Cutter

I can't argue against your first point- a better baseline would result in a better top end. The question perhaps should be (and I'm not at all saying I'm equipped to answer it): "Is a more potent top end, for those who deeply invest in it, an acceptable tradeoff for a better introductory / "newb friendly" / minimal investment experience?" To your D&D comparison, typically the Fighter descriptions tend to be a pretty sparse affair while the Casters have pages upon pages of material. The differences in complexity are known right up front. That's not the case here. With D&D, it's easy for a new player to look at, say, a Wizard, and think "that looks hard, I'll come back to it when I'm more familiar with the game". With CoH, given that lack of information, a player who tries DA and finds it lacking isn't likely to think "that was hard, I'll come back to it when [same as above]..."; I would suggest that the response would more likely be "that was hard, DA sucks, never gonna try that again." Which is a shame. I don't think we want to go down the road of labeling sets "advanced users only", as that opens a whole barrel of worms. And we're long past the era of experience-gated ATs. Honestly not sure what the "correct" or "ideal" approach to that might be. But I'm pretty sure letting inexperienced players struggle, hate and abandon the set isn't it.

So I was a fairly prolific contributor to that DA conversation (Weekly Discussion 48 if anyone wants to go take a boo at the whole thing). While I'll freely admit that a couple of my ideas late in the thread got a little out of hand, there was also some positive reception to these few early thoughts, which somewhat mirror @Neogumbercules' suggestions. I've bolded the two powers that Neo discussed, and left the rest for posterity. To a few other posters' points - yes, DA can be built to do ridiculous things, but it requires a pretty substantial IO investment to get there, along with arguably a deeper knowledge/learning investment to get into what makes it tick than other sets ask for. It absolutely rewards those investments, but its baseline is (again, arguably) perhaps less rewarding to the casual player than other sets. So maybe not a full suite of radical changes, but a couple ways to bring up that baseline would be welcomed.

Yup. My Shield/Elec tank runs 5 PT:Heals, all slotted in attacks, and I see a nice regular stream of little green numbers floating up. It's only in auto powers where multiple PT:Heals deliver diminishing returns.

NPC chatter in Brickstown: "relys" should be "relies"

/Ice also has some good mitigation tools with slows and knockdown.

Derp, don't know how I missed AG! And I appreciate the reasoning behind Dark Blast and Gloom - I get the basics of number theory but struggle with proc math. Once I get her slotted out (and finish leveling) I'll revisit this with tales of my exploits!

Ugh yes triple post... Dark vs DP seems to swing wildly in favour of DP in terms of AOE, which in my experience has been the driving force behind pushing to the /x8 side of the difficulty slider. Dark feels very single-target focused. Is that actually true in practice at the high end? And if so, is there value in looking at Umbral Torrent or an epic AOE to shore that up? Can Dark at 180+ recharge get away with a single-target chain in the vein of DB > AG > LD > AB > repeat? If so that would free a slot for another AOE to complement Dark Obliteration.

Many thanks for this. I did a rebuild on my own last night that hits just over 181% recharge, which almost makes it. I see your hypothetical slims down to only AB and LD with procs. It looks like that's the difference here - you're getting some extra 10% recharge in favour of removing procs from the low percentage attacks. More to think about!

Now that I look at it, I'm 99% sure that the bulk of the /SR side of my build was lifted from yours. Mine came out of a few different posts but your build sticks out most as one I remember looking at. So some big thanks there!

Thanks @oldskool for weighing in. And for pointing out where my thought process wasn't giving me as much bang for the buck as I thought it was! (And for the encouragement that my build could do more than I think it could 🙂 ) Gonna take some time to noodle around a rebuild and see how far I can push it. Quickly tho: I just noticed, while looking at the numbers in more detail, that Gloom and Life Drain have almost identical stats. Gloom has a slightly faster cast time and shows a 20% -RES; LD has a very slightly higher base damage, the wee heal, and ability to slot accurate healing procs. If I were to look at dropping one of those in favour of an epic attack that can slot Force Feedback +rech (assuming that's enough to make the difference for perma-hasten), does that sound like a recommendable approach? Looks like KO Blow or Thunder Strike could both fill the bill as 1-dip wonders. I could look at changing the slotting of Dark Obliteration, replacing Oppo Strikes with 5x Ragnaraok + Oppo proc. Might be worth it for the extra proc and couple % more recharge?

So I'm used to building my Sentinels the "traditional" way, as in chasing set bonii and leveraging straight damage in attacks. However, seeing recent threads about /SR, and how (relatively) easy it is to cap defenses without needing too many sets, I thought I would take the opportunity (ha!) to rejig my fledgling Dark/SR and see what I can do with her. I'm going into this knowing that Dark has a fairly limited selection of procs, outside of loading up Abyssal Gaze, so I've chosen to aim for passive damage bonii on top of what procs seemed to make sense. Big question: Can any of my primary attacks be subbed out for epics instead, and in doing so provide a better return on the investment? I'm loath to give up my T1 and T2 for now, due to the way their timing lets me stack both Opportunities at once. I think everything else but Blackstar is fair game tho. The other target I'd be interested in hitting is shaving the last 12 seconds off Hasten to get it perma. Preferably without Alpha - Spiritual will do it, but its other aspects are pretty much wasted, and it also messes with proc math. Also note that I don't chase solo ITFs or any of the major metrics, so I'm not shooting for bleeding edge here. However, I do like to feel like I'm contributing on teams, and would like to be able to solo something like +1/x8 at reasonable speed. Thanks in advance for any suggestions to improve on this!

