Frosticus

You'd want to look at his resistances in addition to getting his -regen under control. I think he has a big ole psy hole. As mentioned poison-poison trap doesn't do -regen. Though that doesn't necessarily eliminate it from contention.

I get that corrs had /cold first. It was my favorite set on live by a landslide. As we've pointed out elsewhere no one can even remember when HL was dropped down to 24% for corrs as it used to be 30%. My vote is 35% for sleet on defenders. and corrs/trolls/mm/doms take a small hit on theirs. Cold still retains tremendous "spike" -res with sleet+HL and they aren't removing stacking ability of psuedo pets, so it is still more or less the king of -res (although that should probably go to poison or sonic imo).

My crystal ball tells me that once all the AT modifiers are respected they will likely do a deep dive into some of the sets that are really struggling (TA, some aspects of poison, sonic, maybe FF) and a once over of the good sets to spruce up some things (powers like frostworks for example). I'd also expect a few powers to be trimmed down (rhymes with bar-light). That seems to be the direction they are moving in to me at least. FWIW they are also moving way faster than the old devs imo. But everything still takes time. As for bumping tarpatch up to 40% for fenders? I'd say "where's my bump?" as a poison player. But I also don't really want envenom bumped up, it is already a super strong debuff with very real limitations.

Nothing wrong with possess. But 2 second cast single target confuse becomes a lot less important in the higher levels once you have good recharge and some defenses in place. Purple confuse proc in it is decent, but you can generally just fearsome stare and attack easier groups, or aoe stun tougher groups to similar effect. I find I rarely use it on my dark/sav once i hit the late 30's. Very rarely as soon as I slotted out perma dom.

It's not the direction I'd have gone, but it looks like a solid build. I lvl'd poison/rad for awhile, but ultimately switched to poison/fire. I don't see a huge difference between the two blast sets other than fire does a bit faster damage and rad offers quite a bit more control. That said, rad blast really needs procs to put out good damage. Rad can take a lot of good procs in each attack. I'd take a fairly significant hit to ranged def to get those procs in as they make a very large difference. In particular cosmic burst and proton volley turn into a very heavy 1-2 punch and really become the workhorse of your attacks along with proc'd char. Paralytic poison is ok, it does ok damage with procs, but I'd focus on getting proton volley and char fully slotted out before I look to paralytic as it is quite slow. On the note of char, if you aren't married to the epic choice I'd look at /psy. World of confusion w/ purple proc is actually really good on a poison. I know the defender ATO's "seem" like throw aways but for poison they are actually fantastic. I have one in blaze and one in blazing bolt (ie cosmic burst and proton volley). They help massively with keeping you healed up. My build made a lot of sacrifices and only has 28% ranged (15% ish everything else), but poison + the 2 ATO's have me breezing through the Maria Jenkins AV's (set to 50) without insp. I usually have 300+ absorb and heal every attack rotation (I have entomb in dominate as well). Last but not least, you may want to consider some sort of mez protection. When my poison gets mezzed in a group I usually die. Vs a couple targets it isn't so bad as weaken keeps the duration super short, so other than the detoggle it is ok. I alternate between rune of protection and melee hybrid. That isn't 100% uptime, but most of the time is covered. They both add good resistances so mix well with poison.

It seems like you guys are doing an awful lot of work. Regardless of whether every change is agreed upon, the effort is really appreciated. VEATs (banes in particular) and thorny doms thank you far in advance as they are redraw nightmares to play.

Trick arrow says it is ok waiting while you buff dark after these changes...

You should be able to use antidote on yourself too. Not necessarily with the mez protection, but some regen, slow protection, etc would make sense.

What purpose do pool attacks even serve? If pool attacks are so ostensibly bad that no one uses them in an attack chain then to what purpose do they even exist? Air superiority at least has some function as a control power. Cross punch is pretty good, but pays out the nose with 2 other useless attacks required. Flurry? Jump Kick? New Attacks: arcane bolt? so slow project will? so slow Even my trollers barely ever use them and you get double damage and trollers have no "attacks" for the most part. I'd say pool attacks are in the same realm as petless MM's.

Fair enough. That's unfortunate because when external buffs are present corrs deal a lot more damage. I'd harbour a guess that defender popularity has more to do with ease of making them tough due to higher values on defensive/resistance shields. Plus you can shoot up to lvl 30 so fast now. It used to matter getting bitter ice blast at 18 vs 28. not so much anymore . The latter two are why I've learned toward defenders lately. Combos I wanted to try were just too time intensive previously. At any rate. I've petitioned for a larger scourge range in the past and continue to.

