Storm Blast Needs More: A Summary

[Videra]

Hello, everyone!

 

To cut straight to the point, as you all know, Storm Blast is painfully mid - despite likely being the best set that HC has added. Below, I will jot out a set of major pain points that could be corrected in order to make improve Storm Blast and potentially make it more competitive.

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• Storm Cell feels anemic: Simply put, Storm Cell has a unique mechanic which causes a lightning strike to potentially proc when you cast a Storm Blast ability - a good idea, in theory, but in practice the lightning proc occurs at an average rate that results in it both not being particularly visually impressive and also being a weaker rain power than, say, Blizzard or ROF, - despite having a conditional aspect to its damage. This is a sad state of affairs for the marquis power of the set.

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• 'Replace' Flags: Both Category Five and Storm Cell have flags that - unlike powers adjacent to them, Blizzard, Lightning Storm, Rain of Fire and others - cause them to be replaced when you cast the powers again, either naturally or using burnout. This is both something that severely handicaps the potential output of the powers and is also observably INCONSISTENT with every power that is similar to them. Let Storm Cell and Category five stack.

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• Chain Lightning's Chance To Do Nothing: This power is uniquely bad because it's the only AOE in the game with a minimum 5% chance to do nothing, because if it doesn't hit the primary target - it hits nothing. I've experienced this first-hand several times, myself. It already doesn't take procs well on account of being a chain power. A way to make it better could be to have it use pseudo-pets like Chain Induction in Electric Melee - or simply make it a proper AOE with the aesthetic of Chain Lightning.

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• Category Five and Storm Cell Lockouts Are Shared: Call Lightning and C5 Lightning cannot strike the same target for a few seconds, this means that if you have multiple Storm Blasters, only one of them is actually benefiting from one of the unique aspects of their set! Why? I don't know. This needs to be bug-fixed.

 

Thank you for reading!

Edited April 29 by Videra

[Saiyajinzoningen]

yes storm is mid, deliberately so. It has been painstaking designed by the devs to be balanced.

It mostly succeeds in this aspect. while I am sure there could be improvements in many areas the same is true of all powersets. 

 

Storm cell - tbh the proc isnt what bothers me, what bothers me is its main component slow is un-enhanceable. even though its the only component that is guaranteed. 

 

Flags - Most pseudo pets do not stack this is normal for the game the only pseudo pet that stacks is the lightning storm for the original storm set. allowing both category 5 and lightning storm to both have multiple pseudo pets would be unimaginably powerful. As it is throwing out cat 5+lightning storm is ridiculously strong (but fun)

 

Chain lightning - gotta agree here its kinda lackluster.

 

Proc lockout - I have never experienced this 1sthand, so I cannot attest to its validity. I will say with lightning storm in the mix very little stays standing in my storm cell. 

 

 

Personally I feel the problem with Storm is most folks attempt to play its very aggressively.

I've found, that storm plays more like a traps set.

You set things up and foes get snagged 

Trap sets are never particularly fast they are strategic.

 

[kelika2]

Slow storm cell and repel on jet is holding it back from being an amazing set

[Uun]

1 hour ago, Videra said:

Chain Lightning's Chance To Do Nothing: This power is uniquely bad because it's the only AOE in the game with a minimum 5% chance to do nothing, because if it doesn't hit the primary target - it hits nothing

Not disagreeing that this happens, but it's not the only power in the game that has this problem. Among the others: Martial Assault/Trick Shot, Electric Control/Synaptic Overload and Electric Control/Jolting Chain. The latter two use pseudo pets and it still happens.

[PoptartsNinja]

Having played Storm/Storm for a while with my SG, it feels pretty good on a Defender; but that team's usual blaster is assault rifle so we're pretty consistently finishing off each others' targets with chip damage. I imagine it would feel much worse when paired with other (or more) blasters. My SG also isn't playing with level 50 incarnates at the moment, but I can already tell that's where Storm Blast's "fun" is going to tank.

 

My two biggest personal complaints are Storm Cell's animation time and Storm Cell's movement speed. With it taking over 2 seconds to cast and another second or two to for Storm Cell to actually spawn in, I know there's a good chance someone would've tagged the spawn with the lightning judgement before Storm Cell was even on the map; and it's so slow that the odds of it having any impact on the next fight are almost nil. It can't keep up with a fast teammate or a rush-rush-rush mentality, but it's good on a slow, deliberate, casual team.

