Hjarki

The rule of thumb here is: if you can't drain endurance faster than health, you might as well not bother. End drain is all-or-nothing. You need to floor both the target's endurance and their recovery before end drain does any good. At that point, you've effectively got a disorient. Against minions/lieutenants, endurance drain will almost always be useless. You kill them so fast that it makes no sense to End Drain them. Against bosses, endurance drain can make some sense. However, there are relatively few one-button end drain methods that can sap a boss to nothing (especially @ +4), so you very rapidly get into "I'll just throw my Hold twice" territory. Against AV/GM, endurance drain could potentially make a lot of sense. The fastest pylon times are usually in the 1 - 2 minute range. You can sap a pylon in 20 seconds. This becomes especially relevant when you consider all of those long recharge defense clicks that let you be effectively invulnerable for more than enough time to sap the AV/GM to zero. So the theory goes: click your "I can't be hurt" power, sap the AV/GM to nothing, spend the rest of the fight in complete safety. Unfortunately, there are two wrinkles to this scheme: Recovery can't be floored. Maybe you could do it with 3-4 Electric Affinity players. But not with a single player. Recovery debuffing is just resisted too much. If Recovery isn't floored, you wasted a lot of time draining endurance because it has no impact on the fight. AV/GM (probably) can act anyway. There are almost certainly abilities particularly to a given AV/GM that cost 0 endurance and can be used anyway. So instead of crippling the AV/GM, you're probably mildly inconveniencing it. Maybe you can come up with a build that can do something useful (PvE-wise) with End Drain. But I was unable to find any build - even dedicated sapper builds that sacrificed any hope of dealing meaningful damage - that were of any use against pylons or Lusca (testing against actual AV/GM in missions requires a bit of effort to reach them).

I probably should have mentioned this because I suspect loading the build I linked wouldn't work on a standard version of Mid's.

If you're fighting a level 50 AV/GM, it should have 85% resist. That means -40% resist would debuff it to an effective 79% resist. Applying -110% damage would thus reduce it's overall damage by -23.1%. About half of that is the almost-certain-to-be-killed Dark Servant so you're looking at -12% or so in practice.

As an example of the sort of things I've been playing with: The above isn't really a 'power build'. It's very durable (at least vs. S/L) and has decent damage for a non-Storm Defender. However, it is nonetheless a 'Classic' Defender in the sense that it's far more effective as an aid to a team than solo. It can function solo, but you'll discover that keeping your Galvanic Sentinel alive (without which most of your primary becomes useless) can be tricky. As usual with Electric sets, I ignore the end drain component and just focus on the abilities themselves. Psi Blast meshes well because it has two solid single target attacks, a KB AE and a PBAoE ultimate. I don't really need more than those two single target attacks (Mental Blast can be used, but it's basically a mule for set bonuses) because the Primary is so busy. You'll need to be activating Energizing Circuit on recharge and then healing as necessary. Empowering Circuit only needs to be refresh once every minute.

The Cage creates a pseudo-pet that refreshes the buff on a fairly short duration. So you have to stay inside the cage. If you activate the power again, the previous Cage disappears - you can only have one at a time.

The key features of Electric Affinity are the recharge/endurance and the bubble/self-heals. As long as you've got an active pet, you can take an enormous beating - I didn't try solo'ing Liberty or anything with it, but it's very hard to kill. But neither Electric Affinity nor Electric Blast/Control make endurance drain practical. I do think that a good place to start looking for synergies is with relatively long recharge PBAoE since the combination of recharge + bubble makes them more practical. I did do an Elec/Elec/Soul build to exploit Soul Drain + Power Boost (Power Boost allows both Thunderous Blast and Short Circuit to zero end bars). However, while the bubble is very good, it's unlikely you'll be hard-capping resists except S/L and it does nothing for defenses. Rectified Recticle isn't really worthwhile outside of PvP, unless you want the S/L def bonuses. Gaussian's appears to act in a manner similar to Tactics - the chance to proc is increased by the number of targets. However, from my admitted brief testing, I believe you have to be in the Empowering Circuit yourself to get the buff (if you're only buffing others, it doesn't seem to proc). Also, because Empowering Circuit can only usefully be activated once per minute, you're almost certainly going to get performance directly inferior to Tactics.

