Mezmera

I've tried some of this so far I'll give a general take on the things I play frequently: Kinetic Melee on stalkers is superb especially with that long animation AS buff. I do think maybe the siphon stacks on other ATs could last a little bit longer, otherwise love where its at. Can we port just this over right now? No need to wait for Christmas. Broadsword is okay. It feels better than it was but still not as good as it could be, it's a little bit of slow crunch set but there's still faster sets that put out more damage. Maybe massage it up a bit more. Dual Pistols felt good like maybe it was doing 50pts more ST damage now being full elemental when switching to the different bullets. It should help a bit more on single targets since there's a lot less enemies with high toxic/cold resistances. I would've still liked to have gotten a way to incrementally increase the dmg/tohitt by adding some sort of ranged follow up to one of those pistol attacks. The aoe felt great and even a little better, but aoe was never an issue with DP, mainly just ST dpa. Bio is the top armor and has needed some sort of slight tuning down for some time now. Other than any bugs people are finding I do have one hope that DNA Siphon can get less of a harsh nerf as it is getting. A decent amount of people just skip it for more uptime aoe damage output powers but I love the dual aspect of damage when I need it or a great heal. It feels like this power is getting kneecapped with the heal being less and the damage output severely reduced, making it an even easier skip. The whole armor t9 revamp could use some pullback on duration to somewhere between 60-90s for most of them and put some sort of crash back into it. This way that new crash tech that was just implemented can still feel relevant. There's lots of goodies for everyone to enjoy with this one thanks.

I figure it was because they didn't want to get into the guts of changing the pseudopet to inherit AT modifiers. Which means it was getting lower regular damage output as it could have been and things like Fury weren't affecting it. Leaving it so that it doesn't break hide was likely one of the byproducts of the old pseudopet behavior and was a bone left for people due to how it operated at the time. I don't disagree that if you're blasting someone out of the shadows you're breaking stealth, though I don't disagree with others that now maybe it should have some chance to crit as per that's what the AT does with their first attacks from the shadows.

That's how that ATO behaves in any attack you have it slotted in. The chance to doesn't rev up until you use the attack it is slotted in within the instance you've just loaded. That wouldn't change.

Nevermind how I feel about the change to DNA Siphon. Saying stalker Bio was ever bad comes off like someone was never able to make the most of it. My EM/Bio stalker is easily the hardest hitting ST melee character I have and the current Bio gives it great survivability along with all that great offense it gets you.

I like that change a good deal. Everyone uses fast AS since there's not as much incentive not to, just scrap and try to get the orange ring around it then hit your target. This'll give an option for people to get skilled with Placates and initial AS'ing which the AT has more intent towards anyways.

I want to like that instant recharge of Ninjitsu powers ability, I'm just not sure how handy it actually is. On my Ninjitsu stalker for the heal I put a good set in it so that it recharges real well. That leaves Caltrops and Smoke Flash to be affected most by this change. There's 3 powers I skip on my Nin stalker, Caltrops, Smoke Bomb (I'd rather have the actual placate power), and Blinding Powder. Are Caltrops and Smoke Flash going to be so good now that I'll want to double up on them in the area at times? Not sure I'm sold on the instant recharge, the absorb will be nice sure, but a 30s duration will be annoying to manage especially if there's no real benefit to instant recharging any of those Ninjitsu powers.

For armor t9's yeah its duration and netting you something you don't already have a ton of, like Elude is a waste you're already getting oodles of defense from your regular powers, but something like OWtS at least nets you a ton of resistances you likely aren't capped on plus more hp. I know a few t9's got reworked a few updates ago like the Ice Armor change which was fine and appropriate for that specifically since it was taking the place of Hibernate. I just don't want them all to be like that in duration. To me at minimum I'd like most armor t9's to have a 60s duration.

Not particularly fond of removing the ability to stay in hide after using Shield Charge but it seems like damage has the potential to improve so I'm neutral on it. As for One With The Shield some aspects I find neat. The addition of absorb is highly valuable and the Shield Slam sounds like a novel idea for it. I do take OWtS but only use it in a pinch which usually can be a longer fight than that 40s. The old crash wasn't as harsh so I'm not really swayed by its removal since after 2 minutes I'm anticipating that I was able to ride it for what I needed. Maybe the duration could be bumped a little and some numbers get massaged to compensate. Mostly my feelings on it line up with @Glacier Peak's. I'll have to give my BS/SD scrapper a playthrough now to see how I really feel. The absorb will for sure be nice, we'll see about the slam. If we can slot damage sets that might be cool.

Tried this on a KM/Psi stalker. The changes feel good. You can still feel the length of the animations but now you're doing dot over that animations cycle plus Concentrated Strike now crits instead of a redundant BU recharge for stalkers which is awesome. Burst feels alright, the one nerf of the whole KM was to bring Burst's crit rate down which you can feel the difference but its not terrible and to get dot on that and CS with crits its a fine trade. Plus stalker AS scales got raised a bit more which gives more weight to KM's AS which is the best in its class. I hadn't tested the range powers nor on any other AT. Objectively Energy Melee on stalkers is in a tier of its own and this doesn't feel like it can't give it a run for its money. It feels like Energy Melee-lite with better aoe.

Staff Stalkers is the ultimate form of Staff in CoX.

