kelly Rocket

I'd agree with changing Elec Blast to disorient, or something like that. Elec Control on the other hand is actually good at sapping, far better than Elec Blast, and it works quite well as is.

This appears to have gotten lost in the shuffle. I would ask people to keep it in mind - the fix isn't going away, so how can Rage/SS as a whole be made better, in your opinion? A little clarification on this would be helpful. So as others have pointed out, the Def crash can be completely removed without affecting the bug fix, restoring SS to where it was on live for all intents and purposes. So are you saying that just the bug fix won't be rolled back, but getting rid of the Def crash is a viable option, or that the Def crash is staying, and you want other solutions completely? Just to jump in here, a couple things are worth pointing out, although these things all point in different directions. 1. Removing the crash doesn't actually return the set to I23 live, because the crash was unavoidable in the non-perma case. It is important to note that the devs didn't balance the sets for the top end of performance, and like it or not perma-Rage was top tier performance most players were almost certainly not achieving. I think this is important to keep in mind. 2. Conversely, the devs had been slowly moving away from "crashes" of a serious nature. What qualified as a serious crash was and is subjective, but I believe the philosophy of the devs was moving in a direction of not needing to pay for powers like this with crashes, but instead in other ways. That shift in thinking doesn't necessarily mean they were going to jump and remove all crashes from all powers everywhere immediately. But I think if the game had continued on they would have been more willing to negotiate on something like the Rage crash. Just IMO. 3. Making the -DEF crash resistable is nice in theory but problematic in practice. My recollection of the numerical analysis I did on the Rage crash in combination with my defense set mega spreadsheet suggested that this would end up going all over the place. Like if I recall correctly tanker SR was going to ignore this completely while tanker Shield defense was not going to be happy. And ironically both with and counter to point #1 above, this was going to do interesting things to high end invention builds. So what would I have done with this? Glad you asked. I was working on an idea before shutdown to replace the Rage crash with an anti-crash. This is going to sound completely bananas, and I didn't have all the details worked out (like how to justify it - this will become obvious soon enough). But basically, I would replace the -DEF crash with a buff. Sort off. The crash would reduce damage by -1000000000% - like enough to put you to the floor no matter how many defenders are on your team. But it would *also* grant +Rech and +Endred. Basically, you go faster, you spend less end, but your damage goes to almost nothing. This would help early tankers by allowing them to tank better: their clicky defenses get stronger by getting faster, and they can use powers like AoE to keep tagging spawns with enough damage to keep aggro. But they would also have a little bit of that "exhaustion" associated with Rage running out. They kind of become "pure" tankers for a few seconds, hitting everything and grabbing aggro with all of their attacks, and their defenses get a boost. Here's the catch. You only get this benefit if Rage actually shuts down. If you make Rage perma, you *don't* get these benefits. Furthermore, you can't activate Rage during this crash, you either go perma and lose these benefits, or you accept the crash and must ride out the low damage period without Rage, even if you have enough recharge to activate it. So how do I justify such a change, from a crash to a buff? Well, as many have mentioned, in the high performance arena perma Rage already existed on live and this would not change that behavior. But in the low end, it would actually increase SS performance substantially, at least defensively. The question is did SS need a low level buff. I thought it did, and that's where my work ended - I didn't get to trying to prove that. But bottom line: instead of Rage having a defensive crash that people tried to avoid by making it perma, this new version of Rage would contain a gameplay choice: avoid the "crash" and get perma-Rage, or accept the crash and temporarily gain significant defensive benefits and aggro control but also losing the ability to deal a lot of damage. That seemed to be a reasonable tanker-like trade. This new Rage might need to be tweaked down slightly in terms of its overall +DMG/+ToHit, of course. I am pretty far out of the loop in gameplay for Tankers having not touched them since shutdown, but as this was something I was actually thinking about before shutdown (since -DEF was in my wheel house) I thought I would throw this out there. I quite like this idea. It would also help Brutes out with Fury generation during the crash.

I'm in favor, and frankly don't see any good reason this shouldn't be done.

Yeah. Resistances only shorten mez, you need mag protections to prevent it. And shortening it doesn't do anything to prevent the dropping of all your critical toggles.

I don't consider Incarnate powers to be solutions to problems, as the Incarnate trials are literally why you need to solve the problems in the first place. And once you've done them you've nearly "won" the game. I'd still take Acro because hold is the most troublesome of all mez, personally. It'd sure be nice if MMs could get the Psychic Mastery APP with Indomitable Will...