"How little of slotting" is often a bug, not a feature. There are no defensive powers (no LotG mules), no damaging powers (lots of opportunities there), no Holds/Confuses (great sets overall), etc. The new Preemptive Optimization offers 3.75% Ranged + 3.75% Recharge at 6-slot, but that more 'better than Performance Shifter' than actually good. The two heals can take Numina's (Ranged Def), Preventive (recharge) or Panacea (recharge), which are all reasonably good options. In terms of the set overall, I think the core features are Energizing Circuit and Faraday Cage. I tried a lot of builds and the notion of 'sapping' never really worked out - spending a minute to drain the endurance of targets you could kill in 45 sec just isn't useful. Amp Up and Defibrillate are the two powers I can't really see taking in almost any build. Galvanic Sentinel is a power I'd only take as a potential target for my Chain spells when I don't have another pet to use. Shock just doesn't do anything useful - either it's pointless (on standard minion/lt/boss) or it's resisted into nothing (AV/GM). Empowering Circuit doesn't really need any slotting at all since it doesn't stack and the duration is four times the recharge. Maybe some +hit slotting if you really want. The two heals are nice and there are some decent heal sets. However, back to those core features (Energizing Circuit and Faraday Cage). The key features of both don't meaningfully vary between primary and secondary, so the only reason to play as a Defender is if you really hate the idea of wasting a power on Shock or you need the superior values from pools. Probably the best build I threw together was Ill/Electric/Mace, but this is less an optimal build than a more team-friendly version of the always popular Illusion. I do think Electric is generally one of the best of the 'pure support' sets with its excellent heals and bubble.

Except it's not really much fun to join a group and find that you're totally useless in that group. No one takes their level 5 character into an AE farm with a level 50 Brute because they find watching some guy stand in a puddle of effects for 10 minutes 'fun'. Mostly, they just go afk and come back to their xp. When half or more of the archetypes/powers in the game aren't really of much use because they can't be competitive at high levels, that is a significant problem. Nor is it one that can be solved by introducing really challenging content that even more dramatically showcases the shortcomings of such archetypes/powers. I get the impression you haven't spent a whole lot of time playing around with this 'new content'. Personally, I think it's fairly balanced - by which I mean that much of it isn't going to make an appearance in any 'power build'. Defibrillate is essentially a mass disorient with a longer recharge and shorter range than most mass disorients. While it's neat to completely sap a spawn of endurance, that's only half the story. The other half is the recovery debuff - which has a relatively short, unenhanceable duration. Once their recovery starts ticking, there's no real difference between being at 1% endurance and 100% endurance. So really you end up with an effect that might be considered an interesting variation on a tactic that few players use in the first place. Remember, we can already do what Defibrillate does with Thunderous Blast. But no one does. Likewise, your argument about Amp Up fails to recognize how rarely boosting those powers on others is of any meaningful value. Bear in mind that we're currently playing a game where people slot their mezzes for damage, the only debuff that really matters is the unenhanceable -resist (or the equally unenhanceable -regen) and players build their characters around having enough +hit so they don't need your help. When a power like Amp Up affects the player - who can specifically build around the certainty of its presence - it makes sense. When it buffs others (whose builds were created independent of that buff), it almost never provides them with anything they can use. Or consider the new IO sets. Bombardment has a new proc which will probably see some use. The pure end mod set has some nice set bonuses that existing end mod sets don't have so you're likely to see it in powers like Transference. But the others? Why would you need a hybrid End Mod/Damage set in the first place? If you wanted to increase both End Mod and Damage in the same power, you can already do that by mixing End Mod and Damage sets - and normally far more effectively. But, of course, no one does that because endurance drain is only useful if you're draining endurance faster than you're draining health - and the powers we have in game don't do that. Once the first blush of "ooh... shiny" wears off, I think you'll discover that this new content is relatively balanced... by which I mean it's not something most players will use. Electric Affinity is nice, but it's basically Kinetics with a bubble rather than Fulcrum Shift - a trade most people would be unwilling to make. From my perspective, that's a big problem. It's not "play what you want, have fun doing it". It's "play what you want, but you'll probably be gimped". Adding new content that no one wants to use is no different than adding no content at all. The complexity of CoH builds tends to mean that most of them aren't very good, so I'm not sure how valuable such a survey really is. If you compare between strong builds, I suspect you'll find a lot less diversity in choices - and much of the diversity you do find is simply due to the fact that some abilities synergize better than others. What I'm pointing out is that CoH's primary problem isn't "there's nothing to do" or "there's no difficult content". The problem is game balance. You briefly mentioned that you rarely see Empathy. That's a problem. Empathy isn't a bad power set - it just doesn't provide much that's useful when you're playing slammed up against the limits of the game. If you're a player who thinks its fun to play that sort of pure support character, you're eventually forced to confront the reality that few others can benefit from the support you provide - and that you're not much use to the team. Being useless is not 'fun'.

