aethereal

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.

I'm in the same boat, and I'm still mad that stalker hemorrhage was nerfed in the last page. I acknowledge that it was a bug, but it provided a real reason to play Savage.

It doesn't look like a major difference to me -- maybe outside of PvP. Hemorrhage just got a fiery embrace bugfix, it's a no-op unless you're playing savage/fire. Savage Strike got a fiery embrace bugfix, a nerf of its DoT damage (which was never that big) in PvP, and, for scrappers, it accidentally had a half-strength crit that's been brought up to full strength. This is the tier-1, it's not going to be game changing for crit damage only to be increased by 33%. Shred actually got a generalized damage bump... of 7.5%. Rending Flurry got an endurance change, plus a PvP change. Maiming Slash got a PvP-only change. I doubt that anyone will particularly notice these changes, except PvPers. I mean, it's nice to have things that were broken, fixed, but I can't imagine that it will change anyone's take on the set.

I presume that the toggle for Voltaic Sentinel does something like refreshes a timer on the pet being alive. Doesn't appear that the info is in the CoD version of the power (even with the alpha settings turned on), so I can't check for sure. If so, maybe a compromise? Could we make it so that getting mezzed causes the pet to vanish if the mez isn't promptly broken? This gives a chance for people to make skill plays with breakfrees or whatever, and potentially reduces the annoyance of "I get mezzed for one second, lose my sentinel, in ten seconds I retoggle it only to get mezzed again" stuff. My thought for how this would work (obviously I'm not sure if this actually works with the tech): The pet lasts a fairly long time (10s or so) without needing to be refreshed by the toggle. The toggle is suppressed, not switched off, by mez. But if the pet is desummoned (which happens after 10s of suppression), its on-banish effect forces the toggle into cooldown (would also happen for other reasons that caused the pet to go away, but since the pet is not targetable, there are few of those) So the upshot is, if you get mezzed, your buddy helps you out for a few seconds while you reach for your breakfree or maybe Iron Will from Martial Combat or yell for your teammate to Clear Mind you, and if you successfully get out of jail in those few seconds, your buddy sticks around. If not, it vanishes and you have a ten second timeout before you can summon it again.

Seems like it'd be overpowered in Combat Teleport. (Well, untargetable would be. Self-Phase would just be bad.)

Is this intentional/correct? I see two different recovery debuffs in Short Circuit on beta, one for 5s and one for 10s. The patch notes don't mention any changes to the recovery debuff on Short Circuit. CoD for live shows a single 10s, 100% (unenhanced) Recovery Debuff. (Ah, nevermind, I figured it out, it's the Shocked special line -- presumably conditional on getting the Shocked proc, which is not shown in the detailed info. And enhanced from its base 40% due to my endmod enhancement.)

Hmmm, I did get a case where as far as I could tell, a fully drained Nebel Elite Oberst attacked me while he had 0 endurance. It wasn't while I was explicitly trying to test sapping, so I have nothing but my having just used Short Circuit and then Charged Bolts, glancing at him, thinking, "Oh, he's out," and switching targets, only to have him whack me. But after that, from the ground, I watched him, and it was several more seconds before he got any endurance back. It's possible that he briefly had endurance and then used it in the process of attacking me, but I didn't see his blue bar show anything. EDIT: My best guess is he attacked me with this power: https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=5thcolumn.fifth_column_lt_boss_solider_ranged.rifle_butt which costs 0 endurance (on prod as well, not just beta).

Yeah, I just went around and sapped about 10-15 enemies, minions lts and bosses, from Outcasts, Thorns and Tsoo and all of them correctly were unable to attack me when their endurance was zero. Please provide more info about your experience @DarknessEternal, and we'll try to reproduce it.

I'm on an elec/elec blaster right now, I'll try to repo.

EB's do NOT have 0-cost attacks, but DO have a recovery floor, so you can't fully incapacitate them with end drain -- they will always get a tick of recovery every 16 seconds minimum, and be able to use at least one attack before you can re-drain them.

If you slot Placate with the Perfect Zinger damage proc, and the proc fires, does it break the Placate?

And note that this includes "melee cones." In general, only cones that take ranged AoE sets will have their cones lengthened by +range.

Proc rate is based on animation time + recharge time (as modified by local recharge). Obviously, with the longer-recharge-time powers that we tend to focus on, recharge time dominates, but animation time does play in.

You don't need to run it "repeatedly," just once. I'm sure that you can find someone who's rocking a 50% chance to hit and plugs his ears and says, "YOU'RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME" when people tell him to slot accuracy. But expecting people to make it so their powers basically hit some of the time is what we should balance around. This is not, at all, the same as assuming that everyone will be soft-capped or that all squishies will be immune to mez through T4 Clarion, or that tanks will be able to AFK in the middle of a +4/x8 spawn and not have their health bar budge.

I absolutely do, and "slotting enough accuracy that you're at near-cap" has been standard advice from the moment the game launched. At low levels, you get a to-hit bonus anyway and it's easy to pick up DFB bonuses to carry you until you have slot space to put in accuracy.

I mean, maybe! Or maybe it's a mistake -- god knows we've seen crit damage mistakes before. I think it's worth asking for clarification.

Enemy buffs to hit seem not that big a deal to me? Every time I'm on an 8-person team at level 50, my defense scores end up being like 80-100 from stacked maneuvers and other stuff. It seems unlikely that people will really get super exercised about the difference between Shield and SR given that. What I think the static enemy bonuses do do is put yet more emphasis on Leadership pool.