kelly Rocket

It's just a name... If it was called "Longer weaker Build-Up" would you be skipping it? I like to RP and theme is important to me, but I don't care what the powers are named. I'll fluff it to be whatever I want.

The problem with a swap ammo power would be that if we look at Dual Pistols, Chem is kind of the only good one. Fire's damage boost is negligible, and Cryo gives less of a mitigation bonus than Chem. It's not a bad idea, giving all their gun attacks -damage would certainly help them with survivability, no argument. But you'd pretty much *always* be using chem. And ultimately I feel like what the set really needs (Well, not counting stopping them from suicidally running into melee all the damn time) is more damage. Keeping them alive can already kind of be done by picking a secondary with really good mitigation, but then you're still left with the problem that their damage is awful and your clear times are abysmal.

I really hope this gets fixed at some point. Wormhole is such a cool power, and kind of Grav Control's main special trick.

I've been in favor of changing it to an Artillery Strike for ages. Something like a ground targeted AoE pseudopet field that does knockdown (Like Earthquake) and also damage over time. However I also like the suggestion of turning it into a combined leadership toggle of sorts. That would be thematic, and give Mercs something unique.

Apples to oranges comparison. And CO's problem wasn't anything to do with "Archetypes", it was that all the powersets were the same with different colors.

I wrote "DPS/DPA" deliberately because even the DPS (balance for recharge alone) isn't anything close to balanced.

The problem with your analogy is that I'm perfectly happy to let PvPers have this... If they also take all the things that I'd have to go into PvP zones to get which can be used in PvE, and make it so I don't have to go into those zones to get them anymore. But any time I make that quite reasonable suggestion, I'm instantly attacked by all the PvP players for my selfish desire to have these "non-required" things in PvE. So, if that's their attitude then mine is I don't think these accolades are required for them either. I'd be happy to let PvPers level from 1-50 without ever playing PvE. I'd be happy to let them get all their IOs through PvP. I'd be happy to let them never ever have to set foot in the PvE zones at all. As long as there's nothing in the PvP zones which is useful in PvE and can't be obtained through PvE.

There are now. There weren't originally--which is what I was discussing. And furthermore, even with those formulae different sets have WILDLY different DPS/DPA potential.

My first instinct is to say it wouldn't work well as Necro pets are fragile and Storm doesn't provide much defense/resist, and because Necro's strength is CC and Storm tends to be rather disruptive. But frankly, once you get Storm loaded out with Sudden Acceleration in everything, it would probably work. You're gonna wanna be spamming a KB->KD converted Gale constantly to keep your pets alive though.

It's absolutely not functionally identical because I have to deal with the anxiety of knowing someone might show up and try to kill me, and I don't want to have to deal with that. If there were pvp-disabled versions of those zones where you could go to get those things, I'd be fine with that.

I'd agree regarding knockdown, but not knockback. The extreme increase knockback causes in your clear times utterly outweighs the benefit in mitigation. And yes, clear times matter. XP/hour matters. Knockdown is very valuable. Knockback is not. Unless you're soloing at absolute scrub difficulty. And I'm afraid that I don't believe that for a second about their damage formulae. The quite vast disparities in the DPS (Let alone DPA) between sets can't be explained by anything other than deliberate design. Especially when you consider that those gaps have been tightened over the years, by people who actually were trying to reduce the DPS/DPA gaps, and they're still this big. And they do generally line up such that powers with no secondary effects do better damage than those with secondary effects. I know they claim to have had a formula and intended for everything to be equivalent, but I don't believe it for a microsecond.

And I'll say it again: I don't "need" Shivans the same way they don't "need" the buffs from accolades! IT'S STILL AN ADVANTAGE! And the damn PvPers can have it when I CAN GET SHIVANS WITHOUT GOING TO BLOODY BAY AND NOT ONE SECOND BEFORE!

It's absolutely how Cryptic did it in the very dawn of the game, when they first made it.

Yes there is. Because I still have to go into PvP zones to get my Shivans, and they don't have to go into PvE to get their accolades. If I have to suffer, they should have to suffer too.

In my opinion, most of the powers and sets that have knockback are actually weaker than others in terms of damage, because the original devs counted knockback as a beneficial effect and reduced damage accordingly (Much as they did with other actually beneficial effects like -ToHit). Energy Blast and the Peacebringer powers for instance are significantly below average in damage. There are only a few specific outlier powers which become balance issues with knockback conversion, and they're *already* problematic, even if all we had was the unique Overwhelming Force piece. Bonfire is insanely strong, for instance. But giving everyone an inherent toggle for KB->KD conversion wouldn't change that picture noticeably.

They're as required for PvE as Accolades are for PvP IMO. And this argument is just another example of PvP boosters wanting to have rewards in PvP which give advantages in PvE, but not wanting any PvE rewards that give advantages in PvP. I can't tolerate that disparity. Either we have both or neither.

