Steampunkette

Honestly... My actual best is probably Cyclone. Kin/Bio brute recolored to grey and grey-blue for "Wind"

Sorcelle. Petless MM because I'm a masochist who likes the new Sorcery Pool and how it looks with Whip. Hard to see, there, but her chest and mask are the darkest violet, to match her boots and gloves.

Oh, I was just referring to ground target buff/debuff. Things like Distortion Field, maybe. Lightning Storm and Bonfire are both Damage/Control. Though that -is- a good note about Liquefy. And this could also work for Heal/Regen things like Tree of Life.

This made me think... What if Tar Patch and other "Ground Target Buff/Debuff" effects were given a sort of Faraday Cage treatment? Strip the Cooldown off of it, but make each cast destroy the last one. That way you can -always- put down a Tar Patch, at a cost, but -only- one at a time?

I think I might have just solved the issue of an Assault/Defense hybrid melee/ranged character... One of the big reasons that Assault/Defense characters are generally frowned upon as an archetype concept is that there's simply no reason to not get in melee and just stay there, using such a character. Your defenses (Plus IO Sets) offset the danger, and ranged attacks can't have a -minimum- range they fire from, so why not? One of the common suggestions is to create some sort of "Stacking Buff" mechanic which causes all the ranged powers in the Assault set to get Combo Levels based on how many melee attacks you've fired off, and vice versa. But that doesn't solve the inherent problem, it just encourages people to combo up their ranged attacks by doing a bunch of melee and then staying at point blank for the ranged attacks. So what if their inherent actively cost them damage for doing so? What I propose is an inherent similar to Invincible or Evolving Armor. One which gains stacks based on how many enemies are nearby. Each stack of this power would provide a Damage Debuff and a "Defensive Strength" Buff. To keep it from being -too- drastic, let's keep the Debuff at 2% per target, and the buff at 3% per target. At maximum Saturation, 16 targets, you would have a -32% to damage. All damage. And a +48% bonus to Defense Strength. What do I mean by Defensive Strength? Same thing that Power Build up modifies: The amount of defensive benefit you get from powers, not a direct bonus to resistance or defense. For the sake of argument, let's say you're using /Bio Armor. You've got Hardened Carapace toggled on granting you 17.5% Smashing/Lethal/Toxic. 3 SOs you're at 27%. Get into full saturation and you're Resistances jump to 40.4%. Got 16.38% defense to Energy/Negative with 3 slotted Environmental Adaptation? Get into full saturation and it climbs to 24%. But you -lose- 32% of your damage. That's a big pile of damage lost. Meaning an Assault/Defense character would need to decide when to jump into melee, or out of it, to keep themselves in fighting shape. Should you fire off your ranged attacks, first, and only close to melee once there's only a few enemies left standing? Or should you dive in, right off the bat, to gain the increased defensive strength to soak an alpha? Should you jump into melee once the team's support drops or would that only delay the inevitable? Further, should we allow -control- strength also play a part in this? If you're at full saturation, should your KB hit with 48% more strength as a way to get out of full saturation? Could be an interesting way to go with it.

The suggestion boils down to Incarnates and Inventions. Once you hit 50 as a defender, you can become a -really- strong character. But on a team, your ability to shine is gravely diminished. Take a Dark Miasma for example. Twilight Grasp is a really nice group heal. Works all the way through to 50 really -really- well! Tar Patch: If you don't put this power down before the first Judgement or Blaster Nuke lands almost everything will be dead before you finish the cast time. Darkest Night: Your Anchor exploded before the cast time ended, and everyone on the team has soft-capped defenses, anyhow. Howling Twilight: Really powerful group rez, assuming anyone dies! Strong Stun component, too! Shadowfall: Really strong and useful PBAoE Stealth and +Def buff. Mostly to get yourself to softcap, 'cause everyone else is already there. But hey, it's debuff overhead! Fearsome Stare: Everything that would get Feared is dead by the time you finish casting it. Petrifying Gaze: Everything that could be held is dead by the time you finish casting it. Black Hole: Very few people bother with this power, and you'll probably get yelled at for trying to use it. Dark Servant: More damage is good? The rest of the pet's powers are useless. Granted, Dark Miasma is one of the more extreme examples, but Radiation and Sonic face similar problems. Electric, at least, provides benefits in unique ways and unique values to make it more useful overall at high end. Which I think may have been part of it's design ideology. Maybe there's a better way to take it than minor buffs that allow for wider build variety, I just haven't really given them much thought. But support classes, as well as Khelds, are against a brick wall at high end.