 

So, basically, Storm is reliant on its set-up and there's a good chance that set-up will be completely wasted before you're even done casting it.

 

 

My pie in the sky wish would be to give Storm Cell the Voltaic Sentinel treatement and turn it into a toggle pet, give it a ground speed increase (because it doesn't fly 😕 ), and have it try to move to an enemy its owner is targeting if that enemy is within 80 feet (and after that just stay near enemies as it does now if there's an enemy within its detection radius). I'm just pretty sure the technology for that doesn't exist, and the reason it's not a pet like Volty is because the pet AI is dumb as a brick.

 

My more realistic wish would be to remove Storm Cell's animation time, because it already takes it a server tick to spawn in. And increase its ground speed so it's fast enough to keep up with anything slower than a Warwolf.

Edited April 29 by PoptartsNinja

[Shin Magmus]

I would also really like it if Storm Blast was better.  The ideas in the set are fine, and it matches the mechanical theme of Storm Summoning, which is that it ramps up and gets better in longer fights, vs enemies with tons of HP that facilitate the long setup.  My issue is that both of these sets have the weakness of powers being disproportionately bad vs weak enemies and on fast teams.  Lightning Storm and Category 5: both powers that theoretically can inflict great dmg... do very little in a fight that ends in 10 seconds.  On top of general buffs to Storm Blast, I think the baseline of what the set *should* be capable of doing needs to be adjusted.  In the ideal conditions and long fights where Storm Blast users get to fight an Advanced Mode AV or Reichsman with hundreds of thousands of HP... I honestly believe that Storm Blast should outDPS every other set (including Fire Blast).  This is only fair from a game design perspective, since 60%... 70%... sometimes even 80% of the potential damage of your Storm pets is lost on common encounters.  It doesn't make game design sense or balance sense for a set with extreme weaknesses vs common scenarios, to not have proportionate strengths vs uncommon scenarios.  The Bad in Storm Blast far outweighs the Good and that's really just not fun for anyone involved.

[Steampunkette]

4 hours ago, Saiyajinzoningen said:

Personally I feel the problem with Storm is most folks attempt to play its very aggressively.

I've found, that storm plays more like a traps set.

You set things up and foes get snagged 

Trap sets are never particularly fast they are strategic.

 

Aggressively is the BEST way to play Storm Blast!

 

... as a Sentinel.

 

Sincerely, Sentinel Storm Blast -shines-. It's never going to wipe groups like a true blaster, but throw down your Storm Cell and then drop C5 every spawn with a bunch of lightning..? *chef's kiss*

 

The problem with most Storm characters is that they're not Sentinels. So they have to waste a bunch of their time clicking powers from their secondary powerset instead of just having a few toggles providing them everything they need to survive while they focus on destroying everything.

[macskull]

3 hours ago, Uun said:

Not disagreeing that this happens, but it's not the only power in the game that has this problem. Among the others: Martial Assault/Trick Shot, Electric Control/Synaptic Overload and Electric Control/Jolting Chain. The latter two use pseudo pets and it still happens.

It’s a problem unique to chain powers. In this case, Storm Blast is the only blast set that has this limitation, which makes its AoE clunky and inconsistent. I’ve brought this up to the powers team already and was told that it is unlikely to be changed because Chain Lightning has several benefits from being a chain power. About the only reasonable benefit I can see out of it is that it has a theoretically larger AoE area than a standard targeted AoE, but I don’t know that the larger potential radius ends up making much difference in practice and it comes at the expense of proc rate and that 5% chance to just be a dud. Even some kind of “second chance” mechanic would be good.

[PoptartsNinja]

That makes me wonder if it's possible to remove the "on hit" requirement from the chain, so it chains regardless of whether or not it hits? It'd still fit the powerset, it'd be like lightning striking the tree next to the tallest tree in the forest because the shorter tree had a stronger electrical charge.

[Saiyajinzoningen]

14 minutes ago, PoptartsNinja said:

That makes me wonder if it's possible to remove the "on hit" requirement from the chain, so it chains regardless of whether or not it hits? It'd still fit the powerset, it'd be like lightning striking the tree next to the tallest tree in the forest because the shorter tree had a stronger electrical charge.

 

if we are gonna bring real world physics into it,

why not make every electric attack have a small chance of jumping to nearby targets for a wee bit o damage?

[Player2]

6 hours ago, Videra said:

Storm Blast is painfully mid - despite likely being the best set that HC has added.