People intending to tankermind will generally aim to get Acrobatics from the Leaping pool, or go Mercenaries for their primary, as if you keep the Medic on passive he will generally continuously use Stimulant on you which provides you with immunity to all mez other than knockback, which you can handle trivially with IOs. They will generally also go with a build that lets them hit the Defense soft cap, so that most mez should simply miss them to start with. I take provoke even when I'm not intending to tankermind per se, because the pets survive a lot longer when it's me eating the attacks instead of them. Much easier to keep them up when they're only taking 1/8 of the damage instead of taking entire hits. And even if I'm not using it all the time, it makes a good power to throw when a pet is about to die, to buy a little more time for my heals to come off cooldown, or whatever.

Err, Thermal has no slows...

For Mercs, I end up doing a fair amount of micro, because I need to keep the Medic on Passive while the other two T1 pets are on defensive/aggressive/whatever, or he spends too much time attacking and forgets he has heals.

The reason for not going Cold is that I don't want to suffer with crappy Merc kill speed all the way until level 35. I don't generally take any of the fast routes to level 50, getting to level 35 could take me several days of playtime.

Sleet IS Freezing Rain. It's absolutely identical in every way. Most of the powers in Cold are recycled from other sets.

It also happens on my /nature, as if the mob gets too much attacks per second and fear just kicks in (like some tend to run away when health gets low). nature has a power similiar to darknest night. that power also causes fear for both dark and nature. I don't run any debuff toggles on my nature, just the odd few aoe buffs. Even when im not even close, when all 5 wacking the same mob, they tend to just run off. wondering if primary may matter here. beyond the obvious primaries that drop patches which have fear associated with them, I have never dealt with many runners on demons. I was doing diabolique as a +3 av on Justin with a tw/bio scrapper and it was frustrating because she would bubble and run every minute when she was at 20% health. but with my demons/thermal also +3 even though she would bubble she wouldn't run, or rather fly off. I know someone said earlier that acid mortar also causes a permanent fear effect when really it shouldn't. just more reason to always grab an aoe immob as an mm. From what I recall the devs saying back on Live, it may be a time to kill problem. I recall enemies will decide to run if fights take a long time and your side doesn't seem to be losing much health or losing people.

Sorry, just can't agree. Almost every other secondary aside from Empathy and Pain are better at keeping pets alive than Storm. If I take Storm it's literally for Freezing Rain. Freezing Rain is THE set-defining power in Storm for me. I'm currently in the process of leveling up a Mercs/Storm, and it's pretty much purely because Storm can make Mercs' wretchedly bad damage be less wretchedly bad, and that's all Freezing Rain's doing. So getting double FR is literally my #1 goal when I get around to doing a proper build for it. If I wanted survivability, I already have a Mercs/Time who basically can't be killed. Or I'd have gone Mercs/Cold, and eventually gotten both better mitigation *and* better damage boost, but the key term there is sadly "eventually", as Sleet comes rather late when Cold is a secondary. If I were going to focus into survivability I'd start with pets that have good damage, so the -res from FR wasn't as critical. Definitely not Mercs.

I want a "sidekicks" set, so I can be like Batman and send kids into horrifying danger and their probable deaths.

Personally I don't care about clipping issues as long as you can actually get through all the doors. Let people clip if they want to.

I really like this idea. Maybe add a few more cryptids with a badge for each and an achievement for getting all of them. LOL. Yes... Make the badge for getting all of them grant a summon power :D

Well, maybe you're fooling yourself. Putting a different power alongside Serum might follow the letter of the Cottage Rule, but completely ignores the spirit of it. If those two IOs that Mercs can't use are so powerful that the set is strictly inferior for the lack of them, the IOs are probably the outlier and should be nerfed. And I don't think anyone wants the IOs nerfed. Actually I think you're unclear on the spirit of the Cottage Rule. The purpose of the Cottage Rule was always just to not leave existing players feeling bait-and-switched. As long as the original power remains and is not taken away from players who liked it, the Cottage Rule is respected in both letter and spirit. It never had anything to do with balancing.

I just have to point out that you may have a misconception about the Aura IOs. As globals (As opposed to procs), they are always on, whether the power is activated or not. Simply by having them slotted in a power, you have the benefits, whether you have summoned those pets or not. And to be clear, the auras emanate from you, not the summon. I also have to point out that there's a misconception here: You don't just want Perma Freezing Rain. You want DOUBLE or TRIPLE Freezing Rain. It's a pseudo-pet (As are all ground targeted AoE powers) and as such it does stack with itself, even though the power is flagged as "Effect does not stack from same caster", because each Freezing Rain instance is technically being cast by a different pseudo-pet. So there is no "too much" recharge for Freezing Rain. At the recharge cap the Duration:Recharge ratio is 2.5:1, and if you can reasonably get this, you very much want it.