Defense values equal to 50% of resistance values are interchangeable. 45% defense results in you taking 10% of incoming damage in the same way 90% Resistance does. Whether the values are 3.5 and 7 or 5 and 10 it works out. But if you give 10 and 10, holy crap does that favor Defense sets! I respect the intention, though. Spreading the value to the caster through passive increases. I would probably lean toward the 3.75 and 7 range, personally, including for things like bonus Damage from powers or Recharge. Regen is a stickier wicket, and I haven't thoroughly examined how the values would interact. But generally speaking they, and recovery bonuses, should probably be closer to the order of Health and Stamina than 50% of whatever the original value is. In this way, a Support Character could get -some- baseline defense/resistance/damage outside of their Epic Power Picks and PBAoE effects, on which they could stack set bonuses, without it being huge. Which would free up set bonuses for other types, like recharge or damage so they can better contribute to putting the enemy down through more debuffs, more team-buffs, and more damage.

Reducing values to balance the AT... okay... If it's Control/Defense most of your attacks would be doing like 3-15 points of damage early on, with damage auras putting out somewhere in the 2-3 range per tick. (Assuming you -have- damage auras). Baseline, I mean. Assuming Controller damage scalars because it would be using Control Sets. Or do you want to give them Blaster's 1.125 damage scalar and bump that up to a whopping 5-23 damage and 3-4 damage per tick? And hey, don't forget about the Design Formulas Leandro posted two years ago to show off the guidelines. You'll still be doing incredibly low damage, or have outrageous recharge times and end costs to balance it out, which just back-loads your wait time while trying to defeat a group. Sure, they could "Reduce it" by making your control effects last a shorter period of time or your defense values lower, but unless the damage values are in the 1.85 range (A higher damage scalar than any AT in the game) you're still going to do -way- less damage than a Defender flings out because the baseline damage of the powers involved is so -incredibly- low. And Defense/Support... uh... and the Damage comes from... where? Enemies just -decide- to take a bunch of damage? 'Cause the /Support sets basically do 0 damage. Now if you wanna suggest an entire new concept of attack/support set and defense/control set that's... Okay. Weird? But I'd be absolutely down to see a type of powerset that uses both active absolute and passive relative damage reduction. Don't care much about the attack/support, myself. But if -that's- what you want, that is what you need to suggest. And design up a quickie example so that people know what you're talking about.

If it has a Control Primary and an Armor Secondary there is no way it could be made "Fun". Effective, yes. Very survivable. But not "Fun". Same for Defense/Support. Don't care what values you tie to their defenses, controls, or support abilities, it would still suck a whole bag of rocks to try and play that character for any length of time. Early on you wouldn't be able to do much of anything. Then in the late-mid range (35-45) you'd get -kind- of useful. And then in the Endgame you'd go back to being largely useless. And I "Assume" they'd follow the current archetype paradigm because there's no reason to assume they'd completely discard all their current balancing setups -just- for this one archetype. Full on discard all the end cost, effectiveness, ,damage, and recharge time mechanics, Archetype Scalar Priorities based on Primary/Secondary Sets, and other levers. Because there's no reason to assume they WOULD be willing to completely start over from scratch on balancing just to make this one incredibly slow and plodding archetype to function. Why in the world do you assume they'd do all that just to try and wedge this archetype that can barely do anything but "Not Die" in the general direction of the NPCs into the game? And can you imagine how hilariously unfortunate it would be to try and take this behemoth into PvP? Woof. That's what I'm gonna call this AT 'til you come up with a different name. The Behemoth.

