lobster

Some thoughts post patch: Stone feels really good. My main dominator is ice/stone/(mu or soul, currently soul) and he's a blast to play. Hurl Boulder is now better than Stone Mallet across the board, so if you have a choice, take Hurl. I couldn't make it work on my build (which is annoying) because I didn't want Chillblain or Frostbite, but most builds should have the option. Elec is a little better. Thunderstrike is certainly better. The snipe availability is a buff in general, so it's just a better set now. Energy wants to take Whirling Hands even more now as the damage boost to Whirling Hands after using TF is considerable. You can still play it entirely at range if you want, but you won't be fully taking advantage of the capabilities. I like choices like this! Icy is just better across the board, flat buffed. It even got a special exclusion to stop the damage aura change from breaking sleeps (This will let the mind/ and elec/ combos with /icy work as they did before - other sets have sleeps, but those two have better reasons to use them). There's nothing here that changes the way it plays - everything is just better, except maybe early game where your attack recharge increases might feel more like a nerf than a buff (it's a buff, because later with high recharge it's just more damage). Martial is still really strong at range (and the best pure range dom I would argue, especially paired with grav/ or something), but the melee attacks were slightly nerfed from a raw damage standpoint. However, they still have very good DPA, so for late game play it should still be quite good, and for all levels of play it keeps the smooth/fast flow. Psi is basically the same. Rad got solid damage buffs across the board, but still needs an identity imho. Savage got minor damage buffs, but a minor nerf to aoe target cap on the T9 attack, which is a bit of a bummer. I'm still working on my dark/savage (l39 currently) and it still feels solid BUT the flow of the set isn't working quite as well for me as say, it's Savage melee counterpart. I think it's the alternating attacks and calling birds... I think I'd be fine if they just got rid of all the birds and bees and made it a 100% melee set, but that's not generally how dominator sets are so this is what we've got. All in all, it's a solid set that just feels a little off to play (to me). I haven't had much time to test Thorny yet, but overall the numbers look to be a buff overall. A little less on the cone - but it's up more often - and less arc on the melee cone, but other than that damage boosts abound.

Do you mean AOE control, or AOE damage? Psi is pretty strong for aoe damage, but the lack of soft controls (immob, slow) in mind can make it hard to keep everything in your cone & pbaoe. Playing plant can definitely spoil you, it's pretty beastly. Mind control is best (IMH)O either solo, or in a group who understands how to play with a mind controller (in the sense that a group doesn't have to do much different to play with the other primaries, but to take advantage of mind/ you have to understand how to play around Sleep & TK) - and neither of those might match your playstyle.

Will the new dominator numbers be in there? Trying to decide if it's worth the time of doing manual changes for those...and I do want to re-evaluate several dom builds.

I picked up T2 vigor and was able to stop using Power Sink entirely, so Cardiac should be fine. Popped over to Soul Mastery for a bit to see how it feels with this combo.

That's /icy that has damage added to its slow aura. I'm running ice/earth/mu and enjoying it - this is a dom that LIVES in melee. Why ever leave when everyone is so busy falling all over themselves for you...

Power Sink ftw. I don't even think I have numina proc slotted yet. I also have aid self with the new T3 that gives it bonus end (which is not recovery, but some weird delayed, +end), which I use rarely. This one just hit 50, I don't think I have any incarnate stuff on him yet. I think I was running 2/2 and while yeah, my end bar drops, I do not have what I would consider "end issues".

