Mezmera

Dom's tier 2 assaults are usually some of the better powers in their sets. They're melee attacks with high dpa to coax you into thinking of them as a hybrid assault approach. Bone Smasher available right out of the gate will be awesome! Dark's t2 is its best dpa power. Lots of upside on this for doms being able to skip a quickly obsolete power for a very strong one.

This is what I went ahead and crafted on test. The thing is an absolute animal.

I'll say at the very least having options in your first secondary power to choose from will give people more to scrutinize when they are looking at these powers. The characters with armor secondary's I haven't bothered to look at since I take mostly all the armors available. The characters with an assault I went ahead and logged most in to have a better look at those first two powers and I must say aside from my Doms I don't see much I will be reworking. My tank getting an attack with a very slight uptick in dpa isn't all that consequential to me when I consider with the t1's much faster animation I am afforded quicker responses to grab extra aggro or fix myself if some attack got through. Same for my blasters, it'll be hard to drop a ranged attack I can use while mezzed. My defender's t1 does some nice extra debuffing compared to a slight upgrade in damage with the t2 which I don't feel is better. As far as the rest of the powers being available earlier I understand the problem with the nukes but those nukes are already OP as it is, that's more of a nuke problem than a power availability problem. There's a much broader pallet of powers I now have to realize to be more choosy with. The most noticeable thing aside from the t2 power option is how deep you can get with the epic pools. To me the most intriguing part of this is the t2 option and the epic pools. Other than that it's hard to pretend we weren't already well past power creep especially for exemping what with all the extra slots and fully fleshed out builds of lvl 50 characters.

This is such a beastly powerset. The pets do great on their own and the control is just right where it doesn't take you out of positioning if you don't want to. If you're in melee and getting surrounded you can drop one of the aoe controls and watch as your pets devour the enemies alongside with you. It pairs well with melee style doms, real fluid. This thing is about to cause some strife between me and my main.

Well. Having the option to choose from the first two powers in the secondary will be real nice for a lot of characters. I agree with the sentiment that some power pools add just as much to the power creep as your main powers so by having some main powers available earlier at the cost of things like Hasten and Leadership powers isn't all that much power creep that it seems it could lead to. I wouldn't be looking to change most of my characters because of earlier access to powers since I'd still be choosing the same ones just in a different order BUT I will for sure appreciate the option of the t2 power out of the gate. Overall I like the idea. Excuse me while I go look at all of the characters I will be looking to respec.

On the Dual Pistols side of things here's what I go with. Pistols Swap Ammo Bullet Rain Executioner's Shot Hail of Bullets This is a very fine rotation and will allow for you to lay out those Dark powers while getting in your best shots.

Ice/Cold Corruptors are great all around for these. You can always use the defense shielding they bring along with their great debuffing. Ice procs great damage. Illusion is great but more so on the ITF for tricking those Hostless. Trick Arrow is a fantastic debuff set as well The backbone I look to build a run on these are 2 Colds, 1 Kin and 1 TA. I'll take a Nature to get the team tanky if its offered. Beyond those first 4 I'd look to get 2 great dps blasters usually Fire and I like an Energy Melee Stalker for that great ST dps. Then having a good tank to fall back on is always nice, you'll want one with great DDR and capable of decently high resists for those nasty Cim swords.

DDR caps at 95% which SR can easily attain. My Shield tank is at 90% without using Ageless, seems pretty close to me. Then Shield can bring much more to the table.

It'll fluctuate particularly when the next higher tier costumes come out but yeah I'd say 10 mil for these will still even be a bit high. So if these end up being anything less than the current 10 million then my example proves you're better off making better use of your merits and buying these PAPs which could very well end up being the value of 2 for 50 merits. The market will take care of this.

PAPs are hovering around 10 million which will probably be about where it settles. You could trade in 100 merits for a Winter enhancement and sell it for 20 million and buy yourself 2 PAPs...

It's the combination of debuffs in Benumb and a few of other debuffs plus then yes its the defense shields which the soft cap is raised quite a bit higher whereas the resistance cap is a hard stop at the AT values. Lots more versatility to bring to the team in Cold which really is nothing new, except the defense shields shine brighter now.