Can I please have the Gunslinger Belt in the Jackets and Sleeveless Jackets categories? I'd love to use the belt with the long train in conjunction with the little shoulders-only Victorian/Steampunk jacket because it would be super cute with a nice corset and gloves.

Lemme 'splain. Armor Powersets are by nature Relative Mitigation. X amount of damage comes at you, you take Y percentage of that damage. If it's Defense based you're taking full damage from a smaller % of attacks than normal, if it's Resistance based you're taking a smaller % of damage from the normal quantity of attacks. But generally speaking 5% Defense is equivalent to 10% Resistance. The level of power of this form of mitigation is based on whether it is the Primary or Secondary powerset. Tankers have Defense for their Primary, so their archetype gets more Defense/Resistance from their Defensive Powers than, say, a Scrapper does since a Scrapper's Defensive Powers are their secondary. The Tanker also gains earlier access to those powers because of it being the Primary Powerset. The character archetype you're describing, then, Defense/Support, would have Tanker-Like values for their Defenses. Support is also a form of Relative Mitigation. It can be used to apply defensive buffs, offensive debuffs, and healing to offset damage taken either proactively or reactively. They can also offer Offensive Buffs to reduce the amount of incoming damage by Murder. With Support Powers as the Secondary Powerset, you'd be at Corruptor rather than Defender levels of Support. Less total values, and slower access to the full powerset. Control Powers are a form of -ABSOLUTE- Mitigation. While an enemy is Stunned/Held/Asleep/Fearful they are doing 0 damage. So rather than reducing damage by a Relative Value, you're stopping damage altogether. These powers cannot exist as a Secondary Powerset, in total, because of the requirements of Stacking Values to overcome a target's Mez Protection. Trying to combine a Defense Primary with a Support Secondary would result in a character that just stands in front of enemies brawling them and debuffing them forever until the enemies die. Why? Because between the debuffs, the heals, and the armor, the character would be essentially unkillable. Also unable to kill most Elite Bosses or -any- Archvillains due to a lack of damage output capable of overwhelming their Regeneration. Trying to combine a Control Primary with a Defense Secondary would result in a similar situation, where everything is locked down at almost all times and very little damage is being done to the character... but very little damage is being done to the -enemies-, either. Sure, once you got to 32 your fortunes would change, but outside of PLing it would be a nightmare to grind levels. Both of them would be a nightmare. Not because they're too strong. But because they're too boring. ESPECIALLY once you reach Incarnate Levels and everything is dead before your Defense/Support or Control/Defense character can take the time to put out Debuffs, Buffs, or Stack Controls to any useful degree. Does it make sense now?

You're not talking about Control, here, Leprechaun. You're talking about Support. And given that fact I don't even know what you -actually- mean by "Defense Secondary". Do you mean like a scrapper with defensive powersets as their secondary or do you mean a tanker with melee powersets as their secondary? Anyway. The reason it won't happen is that every archetype needs to be able to solo. Even at, like, the BARE minimum levels, they need to be able to run content on their own and do so in a manner that isn't frustrating enough to cause most players to immediately give up on the whole AT. And with this one? They definitely would. If you wanna create a character that "Only Works on Teams" you're free to do that. Might I suggest making a Mastermind with only the primary Attack Powers, then grab the whole secondary powerset, and then Power Pool Buffs like Sorcery, Leadership, and Concealment. Should be good and frustrating without spending dev-time on it? As to the "The Devs can change the powersets!" angle: That's got to be part of your suggestion. Try putting together a few powersets to see how it would function in your mind as a solo character.

