siolfir

Your pick.

(Yeesh, back to dreams already? At least I'm off work now!)

Yes. Because you at least put in some minimal effort to create them in the first place, and using binds or macros to do it means you have to actually click things.

You could try Energy Melee. Same damage types, mostly slower animations. And you get to look at your hands glow. Look! They're glowing!

Yes. Purely hypothetical. Because there's no possible way the PvP community would come to a consensus on such a thing*. As for jumping into something "simple" only to realize that you've exploded a huge can of worms that breaks dozens of other systems... been there, done that. That's why I typically lean on the side of things being more complex than they seem to be. But I wanted to present the counterargument for using "can't be done" as the shortcut for "it's harder to do than you think" and get in a couple of jokes at the end. * - prior to the i13 patch notes

Well, in that case the game is correct about one thing - there isn't any tidal activity.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, response to that is easy: But because I'm still at work on a Friday...

Electric - like most resistance sets - is worse on Stalkers than it would be on a Brute or Tanker, just due to the lowered resistance cap. That said, you could cap resistances to most damage types all the time without Power Surge and still get some defense set bonuses if you want. If it's about the recharge and endurance management tools, Energy Aura provides those in a defense set, and without doing any power customization the sets even look like they belong together. Super Reflexes can get you the recharge and movement speed, but it's a tight build because you have to take so much of it to cover all the vectors. Edit to prevent double-post: It's burst and sustained damage for Stalkers. KM has the fastest "fast" Assassin's Strike at 0.67 seconds, and a regular Build Up that you can recharge and stack fairly often with the ATO proc; if you bother with Concentrated Strike you can guarantee double-Build Up for a few seconds (triple with a Gaussian's proc) even without the proc.

There isn't much that can't be coded within the game, but some things would require major refactoring while other things are essentially updating values. Given that we were led to believe that changing the aggro cap to an AT-specific value was closer to the former than the latter, after having the same argument to the same request so many times, people started just saying that things are "impossible" to get them to shut up about it so that other things could be worked on. If it's a small project, can be done relatively quickly, and won't interfere with the code performance, then it can be done quietly behind the scenes without telling anyone because you can just set the values to the current cap across all ATs. Then the next time the request comes through, you can just quietly bump the number for Blasters and Brutes to 256 and see if anyone notices on their farming characters.

I did mention another change in the post that you quoted that I'd like to see - three if you include the Total Focus animation change. Being focused isn't a bad thing, but to be worthwhile you should be great at what you focus on. Energy Melee focuses on single target damage and stuns, and because all of the stuns are single target it's worse than Electric Melee, Stone Melee, and Super Strength at stuns (all of which do it with just one AoE stun) and is only considered good for single target damage when you hit with all of your long animating attacks - if they miss, or more often, hit something already dead, then it's near the back of the pack behind sets who just hit faster. Martial Arts isn't as maligned because it actually gets to hit with its attacks - well, outside of Eagle Claw, which for all the complaints about it still has a shorter animation time (2.53) than either Energy Transfer (2.67) or Total Focus (3.3), plus the damage hits earlier in the animation instead of at the very end.

Well, if we're taking morning trains...

So it would go from 0.55 to 0.65. Still not great. At least Corruptors are at 0.75 on each already, but they probably don't want to deal with Scourge on melee sets that haven't already been ported to Stalkers or Scrappers (and with melee powers being in epic/Patron pools). A Fulcrum Shifted Energy Transfer that has a full damage Scourge would be fun, though.

Not that much of a stretch, I was debating whether or not I should reply with The Clash for Clash of the Titans or just leave my response to Son of Hercules in place, so I wandered to other sections of the forums first. Here's another stretch from 6 to 4:

I had a long post earlier, but forum maintenance ate it when I clicked Submit Reply. The long and short of it was that if you don't count Stun, Energy Melee is hardly alone in having 5 single target attacks: Kinetic Melee, Martial Arts, Street Justice, Super Strength, and for non-Tankers, Fiery Melee all also have 5 single target attacks, and that's not including the tiny cones for Broadsword and Katana/Ninja Blade. As for them all having a stun effect, at one point it was considered almost overpowered that it had a chance to stun in every power. Whirling Hands is average in every way for an AoE, so it's not really the problem. Stun is a useless power that adds nothing to the set, and is the outlier. With that out of the way, back to the long and boring part: Barrage used to be complete garbage until the recharge was tripled with a corresponding damage increase (it was Jab, but in a longer animation with damage over time in a set without double-stacked Rage). It still only has a 10% chance for a mag 2 stun; Energy Punch and Whirling Hands are also mag 2 at 30%, except the Stalker version which is 10% also. That means your reliable stuns are in Bone Smasher (60% mag 3), Energy Transfer (60% mag 3), and Total Focus (100% mag 3), ignoring Stun for now (more on that later). The fact that those 3 powers make up the bulk of your damage in a single target chain is great, but with a slow Energy Transfer you're looking at almost 5 seconds to stack stun magnitude on bosses if Bone Smasher hits - it's about 6.5 if you have to use Energy Transfer and Total Focus - and the set has only Whirling Hands for AoE control. Even if you use Bone Smasher and Stun, you're still looking at about 4 seconds; Stun isn't a short animation, it's just not as long as Total Focus or Energy Transfer. Reverting ET cuts that time drastically. What I'd like to see done with Stun is to turn it into an AoE stun and knockdown effect like Fault, using the Ground Punch alternate Foot Stomp animation (as a PBAoE) or, to keep the "melee damage" IO set slotting so the "cottage rule" people don't have a coronary, leave it with minor damage to a single target and have AoE knockdown and stun (but not AoE damage) from the "shockwave", similar to how Thunder Strike (and Fault, for that matter) behaves. That way you would have an AoE control in a primarily single target set, and if you use the structure of Fault's stun (100% mag 2, 50% additional mag 1) instead of keeping the 100% mag 3 you would still have to stack it with something for more than minions... like Whirling Hands' 30% chance or one of your "reliable" single target stuns. (edit: heck, if you're going with single target damage / AoE mez route and you just have to keep the ET/BFR animation, use it here since an AoE KD/stun sortof justifies the over-the-top animation) But really, it would be played again with just the old Energy Transfer. It would be incredible with the Dominator animation for Total Focus and change to stun; you'd have top tier single target damage in a set that could keep the small fry off of you while you were busy killing yourself as fast as Energy Transfer could recharge.

I made a character on Pineapple just to test this, and I think the problem is that the +defense is flagged to cancel on miss. If I stand on a roof with no mobs around in Atlas Park and hit Hail of Bullets while monitoring defense in combat attributes, there is no increase. If I walk over to a group of Hellions and hit Hail of Bullets, I get 11.25% to Ranged, Melee, and AoE defense (since the report was about Corruptors, I made a Corruptor). Move away from mobs, hit it again, no defense. Move into a group, hit one, get +defense. I think it should provide the +defense regardless of whether or not the power hits, but it is triggering when you hit a mob.

But everyone knows the answer to that one. Soon™.

Depends on the Defender, Corruptor, or Controller, really. Some support sets are more active than others, and some players skip a lot of the single-target buffs. For the most part I agree, though; that's why I commented about the ranged/armor that you get from the VEATs (and even earlier, from Khelds) as not preventing them from making Sentinels.

I usually just drop it into Sprint instead, then I can have one layer of stealth from either Sprint or Super Speed, or two with both.

You should watch those claws or you get...

My point was that it hurts people who aren't steamrolling already, and does nothing to stop the teams that are. It doesn't fix the problem, it just gets rid of the middle ground.