XaoGarrent

Almost every time I try to make a Blaster I end up rerolling as a Dominator. ...Thing is, I consider Blaster to be head and shoulders a better AT than Dominator... They just aren't as much fun. They have half the problems that Dominators do, and about a third of the dimensionality. The biggest problem Dominator has is also the biggest draw to actually playing the AT: Control primaries mixed with Assault secondaries makes for a buffet of toys to play around with. The AT is scatterbrained, and its inherent lopsided (unless you perma it), but that's what makes it fun.

Honestly, if it wasn't for all the Lawful Good Crusader type hero activity trying to pry its way into the Isles, Arachnos would probably take a more hands off approach. See, they're social darwinists, they're basically a form of anarchist, specifically a form of anarcho capitalist without the non-aggression principle (Which for all their evil, is actually to their credit, the NAP is unenforceable delusional garbage). They don't like any form of governance, they want to establish a hegemony of only the strong survive and the strongest rule, a society that is truly every man for themselves. But they will gladly go against their ideals and govern if it means establishing a state of, basically, their desired form of chaos. With the constant incursions by Longbow and assortment of other capes constantly trying to upright the isles, Arachnos has to take an iron fisted approach often, because eventually some heroes would succeed and start making gains, probably trying to set up a proper democracy, enacting criminal justice against villains, and the various businesses that run the Isles, Aeon included, would eventually have the same kind of eyes on them that Crey does. But yeah, basically, the only reason Arachnos operates in as strong arm of a manner as they do is because they're ideologues engaged in a power battle. Ideology is a weird thing, it blinds people to obvious hypocrisy, because ultimately, when delusion becomes rooted in a person's world view, the goal of winning becomes more important than the goal of being reality coherent. This is why I consider the writing red side so damn good: It properly appreciates how extremists with a vision of the world based on subjectivity think and act.

I believe so, yes. And I highly, highly doubt this is in any way intended.

I know that, at the very least, this is also true for the T1 power in Psi Assault. I swear the thing has over 2 seconds of cast time.

There's always been two objectively crippling problems with this set: -Endurance costs are absolutely ridiculous. This is by far the biggest thing holding the set back. -CC Auras being Mag 2 mezz (instead of something like mag 2 with a good chance of +1) renders one of the set's main gimmicks almost pointless unless you pick your other set based entirely off stacking something with the aura. They also require accuracy slotting and CoF in particular has horrible accuracy, while a lot of comparable powers other ATs get not only are more powerful and come at less of a cost (At least relative to the AT they exist on), but have high accuracy assuming they aren't autohit powers. When Whirlwind with -KB is better than a T7 or T8 power, something is wrong. This raises the very real question of "why pick DA to try and help with CC when I could pick Rad Armor, let a Controller handle all the CC needs, and have less holes, more damage." Or WP. Or Bio. Or Energy, Ice, Elec, etc... Most of the sets in the game do what DA does but also do something more, because DA's "something more," those toggles, just kinda drags the whole set down. As a general rule of thumb, if you're going to make a special gimmick, a special niche for a set, it needs to do whatever that niche is well. Especially if you're dedicating more than one power to it. There's a few other less severe problems, but still problems none the less: -DA's moderate weakness to Energy damage. So, normally, I'd shrug and just accept this, because the damage hole is much, much smaller than most other set's holes. In addition to this, energy is something you do run into frequently, but it's usually spread out among an enemy group. Whereas something like Psi, when you run into it, you run into an absolutely insane amount of it, and it's not being delivered with anything else (I. E. smashing). The problem is, paired with the lack of KB protection, the high endurance costs, the weak mezz toggles, etc... There's really no excuse for it, no reason why the set needs yet another problem to contend with. Especially in an era where so many other sets now exist that do what DA does well, but don't have DA's problems. If most or all of the other problems with DA get addressed, this can stay. But *something* has to give. -On Sentinels specifically the set is also weird if you're not using a Blast set with lots of PBAoE, because of the aforementioned aura toggles. If you ARE using a set with lots of PBAoE it's weird in another way due to the removal of the damage aura. It's like this set doesn't really know what it wants to be. Obscure Sustenance is also a cone with a target cap of one? It's weird, but interestingly enough, this is the only version of DA with any kind of built in end management due to this power. -Why is the set's immob protection on its invis power? lol Even putting the +perception in there is weird, maybe just move everything but the stealth out of the stealth power. ...That's everything off the top of my head. Please don't make a bunch of good changes on the test server, get cold feet, and then walk them back this time.