Except defs and corrs have almost the exact same number of characters in the march 2020 stats. If you take out empathy (defs #1) and kinetics (corr #1) there are more corrs than defs being created. Neither emp or kin have anything to do with procs. So either the player base hasn't gotten the memo that defs>corrs, or it isn't actually true outside of a very small number of scenarios. Sonic blast might be an exception sometimes, but probably not all the time.

TW is actually the most endurance efficient attack set (maybe more so than claws)... on paper. In reality it can crush your blue bar almost as fast as it crushes EB's. I gave up on my tw/fire scrapper at 46. Momentum causes hit strikes to land at the wrong times (hello whirling smash) and slow mode attacks feel ultra slow compared to the overly exaggerated hyper speed of momentum. It is so annoying that I won't even finish off a couple minions to help my team out when momentum drops. I just move on to the next spawn. I'd be inclined to play it if the set wasn't so bipolar. Maybe trim the slow animations and have momentum increase speed by like 40% instead of of the current 200%+ increase in speed that it has now on some attacks. It's numerical advantages are vast. I find myself comparing every damage dealer I make to TW and ultimately falling short. My last several stalker projects have been specifically geared to unseat TW scrappers in st damage. Haven't gotten there. Stalkers are awesome though in and of themselves. Bio Armor is currently tougher and adds more offense than Fire armor. While in offensive mode. Something needs to change. The -res applied to yourself in offensive mode probably needs to be unresistable as it is meaningless once you factor in that your resistances resist it. Probably scrap the -res aura and just give it sleep or something (hey it's good enough for stalkers right?).

Yes HL was originally 30% -res for corrs .I had a 50 fire/cold corr that I pvp'd the hell out of long before /cold was available to anyone else. Unless it was just listed as 30% but was actually 24% ingame. But I'd bet real money that it used to be 30%. I don't know when it was changed. edit: posted same time as Trickshooter. There you have it :)

I like retaliatory damage too. I cant think of it being used anywhere else. a poisoned target could take some damage everytime they attack (ala energy transfer).

Duration on live, WAI and passed through beta tests aren't flags I'd plant personally. I think I may have even shed a tear or two over the pvp changes of i14 screaming those same sentiments. They dont really mean anything. All that matters is how the power(s) are in the current game environment. And that doesnt mean incarnate trials, or dfb's, but everything.

If this happens, no one has the right to complain. The powers literally state "does not stack from the same caster" Yah I play a lot of storm and cold, it will be a hit in long static fights for sure. Someone could try it right now with tarpatch though if they were so inclined.

Getting ( former )psuedo pets to correctly follow AT modifiers is a change I've been petitioning for since about i8. You cant really look at improving/nerfing sets until they work correctly across all the ATs that access them. As to why didnt former devs do it when implementing each psuedo pet? They used a butt load of copy paste back then for a "good enough" result. If they had the tech this team has now it would have been done then by default as the powers no longer use custom psuedo pets.

No, like I said it was a silly idea, but it was in response you you saying there is no way for them to make Farsight a click that only gets buffed by powerboost for 15 seconds. I don't think psuedo pets is a real solution, just that it would solve that particular "problem" as something like lightning storm is buffed by PB for 15 sec and then goes back to normal. I think we have all taken powers and tried them in the hopes that PB might affect them. Let me tell you the dissapointment my trapper felt...yay webnade is affected 😛 I don't think trial and error is the best way to figure things out in a game with such a cumbersome respec process. I wish the original devs had spent more time creating a system that works the way one would expect with things like +special, but here we are with some powers benefiting (17 pages of) arguably too much, and some powers not working at all that probably should. It's probably too time consuming to rectify everything now.

True none of my melee characters give a hoot about "gather for" buffs. My squishies still value most of them though. I dunno, I'm sure you could turn it into a bunch of pseudo pets that stick to your allies or something. There are definitely powers that last awhile that only receive +special for the duration of PB. That sounds silly, but there isn't a lot of indication that something like Lightning storm will behave different than farsight. I guess it just seems strange to me that time can buff about as well as any set AND buff itself too. That is a very exclusive ability. I can't tell you how many times I've wished my stormies could cast o2 on myself. Maybe an alternate direction is to let squishes cast most of their buffs on themselves even it is required some kind of invisible target to allow st buffs to bounce back to the originator. That would even up most sets significantly. No one really talks about the tohit, or the perception. I have tactics on every single build for tohit to cut down on acc slotting, and because blindness, while rare, wipes teams. I think those values are of less value at end game, but very valuable in the 18-45 range. ya faraday is a neat power. That will be a pretty sturdy set if a bit slow at killing things. It's been mentioned a couple times that casting pb+farsight eats up a not-insignificant amount of time and can get bothersome Definitely cuts into dps if you are recasting it while everyone is fighting the spawn (so you can tag most of them). While nowhere near as time consuming as the Fade trick was it is about 3% of your time.