 

I am not going to refute anything or even address the topic at hand.  Instead, I am going to point out that this statement made me laugh...

 

"painfully mid - despite being the best set that HC has added"

 

It's like winning the Megamillions jackpot for half a billion dollars and complaining, "this jackpot is weak -- despite being the best thing that's ever happened to me."  Come on, pick a lane.  Is it good or is it not so much?  Or don't pick a lane and I will continue to laugh at the contradiction.

[Indystruck]

It's more damning with faint praise. If you don't understand that that's cool, though, you can still laugh.

[PoptartsNinja]

"It's not so bad that you can't have fun with it, but it doesn't excel at anything in a way that makes you excited to play it."

 

It's a good powerset with some pretty visuals, but it's effectively a DoT set in game that doesn't really reward DoT over burst damage; and it doesn't even do damage over time particularly well. I vaguely remembering BABs or maybe Pohsyb back in live commenting that Gloom breaks the normal damage calculations over its knee, because it was just the hottest of garbage when it conformed to the damage formulas. Storm kinda feels like a whole powerset of DoTs that don't break the formula at all.

 

 

I dislike comparing accross powersets, because that's not a good way to balance, but let's do it just this once as a mental exercise and push everything to a silly extreme just for fun. Let's compare Storm's Cloudburst with Sonic's heavy hitter, Shout Scream.

 

Assuming Blaster values for everything:
Cloudburst does:

- 9 tics of 14.2327 cold damage to targets out of Storm Cell for a total of 128.0943 damage.
- 9 tics of 15.4596 cold damage to targets in Storm Cell for a total of 139.1364 damage to "wet" targets, with an additional 8 seconds of -ToHit, -20% running and jumping movement speed, and -10% recharge slow.

Shout does:
- 61.3103 energy and 61.3013 smashing damage for a total of 122.6206 damage. Yes, smashing is likely to be resisted, but it's comparatively rare for both smashing and energy to be resisted so there's a good chance Shout will always be able to do at least half of its damage unresisted. Shout also applies -13% res for 8 seconds after a hit, so subsequent uses against the same target will do slightly more damage.

 

Cloudburst doesn't significantly outperform Shout despite its:
- longer animation time
- higher end cost
- longer recharge
- 3 second DoT compared to Shout's instant damage
- reliance on Storm Cell to have any secondary effect
- inferior secondary effect

- Almost certainly slower projectile speed (I can't confirm this since projectile speed isn't listed in City of Data)
and the final kicker: Shout is available at T5 compared to Cloudburt's T8.

Apples and oranges though, Storm has a good snipe and Sonic doesn't. Exceeept I just remembered that Shout isn't really Sonic's heavy hitter anymore, Screech is.

 

Screech does:

71.3201 energy and 71.3201 smashing damage for a total of 142.6402 damage and has the same advantages Shout does (good secondary effect with no preconditions, mainly)

 

It has the same end cost as Cloudburst, a 60 foot range (20 feet less), recharges 1 second more slowly. So the range is the real tradeoff there--except Storm's range is dictated by Storm Cell, which... has a 60 foot range, reducing the advantages of Cloudburst's longer range to "better than Screech at picking off runners" which it needs, since DoTs are more likely to make mobs run away.

 

So in order to maximize Cloudburst, you have to move within 60 feet of the target, cast Storm Cell (2.03 seconds), wait for Storm Cell to spawn and start doing its thing (which takes about 2 seconds, but Storm Cell's casting animation eats a second of that), then cast Cloudburst (1.67 seconds), after which it deals 128 damage over 3 seconds. And we'll say it procs Storm Cell's single target lightning and does an extra 31.2808 via that. So for 3.7 seconds (discounting Storm Cell's spawn-in time), you can deal 159.9014 damage to one target after an additional 3 seconds pass (6.7 seconds in total).

 

In slightly less time, Sonic can step within 60 feet, cast Shout (1.5 second cast time) and cast Screech (1.5 second cast time), and deal 265.2608 up front damage.

But that's not fair, because you only have to cast Storm Cell once per fight, and it lingers. So you set it up and Cloudburst should catch up, performance wise, thanks to its faster recharge and Storm Cell procs. Except it doesn't.

 

So let's perform a hypothetical 'vacuum' test, with the following assumptions:

Sonic and Storm can use a single other power one time right at the start of the fight (Storm Cell for Storm, Shout for Sonic), assuming every attack hits, the enemy has 0% resistance to any damage type, and assuming both have 2 SO recharge enhancements (putting Cloudburst at 6.6 seconds and Screech at 7.2 if I've done my math right), and after the initial cast cycle both can only cast Cloudburst or Screech on cooldown for the duration of Storm Cell (60 seconds).