Done, thanks! EDIT: I didn't have a ton of time to test tonight, but here's what I got: Martial The damage from Envenomed Blades seems irregular. It does around 9% of BASE damage on some simple powers, but way less on aoes, likely based on their expected target cap. I'm not sure why that's necessary? 9% should be 9%. I don't have any of the melee attacks on my grav/martial, but damage from the ranged attack still feels fine @ 36. Once I hit 38, I'll have THREE heavy ranged attacks (including propel from grav). This is one of the few doms I have/would build to be 100% at range. I might try a melee /ma dom at some point to test those crazy DPA kicks. I need a good idea first. Savage Feral Charge: Target cap lowered to 5. : Can we get the in game text to reflect that this is an aoe please? These is no indication of aoe size. And it should target targeted aoe or pbaoe instead of just melee sets? Mids shows it taking pbaoe, but in game it shows 'melee damage'. Damage feels fine. Earth Like butter. Rocky, kick ass butter. I already loved Earth...now it's even more fun. Mud pots stacking with most of my AA is great, the animations are smooth...my ice/earth is just a blast to play. He was my first dom to 50 in HC. Ice/ could use a little work, but ice/earth/mu in particular is solid. I absolutely wanted to keep playing so I could smash stuff. Thorny My fire/thorn is only 33, so I'm missing 2 of the attacks that got solid changes. Will continue to level and test. I will say that the one thing that feels awkward right now is the animation time on Thorn Burst. I think the animation time would be easier to accept if it hit a bit harder...but I'd probably just prefer a faster animation - it's still over 3 seconds. Energy I need to respec into Whirling Hands On second thought, I need to respect this character in general. Will comment more when I have time to do that.

It was required for best performance for a number of reasons...you wouldn't take /fiery without taking Embrace of Fire for similar reasons. When Score or whoever created EB, it looks like they copied the code over for Embrace of Fire, buffed it across the board, nerfed the damage, but forgot to flag it properly. As it stands, it's basically an Embrace of Fire with the following changes : Toxic instead of fire damage 40s duration instead of 30s 160s recharge instead of 180s 12% tohit instead of ZERO - this is buffable and will boost your snipe damage!! From a post I found on reddit, it looks like it was doing about 16% of total damage, instead of 16% of base [note : this low number makes the power make more sense to me now, including the uptime]. It looks like, while it might be a ~50% damage cut, the other #s still make this power solid.

I tested /energy and /icy on Justin a bit during the beta period and was pretty happy with the changes. We are getting stronger across the board. Whether or not that's a net positive is hard to say right now. Yes almost everything will "feel better" to play, but will it put as above other ATs where we shouldn't be? Dunno, let's find out! I'm not super happy about the fact that Chilling Embrace is now a weird exception style pbaoe - I would have preferred it not doing any damage to being the one damage aura that is weird HOWEVER, I'm selfishly happy that, if it was going to get damage, it doesn't mess up the elec/icy playstyle. However, this seems to imply that it should be a "special" for dominator damage auras (and maybe controller stuff like hot feet), since any of them might be used with an aoe sleep power as well. Snipes hit hard. With ONLY 6% tohit from the proc IO, the energy insta-snipe was hitting about the same as the T9 blast. That's a pretty big damage boost across the board. To the point where I think it might actually be too much. Sets typically only have 1 big range blast for a reason. Hopefully the DPA #s are low enough to keep it from being OP? Something like 75-80% of a heavy blast would have been fine, then maybe scaling up to full T9 strength at 22% tohit, or whatever the magic # is. Earth, Energy, Rad, Thorny and Icy got some really solid buffs, hopefully bringing them into line with psi, martial and fire without going overboard.

