UberGuy

With no intent to impune the raiders on Victory, EoEs are mostly a crutch for inexperienced raiders, or raids where you can't get enough people, or Villain raids, where there isn't such a thing as Empathy/Regen Aura. If you pile enough people together and stack enough Regen auras on them, they don't need EoEs. If those people then go foth and own face on their respective mitos, then no one else needs massive Regen Auras once the initial wave of them wears off.

Note that you can achieve the same thing on villains with the use of Warburg Biological Nukes, but it's sort of onerous to expect people to come to raids with enough of those to emulate having 4+ empaths on deck. On the upside, the +damage buffs on the Bio Nukes helps significantly with the face owning of mitos.

Well, you know, except for the part where they don't have faces.

I took it on a Dark Melee/Regen, because I already have a (better) version, and wielding negative energy damage against ghosts is the suck. I pretty much only break it out to run exemplar content, like Posi's TF, but I do use it.

I pretty much always take SoM, though.

Rad Emission, Dark Miasma, Traps, Cold Domination, Mental Assault, Mental Manipulation, and Electrical Mastery (the Blaster epic pool). MM Robots also have some strong -regen in their plasma blasts.Those are the big hitters in terms of magnitude and duration, all being 500% or more. Not all the -regen powers in these sets have good duration/recharge ratios, though. Traps and Rad are tops for that.

There's some -regen in /Poison, but it's pretty minor.

Edit: Whoops, I forgot Trick Arrow's EMP Arrow.

I don't think having Hamidon raids drop purples is reasonable. There's a huge jump in power between HOs and purples, because HOs don't grant set bonuses, and the set bonuses are the reason the overwhelming majority of people who want purples want them. The only time someone would not think purples were a big deal compared to HOs is that they wouldn't benefit meaningfully from the bonuses people look to purples for, such as +recharge.

I don't disagree that HOs languish in a very niche place that causes very few people to seek them out (which in turn is making the ones with consistent demand very expensive). I do think this could use improvement. I don't think purples are the fix for that. (Indeed, it would make it worse - who would choose an HO over a purple?) I am not fond of the idea that purples need to be "easy" or even just "easier" to obtain. There is a category of gamer who likes to have hard to obtain things to chase after, and I think purples are for them. I say leave that be.

In particular, I wasn't detoggled, and I didn't see any AoE mez from Lord Winter. I have no idea if that was because we did something that prevented it, if I/we were lucky, or if those abilities were stripped from LW.

I didn't see anything pop Glacier period, though it would have been easy to miss any given power activation when we were piling on LW. Even if there aren't a lot of player characters, the Northern Lights really, uh, light things up with their Peacebringer attacks. It'd be easy to overlook.

That's a major downside to such abstract patch note entries. It's impossible to say if LW did what he was supposed to, because we don't know what he's supposed to do.

I also was on villains. (And yes, I have a wicked present route for that zone - I was glad it was the fallback choice.)

The coop instance went fabulously. There were something like 6 teams there, though I am not sure that all three villain ones were full. We took him and his guardians down rapidly, and enough stuff was flying around that the Northern Lights were not especially noticeable.

Round two, the heroes and villains did their own things. There was something like 1.5 villain teams in zone, and we managed to take him down. We didn't have a ton of time left over, which felt pretty reasonable given how few of us we were.

We for sure had at least one strong hard-target debuffer - I was there on a level 50 Ice/Dark Corruptor with a lot of global recharge. I think that there's no avoiding that people are going to have to rely on high-level characters and/or buffs and debuffs to take down these foes at a decent speed.

The phasing effect is just too hard to see. Even with people telling teammates to peel off and look for Winter Guardians, several stayed behind anyway. It desperately needs some other visual queue than the fog. The main problem is that because he's so tall, the "UNAFFECTED" floater is out of sight unless you peer high up in the air. Please, please, make it more visible on his person.

Is it intended that Northern Lights can attack while they're phased? It's not the end of the world since you're supposed to leave and go looking for the Guardian, but it would be kind of nice if people could at least stay and clear them out if they're going to attack us. I actually assumed they couldn't be harmed at all because, for whatever reason, it didn't occur to me that their phasing was linked to LW's. I turned to blast one that was poking me while LW was phased and found it untouchable, so I assumed that was just their nature - that they were some sorte of "turrets" around him. So if nothing else, them attacking while phased is potentially confusing, because almost nothing does that in the game.

It seemed that LW didn't seem to regen much, if any, while phased. He did noticably regen while unphased. Was this real or just my perception?

Towards the end of the event, Ghost Falcon was explaining that there were apparently distinct instances of the multi-zone winter realm. When heroes and villains entered at different times, they ended up unable to visit one another despite the ability of the magic portal to send you to other winter realm zones. This is going to be radically confusing to most players. Sometimes they'll be able to cross winter zones and find people and sometimes not, and the rules are not going to be clear. After all, even Ghost Falcon didn't understand them until he spoke to a programmer. Anything that can be done to improve on or at least explain this will probably be well appreciated.

All build up powers are useful, and I would never suggest skipping them.

• They do improve DPS.
• They are a significant boost to toHit for their duration. This can be crucial for hitting through defense or toHit debuffs.
• There are times you want a burst of higher damage, DPS concerns aside. Examples would be the need to burst kill a annoying foe, such as a buffing or healing mob. BU-type powers can help ensure you defeat them too rapidly for them to do much.

While the power does serve as a handy "mule" for the Gaussian's set, bear in mind that the recharge enhancement of fully slotting this set is rather low compared to what most people who take the power would recommend for it (which is ED-capped recharge slotting).

As some others have clarified for their recommendations, the above are recommendations for performance improvement. If the power doesn't fit your concept, then carry on.