Shazbotacus

SoA have been better Sentinels than Sentinels since Sentinels were born 😂

Considering that attacks are only good until you're using all your time on activating them, I don't think we need to worry about having "too many" attack powers. I've been wanting these powers to stop being "trap picks." It may be more interesting to have them have a secondary gimmick, but the bottom line is I'd like powers like Heavy Burst to not be arbitrarily awful. Edit: It'd really help peoples' themes if they can get the powers they want to suit them without having to worry about them being just second rate or utterly worthless.

Looking at power stats. Mace blasts, Heavy Burst, and Pummel all still appear underwhelming. Very underwhelming in the case of Heavy Burst and mace beams. Frag Grenade still looks not great. Poisonous Ray seems to have a base lv 50 DPA of 66 up from 55 or so. It seems to have gone from slightly below par to... it looks like it might be okay for a mace Bane to use now? At least if coupled with Venom Grenade which any SoA should be using anyways. For Arachnos Soldier powers, the powers that were trap picks are still trap picks.

It may be worth checking if other sets are granting unintended powers or power effects to minions when they are not selected for them.

I seriously hope you guys aren't using these for variable names in your coding.

Are there any plans to use a different model for the Maintenance Drone? Right now it's literally just a floating protector bot torso with a bot head crammed into the neck hole with a thing on top of that and honestly I don't like it.

Oh, what are the odds we can get the Serum cooldown taken down from 250s to 240s? Just so it rounds out to the minute :^)

I was also kind of hoping for Medic to get better at healing, and for Spec Ops to lean more into doing debuffs and/or CC. AoE on Stimulant would be nice, maybe some kind of absorb buff to help survivability instead of the frag grenade. I'm feeling like Medic should just have one long recharging heavy burst for quickly doing some damage between using healing and buffing powers. Absorb, maybe +Max HP, anything that can be enhanced by healing enhancements, but preferably something that can be applied to the whole squad.

I suppose that's fair, although equip powers do also recharge much faster to the point you can keep up with rapid casualties. What I have in mind definitively would not.

As of this posting, an update was pushed to experiment with Serum operating on a shorter duration and cooldown. Naturally this also means the effectiveness of Serum falls more sharply. Having a duration of 60s, it falls to half in only half a minute, and its base recharge of 5m10s, or 250s, gets taken down to 2m5s on enhancements alone. The base damage resistance was marginally reduced to a flat 30% from the earlier 37.5%, but the damage buff was brought to +75% however it no longer responds to resistance enhancements which I assume was never intended. It emphasizes the things about Serum even more. It plays like it's like a Build Up with an armor component that gives you a greatly enhanced alpha strike, but also gives soldiers a greater ability to absorb an alpha thanks to resistance, and it fades away even quicker than before but can be back after the next fight or two.

Turning away from Serum, I love the across-the-board activation time trim and damage buff on the mercs' attacks. Their damage is much higher, spec ops snipe hits like a truck, LRM recharge being halved is great. Even without Serum in effect, their damage is vastly improved, even if their only (meaningful) native resistance is against S/L, that it can now be enhanced means they're nearly halfway bullet proof. But they're vulnerable to just about everything else. The little bit of ranged defense and half that in AoE defense is another help for survivability. I do lament that the spec ops haven't had their ability to do crowd control or debuffs enhanced in any way, and that the medic has not had its healing improved in any way at all, but the damage enhancements already have done much to help. I'd consider distributing their resistances a little more evenly to some more common damage types, and uniformly across all soldier types rather than just letting the Commando be the only one with a smidge of "exotic" damage resistance. All soldiers need these resistances. Maybe consider 20% smash, lethal, fire, energy, and cold.

Two minutes might cover several fights, but I'm finding that it does indeed gradually go from 100-0% buff effectiveness on an even decline over the course of its duration, including enhancements. So at half duration left, you have half of its buff. It's a novel thing. If I were making powers' stats, I'd have done it to see it in action if for no other reason, but I'm not sure how I feel about it in practice. I just noticed from my pet combat stats that the damage buff is enhanced by resistance enhancements. Whoa. Give the mercs serum, order to attack, and the alpha of LRM + two snipes is an immediate and impressive damage alpha strike. They hit super hard while their damage buff is at peak and enhanced.

I'm still trying to get my Mercs on the test server respecced, set up, and throw it at some stuff, but immediately I kinda wish Serum didn't need perma hasten levels of recharge to be perma. I'm not sure if it'll really matter that much, if henchmen will die too quickly anyways, but the vast amount of resistance possible here makes me think they should be very, very sturdy. I've got the idea of 900s cooldown 480s duration in my head. It's barely perma-able on enhancements alone, 15 minutes on cooldown and 8 minute in duration, nice 'n round, but if your henchmen drop while Serum is still on cooldown, your reinforcements will be frail until it's back, meaning there's still value in keeping them alive, and it's still worth it to have more recharge reduction yourself. I just don't like having to go into sets to make things perma, it's why I picked /Dark out in the first place. Besides, with how henchmen are likely to die, it could end up not being very "perma" anyways. I may have some more informed feedback after I get things set up, whenever that happens.

Think Assault Rifle guns will be proliferated to Beam Rifle and Dual Blades swords like the scimitar proliferated to Broad Sword? I think the Malta Sniper Rifle would make a great beam rifle.

The Resistance Rifle still floats off the hand, in Assault Rifle and Beam Rifle alike. Other Beam Rifle models have this problem to a lesser extent.