We really have only two 'tests' - pylon tests and AE farm clear times - and they're both limited in terms of what they can predict (and, in the case of AE farm clear times, we don't have a very comprehensive set of examples from Controllers). So it's disingenuous to claim your opinion isn't an opinion. For single target damage, it's primarily about the pet(s). Most of the core features of single target controller damage are pets, procs, support sets and pools. The only factors uniquely tied to the Control sets are the pets. So it tends to boil down to (a) how much pet damage there is and (b) whether you can keep those pets alive. Because Illusion absolutely wins on (b), a reasonable ranking for single target damage would be: Illusion > Dark, Plant > everything else. Illusion has the invulnerable pets and another pet summons. Dark has the best actual pet and augments it with additional pets. Plant has the most proc-friendly of the pets. However, Phantom Army's invulnerability cannot be understated. In most tough single target fights, your pets are simply going to get crunched without some fairly extraordinary efforts - and thus not contribute dps. Since no Controller has remotely competitive single target non-pet dps from their Control set, it becomes a bit like a tallest Oompa Loompa contest at this point. In terms of AE, it's largely about layering powers and procs (in a practical fashion). This gives us: Electric, Fire, Plant > Earth > Dark, Ice > everything else. Jolting Chain and Carrion Creepers have incredible proc performance on top of the standard Immobilize and an AE Confuse. Fire has four different AE effects to layer those procs. As you move down the list, your options become slimmer and slimmer.

I think we're talking about different problems. The problem you're talking about - content that doesn't challenge people - isn't really a problem in my mind. If you want to experience catastrophic defense failures or psi control effects knocking down your toggles, that's available. People just don't do it much because there's no real advantage to doing it when you can just rip through far easier content. Certainly, it would be nice to have more content. Even better, it would be nice to have better content systems where players could usefully create missions other players would actually play (beyond simple farm missions). The problem I'm talking about - the dramatic imbalance between 'haves' and 'have nots' - is a problem that simply adding more difficult content doesn't address and potentially exacerbates. There's a vast array of abilities in the game that simply aren't very useful - such as almost every secondary effect on blast and melee sets. A large part of the game's appeal is its customization. But if you want to build your concept character, there's a good chance you'll be gimped because your concept doesn't happen to hit the right power sets/archetypes. When you look at the power pools players take, they're almost formulaic (the reason we no longer have Fitness pool) rather than being ways to expand your concept. To me, that's the real problem. When someone comes on these boards and says "I have a neat concept for a character", the response shouldn't be "well, you can build it, but it will suck compared to X" - which is what the response often is right now.

