Agent White

Yeah, it's a decent power but far from required.

Right but there's only so many sways to swap out area of effect, damage type, and a secondary effect.

And the gimmicks mean that the dev team is having to innovate and think up news ways to do things. For instance, it's because of Titan Weapons momentum mechanics that we got the stalker changes and the upcoming snipe changes. Before they came up with that mechanic there were no powers in the game that altered their effect based on a contextual state. It was all "Power does A". NOW we've got "Power does A, unless X is in effect, then it does B".

Or like the Keyes Island trial's disintegration mechanic led to beam rifle and time manipulation.

The gimmicks are coming in part to help differentiate a set and because new mechanics mean innovation that can lead to other areas of the game.

I agree slightly in that I think its very thematic to have a 'big boom' power that leaves you exhausted.

Problem is, the damage and effects done don't equal the cost. They're gimped. They do -more- damage than a standard power, yes, but they don't do -enough- damage for what it does to you. Even using it in the 'last ditch, panic button, omggonnadieifthisdoesn'twork' usually leaves you dead anyway.

And since the devs don't want to tweak the numbers up to make the reward equal the cost, I'm much happier they're willing to compromise and move the numbers down just a bit and remove the tremendous cost. I'm happy I will have a big flashy attack that may not necessarily be a super move, but it's still me throwing a giant lightning bolt at a group of enemies or exploding a neutron bomb out of my body to do a lot of damage.

So ya, it was thematic, but broken in practice. If it worked the way we'd hoped, sure, it would probably be worth keeping and using. As it is, it's not. You can work and set yourself up to try to leverage it, but really it's not worth the trouble. Now, they're taking most of that trouble out and you have an awesome big boom power to drop on mobs.

wizard did it

Agreed. This was a better, albeit more work intensive, way. Thank you guys so much for putting in so much effort

Padding that post count some more huh?

LOL, yah it might take them a bit, it got retweeted 295 times and that's 295 PMs that have to be sent out.

Apples vs watermelons

Actually one thing I hope about this is that the invasions only occur in zones with large bodies of water and not landlocked zones. Probably won't happen since that leaves out like half of Paragon and none of the Rogues isles. But eh.

No, at the end of the day why does it matter so much to some people what capability other ATs will receive out of this in relation to blasters?

It does not matter. This is an everybody wins scenario. Everybody that has a crashing T9 in a ranged blast set now has frequent access to them. This is a good thing. For Defenders and Corrupters it's a moderate bump in performance, where they were already performing great to begin with. For Blasters it's almost game changing because they now have easy access to one of their strongest powers in terms of damage, availability and even control. Between this, the range upgrade, the snipe changes and the inbuilt survivability into powers, the difference between old blasters and new blasters is going to be night and day. People will still roll blasters regardless of what corrupters and defenders can do. Some people just don't like playing those ATs. They want to be a blaster that blasts things. And now they can with more impunity.

I've got a villain plant/fire dominator just about to hit 41 and ready to take his first epic pool power, I'm still just not sure what to use.

I've heard some recommendations for Fire Mastery. I'm kind of leaning toward Mace or Ice mastery for the Def shields and another place to drop a Luck of the Gambler. Any suggestions? Going for recharge and powers that lend themselves to IO sets with recharge.