I certainly didn't say farsight should only last 15 seconds. Don't start being like Infinitum haha. zero risk + large reward is a questionable design choice and usually hasn't held up against the test of time in this game. fwiw I don't care about pb+grant invis. It isn't in the same league as farsight, it's single target, low value, and locks you into a pretty subpar pool for most builds (but not all). You'll realistically get it on maybe 4-5 people in a single powerboost if you focus on it and they don't move around much. Farsight can hit 255 if they like sardines. One and done. A powerboosted hold, still has to hit and carries at least a tiny risk. It might not seem like much of a difference, but it is. Risk vs reward has always been something that at least holds a bit of water in terms of balancing in this game. I'd change farsight to a wide area toggle. There isn't any compelling reason it should be a click other than that's what it was implement as. As a click it only exasperates the +special issue by being immune to mez. That isn't a luxury that any other buff/debuff set has for any self defense power as they all either suppress or detoggle -(but we've seen time is afforded a lot of luxuries). The exception being ff gen, which carries its own unique limitations (and isn't affected by +special either). Toggle would let it fully benefit from powerboost still and you'll do more dps. who doesn't love dps? I guess we'll see what cpt powerhouse eventually does to it as he said it has been on their radar for awhile. I think he is aware of what other sets have access to and he is definitely wary of def enhancement in +special.

Procs: Blaster - both good and helpful Controller - damage proc is welcome, font is junk Corruptor - both good, need something to expand range of scourge. Defender - both good, but I'm playing poison so they keep me alive Dominator - both junk, +dam would be good but it needs to be able to slot in attacks. That whole set would need to be reworked though Stalker - both great. chance for buildup recharge isn't great unless you have aoe attacks though Scrapper - both great. Critical strikes is bonkers on some builds. VEATs - toxic proc is good, fear proc is ok No feedback on the rest.

I guess my question is what makes time so special that it gets to have 2 mins of +special while so few other sets get more than 15 seconds of +special. 8x the value of +special...which is already one of the most powerful effects in the game. Time gets 8x as much out of it compared to just about every other buff/debuff set. I don't see that as "a fun bonus interaction" as others have put it. A bonus interaction/synergy would be like 1.5x if we were being objective. Not 8x duration. Like if you were accelerated, you could extend the duration of +special. That is what a bonus interaction would be. I don't use any power and expect to get more than 15s of +special w/ PB because that what powerboost says it will do. It is how the vast majority of powers work. I don't click aim and then scratch my head when it fails to give me 2 minutes of buff because it says it will buff me for 10 seconds. And it does. Always. But right now there are some powers that go way beyond and there are some powers that don't work, that probably should be altered to work.

It would be interesting to see the stats on how many people take tough/weave vs maneuvers/tactics You are right, but most people don't really seem to think about how they will play in a team, or what they will contribute to team success beyond dealing damage. I"m always happy when I get on a team and see some leadership buffs stacking. It is a clear indication that the team will likely play well

Poison requires melee play to be effective but offers very limited tools to survive there. Poison is my favorite set apparently. I have 2 lvl 50 poisons now. I have no other repeats and only 10 50's in my stable. This game is very easy so I think I enjoy the challenge that poison presents. I feel the set plays quite well with mez protection and about 20% def. At that point I really start to feel confident and capable of playing aggressively. You have to play aggressive for poison to do well. If you leave melee the enemies get much stronger. if you lay off spitting venom around they pummel you. Getting mezzed is a real sore spot for the set. I dont mind the small aoes. I'd add some delayed chaining to them to help them spread. neuro breath and paralytic are good opportunities to add some -regen or something. Some mez protection would be nice but I dont expect it.

it can definitely stack a lot of -res. I had a 50 storm/son/power back on live. it could make a very large impact in longer fights. rain+howl is nice for each spawn on teams. It is pretty back loaded though amd it isnt often that you get to use it to it's full potential. web envelope is super slow and you will struggle to plant a +level AV. If they get free they will flee far and wide