I tossed together a fairly basic build. The leveling order probably isn't ideal, though. I also did it as a Corruptor for two reasons. First, Psychic Blast has a better second than first power. Second, Kinetics tends to work better as a Corruptor due to the higher +damage cap. The basic goal was to reach 45 S/L Def while preserving a decent offensive; Rune of Protection can hopefully cover some of the gaps. Most of the powers are slotted in ways that, if not ideal, should give you an idea of what you might want to explore.

It really depends on what you're fighting. However, I find typed defenses generally easier on a melee character. For ranged characters, you can eliminate virtually all attacks by simply taking Ranged Defense and staying at range. For a melee character, you'd really need to take all 3 positional defenses to get the same sort of coverage. Positional defenses also defend against any attack that has any of those attack types attached. So if someone fires an Icebolt at you, you can defend against with either Smashing or Cold. Also, you need to remember that Stalkers have massive AoE defense... when they're hidden. When they're not hidden, that massive boost from Hide goes away. So you might not actually be soft-capped to AoE.

For pure farming, the consensus builds are Spines/Fire and Rad/Fire Brutes. The Tanker changes earlier this year probably mean that there are Tanker builds that equal/exceed the performance of these sorts of Brute builds. The controller builds are a bit of a step back from the Brutes/Tankers and tend to require a bit more interaction - you can literally go afk with your Brute/Tanker and come back to a pile of influence/xp. FIre/Kin remains perhaps the most popular build in the game. It's a fairly flexible build that also works well in team settings. However, a build like Plant/Storm is likely to beat it for sheer mass carnage.

I agree that Energizing Circuit is one of the core powers of the set. About the only test character where I found Amp Up useful was Necromancy/Electric.

I think you're threading an awfully fine needle here. This is a power received at 32 or 38. It requires a party member with a fairly specific build and a situation where that would be useful. Consider your example of to-hit debuffs. These are effects no one increases in the first place because they tend to act in a binary fashion. Either your to-hit buffs tend to completely overwhelm the target's hit or they're resisted into irrelevance. If improving hit debuffs was important, then people playing Dark Control or Dark Blast would do that. The fact that they don't even bother strongly suggests that doing it for them is unlikely to yield much benefit. As a thought experiment, imagine for a moment that we: Reduce the recharge to a few seconds Make it affect all allies (just not the user) like a standard bubble-type power Swap it from the 9th slot to something much lower Now, ask yourself - would you take this power? For me, it would fall into the 'maybe' category alongside powers like Increase Density.

As I noted, the damage on Poison Trap isn't remotely close to an ultimate nuke. It's less than conventional nukes like Irradiate or Fireball that have much lower recharges. The hold also isn't very good - it's extremely short duration and the nature of the trap tends to scatter a spawn. In terms of return on investment, it's actually quite low because the proc chance is based on the pseudo-pet (10 sec) rather than on the recharge (60 sec). When I was talking about Irradiate, I was being perfectly serious - Irradiate is a substantially better mechanism for damage because it can exploit the disparity between MRT and actual recharge (which Poison Trap can't do) while also having a large radius and strong damage. If you've already decided to play Poison, then you might as well take it. But it's not a very strong selling point for the set.

Except you're the team's "Defender or Controller". So you need to have another Defender/Controller to receive the buff - and one whose abilities overlap substantially with your own. Moreover, the buff tends to target the kinds of features that builds design around. At low levels, +recharge is a good ally buff - at higher levels, players tend to have enough recharge to run their rotation and additional recharge does little for them. Likewise, they have enough hit to cap, enough duration on their mezzes and End Mod is a hyper-specialized approach. So I'm having trouble seeing how Amp Up would be useful in anything except a static team where you have a teammate designed around the use of Amp Up.