@EmperorSteele I'm not behind a lot of your suggestions, here... but the idea of making alternatives to Hasten -is- fairly attractive, now that you bring it up. Specifically the idea of doing different "Forms" of Hasten with different values and stuff. Like a Power Pool with a 20% Recharge Rate Buff Autopower. And a different Power Pool with a 50% Recharge Rate Buff Toggle. Make them all mutually exclusive... and suddenly you've got some interesting options for different ways to put recharge into a build. Maybe someone who wants Permadom or PermaLightform can use the Autopower version to free up their auto-firing power. Or the Toggle. And then build to deal with end costs. Could increase options going forward.

Accolades. I'm pretty sure Elusive Mind is calculated in there, as well as Eye of the Magus.

Warshades as well!

I seem to have misunderstood... If you're talking about Buff/Debuff/Heals primary and Defense secondary... yeah. Never gonna happen, Bud. Empath/Defense characters could only harm enemies with Brawl and any Damaging Aura Power they happened to get. Same thing with Poison, Pain Dom, Electric, The list goes on.

There are two big problems I see, here... 1) Controls cannot be a "Secondary" set. They always have to be primary. If they were secondary, you'd have to reduce their magnitude and then you wouldn't be able to stun or hold a Lieutenant without stacking and a Boss without 4-stacking. 2) The -glacial- speed of doing anything because you're using double-mitigation. Control is a form of Absolute Mitigation. By stopping an enemy from attacking at all, you mitigate all the damage that enemy would do for the duration of the control, while a Defensive Powerset is a matter of Relative Mitigation. In the sense that you're taking an amount of incoming damage and reducing it by a specific percentage value. You're essentially suggesting an Unkillable Archetype (Outside of possibly AVs)... however it would never be able to meaningfully contribute to AV Fights. And if soloing was possible it would take -forever- to kill enemies, as outside of Gravity and Illusion, most sets have next to no direct damage capability.

Ryu and Ken as Martial Artists Guile as Street Justice Blanka as Savage Melee Zangief as Superstrength M. Bison for Dark Assault It was a joke about Street Fighter. >.>

Happy to help, Omni! I sincerely am trying to be helpful, even if I sometimes come across as pretty negative. I tend to list all the problems out in text and hope someone else solves them while they percolate in the back of my brain and then come back, later, with my own ideas (If I get one). And even this one might be a stinker based on where a particular player keeps their power trays...

The Server Tray Management thing is, ultimately, just a matter of display. What if instead of triggering the traditional pop-up tray, we created a separate "Pop Up Tray" that functioned like the floating tray placed 80 pixels below the center of the screen? Could even have it configured as a 2x2 tray, and only allow a maximum of 4 "Granted Powers" from any source, to open up the mechanic of power-sharing to other sets in the future? Could even make it a "Routine Screen Element" that is hidden by default, and can be moved around the screen while active so players can place it where it best fits their personal tastes?

"Street Fighter" Set. Tier 1 pets: 2 Martial Arts 1 Street Justice Tier 2 pets: 1 Savage Melee, 1 Superstrength Tier 3 Pet: Dark Assault Upgrading your Tier 1 pets gives your Martial Artists the ability to throw Fireballs and your Street Justice character some Kinetic Melee. Upgrading your Tier 2 pets gives your Savage Melee some of the Electric Aura defenses/Damage Aura, and your Superstrength character Footstomp. Upgrading your Tier 3 pet gives your Dark Assault character Teleport Attacks. The Tier 2 Upgrade for Tier 1 pets gives your Martial Artists Crushing Uppercut and your Street Justice Character Dragon's Tail. The Tier 2 Upgrade for Tier 2pets gives your Savage Melee a PBAoE Micro-Nuke and your Superstrength Character the Leap Attack power. The Tier 2 Upgrade for Tier 3 pet gives your Dark Assault character Plot Armor. The whole set. Couple Karate dudes and their Air Force friend, a Beast Man and a Large Russian, and then a guy wearing a military uniform with cape and hat!