It's not a level check per-se, it's a mag protection granted by the purple patch. As I suggested before, I'd actually like to see teleport mag protections just removed from bosses. There's not really a lot of point to them, and you can't stack teleports to overwhelm the protection like you can with holds/immobs/mez, so it becomes an exception to the usual mechanics and somewhat unfairly penalizes people who build a teleport-centric toon.

Strongly disagree. I don't really see terrible Masterminds on teams much at all. If I was going to pick the AT that carries the most risk of a bad player dooming the team, it'd be Peacebringer. SO MANY AWFUL PB PLAYERS.

Heh. My goals were simple: 1. Soft cap all the things! 2. Perma-Hasten and Chrono Shift. 3. Maximize pet damage through crowd control locking the enemy into as small an area as possible. 4. Eh... Add some S/L/E/N resist I guess... Only real shame in the build is I have full Gaussians for the defense boost, but I have basically no way at all to make use of the Build Up proc. Aside from Kick, Shadow Maul, and the Blackwand lol. Still, it does so much I can hardly complain about the one thing it doesn't do.

You might be correct there, although I think Accuracy bonuses may actually apply to pet powers if the bonus was active when you summoned them... Anyway, against +4s the Assault Bot should have 39+11.81+10 = 60.81% HitChance. And he procs Soulbound frequently, which gives him another 32% which brings his HitChance to 92.81, nearly capped. And reaches the cap when I'm affected by Power Boost. You could trivially swap the Damage/Endurance for the Accuracy/Damage in the Superior Mark of Supremacy pieces on the Assault Bot and bring him to 1.3313(39+11.81+10) = 80.956353% HitChance even without the Soulbound proc though. I built this a while back, so if I were doing it again I might shuffle the pet IOs a little bit, but a lot of it would stay as-is. I'd be strongly tempted to ditch the AoE Defense Aura for instance, but it would need to be replaced with another IO from the Superior Command of the Mastermind set to keep the +10% recharge bonus. The Protector Bots I view as more force-field/heal bots than anything, and their damage is sort of weak so I focused on the defense, and making sure they didn't knock any targets back on me. Edit: Additionally, the Nerve or Vigor alphas would easily eliminate any accuracy shortfalls this build might have.

I find the Assault Bot rarely if ever misses with the slotting I'm using. Between Supremacy, Tactics, and the 45% (!!!) accuracy bonus I'm getting from Set Bonuses, he doesn't seem to need any additional slotting. And I mean, if they wander out of Supremacy range they're dead anyway as all the Auras drop, Maneuvers drops, etc.

Well I've literally experienced it. Put Overwhelming Force on the Assault Bot, was seeing knockback left and right (And I had Sudden Acceleration on the others, so it wasn't them, and I was playing on +4/x8 so it wasn't a low level target problem). I noticed whenever the Assault Bot used his Incendiary Swarm Missiles, they'd cause knockback. And yes, the Assault Bot had been resummoned. This went on for a couple of days before I got sick of it and swapped the Sudden Acceleration from the Battle Drones to the Assault Bot, and that stopped the Assault Bot causing knockback, but now the Battle Drones were doing it (Albeit significantly less than the Assault Bot was). So I bought another Sudden Acceleration and put it in the Battle Drones and it fixed the problem and I've not had it since. You can look here and see my bug report on it, and others who replied that they were having the same issue. There are other posts in the bug reports forum on it as well.

I got one of these, personally: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B016ZF77OA I find it works well, and has just enough buttons that I don't lose track. Also I mouse with a fingertip grip, which means I absolutely must have a place to grip the mouse with my thumb that isn't a button, so the radial design is perfect for me. I know it's just a no-name Chinese company, but none of the big names (Logitech, Razer) had what I was looking for, since the Naga Hex is 7 buttons now.

I'd strongly recommend against Overwhelming Force in your Assault Bot. In my experience, he'll throw enemies in all directions with that still. Only Sudden Acceleration actually completely stops his Knockbacks. I'd also recommend SA in both other summons, because they too do knockback quite frequently in my experience, and knockback works against Bots' damage moreso than other sets even. Bots is heavily dependent on keeping the enemies clumped together for damage output. Here's my Bots/Time. It's soft-capped (Overcapped, actually) on positionals and types, except for Psionic, a bit heftier S/L resists, fully soft-caps the bots (Incarnate caps all of them except the Protectors, when you use Power Boost before Farsight), and dishes excellent damage in my experience. Three unique -recharge procs, one of which is slotted in two separate powers, mean this build can generally seriously hamper even AVs' attack rates. I have basically no reservations in recommending this build. I've soloed TFs, AVs, and GMs with it.

You'd have to check the log to make sure it hit, rather than missing, to be sure whether it worked or not though.