aethereal

Your friend is correct, EM's defense is just out of combat defense. It's supposed to keep you from getting sniped while flying through a zone, not keep you alive in combat.

A lot depends on how much end reduction you slot in your other powers. If you're proccing out attacks so they're all at full end, you need a lot more recovery than if you're using sets that give you substantial end redx.

How about the power to kill a yak from 200 yards away? With MIND BULLETS? Which, you know, I guess is the Psi Blast power of your choice.

A hilarious perverse incentive.

For most non-armored characters, the right (boring) answer is probably the mez protection toggle of your choice.

Sadly, Vengeance doesn't give you more of a bonus if more of your team is dead. BUT IT SHOULD.

Avatars of Hamidon use confuse.

Yep, 30% chance for a mag 9 kb, per CoD.

Hey @xl8. I think it's an interesting suggestion. Let's explore it a little. As I think is implicit in your initial proposal, Enhancement Diversification prevents "lots of slots in a power" from equalling "lots of enhancement of a given stat to that power." You can put 10 +5'd damage enhancements in the power all you want, it'll be a waste of slots. "Overslotting" a power would give you the ability to max out (ie, to ED limits) all of the enhanceable attributes of a power, but not to overenhance one of attributes. So you could, if you wanted to, have a Freezing Touch with ~100% accuracy, damage, recharge reduction, endurance reduction, and hold duration. You probably almost can do that with frankenslotting today, and I agree that this would not be abusive. There are a few powers that currently suffer from it being very difficult to effectively enhance all of their useful enhanceable attributes -- powers that significantly damage an enemy and heal yourself are a classic example -- and this change would provide a buff to those powers. There aren't a ton of those powers, but some of them are pretty good, and we'd need to watch closely what would happen if you could easily slot them for both healing and damage. But what about the effects of the change that aren't purely on how easy it is to enhance power attributes? This change would allow you to do things like, if you wanted, slot two complete sets in a power and pick up the set bonuses of both. Perhaps more realistically, it could let you five-slot one set and three-slot another. In the case where you're somewhat starved for the ability to slot certain kinds of sets, you could see this being a pretty significant advantage to some builds. And, perhaps most importantly, it would let you slot a full set (or most of a set) and then pile on a bunch of procs, and that's where I think the change really falls down. Because ED prevents you from usefully 10-slotting damage, but it does not prevent you from usefully slotting Freezing Touch with 5-piece Hecatomb (ignore pure-damage), then Unbreakable Constraint proc, then the following procs: Gladiator's Strike, Mako's Bite, Touch of Death, Ghost Widow's Embrace, Basilisk's Gaze, and Gladiator's Net. And that seems problematic to me.

My understanding -- which may not be correct, it comes from a random forum post (but I glanced at the wiki and it seemed to confirm) -- is that interrupt-time-reduction enhancements do not actually reduce the total window of interrupt time, they just reduce the amount of it which is interruptible. So: If you have a 1 second interrupt time, no matter what happens, it's 1 second before your power starts playing its activation. If you have 100% interrupt time reduction, the first 0.5 seconds are actually interruptable (ie, if you move or get hit, the power is canceled) and the rest of it is just, you know... time.

Well, it's after a 1.0 second interrupt time. So not entirely instant.

CoD says about Aid Self: Cast time 4.333 seconds Interrupt time 1.0 seconds Animation time 3.333 seconds Animation time before effect 0.033 seconds

So right now, many builds (particularly ones without many/any defense powers in their primary/secondary) want Hasten + four or five defense powers in their pools -- this allows them to build for softcap defense and also pick up 37.5% global recharge with LotG (and 70% with Hasten). It's a bit tough right now if your primary/secondary doesn't support you: Fighting gets you one defense power (but it's double-strength, and people generally want Tough as well) Leaping gets you one defense power (and people like that one a lot, with its low endurance cost and good combat mobility) Flight gets you two, but only with a three power commitment (and hover doesn't necessarily work with a bunch of builds, and EM doesn't give defense in combat) Leadership gets you one (and people like tactics as well) Concealment gets you up to three (one of which affects others), but people maybe don't like them very much So if you regard Speed and Fighting as must-picks, and you want 4 (or 5) total defense powers, then you need to pick up 3 or 4 defense powers in two pools. This can get fairly tight (people probably WANT to get Leaping and Leadership, but that's only two defense powers). Being able to dip into Leaping and Concealment to pick up CJ and Stealth, while not being locked out of Leadership/Fighting/Speed (or sub in Flight there for whatever, if the character works well with flight) would result in some power creep. There are also powers like Rune of Protection which are at least arguably somewhat balanced by not being in a pool that includes any defense powers (and also not being in Speed of course).