My quest for one-word names continues, thanks to just snagging LUMP on Torchbearer.

I've built at least one tank of every primary, doubling up on Dark, Fire, Rad and Shield. Of those, I'd give the base-level survivability nod to Rad (Dark can do obscene things but requires significant IO investment). As mentioned, Rad also has end management tools and mini-proc-nukes if you choose to build them. I'd also argue for Elec as another strong primary. Really tho, it's hard to go wrong with any of the sets as long as you know what strengths to build for and weaknesses to manage.

Really enjoying Shield/Elec. AoE for days. Really unconventional build (slotting) but I'm happy to share it.

I don't suppose there's a "mail-in ballot" option for those of us who'll be out of town that weekend? 🙂

I have no idea what I'm doing with this combo. I played a DP/ElAff corrupter into the low 30s entirely by feel, and have now re-rolled to this spec. I kinda sorta maybe get the DP side of things, but have never played Pain before. He's at 22 now (technically 26, but I have no idea what I'm doing with power choices so he hasn't trained). I have half a build "planned", with plenty of holes to fill. Gonna be a mix of solo and team, but definitely do not want to become obligated to be a "healer". I expect to be playing close to / in melee range for the bubble, buff, and debuff. All options are on the table, tho I'd prefer to limit purples in the build until I've decided the investment is worth it. (On a semi-related note, does the Panacea proc in Soothing Aura work like it does in Lifegiving Spores, i.e. chance to proc for all teammates in the bubble?) Many thanks in advance!

My first 50 on HC was an Elec/Staff tanker. Great fun to play, and as was mentioned, loads of AOE with passable ST. I stance dance a fair bit, but to echo @Hjarki Form of the Body is my go-to. Altitis is real - I haven't touched her build in months. It's not "optimal", but I'm happy to throw it out there for consideration and inspiration. (Incarnates as they are, not as they eventually will be.)

(Context: I have an Elec/Elec defender in her 40s, and dragged a DP/Elec corruptor into the 30's before re-rolling him.) As far as blasting goes, the only power I've found any of the newer endmod sets to have value in is Short Circuit. My def runs a full set of Synapse's Shock there. That alone is dropping over 65% of the mob's blue bar. But the damage is pretty crap. Wall of ElecAff rant incoming 🙂 My experience with the pet and chains has been that it's incredibly frustrating solo, and useless teamed. Solo - you have to target the pet to benefit yourself. This means every time you want to heal or buff yourself (which, as was noted, can be often due to how busy the set can be), you not only have to take time off blasting, but you ALSO have at least one extra click in there to target your pet first. If you've got twitch shooter reflexes that's prolly no big deal, but for my slower hands I've been on the wrong end of the life-and-death difference more often than I like. Yes, you technically can just target through Sparky all the time to remove that need to click, but then you're firing blind 'cause there's no reticle telling you what the pet has fixed on. This also doesn't include the fact that you have to resummon the pet pretty frequently, again taking time out of blasting. Team - on my def I've literally summoned the pet maybe half a dozen times when I'm on a team. I find it to be wholly unnecessary, except maybe when you get to an AV. You don't need it for chains, and you sure don't need it to debuff standard mobs. With that in mind, I quite enjoy the defender. She mostly teams, and I feel like I'm "supposed" to use my primary more often anyway. I still find time to blast (SC > BL does good work). On the flipside, I nuked my corruptor. I wanted to run him more as a solo character, and I found ElAff just didn't work for me there. If you're going to be teaming more often than not, you could likely make it work for you. I have used it while mezzed before. No more break-frees is a plus. I'll also note that the protection granted by Faraday is supposed to linger for a few seconds after you leave the cage - I haven't noticed it, but also haven't gone looking for it either.

It's a cool idea. And there's precedent for it too - Dehydrate in Water Blast has a dual build/spend role.

Revamped and recoloured an older design for a new Corruptor - meet Taskforce!

Not really tongue in cheek. I'm sure it's by no means a commonly-known phobia (heck, I only know of it because of random Reddit button), but I figured there are enough fears out there that someone might have looked for and snagged it.

Straight from the "I can't believe I got that name" thread, an old concept reimagined, whose name I am shocked was available on Excelsior last night: THALASSOPHOBIA!

Just reimagined an old concept whose name I never bother to sit on. I'm pretty shocked that Thalassophobia was still out there on Excelsior...

The funniest thing with Misadventure is there's a hero arc (I don't remember whose, highish-level iirc) where you fight a number of try-hard villains, one of whom is named Misadventure! That was a pleasant surprise.

My kids had amazing luck bagging names on their account: Power Blade Pistol Sunset Energy Blast I like to think I've done well too: Hot Lead Max Damage Turmoil Misadventure (x2) Taskforce (x2) Enchanted Borealis Moonless Splash Damage Ceramic Lagrange Beaufort (x2) Scrapperlock Roflstomp Weathered (my most recent snag) It's always the one-word names that I'm most pleased to get my hands on.