For Dominator specific discussion of the patch changes: Powers: Snipes Dominator Snipes 20 second recharge and 18.512 end cost. Base 2.67 scale damage in their "quick" form, down from 3.56 scale. Every point of ToHit buffing the player has will increase or decrease this damage, up to a cap of 3.56 scale damage with +22% ToHit buff. Slow form will do 4.5 scale damage. Powers: Dominator Assault Sets Earth Assault Power Boost is now Power Up. (90s recharge, +34% damage, +75% str to other effects for 10 seconds.) Stone Spears: Cast time reduced from 2.10 seconds to 1.00 second. Tremor: Cast time reduced from 3.30 to 2.50 seconds. Hurl Boulder: Cast time reduced from 2.50 seconds to 1.50 second. Recharge increased from 8 seconds to 12 seconds. Damage increased from 86.64 to 120.5 damage. Heavy Mallet: Recharge increased from 12 to 14 seconds. Damage increased from 133.1 to 151.8 damage. Mud Pots: Increased radius to 15ft. Lowered endurance cost slightly. Damage lowered from scale 0.18 per tick to 0.13 per tick Electricity Assault: Thunder Strike: Cast time lowered to 2.5 seconds. Now knocks enemies down. ST and AoE Damage increased. Energy Assault Power Boost is now Power Up. (90s recharge, +34% damage, +75% str to other effects for 10 seconds.) Total Focus: Cast time shortened from 3.30 to 2.50 seconds. Power Burst: Cast time shortened from 2.00 to 1.67 seconds. New special mechanic. Most single target attacks have a 20% chance of granting Energy Focus mode. Hitting a foe with Total Focus will always grant Energy Focus mode. While in this mode, Whirling Hands will inflict a large amount of bonus damage. Power Burst will do some bonus damage. The mode will be removed if a power with bonus is used. Icy Assault Power Boost is now Power Up. (90s recharge, +34% damage, +75% str to other effects for 10 seconds.) Ice Bolt: Recharge increased from 4 seconds to 5 seconds. Damage increased from 52.9 to 61.3 damage. Ice Sword: Recharge increased from 8 seconds to 10 seconds. Damage increased from 95.8 to 114.5 damage. Ice Slash: Recharge increased from 10 to 17 seconds. Damage increased from 114.5 to 179.8 damage. Chilling Embrace: increased radius to 15ft. Added -10% damage str to affected enemies. Power now deals cold damage every 2 seconds to foes that are not under the Sleep status effect. Slightly lowered the speed movement debuff. Martial Assault Envenomed Blades: Fixed a bug where this power would sometimes proc more than once. Procs now ignores damage buffs and enhancements. Thunder Kick: Recharge lowered from 8 seconds to 7 seconds. Damage lowered from 95.8 to 86.4 damage. Trick Shot is now a proper chain attack, hits up to 5 targets. Damage lowered from scale 1.4 to scale 1.1 Spinning Kick: Recharge increased to 10 seconds. Target cap reduced to 5, same as all other melee cones. This power was also doing Single Target damage despite it being a cone. This has been fixed but recharge increase should keep damage decent. Dragon's Tail: Recharge reduced from 20 seconds to 16. Damage scale from 1.1 to 0.8985. Explosive Shuriken should no longer state it's an AoE, but still will do splash fire dot damage to foes around the main target. Psionic Assault Psionic Dart: Cast time reduced from 1.33 to 0.83 seconds. Telekinetic Thrust: Cast time reduced from 2.07 to 1.00 seconds. Recharge lowered from 8 seconds to 7 seconds. Damage lowerd from 95.8 to 86.4. Radioactive Assault Contaiminated Strike: Recharge increased from 5 seconds to 8 seconds. Damage increased from 67.7 to 95.7 damage. X-Ray Beam: Recharge from 10 seconds to 11 seconds. Damage increased from 103.5 to 112.0 damage. Devastating Blow: Recharge 18 seconds to 20 seconds. Damage increased from 189.2 to 207.9 Devastating Blow and Atom Smasher now accept Dominator ATOs. Savage Assault Vicious Slash: Recharge increased from 9 seconds to 11 seconds. Damage increased from 105.1 to 123.8 damage. Call Hawk: Recharge increased from 12 seconds to 14 seconds. Damage increased accordingly (variable damage.) Feral Charge: Target cap lowered to 5. Thorny Assault Aim replaced with Build Up. Thorny Darts: Recharge time increased from 3 to 4 seconds. Damage increased from 44.4 lethal to 52.8 lethal. Skewer: Cast time reduced from 1.63 seconds to 0.83 seconds. Recharge time lowered from 10 seconds to 6 seconds. Damage lowered from 114.45 to 77.1 damage. Chance for DoT increased from 80% to 85%. Impale: Cast time reduced from 2.43 seconds to 1.43 seconds. Recharge increased from 8 to 10 seconds. Damage increased from 86.6 to 103.5 damage. Flling Thorns: Lowered recharge to 10 seconds. Scale to 40.9 lethal damage and 4.5 toxic damage over time. Ripper: Recharge increased from 13 to 15 seconds, arc lowered to 60 degrees. Damage increased to 136.5 lethal damage. Thorn Barrage: Recharge time increased from 11 to 18 seconds. Damage increased to 42.8 lethal damage per tick. EDIT: Copied in updated patch notes.

