Arbiter Hawk

Dominator Thunder Kick does scale 1.32 damage, compared to the scale .84 damage of Scrapper Thunder Kick. They fit different needs, as Thunder Kick is the T1 for Martial Arts, while Martial Assault has a fairly spammable attack power in Shuriken Throw (and therefore its Thunder Kick can have a longer recharge than 3 seconds).

Spinning Kick is more analogous to Shadow Maul than anything else - it's meant to be an effective single target attack that can be levaraged by skillful players to hit multiple targets, if they care to do so.

Explosive Shuriken is Blaze + AoE DoT. I don't think there's any basis for an argument that it's underpowered or not strong enough, though the point about it disrupting AoE sleeps was a good one (but ultimately, getting some extra AoE damage out of the t9 outweighs the consideration for now, in my mind)

Feedback on the secondary effects of Martial Assault is certainly welcome, but the more accurate the information presented is, the more useful it is - so please go into testing with an open mind, and try to present reasonable, rational feedback on what you think should be different when you get a chance. Also, the Beta forums are now open, so let's try to concentrate feedback over there where it can all be read in one place! Thanks!

I think I put a max on it, something around 10. If I didn't, I probably will before beta ends - some of those holds are more "Encounter Mechanics" than they are "Powers", and as such are not really designed to ever be mitigatable (Anti-Matter's Time Stop, for instance).

That's what I originally wanted Vorpal Judgement to be - teleporting you four or five times and doing a PBAoE on each hop. Unfortunately that's impossible, but it was a fun idea, and I think Tunnel Rat and Honey Badger sold it really well through VFX.

I really love Dimension Shift, as unpopular of a stance as that may be. It's one of the craziest, most powerful powers in the game, but only for the kind of player who really gets their enjoyment out of subtle finesse, rather than through big numbers or straightforward victories.

Numbers not necessarily final, and subject to change on beta:

Eagle's Claw is not in Martial Assault. Its melee attacks are Thunder Kick, Spinning Kick, and Dragon's Tail. Its tier 9 is Explosive Shuriken - 12 second recharge, 1.67 second cast time, 80 foot range, scale 2.28 Fire damage with a 100% chance for 5 ticks of .05 scale fire damage in a 10 foot sphere.

I beat you to it by two months, actually. But when I read the suggestion, I did grin a bit - I really wanted to post in this thread a good "What if I told you..." Morpheus meme, but I have a healthy fear of the wrath of Black Pebble.

The Dom T9's secondary effect is a splash AoE DoT. While it's not a TON of AoE damage, I thought the AoE splash would help Explosive Shuriken stand out amongst single-target nukes.

Eagle's Claw is actually in the set. In the video, we were mostly highlighting the unique mechanics of the powerset, but Eagle's Claw is most definitely present!

It's a different feel that we're trying out here - the advantage of it is that it gets a damage bonus for its area factor, to balance out that it's a different way of aiming than 8 years of playing the game have ingrained in players. That means that if you master its use, you can be more effective than if it were just a normal targeted cone.

The only AoE damage in the set comes from Dragon's Tail and Burst of Speed. Reaction Time and Throw Sand are both AoE powers, but deal no damage.

The way it works is by applying mez protection to your character of exactly the magnitude of mez currently affecting you, plus one. It does give you mez resistance (which reduces duration of future mez) and mez strength (increases the duration of any mez you have), as well as a small to moderate heal. The power is powerful, but since it can only be used while you're CC'ed, under half health, or under half endurance, it needs to be potent when used in those limited conditions.

We did actually fix a LOT of this sometime in Issue 21's launch. I went through every Praetorian villain group and parsed out all of their alpha strikes and long-term DPS, and compared it both to CoV groups like Longbow and Arachnos which were fairly universally considered challenging and to CoH launch groups like the Sky Raiders, Family, Skulls, and Hellions which are typically seen as fairly easy to combat. We then adjusted the outlying Praetorian villain groups (Clockwork and Syndicate) significantly downwards.

Granted, there are still many ambushes in Praetoria - but the individual NPCs are not really intended to be leagues above their primal counterparts, and my observation is that Praetoria's difficulty is perceived far above where it actually lies these days.

No, the easter egg proc will not be changing to PPM. Every other proc in the game will be, but this one would just be silly if it happened more often, since it's both entirely fluff and visually quite "noisy".

Actually, most self-only heals are flagged to ignore resistance, meaning that no matter how much heal resistance (negative or positive) you have, the heal hits for the same amount. These abilities will be affected by the Heal Strength buff from Field Medic's active use, but will not be affected by the -Res(Heal) portion of Field Medic.

It's centered on the target of the power - however, many pseudopet powers technically target the caster, which can cause the explosion to appear on the user. Not really what I intended, but it *is* hilarious, so I guess it's a feature.

Fun factoid we didn't mention in the Coffee Talk - Boxing, Kick, and Cross Punch also grant bonuses to your Brawl as well. They're just thematic/easter-egg-y, but they are fun. If you have either Boxing or Kick, your Brawl has a 10% chance to proc a Recharge and ToHit debuff on its target. This debuff is double strength if you own both of those powers. If you own Cross Punch, your Brawl also has a 10% chance to proc a Regen and Recovery debuff on its target.

On the Presence note, you mention the single-target Taunt becoming a single-target ranged Placate, but Unrelenting is the new tier 5 power in the set, and it's also pretty cool. Using it gives you a moderate Heal over Time, a moderate Recharge bonus, a moderate Damage bonus, and a moderate Recovery bonus. Additionally, you can use it while defeated, restoring a moderate amount of health and endurance to you if used in this manner.

I'll give you a hint: it's something no Summer Blockbuster would be complete without!

No... no, that's not quite it.

This enhancement has a bit of an easter egg attached to it...

I started writing up a post, but I want to make sure I get all the numbers right and it's going to take me more time than I have tonight. That said, I'm headed home now - this thread has been a really fun community experiment, so maybe we'll pick it back up or do something like it again in the future. Thanks to those who asked questions I could answer, and may you all have a wonderful weekend in Paragon City or a truly treacherous weekend in the Rogue Isles, depending on your preference.

Personally, I think Lightning Rod's animation looks awesome, and would make this power feel more like "powering up" than the current "Hand Clap, but with lightning". I'll talk to the art team and see how they feel about this change - we tend to be hesitant about changing the look of existing powers, but since the power is changing, it may make enough sense here to be worth doing.

We love absorb and want to use it in many places. Force Field makes sense as a contender for a support set that would benefit from it, so it's possible you would see something like this in the far-distant future.

I admit, this puzzles me a bit. We are balancing blasters around the assumption that they take both build up and aim if available within their powersets, and that they stagger their use of the two to maximize their outgoing damage by not wasting any of their Buff time from these two buffs while animating other buffs instead of damage. Obviously there will still be times when you use BU and Aim together for a really big alpha nuke from stealth or something, but if you're doing that, chances are Sniping wouldn't have been that important to you during that pull anyway.