Replacement

@Monos King The problem I have with your assessment is... I still see around here, at least once/week, someone claiming endurance drain is useless because enemy attacks don't cost endurance. It's factually incorrect, but there's a reason people keep falling into that trap: it's hard work to sap well, requiring specific power combinations and planning. Meanwhile, making the more direct builds is worlds easier. A Sapping blaster could be a Blasting blaster. A Sapping defender could be buffing survival stats and debuffing enemies directly. A Sapping controller could be using holds directly, that don't feel like a waste of time every time that freakshow tank knocks off half your health because they just got a tick of endurance. Edit: an ice/fire blaster doesn't have to ignore their Slow effects just because their secondary isn't playing ball. Why should my elec/nin blaster be any different?

Novel concept: Sleeps give a large debuff resistance debuff, as well as mez resistance debuff. In essence, everything against them is power boosted. This should persist after they awake, and I still adamantly believe we need 1-2 echoes like I mentioned on the first page. This would have the net effect of a lot of what @AgentForest was suggesting: the secondary effects of these sets would naturally amp up, as would the endurance drain on Electric attacks (mind control is still a wreck). There's an obvious fear surrounding power boosts -- they have a lot of potential to distort things in unexpected ways. Adding it as an effect like this, where it wears off within ~3 seconds of being slept, would be a good way to keep it from getting out of control.

This should work for me. I'm also probably available at the same time frames on Thurs and Friday (and of course, tonight, the moment you're available is basically right when I gotta take care of other stuff -- there's a reason I mostly solo on Live, you know). Some suggestions, in case I'm not around to fulfill: Bring a Controller with aoe immobilize. If we have a defender and controller both with EA, it could be a quick chance to ensure stuff like AT modifiers applying if we have time. Make sure someone isn't 50, so some brief Exemplar tests can be run (I know we can do this with TFs and Ouroboros too but I find myself feeling like that's a bit incomplete of a test). I suggest posting actual game-specific findings in the focused feedback thread, and maintaining this thread for planning chatter.

91% sure they already used far superior activation times.

I can't shake the feeling the changes to the sandman proc are going by... Too silently. I'm also shaky on the premise that it's too powerful and must-have on aoe sleeps, when the +defense uniques are so cornerstone to every build. I guess this boils down to there being so few aoe sleeps that can abuse this, vs everyone can grab Tough for those 2 gimmes. I have an Electric Control Dominator and an Earth Mastery Tanker on live and both have the heal proc. I find it curious that I don't even notice the heal on either. In fact, I don't think Static Field is capable of proccing more than once (I did an informal test a few months back and concluded it must be activating on the act of summoning the patch and then my character is detached from the effect). I haven't done any real testing on Tanker Salt Crystals, but if it's good healing, I've yet to notice.

@oedipus_tex what was the level differential in those results? Pretty sure that multiplies up with the purple patch. General: I really enjoy having Defib as a strong Sapping move, in that it resets your stacks and deprives you of in-fight revives, but I definitely don't think it should be so universally good at it. It seems to me the issue mostly resides in how much end drain is coming from each static stack (I've been trying to come up with a good portmanteau of that for the last 4 builds - stackic? Statick?). @JimmyI won't blame you if you feel the need to nerf the Sapping into Oblivion, but if it ends up reliably draining 60 or less endurance... I would suggest considering taking a page out of the performance of the old, bugged version and scale the sleep Mag. Having an aoe rez that reliably sleeps entire spawns at the same time would be a powerful recovery tool without it being super sappy. Ideally, pair it with +huge endurance drain vs robots, since they can't be slept.

Good point. This is why I would limit it to suggestion sub forums. As I mentioned in the OP, I'm not convinced that's worse than what we currently have, which is promotion of "hot" topics (which is always the most dramatic ones, as opposed to calm consensus). This wouldn't be trading out a "sort by hottest" for a "sort by popularity." Posting would still bump as well. So you would simply be grading threads on a curve for having good ideas.

Sorcery, Experimentation, Force of Will, (and Gadgetry and Utility Belt when they arrive) are all keyed to different origins. They are mutually exclusive. If my defender wants runic magic but I feel at all compelled to create an alternate build that drops sorcery for experimentation because it's the meta way of killing AVs, the set has failed at its premise of furthering origin's involvement.

Just about any day but tomorrow.

I'm willing to test this again but I almost guarantee this isn't the issue. We did a series of tests with the same conditions 1) caster at 19', enemy closer to dead ally. Cast. 2) caster then stepped into 17' range, minor maneuvering of enemies to ensure they remain closer to dead ally. Cast. 3) repeat at 15 feet. NOTE: He used the same enemies for all these tests (and also used did extra tests in here targeting pet instead or just redoing to make sure we saw what we thought we saw). This means at steps 2 and 3, the enemies didn't move much more than about 4 feet, because they were the same enemies who kept waking up from previous tests.

Disagree. -Regen is too rare and niche to put into an Origin pool. You would see all sorts of expectations rise around taking this pool just for that component. This does, however, seem like a cool addition to Medicine>Injection

The question at hand is, "is it fair for me to start every fight by completely destroying the ability for an entire spawn to fight back?" Because that's the territory we're in right now. Doing 250+ endurance drain in a generous aoe is no joke. I personally was hitting (I think) 544 endurance drain at level 36 vs level 30 enemies, which is like 330ish endurance before the purple patch, assuming that applies. 2 things I should mention here: We really need to wait for the next build before casting final judgement on the balance of the ability, given we know there's some wonk going on right now that's getting cleaned up. The "enemies can attack even without endurance" thing is a lie. Endurance drain is very strong once they hit 0, particularly when you pair it with -Recovery (which Galvanic Sentinel does).