That is likely correct. The only way to gain it without using TF is to use a power on a DISORIENTED npc, you are likely killing greys, not disorienting them and having them last enough hits to trigger it? From my testing on Justin, it does not come up very often in the random way - but when it does it's nice. Plan around TF if you want to force it. --- Jealous of all you guys that get to play today! I've been tinkering with the dom stuff in beta and it was great (although I am actually a bit hesitant about many sets getting another big range damage attack via insta-snipe, but that's not a dom centric problem), can't wait to take my doms for a spin tonight! Edits: Dark has a snipe. That's a huge buff on its own. Each set with a snipe basically gets a free t9 blast. Also, I'm not sure how your dom is built...you can post it up in the dominator forums and myself and others can take a look :).

I'll check when I get home. Basically, when you go into the enhancement screen, at level 50 with stock IO sets it was showing say, 800 damage for whirling hands and 480ish for Total Focus (approximate #s). I think there were ...4 or 6 damage items in the list below, it seemed like a bit much.

Energy blast focus functionality issues appear to be dealt with! (In my non-exhaustion, unprofessional bit of testing...hopefully others will confirm.) TF is properly triggering focus every use I could not get the whirling hands+following attack to double dip focus Bone Crusher does not have a bunch of spam (and all the text errors are fixed, obviously!) One bug that still remains: Damage from the focus bonus still shows up as P10201211 in the chat logs. Text issue: damage display in game for the energy powers looks goofy. I think it's showing the focus damage on everything? Can that just be hidden? Whirling hands is showing as doing double the damage of Total Focus, for example. Chilling Embrace interaction with sleep is still functioning as expected.

This is the crux of my argument I would add that you could take Chill as well if you wanted defense but just refuse to take Mace for the 20th time (I have done this), and taking Mu on a bots/ was a solid choice before the introduction of the KB->KB proc and IS still an OK choice there if you don't want to waste slots on that IO. Charge, Field and Leviathan are hot garbage. I think the layout I suggested makes each pool compelling in its own way as well as provides a solid theme for each. Something like team KB protection or status protection would potentially just replace /mace as "the best" in many cases...I dunno, I'm torn. I'd have to see how it was implemented and how all the sets feel. What I don't want is one or two power tweaks, I want a complete re-balance and overhaul of all the pools. The devs really half-assed these for some reason (in my opinion). Adding a 6th power to the pools would likely be a ton of work, and that's something I don't want. I don't want the new devs to put off something like this forever because of the workload, so I tried to suggest what I think (but could be wrong, I haven't looked at the code!) are relatively easy to implement changes. Re : adding some kind of psionic Epic I like this, as it's thematically missing. The controller version is pretty close to usable, I would just replace the attacks with say, a single target sleep or hold in slot 1, and maybe something fun like Telekinesis or Drain Psyche (both nerfed of course - maybe drain ONLY does regen or recovery, not both) in slot 5.

That is some serious dedication to a secondary! I took nin/time to maxed(?) incarnate back on live, and it was quite strong, strong enough that playing that you might not ever consider ninja/ to be an underperforming set - /time does a great job of shoring up most of the weaknesses (letting you defcap, I think, plus the heal over time is way better than a flat heal for them) and enhancing strengths (stacking -res with the -res proc, etc.). My first mm on HC was beast/time and I've just hit incarnate range on her. Moving through the DA content with no issues. Beasts are pretty much like sturdier ninjas with less aoe, so /time naturally compliments them as well. I agree with your implied point that /mace is THE epic/patron pool to go with /time, due to Power Boost. This is unfortunate, as it's generally so much better than the other options that diversity is discouraged. Hoping for an epic overhaul someday (see my suggestion post ; ) ).