I think this is a netcode thing and if I had to guess it's probably difficult or a lot of work to fix. This has been requested a whole bunch over time, though. You're definitely not alone in wanting this.

Perceive whatever you want, a faction that does -res is factually going to hit you harder than another otherwise comparable faction that doesn't. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Goldbrickers, right. Yeah, Midas' guys. Brickbusters are from a certain other game, derp. The accuracy, and even the level of resistance debuff, starts to matter a little less individually when you have a whole swarm of them shooting at you at once, especially if you're playing on a difficulty higher than +0. It's more a problem that occurs when you're on a full sized team, and because you encounter them so early on. ...And once you're done dealing with them, worse things begin to come along. https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Longbow#Longbow_Nullifier

There is a laundry list of reasons why Redside is less popular. -World maps are incredibly obnoxious and difficult to transverse without some kind of vertical travel power. -Nastier enemies, showing up much earlier in the game. Arachnos everywhere, in particular. Brickbusters and Slag golems hit you with a frequency and level of debuff that is rarely seen elsewhere. -Even more narrow caves. -Even more buggy Arachnos bases. -A form of writing that really only works for a certain subset of villains. ...Well, with some exceptions. There are some real true to form villainous arcs in there, but they're few and far between, and one of the most evil ones comes real late in the game. -The gothic thing is really nice, but a lot of Redside is just ugly to a degree that should piss off even cold blooded villains. I mean, it does make sense, it's ancapistan, but still. Grab a damn broom. -Other reasons I'm forgetting. The thing is conceptually, the lore of redside makes a ton of sense, and is written accurately for what it's trying to be. It's just riddled with execution errors and in some places puts the lore too highly over gameplay. The OG devs had an issue with over prioritizing concept/theme over gameplay/balance on the enemy side of things, and balance/gameplay over concept/theme on the player side of things... And the most glaring evidence of this error is smeared all across redside. Even the terrain being a pain to transverse for those that can't fly or jump super high adheres to Recluse and Arachnos' particular brand of social darwinism.

I am not a masochist, no.

I'm sorry, I just don't have time or patience for this kind of argumentation. Conservative in nature, subjectively anchored and favoring the status quo is no way to make changes, and given those three qualities and your general reaction to my posts it's really hard to convince myself to keep arguing. Honestly, I didn't plan to do more than come in, drop my 2 cents and /jranger the OP's idea, and I already regret saying more than that. I could, and half want to, get into a huge thing about how dominators are lopsided in design, and the numerous ways to improve them... But I'm not going to let myself get drawn into a discussion about Domination, which is inevitable, as the pink elephant in the room. Especially when I'd be on the nerfing side (which is rare but does happen) and nobody else would ever see the bigger picture of what I was trying to accomplish. I've been here before, the absolute buffet of potential ways to buff other things that I'd suggest would get shot down or more likely ignored without any honest consideration, then everyone would just stand around like... I've been watching this happen already WITHOUT my participation. I don't even have to guess here. Well, from a purely objective point of view, I guess everything is fine. I mean, it's "just a game" after all. It took literal years for anything to get even half fixed on live, and the world didn't crumble, the moon didn't crash into the earth, and Recluse didn't destroy Paragon. Why even bother change dominators at all, they don't seem to be breaking anything significant. I mean, even subjectively, lots of people like them, right? If we're not going to have some ambition and make serious changes, just leave everything be. It really is just safer and simpler that way. Also, entirely relevant to the above: GalaxyBrain took things way, way overly personal. I wasn't trying to roast him, I was speaking from experience: I was that guy. Repeatedly. I've had the misfortune over the years of getting the devs ears of various games far, far too often, and not having the common sense to know when to shut up and stop digging myself and everyone else a hole. Of either mediocrity or nerfs. I'm not saying it doesn't occasionally work out (the Quartakk in Warframe says hello), but my point is be careful what you wish for. This is why I just leave laughing emojis and peace out. It's really not that complicated: I'm too nihilistic and defeated for this crap. So yeah, /jranger and peace, I'm gonna go play the game, while I'm still enjoying it.