I respect the desire to polish first, but just want to make sure you know: the beta build is already superior to Live in every way for /nin Blasters (that I could find).

We considered this possibility, but Bopper proved that's not the problem, as well, with the first screen shot I posted. With both enemy and caster inside the 20' radius - still nothing.

Did more testing with my Ninjutsu Blaster. Reiteration: From a client perspective, the experience is definitely way better. I see my katana between attacks all the time, I draw when I'm supposed to (though something about the animation feels off that I can't quite place) and skip the draw when I'm in combat. More importantly, I see animations firing off correctly. It's super good, for the client. What others see: Still nothing. My katana appears while I animate (Tested with: The Lotus Drops) but it disappears outside of that state. I see it in my hand; @Bopper saw combat stance but no sword. Bopper was nice enough to take screenshots of my strangely-empty hands in both combat pose and in ninja run, in case you need to see photo evidence. Misc: As @Doc_Scorpion mentioned, I did these tests twice: once after copying character to test server, and again after changing my sword at the tailor. First weapon was VK-99 Event Horizon Second weapon was Chinese Broadsword Neither showed for Bopper (outside of attack animation).

Caster at 11, but target (enemy) beyond 20' Here's it working with caster @7', target further away (about 12') in case it matters to anything (doubt it) I'm guessing this is all just the description being wrong -- it says 20' radius aoe but I'm guessing it's actually 20' diameter. If we can try again with someone alive to Immobilize, I'd be interested to see if the Enemy component has a different range.

I like this one because you can see Bopper is 15' away from my cold, dead corpse, as is his target (I believe the behemoth but it doesn't actually matter which one he targeted). Those are 10' tiles for reference. I took lots more screenies but I don't think most of them show much that's missing from this one. EDIT: I forgot to explain myself. This screenshot was taken moments AFTER Defibrillate. As you can see, I'm not alive and I don't have a rez prompt. This was a "target enemy" test; no chance of it being passthrough targeting from the pet. I'll sort through all the rest of what I collected tonight and post anything relevant. I think everything else we tried was working as intended. Did lots of combat monitoring and all looks hunky-dory there.

My gut reaction, seeing the results: My personal surprises, here, were seeing how high Sonic Resonance was, and comparatively low Empathy was. I basically expected them to be swapped (but still middle of the pack on the "bad" scale). Not exactly scientific, but I like that looking at this graph (as it currently stands), we can organize these into "suck tiers" where first place is the worst place to be. Priority 1: Force Field and Trick Arrow (to the surprise of literally no one) Priority 2: Poison, Sonic, Traps Priority 3: Empathy and Pain Domination - hopefully, if we ever get to this point, the buffs will be divergent to give them some mechanical identity. It's probably a good thing I did this poll when I did, before the beta changes cause a "review-bombing" effect on Dark Miasma (bug fixes will cause minor nerfs to non-Defender Dark Supports).

Apologies for the bump. I've inserted a graph of our "flash poll" results below. NOTE: there is some small level of inaccuracy here, and it's hardly representative of our entire population, but I believe it's still indicative of where the assorted sets are. It's my hope this helps guide discussion about where given sets stand and what their priorities should be for getting balance passes. (As an example of inaccuracy, I'm playing a /Poison controller currently and keenly looking forward to adjustments, yet I managed to forget to vote for them in either category). There is a high chance you'll see more polls in a similar light for other sets that don't have a clear consensus already established. If, for some reason, this bump sets off a new round of significant additional voting, I'll add a second graph.

Just realized it looks like none of us bothered to put this into a bug report, so just being thorough: On Beta, Shadow Maul always plays the "miss" sound effect, even when it successfully hits.

Fun fact: in 15 years this is only the 2nd time I've read something indicating the Rule of Five applies to individual set bonuses (e.g. Small Damage Bonus) as opposed to specific enhancement set bonuses (e.g. Sirocco's Dervish set bonus #3 can only occur 5 times). This is how bad the game is at explaining the very important Rule of Fives.

@Shadowsleuth Obviously I'd be all for that, but I was trying to keep it to stuff that's already in-game - though maybe there's some VFX magic the system allows, such as lowering the Alpha on textures so they're translucent, without creating entirely new textures. Likewise, I'd enjoy hitting someone with a concrete donkey, but unless the asset is already in the Propel/alakhazam/base building libraries...

Thanks, folks, much appreciated. I had a feeling the Belladona arc was the big one I needed to get started on, still working through tons of older level 40+ contacts I never did pre-Snap though.

Hey folks, it occurs to me there are still a ton of arcs (maybe during task forces I haven't ran?) I don't really know much about (WARNING: Spoilers inbound) In particular, I'm looking for: When Aurora got her body back from Mother Mayhem Literally anything about Desdemona - pre-fall The big one: the fall of Praetoria. Please let me know which contacts kick off these plotlines or which TFs they're from.

I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, if you're going to do Sapping as Support, shouldn't it be allowed to be great at it? On the other hand, if it's too effective at Sapping, what's even the point of building other Sapping characters? There are tons of builds that can do sapping while still being OK at their primary roles, but they will feel comparatively silly once people start building Electric Affinity toons specifically for sapping. I guess the best thing to do is going to be to nerf the benefit of additional stacks (unless it's due to the multi-aoe issue) and buff it down the road (like sentinels - we need to make sure our unique community darlings aren't also OP as hell).