Gotcha. OK, I can confirm that the Chilling Embrace lack of damage vs. sleeping enemies appears to be working correctly in standard scenarios. I'm just wondering if this is the right kind of fix, because it makes it different from all the other damage auras. For a sense of...I dunno, things working like you expect, I would prefer a solution that either involves the aura not doing damage, so it doesn't have to be this other edge case where one power works differently than expected, or just make it a damage aura and those of us who are frustrated by this change either won't play that combo anymore or will use CE differently? I'll admit, I don't actually want option 2, but I would accept it if you guys feel that's the best place for damage to reside in the set - although I will say that I didn't notice a huge damage issue with icy in the non-bleeding edge build area. Sure, it wasn't the highest, but it didn't feel weak. With the buffs it's already gotten with this patch, it's only gotten better. Those changes, plus the size increase and -dmg debuff in CE are really good overall and it might be worth just letting that sit to see how it does. EDIT: Random debuff idea : what about a reverse power boost debuff? So targets affected by it are affected by other debuffs at an increased rate? Or maybe even an increased endurance usage debuff (reverse conserve power)? It seems like both those might already be functional with the existing system, leaving some nice design space? EDIT2: Energy focus mode on /energy assault does not appear to be working at all. TF wasn't auto-triggering it, and it didn't seem to trigger off disorient hits like it was before. EDIT4: The TF auto-focus is definitely broken. But I am seeing it pop-up occasionally elsewhere when hitting a disoriented target. When Power Burst is used in focus mode, I am not seeing a difference in the damage. I was able to get TF to trigger it once by using it on an already stunned target. I will say that without the auto-trigger from TF, the mechanic is a lot less engaging, as it's fairly uncommon.

Putting together an elec/ice to test now. 64 bit client * There are no damage numbers for /icy [edit: or any other set] - Clarification, there are no numbers below the line under 'effect area', above that there are the damage/activation/time etc. Below that are a bunch of ValueTypeForDurationTarget/unresistable * HUGE BUG. When I mouse over enhancements, instead of showing what they do it shows "string". * When I sign out it says "disconnecting in TIME seconds" * When I look at my character list it says : Slots used : USED/TOTAL - tested on 64bit/classic/safe mode - it's there in all of them, so I'm guessing the other failed variable expansions are there as well. * Player names are showing as PlayerName above their heads, but correctly in the targeting window.

Hmm. Power, solo, vaguely objective: Primaries: A : Plant A-: Everything else Fun, solo, 100% subjective: A: Everything Else B: Mind (Needs a pet. Maybe make confuse a weak AOE like plant's (or use the 'jumping mechanic'?) and make the l32 a permanent "domination" that makes a non-boss npc a pet) Secondaries: Power: A: Martial, Psi, Fiery B: Earth, Energy, Savage, Icy B-: Dark, Thorns, Rad, (completely playable, but could use minor tweaks, and I agree that Rad needs an identity) C+: Elec Note that on Justin, the secondaries are much closer together. Fun: A: Everything else B: Elec Yes, I love most of the sets, warts and all!

What about an Envenomed Blades style buff that is based on the number of targets in range of the aura? This would put the damage load onto the aura without breaking sleep ,etc. 5% cold damage per target up to a max of 40% or something? Confirmed. Also happens with Power Burst triggered during Whirling Hands. However, sometimes the rings would go away then pop back up, and I couldn't do it 100% of the time, so maybe it was Whirling Hands re-triggering the buff? [edit: To be clear, the double dipping into the buff is what I was able to repeat with Power Burst, only Bone Smasher seems to have the extra text spam). Edit 2: I can't seem to trigger Energy Focus from WH, so that doesn't seem to be the issue. I have been able to get to Focus hits in a row in multiple ways. In addition to queuing BS after Whirling, BS can also be queued after Power Burst, although this seems to be more sensitive than when doing it after Whirling. Maybe some time of brief time out needs to be added between Focus being able to proc its bonus damage? edit 3: It seems like Energy Focus can trigger off of misses too (on Power Blast at least), I was able to trigger it once after stunning someone with Whirling Hands, then missing a Power Blast. The wording of the power does not say "HIT", but it seems like it should require a hit? edit 4: What I *may* be seeing is Bone Smasher, when used in focus mode, itself triggering focus mode again vs. a disoriented target, then expending that focus. Trying to figure out how to sort out log windows to figure it out. That being said, it seems to happen much more often than that would. edit5: The combat logs show "P10201211" instead of showing the new proc damage when it goes off. Note : For testing purposes it would be super handy if we had a "rez at full life" (does this already exist and I just don't know? I'm not super familiar with the temp powers) temp power - lots of running back from the hospital to my mission to test power interactions :P.