I definitely have seen SR scaling resistances show up in combat stats (not specifically on a stalker -- I've only made SR in other armored ATs). Combat bonuses refresh a bit slowly, but if you can't see your scaling resistances when you're at say 25% health, that seems like a bug. (Obviously, you need to have selected the auto-powers in SR to get those bonuses, but I assume you have).

As @Uun alludes to, Kismet, unlike seemingly similar global bonuses like the lotg global recharge or the various +3% def-all pieces, needs to be in an active power.

Scrappers also get epic Hibernate. Geode has a 3m cooldown and Hibernate has a 4m cooldown. Each has a 30s max time-out time. You can't get to the point where you can perma them by alternating, and giving yourself a perma time-out seems not like it's that big a deal anyway? I guess you could maybe be obnoxious in PvP by waiting out some substantial chunk of an arena match? But especially in PvP, with DR on recharge, you aren't going to be anything close to perma. It doesn't feel like a big deal to me?

Dual Blades does very good single-target damage (on every AT), while having a very good (if short) cone attack (so good that it's actually fine as a ST attack), and a "regular" PBAoE, plus its T9, which is, you know, fine. I think your concern should be dominated by which AT's overall style you like better -- DB is pretty consistent between the ATs. Willpower is a solid mitigation set with no offensive adds on every AT, but as a healing-oriented set it scales heavily to the overall HP of the AT, so it's significantly better on Tankers/Brutes than Scrappers/Stalkers. In particular, comparing brutes and scrappers, you do get significantly better mitigation on brutes than scrappers (which isn't really true for some other sets). If you don't like getting the +hp accolades, you might want to bias more towards brutes/tanks for WP?

VS has always had trouble keeping up with its caster. That was perhaps mitigated by needing to be recast every minute. Since its now supposed to be a perma-pet, could we maybe get it to teleport to its caster if it exceeds some leash distance? That tech exists, I think?

I'm dubious that movement speed, max endurance, range, and slow resist are the keys to unlocking challenge mode. If anything, it feels like resist is even more important, and if you don't want to absolutely require a buff set that can give everyone +50% defense, then getting your own way to 45% resist so that Maneuvers + whatever can take you the rest of the way to 80% or so is even more important.

Ranged powers in Scrapper Primaries: Set Power Damage DPA Recharge Range Claws Focus 86.96 74.33 6.4s 40' Kinetic Focused Burst 102.60 51.30 8s 40' Stone Hurl Boulder 102.60 41.04 8s 80' Spines Impale 119.43 49.15 8s 40' Staff Serpent's Reach 112.61 63.62 9s 40' (All numbers from in-game info, so for example they aren't arcana times) Claws' Focus is the standout winner on DPA (and has a shorter recharge than the rest to boot). Hurl Boulder has the lowest DPA, substantially worse than Impale. It does have double the range of the others.

Sentinels seem like they're obviously the huge winners on the Voltaic Sentinel and Tesla cage changes, since they largely do not need to fear being mezzed ever, and they use Tesla Cage as part of their attack chain and so getting some AoE out of it is gravy, rather than something where they have to try to cram into their lives.

Romans now buff each other's defense (as of the patch on live in October), which probably explains your missing them in your testing.

Suggestion: Add a character in every tutorial who calls attention to themselves, and, through dialog, offers the characters 1, 4, or 8 hours of each amplifier, gratis. "Hey <character name>! I can give you temporary power boosts to make the start of your hero/villain career easier!"

I mean, I think that one benefit of the auto-hit change is that it means that you don't actually have to devote slots to a sleep power? Like, sleeps are usually pretty long duration, and most characters aren't going to spam them enough that they really want that much end redx or recharge redx. With no need for accuracy, you can just one-slot them and be fine... except that then they can't hit AVs. Now, I dunno, maybe that wasn't the design anyway. It seems almost like what @Captain Powerhouse wants to do is not so much make them auto-hit as make them immune to to-hit debuffs and defense buffs, but of course that's not really something you can do -- so auto-hit approximates it.

I don't like the change in build 2 to make sleep powers auto-hit except against raid targets. It feels like a weird deal where now probably your sleeps really suck against AVs because you didn't bother to slot them for accuracy, and so now they can't hit the few people they actually roll to hit against? I guess it's maybe not a huge deal because who actually tries to use a sleep against an AV, but if there is going to be a real niche of sleep as a toggle dropper, AVs may have the kind of sustained powers that you really would want to drop? It just feels like it's a nasty bind, where if you want your power to be effective in the hardest fights, you have to slot it in ways that are literally useless in 99% of fights.