. I'm sure someone also liked that armor toggles were mutually exclusive, but we ditched that nonsense early on too. However, garbage powers like Serum, Smoke Flash, Repair, etc can easily be made useful by simply changing their numbers. For example, making repair AE, lower the healing a bit put it on a 60 second timer or so and the power is mostly fixed. Remove the crash from Serum, make whoever thought it needed a fucking 16+ minute recharge apologize, and then lower the recharge to something sane. Smoke Flash can affect multiple henchmen and have its absurd end cost lowered. None of these violate the cottage rule and make them useful.

REALLY good analysis, just wanted to comment on a few things. The brute is going to have IO's of their own, so it's not like powerboosted shields are required (see numerous complaints about force fields being obsolete in endgame). Plus I wouldnt get too attached to Power Boosted fade/farsight (fade in particular seems to be a bug). As for personal defenses, while he's no tank, my cold/sonic defender has positional defenses of 35/35/40%, capped SL resistance, and energy/cold/fire/psi resist between 40-50%, which is a reasonably sturdy foundation to build on given that there are often other support characters/maneuvers etc in the team. Benumb isnt quite perma, but with a 20% stacking resist debuff on his attacks, stacked with sleet, it doesnt really matter much. Hard targets die ridiculously fast.

I have a fire/fire tank and a bots/traps mastermind. Traps honestly sucks on a fast paced team. You can get the -regen from other sources (envenomed daggers are honestly normally sufficient), and it offers nothing particularly special. By the time your ff generator waddles to the spawn the brute is likely moving on to the next one. Time Bomb is garbage, as is web grenade and triage beacon. Trip Mine is useful solo, but falls into the "why bother" category if you're with a brute.

Cold/Sonic defender would be my go to. You shore up cold resistance and provide defense to make it easy for the brute to cap defense. Frostwork buffs HP, which is something fire tanks/brutes don't have. It covers end regen with Heat Loss, as fire/fire is kind of an end pig when going full blast. You have a large amount of reist debuffs to melt foes in sleet/howl as well as your two single target attacks. It matures early, and with force feedback and sudden acceleration in Shockwave you can keep foes on their ass as well as buff your recharge. There's a good amount of freedom in the build too, as Infrigidate, Snow Storm, Shout (a dps loss) and Screech are highly skippable. I personally ended up taking medicine for aid other/self on mine.

That still sounds like letting perfect be the enemy of good. Is there anything we can do to help speed this process along? Post screenshots of pieces that work or anything? New costume pieces seem like they would have less testing involved than powerset balance, which has been the main dev focus for almost a year. For example, how hard was it to remove the flag for the malaise pattern?

Frankly, the only person who should decide if the piece looks good is the person playing the character. I see so many bland and lame costumes as is, so what's a little clipping with some combos? Its not like capes would pass the arbitrary metric you all seem to be using, and just because a piece doesnt work with some options isnt a good reason to not let it be used. This seems like a hell of a lot easier than rebalancing the entire game, given that it took us almost 5 months to remove bruising and give tankers a 15% damage upgrade. Look at the pieces posted in this thread for example. There's no QA issue, so how much work could it be to remove the NPC only flag? Also, pieces being a "npc"s are a poor reason to keep them exclusive. The NPC is a mindless bunch of code. It doesnt deserve preferential treatment over an actual person who wants to realize their concept with a piece they use...

Trying to find it, but maybe it was deleted. Its linked to COXG, who had new costumes for the mercs among others. It looked similar to how I suspect the Phantom Army changes are implemented, where each pet pulls from one of your costume slots.

I'd like broadsword to get the fire sword, greater fire sword, ice sword and greater ice sword options. They are in dual blades, so its pretty weird they're not in broadsword. BS has other elemental weapons, but not these models. Really, let us use any of the one hander weapons in any one hander set (and mix with dual blades). So you could use a sword skin in the warmace set, or dual wield a pipewrench and hatchet. I'd also like to see both non-sword options for fire/ice sword attacks, and adding the ice/fire sword to non-fire sword attacks. It's just something in your character's hand, and you can see the animations work fine in Icon. You can see how they play out with an invisible sword too.

Radiation woud be my pick, w Radiation Therapy, Ground Zero and Meltdown being clickies with longish recharge. Meltdown is an actually useful T9 with minimal crash, that also ups your damage. Shield Defense for Shield Charge, and Bio for its clickies too.

Axe could use something certainly. Right now it's Mace's cruddy cousin, lacking the hard hitting attack like clobber or any variety in its effects. I'd add in -resistance in Gash and some a dot to Beheader to help with its otherwise terrible DPA. Axe does have a ton of opportunities for slotting force feedback chance for recharge, so if paired with an armor set that benefits from a lot of recharge can get good use out of that.

The thread was about the damage (or lack thereof). Not that you can understand that....

I like advertising as "smashy" or "speedy". Smashy not being a kill all, but with the expectation you fight towards the objectives and a level of +2 or higher depending on the team. Make it so you actually get some use out of your powers. Speedy not being a true speed run, but with less fighting and stealthing to objectives when it makes sense. Usually at +0. Helps to set people's expectations when joining and doesnt end up on either extreme of the spectrum. .

To access the NPC parts, go into Options, and in the Settings Launch Parameters, type "-n". Close Tequila, then re-open it and run That will let you access them. The original devs frequently lied to us about plenty of stuff. Like how arachnos costume parts were all forcibly linked, when at minimum the widow parts are all individual ones that you can mix and match with regular parts. Or how mastermind customization was "impossible" when some random guy on reddit figured out how to set their own costumes for them. For the most part, these pieces are ready to go, so I dont know why we cant get them. Not all are finished, and there are some issues with a few, but the majority could be released now. They've been released on other servers as well. I REALLY want the corrupted seer head for a psi blaster. They can stick it under the monstrous options (with and without tentacles) and its ready to roll.

Maybe this game isn't for you Captain Tryhard? The Jack Emmert drudgery dream of 3 minions challenging 1 hero was never a reality.

That would help give it an actual secondary effect in fights where you don't fully drain a target. The secondary should be useful outside of a few set combos. But Elec Blast has some other glaring issues. Thunderous Blast also needs its recharge fixed for Defenders, Blasters and Corrupters. Currently it doesn't follow the standard formula. And before someone who knows nothing chimes "durr, it's ranged", no that isn't part of the formula. It has a shorter range even than the other ranged nukes. Moreover, other ranged nukes follow the standard damage/recharge/area formula. AND it was fixed on Sentinels to have the same recharge as all the other nukes. Tesla Cage should get the Sentinel treatment (ie, deal actual damage) and Volt Sentinel needs something to make it worth taking and casting. I've tried to make it work, but the terrible damage, slowness of it moving, and short duration means I've dropped it every time. It was moderately cool when we could have multiples.

It's a spinning kick with one clear contact point. Also from a physics standpoint, you wouldnt hit multiple targets anyways. It is ALSO a gut punch. Check out the alt animation and tell me that makes sense as an AE attack. Making it a cone would lower its damage, up its endurance and change its recharge, etc. No thanks, I'll keep the best attack in the set as is.