As to the "Knockback" or "Repel" options: Both are entirely directional. Knockback is based on where you are in relation to the NPC knocking you away. Repel functions the same way. You'd need to create an NPC that somehow perfectly tracks player movement and stays directly under them for it to function as a "Lift" mechanic. You could "Spawn a pseudopet and have it fire" but thanks to the inherent timing system of the game, it would either fire while inside your body as you fell into the pseudopet, or from a horizontal direction relative to you, as you glided past it. Knockup and Knockback are also not good options because they both have a loss of control effect tied into the design of the effect. If you were knocked up into the air while gliding you would stop moving forward and perform a "Flip" animation ('Cause that's how knockup works on flying characters) and then go back to gliding. If it didn't treat you as flying, you'd do a pratfall in mid air, plummet toward the ground, and then kip up out of the pratfall and start gliding, again, for just long enough for it to happen again. Gravity Alteration is really the only way to do it, and a way the game isn't designed to function.

If it's not too late, then? Why not move the rooms for Security, Generators, and Detention to the other side of the huge room that you've blocked out for different sub-rooms? With it on the opposite side of the Vehicle Garage, you wouldn't need to do the extra teleporters, and the backup generators could be right there next to the hospital in case of power loss. Alternatively, you could nix the "Doorway" between the Parts/Vault hallway, slap on a Teleporter Aleph with a Door over it, and have it narratively connect to a door that you place in the Vehicle Garage and claim is "Downstairs" or "Upstairs" from the garage. Like a Door in the Security room with a portal to Alpeh and a door in the Garage with a portal to whatever the B one is. Like there'd still be room for Mayhem and RP thereof. But it might make more narrative sense for placement.

Oh, no. I understand the premise just fine. And I don't think the "Granted Powerset" is OP or anything. Just worried about how to make it work. I think the Mystic Fortune is an interesting way to go for it? But with so many powers triggering it, you'd have players who pretty much perpetually have a pop up right in the middle of their screen while they're trying to fight since almost every power in the set grants a power. And then having to drag it onto the bar from the power window seems clunky, and reduces it's usefulness in the current fight. That could be a little troubling. As to redirect: It cannot work. It's not just that it lacks the functions to "Properly Enact it". It lacks the functions to enact it in any way, whatsoever. People have gone back and forth in multiple threads with Dev involvement with "Okay but what about X?" "X Won't work because Y" "Oh, well what about Q?" "Q interacts with Y so it can't do it, either." Unless the Devs spend a boatload of time creating a whole call mechanic affecting every character in the game to make this one power function exist... it just... can't. You could make it into a PBAoE Damage/Repel effect so that enemies who get close to you get damaged and pushed away, but then you'd have "Spiritualists" just slotting it with a bunch of damage procs and rushing into a fight. Heck... even if the devs did spend however long it takes to make the retributive damage effect function, people would slot it for Damage Procs and do more damage to those who hurt them which really isn't very Enlightened.

You're at least largely right on the mid-range build thing, yeah. Hadn't really considered the "Mostly SO" Character, in honesty. But even for such players, isn't it still largely useless? You use Unstoppable as your "Oh, Shit!" button and it lasts for a long period of time during which you're unstoppable... and then you get into the next fight and the one after that and the one after that and it crashes without "Crashing" if you catch my drift and you're in the middle of a big fight with a bunch of enemies who are now hitting you -without- Unstoppable on, putting you right back where you were when you hit the button to begin with, only now it's on recharge. I dunno... I feel like they just need to either be redesigned, probably with a shorter duration/cooldown cycle so they maintain similar uptime but don't die right as you're taking Alpha from the fourth pack down the hallway... and become more of a real "Oh Shit!" button? Which would royally suck for PvPers, so we shouldn't -do- that. I feel like especially with the Afterburner, yeah, we need alternate T9s...