I don't believe there's really any way to 'abuse it' beyond the conventional ones. Jolting Chain should act just like a single target attack. But I think it really boils down to the fact that, no matter what you do with it, it's still just a minor heal. I suppose you could just toss it in Stamina and let it tick away, but normally this sort of 'regen' just isn't very useful. Overall, I haven't found either of the damage/endurance sets to have much use. They don't have any key bonuses that would make 2- or 3- slotting them worthwhile. The bonuses at 5- and 6- are decent but not particularly inspiring. Splitting across end mod alongside more conventional features like recharge, damage and accuracy means they end up being bad at everything. I think there's also the "stop trying to make fetch a thing" factor here. There just aren't many powers that are both good at damage and end mod (Thunderous Blast is the only one I can think of). Indeed, damage and end mod are opposing concepts - if you can just kill something, you have no reason to drain its endurance. Pre-emptive Optimization I have found useful. Non-damaging end drain powers do exist and this is a better set than exists currently.

I tested it on a number of different spawns. It procs a single time - upon detonation. It can potentially proc a second time 10 secs later - if it hasn't scattered the spawn. Its overall damage (with procs) is less than conventional nukes. What you are arguing is that the power works in a dramatically different way than any other similar power and is dramatically different from the way it actually works on the Beta server. If you have some secret trick to making it work the way you claim, I'd love to hear it.

1. 27% is based on a 10 yard radius and a 10 sec activation. It matches the in-game performance. 2. 10 is an approximation. Spawns that you can Fireball in their entirety tend to have the fringes missed by the trap. 4. 7 out of 13 Blast sets have PBAoE ultimates. Only 2 out of 9 Control sets have PBAoE damage abilities, but all Defenders/Controllers/Corruptors have access to PBAoE via Epic/Patron pools. That's not 'rare' - that's "anyone can take one if they want one". Irradiate (from Radiation Blast) is almost directly superior to the trap. Given that there's no great rush to take Radiation for Irradiate, it's hard to agree with the notion that the trap is a key selling point of the Poison set.

In terms of what archetype to use for Kinetics, it doesn't matter much if you're playing a purely support-based character. If you also intend to solo, Defenders will a much easier time with defenses, Corruptors have the higher +damage cap and Controllers have pets. Personally, I'm of the inclination that Corruptor generally makes the most sense - but it's a bit tricky to not become a pure glass cannon. Something I tweaked a bit is below. I haven't really played this, but it should more or less work. Against large spawns, you can use the KB/-hit to bridge the gaps in your defense. You've got two defensive cooldowns as well (Unleash Potential, Power Boost). Against hard single targets, you've got the ability to reduce their resists and debuff them (albeit through their heavy resists). However, your primary defense would be Siphon Speed'ing them to a crawl and staying out of range of their most dangerous attacks. The lack of single target attacks is largely due to the presence of Torrent (fast activating, 80 range attack) and the sheer amount of 'busy work' involved in handling all the Kinetics abilities. Basically you've got Moonbeam hitting like a truck, followed by various debuffing and some stray damage, followed by Moonbeam as soon as it comes off recharge.

It is not self-castable and I'd probably skip it. Amp Up doesn't so much improve attributes as improve powers. So it doesn't provide any additional defense, but it does provide the equivalent of extra enhancements for the defensive powers the target does have. However, the one enhancement you'd really appreciate - increased damage - is missing. The description talks about shooting electric bolts, but I haven't noticed anything that could be construed as doing this. In theory, it should boost the end drain of Galvanic Sentinel, but if this does anything it really would only be taking the end drain from 'irrelevant' to 'slightly more noticeable irrelevant'. For most pets, Amp Up will do almost nothing. From what I've seen, it's useless on pets and not terribly useful on players.

