Onlyasandwich

One of the biggest hurdles a proc heavy build must overcome is hit chance. Rage pretty handily sorts that out, giving you much more freedom to skimp on accuracy.

It's especially annoying because the set bonuses for slow res are movement plus recharge, so I either have to double down and waste half my set bonus to cap out, or just deal with one of these values being lower.

Correct. This is because the upgrade power grants the defensive power to the ninjas permanently until death. It is that defensive power that is inheriting kismet, and kismet is always on because this power is passively running at all times now that the ninja has it.

I love your idea here! This would make fury an interesting resource to manage with real gameplay impact. Currently we just sort of roll in max sustainable rage into our average damage expectations of brutes, and sometimes end up disappointed that this baseline is inferior to a good scrapper. The key lever here I think is the spender power. If it were a substantial survival buff or recovery tool, we'd have this trade off between: Keep max fury and pound things into the dirt, but take noticably more damage. Maybe even technically less survivability than even a scrapper. For this to work we'd need better upsides to max fury. Maybe a -resist aura that scales with fury past 60% or so. Now we've also engineered the limited scenario where brute can out damage a good scrapper, but with a controllable trade off. Use your fury spender to go back below 60% or whatever threshold. You then bounce back with some healing or recovery from the spender, perhaps with some other modest survivability buff like 10-15% resist all. This also helps brutes actually benefit from their higher res caps without gutting their build's offensive focus. Maybe this even debuffs fury gain for some period so you can avoid spiking quickly into danger zone again. The recharge of the spender would need to be high enough that hitting it is a commitment, but low enough that it is a meaningful part of the flow of battle.

I'm thinking about coming back and starting up a Pyro of my own - I'm thinking Pyro/Rad looks like a great platform! I like Poison as well, but it doesn't quite click with the character themes I have in mind. Since Pyro has what seems like a very reliable opening hit with glittering column, you should have ample time to get your -tohit toggles and auras into position before mobs start reprisal. Glittering sets up -tohit oriented sets super well by clumping things, taking the alpha, and setting an awesome baseline of tohit to stack off of. Rad can be colored all sorts of pretty things to thematically integrate with Pyro, and has the standard suite of Rad tools we've come to count on over time, which are more powerful than ever since they buffed RI's animation time. I'm usually a fan of choking cloud, but it has minimal synergy in this combo, despite some melee encouragement from incendiary aura. Here's the build I jummed up this morning for reference -Controller (Pyrotechnic Control - Radiation Emission).mbd It looks like Multipurpose Missiles has some interesting proc opportunities, though perhaps the reality of how it's implemented will make it less powerful than Mids represents.

I like this too because it puts more pressure on tanker defenses, giving you more justification for having such high survivability, and having to make use of your resources to survive such aggro.

Personally I think the overcap mechanic is actually pretty clever, and gives us a more discrete way to tune ST vs aoe damage. If we could just go to original base damage, increased caps we've had, but with overcap redux for the extra targets I think we'd be in an ok place, though even then I think the overcap reduction is a bit extreme, and could use more conservative diminishing returns on extra targets.

If they are recalculating base damage based on the design formula due to a radius increase that is ostensibly part of a unique AT bonus, it isn't so much a unique bonus as it is moving a slider from smaller and stronger to wider and weaker. I hope they see this feedback and consider setting base damage from original radius rather than tanker adjusted! Thanks to everyone who has tested and shared data. Alternatively, remove all the radius buffs entirely but also remove the overcap mechanic and just let them keep increased target caps.

I'm happy with the latest change to Seeds. It now serves properly as a Controller "most spawns" opener. I had mine procced for damage too, and this isn't so useful any more. I consider it a fair enough balance. Spirit Tree is great! I'm loving it so far. It gives me another opener or "oh crap" power to bridge the gap when things get messy. Spores is still great, as it was on the previous beta patch. I hadn't given Vines much of a shake on the previous patch, but put in some more work with it this time around. Previously I would use it as a "stuff is going south > stop the mobs now" emergency button, but it doesn't really work well for this any longer. It's a bit slow acting. Instead, it's more of a conditional opener if Seeds is on cooldown, or planned measure if I know multiple mobs are risking aggro and I want to lock one down at the start. Overall this is okay. I can't say that I used it a ton before the change, but I do miss the emergency button. My previous comment on the last patch stands for Creepers. They are sort of okay, but weirdly the most skippable power in the set now. It's very sad to see what was once a centerpiece power of the set (alongside Seeds) to a "maybe skip." I would love to see them summoning more entities as they do on live, even if the powers these entities use are changed to mitigate the impact of procs within them. Fly Trap is good! I already took it on live anyhow, and now it actually stands a chance of living without heavy support. ST damage is low as some have noted, but it has some okay AOE, and provides a decent distraction as well.

My observations so far: Seeds is still usable and decent, though as others have noted the 10 target limit keeps it from being a very safe opener. I have found Spirit Tree or Spores to be an okay substitute here when solo, and the Deep sleep improvement on spores makes this more workable overall. I do feel more obligated to take both of these powers for functional opening play, which means tighter power choices overall. This isn't necessarily a terrible thing, as it's nice to actually have a reason to use them. I would personally prefer a duration nerf, while keeping the old target cap. Carrion Creepers are much less interesting, and seem to spawn many fewer pseudo-pets. Perhaps the original behavior wasn't intended, and this is what they meant when they said they were addressing cascading procs. However, even without procs the Creepers now no longer scale effectively with crowd size, and are substantially less useful. Their damage contribution is pretty forgettable as well. Perhaps I am just spoiled by the comparison to my previously proc bombed creepers, which were indeed pretty absurd in the right saturated environment. I would prefer an approach that keeps their scaling summon behavior more in line with live, while diminishing the impact of procs within the pseudo-pet powers in some other way. I like the adaptive recharge in Vines. I already used the long recharge aoe controls as is, and this only helps.

Please don't go - the drones need you. They love you.

If you click it once only, it's not like you're vulnerable while waiting to click it again. Single clicking when you meant to double click for the bastion effect doesn't exactly punish you, it just means you look all cool and frozen for a second when you didn't mean to. Overall I like these changes! I definitely didn't use hibernate on cool down as is, so the increased recharge didn't really hurt. Meanwhile, the bastion resist can help stabilize you when you pop into intangible during an emergency.

This for sure! When they go to melee each other, they clump tighter. An aoe hold just freezes them where they are, which may not always be ideal. Alternatively, just combine Fold Space with any dom and immob/stun to your heart's content. 😉

I agree with @Hedgefund here. OF KD proc is good because if it goes off once, you get a tangible benefit. Most any mob gets knocked down unless just immune. Cupid's crush is only Mag 2, so luits and bosses won't see any effect at all, unless you happen to have some other confuse effect that you are, by luck, applying to that target currently. I can see some utility slotting it in a long-recharge aoe with high proc rate to mitigate minion tag back, or maybe if you have a slot to burn in a confuse heavy build and want to toss it in there for stacking at random. Mastermind pets have some aoes that would inherit the proc and have more noticeable impact. However, pet slots are already at a premium, and are better served with base enhancement or damage procs more often.

I think it's at least above average aoe for a stalker, maybe even excellent. Guarded spin procs super well, so you end up with two very nice aoes, which is not the case for most other stalker primaries. I agree that it's not a revelation of superiority, but feel like it's one of the better stalker sets in general, not just "best on this at but still blah."