If you're organizing these things it's good to know what is good to bring. If you're joining a 4 star ITF and you see a bunch of meleers on your team you might want to tell the lead to reconsider team makeup or make up a reason to be excused. As someone that organizes Relentless Aeon's frequently if I'm pulling people from LFG my broadcast will look something like "Relentless Aeon lf debuff/dmg w/barrier". A lot of debuffers come with some shields, either resists or defense, but I'll certainly take a one stop shop character like TA that can provide quasi defense and resist shields without being encumbered by a cap. Barriers and Rebirth fill a lot of holes, effective debuffs are what are really hard to get through incarnates.

The thing is a lot of people run quite a few Barriers on these HM tf's and their teams usually will consist of some support characters like Colds and other buffers so you should be resist capped and defense soft capped. What TA does is that it gets around these caps and allows for even more buffing by debuffing the enemy of -50%+ damage (great resist shield) and -25%+ tohitt (great defense shield) by staying proactive and affecting the enemies. Plus then it also brings so much more to the table in other debuffing. I'd take a TA and 2 Colds all day on these HM task forces.

Gesundheit! Yes do see @Bionic_Flea's one topic that somehow doesn't involve @Jimmy

Are you suggesting the moneybags just may be attempting to manipulate the market? Egads! How very real life. You all have done a fantastic job of keeping the market affordable for any player, fresh or old, to be able to deck themselves out to the 9's. The grind is so much less than on live which I appreciate so much, after I got a few first characters well built it just snowballed to the point I can afford to build new characters if I feel like it from time to time and still give stuff away nonchalant. All of my 50 characters have top end builds whereas on retail I'd only have my doms with the expensive builds. If the point of seeding the market is to get it to the point where people can just log on and play the game whatever they feel like without feeling inadequate because they can afford a top end build themselves then marvelous job. I'm fine with the aether being in such demand and I'm okay with this one new currency for flair, if it stays at just this one extra currency. That it will just be for flair and not any permanent power buff I think it's a cool way to entice people into lots of activities without introducing some must have powercreep. With all of the moaning about it though part of me feels there should be power buffs offered on top of just flair since that would be most attractive to those who have tinkered with their characters to be able to perform these harder tasks. If the HC staff is going to be doing all of this to keep the game moving forward and wants to try to generate interest skewed a bit more towards team oriented play through certain rewards all the while dedicating your time to generate this flair I'm all for it. Thanks for taking the time out to read and reply to all of this randomness as well. Now get back to work we need a new HM goldside TF stat!

Ooh. I don't use mids or any type of software. Here's what I do with these powers though. Flash Arrow : 4 Clouded Senses (no proc) Glue Arrow : 53 Dsync Slow/Rech/End Ice Arrow : 50+5 acc and 5 dmg procs (my lead attack) Poison Arrow : 2 Purple sleep (acc/rech) Acid Arrow : 3 Annihilation w/res proc and an Achilles proc Disruption Arrow : 2 Synpase (rech) Oil Slick Arrow : 5 Ragnarok and Achilles proc EMP Arrow : 2 Synapse and 2 Superior Entomb (rech) this one can go all kinds of ways but I like chasing recharge for this one. Pistols : 6 of Defender ATO (can't remember the names but the one with the good 6th bonus) Swap Ammo Bullet Rain : 5 other Defender ATO + Force Feedback proc Executioner's Shot : 5 Apocalypse + Achilles proc Hail of Bullets : 5 Armageddon + Fury of Gladiator -res proc TA is real nice in that you don't have to go wild with slotting since there's not much benefit from sets and the real benefit is in the powers themselves so I like to get the best enhancement values for traveling like acc/rech. I skipped Entangling Arrow because I go with FoW pool and take Weaken Resolve instead which I wasn't getting to use both powers. I also go with Power Mastery for power build up to boost Unleash Potential and Vengeance but the pools I leave to you since its a lot about preference.