The problem with "just make more difficult content" approach is that it doesn't really address the problem. The real problem is that individual characters are slamming up against the limits of the game and this warps the entire gameplay. Look at the notion of 'soft-capping' defenses. Now, there's nothing wrong with trying to soft-cap defenses. There's a big problem with succeeding. It's one thing for a Super Reflexes Tanker to be effectively un-hittable. But when everyone on your team is un-hittable, what place is there for a Force Field Defender? You see the same thing over on the resist side. I have no problem with a Fire Tanker who makes an effort to be Fire Resist capped. But when your Shield Defense Brute is Fire Resist capped... that's a problem. And it's not a problem that 'harder content' will solve - you're still left with the fact that a build purely focused on Fire Resist is no better than a build that should only have incidental fire resist. And, of course, it severely limits the value of your Thermal Defender when the Tanker doesn't need their buffs. Or think about hit buffs. I take Tactics on quite a few builds. But I don't expect it to ever be useful to my group - I just take it for the self-buffs. If defenses/resists are normally - but not always - capped, hit is absolutely always capped. My personal choice for fixing this problem is to limit how the game stacks attributes. That is, if you have both Weave and Maneuvers, you only get the higher of the two defense buffs. You can still have both powers active - if you want Immobilize resist at the same time you want to buff your group - but you'd only get the +defense from Weave. Likewise, if you have Dispersion Bubble (Force Field), Maneuvers and Weave, you'd only get +defense from Dispersion Bubble (the largest effect), but you'd get all the various non-defense effects from Weave/Maneuvers. However, your friends would still receive the full bonuses from Bubble and Maneuvers. This wouldn't really impact low level play because you don't have all those stacking powers anyway. But it would significantly limit how far you could push the limits on a single character in high level play. It would also diversify builds quite a bit since you wouldn't have every character taking the Fighting Pool, everyone taking movement pools for defenses, etc. By the same token, you could change the 5-of-the-kind rule for enhancement sets to something like "triple your best bonus". So let's say you slotted Coercive Persuasion (+5% ranged def). No matter what other enhancement sets you slotted, you could never get more than +15% (triple your best bonus of +5%) to Ranged Def. But you could get that additional +10% from slotting a half dozen Blessing of the Zephyr if you liked (and somehow found that many movement powers to slot). Again, this wouldn't impact low level players at all - who don't have those set bonuses - but would pull back from the abyss at the high level. Debuffs are another issue, where AV/GM resists render most of them worthless. However, this would likely require a case-by-case analysis of the different debuffs and their mechanics.

I didn't recall off-hand, so I went on the Beta server to try it out before responding. The '27%' is the theoretical number, but it matches in-game performance. With 4 standard procs, I almost never saw 4 procs - it was primarily either 1 or 2 procs. Certainly, you could use higher damage/chance purple procs - but the trap is a poor platform for them if you've got alternatives. Again, I went on the Beta server to try it out. It's hard to gauge ranges, but it's definitely not a 20-25 yard radius that encompasses an entire spawn. This is my fault - I didn't fully the level test character. Opening up PBAoE slots isn't really anything special. On a Corruptor/Defender, the Blast sets have plenty of much higher damage PBAoE to choose from. On a Controller, the pickings are bit slimmer but still available. The only real advantage is that you can potentially use it as a trap - stacking multiples and dragging/Wormholing enemies on top of them. But that's not really compatible with a fast-moving team. However, this is also a disadvantage as it means it's a ground attack only. While you can certainly throw procs in it, I wouldn't consider it a significant feature of the set. It has a relatively long recharge compared to actual Blast powers to deliver generally worse performance.

I wouldn't go that far. From my perspective: It has a relatively low (~27% or so) chance to proc any given proc. It has a relatively small radius for both triggering and damage (10 yards?). For some inexplicable reason, it can't slot purple sets. The power itself doesn't do much damage. Envenom's -regen is uselessly small. The small radius on Envenom (and the far less useful Weaken) is only somewhat of a problem. -resist powers are, in general, not all that great on AE powers because you rarely have time to debuff the spawn and them nuke them. There are some minor exceptions (Blizzard -> Freezing Rain is the classic example), but mostly you're opening with nukes on large spawns rather than debuffs. However, the radius still has the effect of penalizing procs placed in the power vs. AV/GM. Even if you expanded the radius or eliminated it, Envenom would merely be comparable to what you can get elsewhere. But you'd still have a set with 3 mostly superfluous target ally powers, a PBAoE toggle without any of the defenses necessary to make it useful, an uninspiring/unnecessary single target Hold and an unslottable Cone slow. That's a whole lot of bad-in-any-form powers without any real killer app powers in the set.