Aean

Team shielding powers are a staple of 4 different support sets, but I think in their current iteration they are needlessly tedious to maintain. As of right now, shields are applied to the whole party except the user (fine - I'm not asking for direct power increase) and last for 4 minutes (I wish it were longer, but this is acceptable) which means they need to reapplied 2-3 times per mission at least. The problem is that even though casting a shield has a good range, the range of which other allies in the area are shielded is only 30 feet. At the start of a mission this is no problem, but since it is necessary to reapply these effects mid mission you very often have people who are just out of range. This may sound like a weird nitpick, but Sonic Resonance and Force Field shield buffs are hard to distinguish on the buff bar and its hard to visually check the whole party. All of these factors combined means its very easy to let shields lapse on one or more players simply because they stood slightly too far away and you didn't see. In a perfect world, I would love for shields to be a toggle aura that passively affected allies besides the other in a wide radius, but I am under the impression that the current version of shielding powers was at least to some degree deliberate. Instead, I ask that we get the following change. All shield spells (Sonic Resonance, Thermal Radiation, Force Field, Cold Domination) changed from: 80 foot cast range, 30 foot area of effect To: 30 foot cast range, 80 foot area of effect In a perfect world, I think these shielding spells would be an always on toggle or some other way to remove the need to repeatedly refresh them, but if this is going to remain part of the design paradigm I would strongly plead that they be made easier to maintain on parties who aren't necessarily all clumped together.

I am not personally a fan of the Tier 8 suggestion both because it goes against Empathy being a strictly ally-focused set and because it makes it close to the already-similar Pain Domination powerset, but even then I think its a reasonable option. Since everyone else is already doing so, I'd propose an alternative of: "Empathetic Link - Ally targeting Toggle skill - Grant an ally protection from -To Hit, -Damage, -Regeneration, -Recovery and increase the power of their secondary effects. Whenever your ally performs an action which consumes endurance, they have a chance to give you a boost to your recharge for a short duration." ---- ...and with that out of the way, I think every other suggestion here is great. These changes seem like they are in theme with what makes the Powerset appealing to players and boosts the overall potency without causing it to encroach on the niches of other power sets. While Empathy isn't useless, I think most people agree its undertuned and these are the sort of changes I hope we eventually see to it.

As someone who is already level 50 mostly through group play, are there any particular missions that are worth doing through Ouroboros? ...and also what are the names of the specific arcs? It seems like the replay crystals only give the arc names and not the contact names.

Oops, looks like I put the wrong Steadfast Unique in Fallout Shelter - I should update that! For a single target attack chain I'm not entirely sure what I can do to address this. Most discussion of Savage Melee I see suggests skipping the Tier 1 'Savage Strike' and the Tier 8 'Hemorrhage', but without those I think I am reliant on using AoE attacks to fill out the attack chain. I think I could sacrifice Tactics to pick up Savage Strike, but my understanding of Hemorrhage is that the loss of Blood Frenzy outweighs its usefulness in a rotation. That said, I was always under the impression the Tier 1 powers were generally not worth using though I admit that might just be misinformation! Particle Shielding is probably overslotted, but it has 100% uptime with these enhancements and provides a recovery buff as well as a lot of set bonuses I'm not sure where else I could squeeze into my build. I definitely agree that the global accuracy is a bit high and and recharge is a bit low, but I couldn't find a way to slot in more recharge or less accuracy while still reaching Def and Res thresholds. I'm not a pro though, so its very possible I just made a poor choice somewhere!

I recently reached level 50 on my stalker, and I'm looking to set them up with a full set of Invention Enhancements. Unfortunately, Savage Melee + Radiation Armor is not a particularly common combination on any character, and doubly so on a Stalker which tends to prefer defense-focused sets. I did find one example build in Croax's wonderful pinned post. Unfortunately, this build is from before some of the recent updates and makes a few choices different than I personally would have: it skips placate, it doesn't take a snipe power, and it does not go into tactics or any +ToHit beyond the potential build-up procs. After a bit of work I've created my own modified version of the build that uses the new Psionic Mastery for the combination of Psi-Lance and Harmonic Mind as well as picking up Placate and Tactics. It gives up a bit of recharge, defense, and resistance compared to Croax's though I think it still reaches the same benchmarks. I'm not particularly good at builds though, so I worry I might have missed something obvious - could anybody take a look and give feedback? Harmonic Stalker - Stalker (Savage Melee - Radiation Armor).mbd