You're good at crunching numbers and you seem to know the game well inside out, but you need to work on your common sense and situational awareness. Everything you say is true. Everything you say also is very unlikely to happen the way it should. Think twice, think real hard about what is likely to be reality versus what is your vision, and be very, very careful what you ask for. You might not be supporting a nerf explicitly, but you are implicitly, even if you don't realize you are. Context is always important, and in context you're playing with fire. With the record on balance and design that the Homecoming devs have, especially the ease at which the reactionary community talks them out of improvements pretty much every time they come up with something good, the way this will pan out ultimately is that we'll get domination nerfs and at most an extremely irrelevant buff. No +recharge, no fancy ATOs, none of the many, many little but specific buffs that would polish out the comparatively large amount of rust in this AT's design. Frankly, if they go messing around with Domination, Dominators are going to need a lot more than some ATOs and a couple buffs to specific powers. Just look at what they're doing over on Thunderspy for instance, that's way, way more ambitious and it's not even coming as a trade. That's because over there they did something that all the wizards and reactionary vets over here refuse to do: They admitted to themselves basic reality. Dominators ain't really that great. Especially without permadom. These sorts of changes keep up long enough, and eventually people are going to start considering greener pastures. People have options now.

There is a lot of really awkward design surrounding Dominators, and Domination itself is the absolute last item on the list of things that should be looked at. This thread is a defacto example of putting the cart before the horse. Consider this a big fat /jranger from me.

The recharge meta exists, entirely because designing every single power in the game with and around a cooldown was one of the biggest mistakes the devs made in their original design philosophy. The devs and players both spent years trying to work around this (as well as the outdated at time of release "mana" system), because the constant downtime makes for frankly jilted and frustrating gameplay. Hence why "these threads" and the haste threads just keep happening over and over. Same goes for the tanker "argo" cap threads, pretty shoehorned, awkward and arbitrary how they hardcapped agro, but that's a different discussion. Being almost DECADES in to this decision, not much can really be done about the core problem... All that can be done is to minimize its negative impact on the game. So the very least some proliferation should be done just to give people more options of *accomplishing* the recharge meta. LotG and the various recharge incarnate powers wouldn't even exist in the first place if someone somewhere at some point hadn't realized downtime sucks. Even if you ignore that, most players who give any kind of a damn about their builds (none of this is relevant to casuals anyway) wont ignore it. PoE's devs tried nerfing AoE nodes for the same reason, they became completely meta to the point where any spellcaster build incorporated them. Didn't work, people still took every node they could get their hands on, because the nature of the game is that you fight hordes of enemies. Honestly, if I had been directing the implementation of the IO system, large global bonuses like LotG never would have been part of the IO system, and instead existed on their own special sheet that opens up as you level and can be affordably populated while leveling. Hasten wouldn't have been a click either, but rather a passive with a lower (but still quite significant) bonus, etc, etc. Probably would have made that change when I introduced IOs. Sets would have also all been leveless and scaling, and the player would be encouraged to build and slot them as they level. Then again, if it was my call, a lot of things would be different. The original devs made big mistakes and were too afraid to actually fix those mistakes. Cottage rule and all. It's kinda ridiculous how long it took just to get Blasters, Dominators and Stalkers some serious changes. This game is rusting and I wish the new devs would start getting a little more ambitious in regards to de-rusting it.

I would make a yeet blaster on day one. 🤣

Your post went well outside of that just that topic, and that's what I was addressing.