Actually people tell Defenders all the time that they should not try to do meaningful damage, and that they should regard their Blast set as almost entirely for debuff, not for actually doing damage. I agree with that, personally. My signature should tell you my opinion on the subject. Yes, the debuffs on Defender attacks are useful but if you aren't using them to deal damage you aren't doing your job. I always have options that would be better than dealing miniscule Defender damage on my Defenders ;-) I find that very hard to believe for pretty much any Defender primary. There's no set that needs to spam buffs all of the time and in general if you're debuffing in the latter half of a fight you're wasting those powers and enemies that are about to due and would be better of just killing them. Keep in mind Defenders do about half the damage of a Blaster so a Defender who's blasting away is like having an extra half-blaster on the team. I have multiple Time Defenders... There are two factors at work here. One is I want to be slapping as many enemies with Time Stop as possible, or else I'm trying to perma-hold a boss/EB with Distortion Field+Time Crawl and Time Stop. On an AV I'm constantly refreshing Crawl and Stop for -regen. Between that and refreshing Distortion Field the instant it comes off cooldown (Because it stacks on itself), using Mending when needed, keeping Farsight and Chrono Shift up, etc, etc, I don't have a ton of time for blasting. I do throw my AoEs with my Time/DP, but it's for the debuff, I barely notice mobs hp bars move when I attack. The second factor is that Time is an endurance hog, and I don't want to spend all my endurance blasting and come up short when I need to throw something important, or be out of endurance at the end of the fight and have to rest and hold the group up. That factor should become a non-issue in the future, once everything is fully slotted and certainly when the final build is complete with sets, but it's a big issue while leveling. So a lot of the time the best use of my powers is to not use them, once I have sufficient mitigation in place, I often need to just let the endurance recover and not spam powers. This all applies to my MMs too. ALL MM secondaries are end hogs (They have the end costs increased compared to Defender/Corruptor/Controller versions), and I have better things to do than blast, even if those better things to do are just micromanaging the pets. And I don't want to burn out my endurance blasting when I need copious amounts of it for my secondary.

Dark Servant can’t take Pet or Pet Summoning sets, so that’s a no-go. Neither can Lightning Storm. Tornado can though. It can even take MM ATOs on an MM.

Actually people tell Defenders all the time that they should not try to do meaningful damage, and that they should regard their Blast set as almost entirely for debuff, not for actually doing damage. I agree with that, personally. My signature should tell you my opinion on the subject. Yes, the debuffs on Defender attacks are useful but if you aren't using them to deal damage you aren't doing your job. I always have options that would be better than dealing miniscule Defender damage on my Defenders ;-)

Actually people tell Defenders all the time that they should not try to do meaningful damage, and that they should regard their Blast set as almost entirely for debuff, not for actually doing damage. I agree with that, personally. And with most secondaries, I find I have more than enough to do without throwing pointless attacks on a Mastermind. I'll grab the AoE if the primary has a decent debuff attached to the personal attacks, otherwise no.

Except when my proposal is demonstrably within the abilities of the admins (See Super Reflexes on Sentinels for evidence), and doesn't take anything away from anyone, since the new replacement power would be optional. Whether it's technically possible is irrelevant, and no one said it was impossible. If you change one power solely to enable exploiting of set bonuses you're going against a cornerstone philosophy the game is built on. There is no reason Serum has to be replaced. I think you need your reading comprehension upgraded. No replacement needed. Player can choose Serum still. Either that or you don't actually understand the Cottage Rule. You're not fooling anybody. The Cottage Rule isn't the cornerstone philosophy being violated by your suggestion, it's the balancing of sets around IOs that is. You just want a power that can accept pet IOs to use as a mule for the unique enhancements. Saying, "Oh, but Serum's still there for anyone who wants it, it's not being replaced," is a distinction without a difference; just being able to slot those IOs in some alternate power, even if it was as useless as Serum, makes it no choice at all which to pick. I'm not trying to fool anyone. People are objecting to my proposal on the basis of the Cottage Rule, and I'm pointing out that the Cottage Rule is easily worked around in an environment where powers can be optional. Furthermore, I'm not pretending I don't want a place where I could put some of the Aura IOs. Of course I do. I'd like Mercs to not be STRICTLY INFERIOR to all the sets that have such powers. But I also think my proposal is much better than a buffed Serum. Serum is just not a good power, full stop. Mercs have shit damage. A power that gives them a damage buff just results in polished turds. I'd much rather have an area disruption attack that provides me with damage and mitigation than a useless buff for my pets that can't damage their way out of a wet paper sack even with a full Fulcrum Shift. And you can *also* buff Serum at the same time, and leave both as options. The fact that no one would take Serum at that point only proves my point that even a buffed Serum is garbage, however.

It's because Sally isn't aggressive. Only jerks hit her. She's nice!

No way to negate the repel effect. You can however gale them all into a corner, and then hold them there with Hurricane.

The reason I don't include Incarnate powers in my builds is because Incarnate content is what you're building for. If you need Incarnate powers to reach your build targets, how do you expect to get those Incarnate powers?