I'd be fine with either of those! I like it much better as a debuff than a damage power. -fly or a chance to immobilize or sleep or other stuff that goes along with the slow/ice mechanic, any of that would be fine as well!. That would be pretty cool if it was me. I know I've talked up how much fun elec/icy was a few times 🙂 I enjoyed that playstyle and will probably re-make him someday after I get through all these new ones... ---- Energy Assault : I just put in a bit of time putting together a mind/energy dom (something I've never played before) on Justin and, while I can't speak to the numeric balance of the energy changes without sitting down, I can say that the the new mechanic did feel FUN (and I didn't notice anything buggy). It gave me something else to think about while playing (which attack to use to capitalize on the buff) and made me heavily prioritize using total focus to trigger the reliable buff.

I would support this over damage on it. If it needs more buffs beyond the aoe size, I prefer increasing debuffs to adding damage. One of my main doms on live was ice/elec - it's a great combo for the reasons you mention!

Well crap, now I need to set up an energy dom over there and test the new energy stuff 🙂. It sounds interesting at first glance, but also like a pretty big change to be added this close to going live. The addition of damage to chilling embrace should indeed make it able to take pbaoe damage sets like all the other toggles. However, I don't think it needed damage. It's fine with it...but being able to use it around sleeping targets was an interesting side effect/bonus of the set. With damage, it won't be quite as good a pairing with that limited subset of playstyles (primarily elec using Static Field, but mind to a lesser extent..and maybe people take the sleep in plant??). Without them saying, hard to guess at intent. It sounds like they want the MA attacks to be just plain fast, which means less damage to keep them balanced. I'm not sure why the change to Fling Thorns. It sounds like they have some goals for the sets that we aren't aware of, and making that faster was part of that?

I have a couple so far:

Charge Mastery - shifting it over to a more defensive set. Static Discharge -> Power Sink : elec based epics almost always have this, and it's a super useful utility power, offensively and defensively. Adjust numbers to be weak enough for an epic pool, etc. Surge of Power -> Charged Armor : stock resist armor. Thunder Strike -> Voltaic Sentinel : exactly the kind of epic power MMs should get - MORE PETS 😉. Chill Mastery - this is one of the better sets already, only the attack doesn't really fit (I'm restructuring some of the sets to be more attack oriented, so players that want that can find it). Ice Blast -> Shiver : a nice soft control option. Plus, "Chill" Mastery should be able to CHILL things. Renaming it "chilling blast" and adding a small knockback too it would be nice as well, but might overlap too much with Gale. A fun alternate might be a pbaoe knockback+slow using the same animation as Atom Smasher or Hand Clap. Basically a "get off of me and come back to me slowly" power. Field Mastery - this set really wanted to be the offensive set for Blasterminds, let's make it that. Power Blast -> Double the damage - makes it roughly equal to a defender T2. Temp Invulnerability -> Kinetic Shield (S/L/E DEFENSE) : We need more defense armor options, and being able to softcap s/l pairs very well with an offensive mastermind playstyle (I'm here for you petless blasterminds! 😉 ). Energy Torrent -> Bump it up to 45-50 damage : it should be AT LEAST as good as the cone in the primary. Explosive Blast -> Energy Cloak (stealth + minor defense) : We just gave them 2 very good attacks, a third might be overkill, so let's go with utility and more defense. Force of Nature-> Entropic Aura : status protection, but half the mag strength and double the end cost of the brute version. /Son, /FF & /Traps already have status protection, it wouldn't be the end of the world if others had access to it. An additional or alternate option, would be a self damage buff of some sort, to help offset the MM damage penalty, something like Envenomed Blades in the Martial Assault set - use the build up animation and add say 40% (scale off base, not total) energy damage to each attack (but NOT to pet attacks). Heat Mastery - This set is solid. It's a hybrid utility/combat set currently, and fire is typically associated with "damage", so we'll leave it be. Just bump the damage numbers up to defender level or higher. Heat, Field, Leviathan and Soul will be the sets you take if you want damage or a mix of damage/utility. Giving these pools a focus lets us free up other pools for me utility. I don't see a reason for putting an attack in every set other than that's how someone wanted it to be for ease of work and design. Leviathan Mastery - redside equivalent to Field mastery, it wants to be a damage set, let's do that! School of Sharks - cut the immob duration in half, shorten + widen the cone. Bile Spray -> Arctic Breath (basically just add -def & -res), cut the recharge 20-30% : adds utility if you don't want to play up the damage aspect. Also cut the range and widen the cone so it feels better in melee since you'll also be using … KO Blow -> MOAR DAMAGE : no it doesn't have to hit like a scrapper, but it should hit for more than a wet noodle, especially on a 40s recharge. Shark Skin : is fine as is, but adding KB protection, or a minor defense component (3-5% def all) to it would be a nice bonus since we'll be in melee, and potentially allow additional IO slotting options. Spirit Shark Jaws -> PET or leave as is, or convert into a medium range, heavy damage blast. Shark bites should hurt! Mace Mastery - This set is amazing already. The only change I'd make is to add more utility to Mace Beam Volley and remove the damage aspect, since we've handled those elsewhere. Mace Beam Volley -> PET or convert into a control power : remove the damage, add a stun component, boost the recharge. Mu Mastery - I like the idea of making it into a ranged counterpart to Charge Mastery - so charge has the stronger melee power sink and Mu gets a ranged version. We also need another DEFENSE armor option, ideally on villain side. It would fit in any of them, but Field Mastery would now provide a melee option, so I'd place it in Mu over Leviathan or Soul, both of which would be more melee focused. Static Discharge -> Static Transfer : Keep the animation and convert into a 30% strength Power Sink, boost recharge to compensate & balance. Charged Armor -> Static Shield : Either solid RANGE def and minor AOE def, or solid E/N def and minor S/L, plus moderate energy resist and endurance drain resist. Thunder Strike -> PET or weak version of Static Field (80s recharge, 2s sleep duration?). Soul Mastery - since this set wants you to be in melee so bad, why all the ranged cones? No thank you! Night Fall -> Midnight Grasp (at a decent damage level) : would play the Soul Storm hold animation. Probably just use the same numbers from the boosted KO blow. Dark Embrace : is fine Soul Tentacles -> Doom Stomp (or Soul Stomp) : Pbaoe high damage + immob+ -tohit. Use the foot stomp animation but it makes the tendrils instead of knock up/down. Slot it for damage, debuff or immob. Soul Storm -> PET or Soul Transfer -> As much as I love this power and animation, it exists for other ATS, and I feel the set would be better served by another melee/utility power - and I added Midnight Grasp to basically take its place already.