Unhealthy for new players, though, as it always rapidly turns into an arms race as players seek more and more efficient methods of farm to keep ahead of the curve. As someone who came into the game Warframe late, a game that saw years of inflating credit sinks before I even started, I can tell you that the experience of hitting a brick wall price meant to drain people with massive "warchests" is incredibly discouraging to the will to keep playing. Luckily the Index had been implemented already by that time, but god, I must have spent a hundred hours grinding credits in that boring and frustrating game mode, just to get things that vets could and already did build or rank up, on their day of release. Currency and resource sinks don't really work the way people want them to in practice, and they come with tradeoffs. I mean, I guess it's fine if you're trying to build a stable farming meta to center the economy around, but that's the reality of what comes with this particular solution. If that's the goal, that's fine, most modern games do that eventually. But it's still a bad idea to put the sinks in line with non-farm non-endgame content, because at that point you're basically forcing people to build a farm character just to, for instance, alt effectively. Placing a large inf sink on the market itself, or on the creation of end game upgrades, is more in line with how you do this, because it doesn't have any effect on your more casual or new players... Which aren't going to have the want or tools to generate piles of inf anyway. ...Endgame and market sinks is something they've already implemented in game. So I fail to see why, in the current state of the game, it isn't simply rational to cut the price down some. Primarily since it would go a long way towards encouraging people to *actually use* SOs, so this new feature doesn't just go ignored in favor of the still more convenient set and forget basic IOs.

Vampire Sentinel is a good excuse to make a Water/Bio Sentinel. 😛 Color everything red, make it as close to blood as possible. Works especially well with Bio Armor, think Legacy of Kain. Dark Armor is awkward on Sentinels, it really wants to be paired with a sentinel set that has a lot of PBAoEs and short range cones. At least, if you plan to use the set to its full potential. It's better paired with something like Rad.

This is the kind of lateral thinking I like to see.

Permadom is so central to the AT that it's one of those things people have created binds around. In addition to the above mentioned flavor, people also bind the movement keys to activate one or the other, kinda like how obnoxious scouts used to bind NEED A DISPENSER HERE to the movement keys in the golden age of TF2.

What you said is akin to saying "the solution to climate change is to move to mars." Removing absolutely all context and real world consideration, yes, anything vaguely related to the topic sounds like a good argument. I told you to read context for a reason. Because the reason why your solution isn't actually a solution is inherent in the context of the posts in this thread. Most of what you mentioned there is either an expensive toggle that confers an absolutely tiny bonus, on a class that has a full attack chain before the level it can even fully slot out Stamina... Or is reliant on being level 50, and is passively assuming we're stacking with IOs. Yes, nobody missed the slimy weasel words, "On top of that there's all kinds of easily attainable bonuses" but you don't specifically state anything because you're thinking of IOs, but you know the OP has already ruled that option out. Nobody's questioning whether these are effective under the context of min maxing for end game, with an ideal, complete build. It's absolutely everywhere else that's being discussed here, because if the OP was in that situation they wouldn't even be here. With the assumption that stacking IO bonuses to min max on top of say, Weave and Maneuvers off the table, and whether we're dealing with leveling or endgame not being clear, you're giving horrible advice whether you realize it or not. You're not arguing the point that's in the thread, you're arguing some point that you made up in your head because you have nothing worthwhile to say and just want to arbitrarily defend something regardless of reality. Please stop doing this.

Read context please.

I hardly said anything about MMs, so I'm not sure how. As for doms... It's just a simple matter of AoE. Most Doms have a lot of it. Much of it crowd control. Much of it damage. With very little to protect them from anything they fail to lock down.

The vast majority of Dom builds really do need IOs, and leveling doms is always going to be painful, even if it's *less* painful than it was on live because at least now you have an easy option of slotting scaling set IOs early-ish. If you're playing a lot of doms, you absolutely want to get a farmer of some sort going so you can fund them. The problem with Dominators is that they're extremely all or nothing, and life is a real struggle until you get your pet(s)... Which aren't particularly commandable, unlike MM pets, so the struggle continues in a new way even once you have that. Dominators work like this in a nutshell: Either you lock everything down completely and basically win because if nothing can attack you you're functionally at the immortality line, or... Well, you die horribly, because at anything higher than +1 even LTs can slap you for almost half your health. Even on teams you're highly reliant on your meatshields having a clue what they're doing, so you can do your job properly. If your tank can't hold agro or can't stay up long enough for you to lock enemies down, you're going to die. A lot.