Battle Agility DDR is enhanceable, I have 71.5% defense enhancement in it running Agility Alpha. I also don't use Ageless to get there, I just take all the powers in Shield that provide DDR.

Um you all do realize this thing just came out yes? I'm sure some data-mining will be made use of to configure these drops are a bit more in line to encourage all types of playing the game. I'd bet lots of things are on the backburner to get released in this manner for you @battlewraith like a Hobo costume, I wouldn't hold my breath on the Gynecologist one though, patience kemosabe.

Main Tank - Rad Armor or Shield (Grant Cover is a very nice team buff) 2 Colds, Maybe one with Illusion Control to trick those Hostless 1 TA Defender 1 Nature Defender 2 Blastas 1 Wildcard: Could be some hard hitting EM/Bio Stalker or another debuffer.

Yes I'd go as far as to say that two 35+ TFs are called for in Praetoria. It wouldn't need to be all right away but if they are going with a fresh HM TF they've proven themselves adept at making these things so I'd like to see the next one set in Praetoria medium in length, then a bit longer one later on. As far as Praetorian Hami I'm not sure if it wouldn't be better to build off of the UG and Magi with an itrial dedicated to Praetorian Hami, if more itrials are on the radar that is.

I'm hazarding a guess based on how much of a development time sink this became for the live team and continues on. I'd think if it were so easy to implement what you'd want without any major QC oversight it would have been done instead of them having their AE featured story content they highlight.

I can't see this will be an easy task for the HC team to code something as complex as this to allow for people to be able to craft in-game content that wouldn't be somehow game breaking. You're just taking it from the AE building and putting it on the streets. The big drawback to AE is that it comes off as a creation intended to allow what was the live team to draw down their actual content creation in hopes that user generated fanfics would suffice. It's a lazy approach to content creation which can and has gone all kinds of sideways inside those AE buildings which I'm sure created more headaches for the live team than focusing on releasing their own manicured content. This one seems far-fetched sorry. There's factions in game already that could be made better use of, which it looks to me like that's HC's direction. Less development time on creating new factions when we already have so many to choose from and just give them some new abilities means more time crafting things we've seen from Aeon and ITF. Aside from creating their very own enemy group this is something HC is doing if you're not picking up on that. Yes I'd like more actual costume pieces instead of overlays but that may just be the intent of getting out this new currency before they go ham on giving us tons of costumes. You'll just have to play the game a little bit to get them, not a big deal. I can't imagine its easy to break off some of those textures so if they want to reward you for taking part in various activities to get them I say great, we used to have to pay for that kind of thing. There's already oodles of combinations. Sure I'd like more Dominator stuff but what fun will it be when I'm just running these new shinies through the same old stuff. I'd like a few new powers here and there as all of us would but we don't need a deluge of powers created as I think this takes a considerable amount of time to craft brand new stuff. Okay.

That's why I think it's a good idea to have the WST reward of these things to be all encompassing and some arc completion bonus. This is also a good way to get people to level their characters to 50 so they get a full experience. 2% chance isn't anything to hang your hat on though yes.

This currency doesn't just drop from Hard Mode content, it comes from all types of activity while playing the games content. I don't disagree though that sub-50 characters should get these Aether drops from the WST just the same as 50's and that there should be a better way of previewing these items but I think this kind of consolidated way to unlock various things that interest you is a good way to generate interest in playing the games features.

I'm all for their currency thing. If this means the devs will spend their valuable time breaking apart highly requested costume pieces we can use to decorate our characters and want to have it as a reward for playing the games content I'm all for it. Just so long as the redeemables aren't ever performance enhancing, although I wouldn't mind being rewarded for accomplishing these harder task, I see how a permanent character buff can lead to some envy so lets just leave it as flair. We can call it carrot on a stick or what have you but if it means they'll get costumes like the Seer robes released in this manner while giving us quality new content to play while trying to earn this currency then what's there to gripe about? Its a good idea to have a consolidated currency for all kinds of various redeemables, the people running around with the Cimerroan armor piqued peoples interest in running ITF since that's how you got it. If this is perceived as some grand plan to tank Halloween salvage prices get real.