Check out Faultline's post. It's known, they wanted to at least get the new increased settings in place which they'll likely be working on the reward table fix. For now no rewards are lost beyond what you were already getting before, you can select the higher difficulties but you'll only get the old reward table until they get the workaround.

Before any weight is given to this diatribe I would like to speak on just a few points. - Giving Frozen Aura to Flashfreeze and having her use it well I agree with. I question why anyone would skip that power if they have it to select in their powerset...? - For the challenge fight may I offer to have a good control buddy to bring along if you're having troubles knowing if something is held. Maybe we tie the Soul Storm's hold fx to all of Chachki's hold powers so he can tell that he has held his target. *This is in jest* The hold mechanic is well done thanks! I didn't have the trouble knowing my target was controlled like Chachki so maybe a little user error involved on this one, but then I've been playing doms longer than our friend here has been shaving and I understand there's still room for growth so I'll be a good sport and offer to be available for tutoring. Joking aside one thing I did have for a suggestion. Not everyone takes TP on every toon and I know you have made a big beautiful lively zone and want everyone to see it as they are running this. Could we maybe adjust the distance of a few of those doors? 1-2 and 2-3 to be specific. Or maybe we can put a split zone travel like the helicopters or ferries? I would also settle for nerfing TP, our good friend here would advocate for it too I'm almost certain, almost. Other than those few points I agree with most of what was said. Very enjoyable 4star you have here. My dom felt very impactful on a lot of the run and especially the big fight, which is usually somewhat the inverse on big AV fights. It can be quite chaotic with those tornadoes and constant positioning pushing throughout the fight which is fun to keep on our toes. The one time I did get caught hard and killed I was able to confidently know I could get back up and keep that bounty held with both my ST and aoe hold even though I had just lost domination. Anyways good stuff! I'll have to give it a solo run so I can familiarize myself with the maps and see stuff I hadn't gotten to see.

In comparison to general gameplay as it has developed to this point, nukes and proc'd aoe damage spam has been king. It's not that instantly aoe confusing mobs isn't a great ability, it has just gotten overshadowed when you're clearing most of that mob within seconds. In this advanced content with not being able to wipe mobs out as fast and being able to convert the damage the enemies do into basically your own it had shown to be a good deal better than having a nuke power which was a nice change to have control be top tier again. The problem with that is as much as I think nuke's have too fast of a recharge, such a consequential aoe confuse to allow you to do this should have a recharge longer than nukes and far longer than some of them currently have/had. The problem with control in advanced mode is that enemies get this high mag confuse resistance which eliminates one avenue of aoe control. So you're left with usually the aoe hold of best use but once the enemies give themselves vengeance you need to cast another layer of that same type of hold onto them all which you've likely just exhausted your aoe hold just a bit ago to get them under control and aoe controls don't get as good recharge as aoe damage powers. Bringing a 2nd control type of character on these runs isn't going to instantly solve the issue either as it's far harder to coordinate aoe control with another person when you need it rather than just aoe damage spamming amongst the team and you're clearing targets as well. With how many good aoe confuses there are now you can't just go back to what it was when Aeon first came out since these powers have the ability to trivialize this content. To make control more attractive for people to learn and use in these more frequently some of this falls on the powers team and some on the content itself. Maybe some of the mag can be reverted on the enemies and also give some control abilities more mag for what they do. Like I'd rather have Mass Confusion actually work when I use it even if the recharge gets raised some more to add some mag to it. People like Seeds of Confusion where it's at with its recharge, okay leave it where its at along with those other new short recharging aoe confuses, altering the mag some of them do along with the recharge can be an avenue. Also on the content creation side why not make enemies have high damage resistance or do wicked damage, etc. unless held/controlled, they still will get vengeance to break them out soon but at least for a bit you're effectively gimping some groups. I enjoy the mechanics of this content for most of my characters, hopefully something can be adjusted so control doesn't feel as fringe as it has become since accounting for a few broken abilities.

An aoe confuse of 16 targets you can have recharge in 15s is a ridiculously broken power. Moreso than the current state of nukes. Between how fast Seeds recharged and procing Creepers soaking aggro, if there was any, Plant players would hardly ever see any fire come their way. It's bad habit forming to rely on two ridiculously broken powers. Its not unlike how Mind Control was with Mass Confusion having a much faster recharge and the old TK before the IO system and even those powers weren't as broken as what Plant gets to put out in two powers. Plant players can adapt just like Mind players had to, the good thing is that it took forever for the other MC powers to get massaged into form, Plant gets theirs from the jump. This still looks like a S tier set to me. And hey who knows maybe now that they have confuses more in line with what they want we can see some reverting of the ridiculous amount of mag it takes to confuse things on those pesky 4stars. (Maybe they can even throw in some 'targets dont take damage unless controlled' on top)

They literally nerfed confuses on 4* content because the devs saw how well a Plant dommie performed in one. Heck to get people their dummies I used to lead lots of runs on my Mind dom with the more sensibly OP Mass Confusion. They punished any control with a confuse all because of one outlier power. Between how fast Seeds of Confusion recharged and how Creepers were with proccing a Plant dom could run interference and there was so little the NPCs could do to counteract. The best aoe hard control you can get that just so happens to have a 15s recharge is a little bit OP. Seeds needs to be fixed so they don't have the excuse to keep making content hard on control.