See my guide to MM epics here for background info and my thoughts on the current state of things: The recent dominator and snipe changes on the beta have given me hope for interesting balance changes going forward. I'm not sure how sweeping they'll be, but who knows! So I thought it was worth putting out my thoughts on these pools, after having spent ….way too many hours on too many masterminds on live and now. In my previous post I laid out what I thought each set should bring, so here are my proposed reworks. Keep in mind that these suggestions are intended to take the minimum amount of work to implement. So no new powers beyond what can be made by swapping damage types and effects on existing powers. Also note that I've always found it frustrating that masterminds - THE pet class - didn't get at least one pet option in the epic pools. Yes, yes I know they can "already do that" but I dunno, I appeal to the "rule of cool" (often invoked in D&D) - it would be FUN. People play masterminds (usually) because they love pets, why not give them another? Plus, with the patron pets as they are now, they are super hard to perma anyway (which is a subject for another thread…). Not mention that controllers, dominators & SoA get more pets. Point being here is that just swapping in a pet for one of the less interesting powers in the patron pools would be great BUT I provide a non-pet option for the patrol pools below in case that's a bridge too far. The one place where I'm really breaking with original design #s (although, I would argue, not with the design intent) is changing the damage formula (increasing it) on mm epics - I think that change should be part of the epic itself, since MMs can't normally deal good damage, providing that is sort of in line with the epic philosophy of giving ATs access to something new. [Also, honestly I'm tired of trying to talk myself out of mace mastery on most of my mms 😉 ]. So, here are my proposed changes to the mastermind epic pools to make each one unique, desirable, and worth taking as well as making power choices tougher and more meaningful. One major thing I want to address is that only 2 of the 8 sets have a defense based shield (compared to 4 resist sets).