- Storm casts Storm Cell and then casts Cloudburst 9 times, proccing Storm Cell's bonus damage each time for (9 * 159.9014) = 1,439.1126 single target damage over 60-ish (because it might take slightly longer for full DoT duration) seconds

- Sonic casts Shout, then casts Screech 8 times for 122.6206 + (159.9014 * 1.13 = 180.688582) + (159.9214 * 1.182 = 189.0270948) + (6 * (159.9014 * 1.13 = 180.688582)) = 1,576.4677688 single target damage over 60 seconds

 

 

Now, don't take that as a "Storm Blast sucks" or anything like that. This was a mental exercise perfomed in a vacuum, and testing in a vacuum doesn't resemble real conditions. Storm pulls ahead of Sonic pretty comfortably when fighting multiple targets (because Sonic's AoE is pretty dire and Storm's is, like everything else in the set, mid tier); but otherwise the two sets are pretty comparable considering they're both mixed damage sets that excel at doing damage over time. Sonic's smashing and energy damage is more likely to be resisted than Storm's smashing, energy, and cold; but Sonic's -resistance actually does a really good job compensating against anything that isn't bright purple.

 

This also isn't proof that Storm needs a buff. It's just why "aggressively mid" is a really apt way to describe it. It's like someone picked a midpoint on every graph and found Storm Blast just sitting there. Storm doesn't do anything egregiously bad, but it also doesn't do anything particularly well and requires a lot of setup to reach peak "doesn't do anything particularly well." It doesn't lack shine, it just doesn't shine especially brightly in anything but the visuals (which are fantastic). When they were passing out gold, silver, and bronze medals, Storm got well-polished cast iron.

Edited April 29 by PoptartsNinja

[Shin Magmus]

10 hours ago, Player2 said:

 

I am not going to refute anything or even address the topic at hand.  Instead, I am going to point out that this statement made me laugh...

 

"painfully mid - despite being the best set that HC has added"

I'm not disagreeing either, but the reason that Storm Blast is mid is a combination of arbitrary, deliberately added-by-devs "Replace" flags, and arbitrary, deliberately added-by-devs "Lockout" periods (that heavily punish multiple Storm Blast users on the same team).  Storm Blast effectively has the potential to be good, but someone took it into a warehouse to gouge out its eye and break both of its legs.  As for why that someone did something so cruel, we will never know (because the Powers Devs don't talk to us).

[srmalloy]

22 hours ago, PoptartsNinja said:

So, basically, Storm is reliant on its set-up and there's a good chance that set-up will be completely wasted before you're even done casting it.

It's not the only build that has concerns like that; my Grav/Traps controller plays completely differently solo than when on teams. Solo, she goes through missions putting down a set of Trip Mines with a Poison Gas Trap (more mines and possibly an Acid mortar for higher-level spawns, and I've taken to adding Temporal Bomb to give me a backup damage addition), then Wormholes a spawn into the minefield, waits for them to appear and die, then proceeds to the next spawn. On teams, it's virtually impossible for her to get the time to lay any of her traps except when there's a single path a known ambush will move through, and she can lay the traps while the rest of the team is wiping the spawn that triggers the ambush, so she relies on her holds and direct-damage attacks.

[Snakebit]

Please don't change storm blast. 

 

It's an amazing set.  If you want burst damage, go with a burst damage set. 

 

1) Storm cell too slow. Hello, recast? Takes too long to cast.. whatever. Just click and go. 

2) Doesn't do enough damage?  Why not? I can solo anything my scrappers can solo. What's the problem?

3) everything wasted when on teams.. just like every other powerset. Nothing carries a team, why should storm be the set that does?

 

Whoever made this set did it right. 

 

 

[Steampunkette]

The only thing I really think would help Storm Blast without making it OP or whatever is just dropping the lockout on the storm procs being target-based.

 

That would make it so multiple Storm characters can work together on a team without stepping on each other's toes, and also make Storm better at fighting AVs/EBs/GMs/Etc than it currently is.

 

Put the proc-lockout as a debuff on the storm pseudopet rather than on the pet's target. Then -my- Storm won't lock out other players, and a single enemy could be struck by multiple procs in sequence (Lightning, Split Lightning, Quad Lightning) if the procs line up well.