Vanden

Statesman had Thunderous Blast (and a few other Electrical Blast powers) on the rare occasions a Dev would take control of him for events. By the time he was a character that players encountered in canon content, those abilities had been replaced by Zeus' Lightning Bolt and Hammer of Justice.

I'm a player who gets annoyed when my teammates scatter the enemies with AoE knockback.

I would like to keep the mez and KB protection, especially the KB protection, since that can severely cripple your pets.

Yes, that's why Energy Torrent would only have 5 slots to work with.

Apparently Lorenz Ansaldo doesn't have a side objective for the second mission. I tried a third time and this time just kept going and the side objectives picked up again after that.

Were you able to get the secondary objective for the second mission, then?

According to the wiki, this badge is for running Vincent Ross's arc while doing side objectives for one of your other contacts. I started the arc in a flashback and was able to talk to Lorenz Ansaldo to get the first optional objective in the first mission. However, Lorenz wouldn't talk to me before the second mission and the radio at the beginning of the second mission did nothing when I clicked on it. The wiki doesn't seem to have any info on how exactly this should work, so I restarted the flashback in case it had bugged out, but the second try didn't go any differently. Am I missing something here? Is the badge bugged out through flashback?

Energy Manipulation synergizes with everything. If you want to blap, it's got melee attacks. If you don't want to blap, it's got Boost Range, great with any primary and easily permable.

bodyguard mode only works so long as your pets are alive. demons have no innate defense, only a large amount of resists except the prince who has a bit of both. if your goal is to maximize bodyguard for survival, then a defense based secondary for demons is not the way to go. Pair it with Provoke so the enemies are attacking you and your pets don't need lots of defense.

Alkaloid is actually a stronger heal than O2 Boost. The problem is it has a slow activation and a projectile with a travel time, two things you definitely don't want on an emergency power.

Why? Mercs are the weakest set. There isnt a downside to Hell on Earth, Gang War or Soul Extraction, and all of those allow for more slotting of pet globals. The sets without those are at a disadvantage compared to the sets with temp pets due to IO options. Repair Bot needs a complete overhaul as well. They're not easily permable (if at all) like Rage is and theoretically Serum would be. (And Soul Extraction does have a downside, you need a pet to die to use it.)

That PPM calculator doesn’t let you calculate proc chance in AoEs, does anyone know one that will?

I dunno, I’m pretty much just hoping that the new TAoE IO set Leandro helped us spitball in that suggestion thread actually materializes in-game.

Elec gets Power Sink at 26. While that’s a little late, once you have it you’ll basically have unlimited endurance. Energize also gives a nice reduction to end costs, but it’s better to use as a heal rather than when you see your blue bar getting low.

Thermal’s a great set. Fire Blast is not so great; it’s all about damage damage damage with no control or utility, and Defenders suck for damage, so the set doesn’t play to the AT’s strengths. If you haven’t seen a lot of Thermal Defenders, my best guess is that most people who want to play Thermal also want the thematic pairing, and so they go to another AT where the Fire set they can pair it with works better.

I’d lean towards Time because AoE heal + Bodyguard Mode makes you practically unkillable.

You don’t have to go into melee range to use Ice Patch; enemies will run straight at you so you can just drop it and back off, and they’ll run right into it trying to get to you. Frigid Protection and Shiver both ruin enemy movement speed, giving you time to pick them off before they get to you. Frozen Aura is bad, sure, but buffing it to be worthwhile wouldn’t require a rework.

Ice Secondary is perfectly fine. I play it and like it how it is. Good control and many tools to keep enemies out of melee range.

I’m not sure what to think about this. On the one hand knockback is actually considered to be “better” than knockdown, so when you slot a KB-to-KD IO you’re technically spending a slot to make the power weaker. I also never really liked having to use a slot for that, because any power that you want to convert to knockdown has to make do with 5 slots. On the other hand, unlike knockback, fear effects are usually an intentional downside to the powers that have them, so maybe having to spend slots to reduce them would be more balanced? I don’t know.

My gut says the big downside there is that if a fully-Serum’d squad is possible, it’ll get very frustrating when the pets inevitably die, or the MM levels up and needs to resummmon to get the pets to level up too. It’s possible that Mercs is at a point that making perma-Serum achievable, with the numbers you gave, might not be too unbalanced. It could be the Mastermind equivalent of Super Strength, with its perms-Rage. It would need some downside like Rage has, though.

I just can't find anything good to put into Energy Torrent on my Energy/Energy Blaster. Explosive Blast has the Overwhelming Force set, so I can't slot that. It still needs a KB-to-KD IO, so I only have five slots to work with. Positron's Blast sucks, and Frozen Blast is very expensive. I need the 6-slot set bonuses from the Blaster ATOs, so those have to go in other powers. And Ragnarok is both expensive, and would be very overslotted for damage; usually I'd skip the pure damage IO, but the proc would be counter-productive so I'd have to use it. I dunno, is there something I'm not seeing? Am I just gonna have to settle for a set with bad set bonuses like Annihilation?

Code it where the requirement is that the NPC is verified to be in the wall? If they could code it so the game could tell when and enemy is stuck in the wall, we wouldn't need a special power to fix it.

Virtually no info on these characters exists, beyond their names, as far as I can tell.

If that's accurate, the pets are written in a way that no other buff aura (e.g. Dispersion Bubble) is in the game. It seems like they could be revised to use the non-broken version of that effect. I remember a dev post that the engine could calculate mob aggro based on a lot of things, like who's doing the most damage, who's healing, etc., but most of it never actually got used. That post might have been before the buff pets were implemented, and they might have decided to unearth those mechanics for them.

Enhanced recharged. Recharge buffs from powers and set bonuses are ignored; enhancements are not.