Arbiter Hawk

It's not an exact copy of Energize, but it does have the 120 second recharge, down from Conserve Power's 600. It provides 60 seconds of scale 1 Endurance Discount, 60 seconds of scale 2.5 Regeneration (50% enhanceable), and a scale 1 heal on activation. All numbers subject to change pending internal and beta testing, but I figured I'd throw some real numbers out there so you have as much information as possible.

There are more than DPA changes coming to improve Dual Pistols. But Synapse should be the one to tell you about what he hath wrought.

Re-ordering powers does bad things. It can sometimes cause enhancements to get deleted, for example, which is a customer service nightmare. I think the sustain makes sense on all the powers I chose for it, and I wouldn't want every powerset to have it in a toggle - I think that would be boring for some variants of the Blaster playstyle.

This is, indeed, correct. I've edited to clarify that only single-target blasts are affected.

Ah, my mistake, Dominator t9 single target blasts are going up to 80 feet as well. I misspoke earlier.

Totally reasonable. Blaster MaxMax Health might not have changed when Blaster Max Health was adjusted upwards many issues ago. No promises, but it sounds like a cool change, and doesn't violate cottage rule since Absorb still uses Heal enhancements.

• Beam Rifle/Lancer Shot
• Dual Pistols/Executioner's Shot
• Energy Blast/Energy Burst
• Fire Blast/Blaze
• Ice Blast/Bitter Ice Blast
• Radiation Blast/Cosmic Burst
• Sonic Attack/Shout

These range increases apply to all Archetypes with the Ranged Blast powersets - Blasters, Defenders, and Corruptors.

Edit to add: Dominator Tier 9 single target blasts are also receiving the range boost up to 80 feet.

All mastermind pets are on the list to look at and bring up performance to something significantly above where Mercs are right now. This is a long-term goal (read: not soon) due to the sheer amount of analysis required to simulate all of those various different lists of powers.

We actually explicitly design almost all Incarnate Trial AoE abilities to do somewhere between 50% and 10% of their normal damage to pet-class targets. We also explicitly design patch-targeted powers never to target pet-class targets, since for some reason they seem to be notoriously bad at dodging... If you ever notice a pet taking as much damage from an AoE mechanic as you are within an Incarnate Trial, it's probably a bug.

Unless we make a Ranged Blast powerset which uses Range as one of its major mechanics, I believe all non-snipe single target blasts in Ranged Blast powersets will now be 80 feet forever. Shorter ranged attacks in non-ranged blast sets will remain as is. Shorter ranged cones will remain as is.

EM was the easiest choice to make - it had Conserve Power, which we've twiced changed in to Energize, so we felt it made a lot of sense to do the same again. Boost Range is not problematic, although it is a bit unintuitive in how well it synergizes with cones. It's the kind of power that I really enjoy as a player but would probably not design in a new set because I feel a number of players would just not grok how to use it best.

I'm not adding damage to it, but I did increase its range up to 30 feet so it's now a more effective deterrent to enemies closing to melee range with you.

Sadly, this is not possible within the scope of what our game can do. It's a cool idea - "The better my aim, the less time it takes to line up a shot!", but it's just not something our animation system is capable of.

Someday, maybe.

Edit - minus the self damage, I wouldn't inflict that on Devices.

If you activate the power at 45 seconds, the clock starts back at 0. The Regen/Recovery attributes of the power Replace themselves instead of stacking, meaning they will still be applied if you use the power again, but overwrite the copies that were there before.

Death Shroud, like Electric's damage aura, comes at level 4, which is earlier than we wanted to put these powers within the cadence of the powersets. You only need to use Touch of the Beyond once every 60 seconds, and you may even find that the mitigation from Fear also helps you stay alive, especially now that you can use it at an 80 foot range.

The +Rec on the new powers is quite sizeable, and in many cases Endurance costs for the powers required have been reduced or eliminated. We felt it didn't make a ton of sense to spend endurance to get Recovery in these powers.

It will definitely take Heal sets. I believe the only sustain power which takes Accurate Heal IO sets is Touch of the Beyond, because all of the other powers work even if they don't land their hit roll (though it does have a high base accuracy of 1.2, and a recharge of only 10 seconds, so it's very easy to keep your buff up with it.)

Strictly hypothetically speaking, that's one option. That's what I opted to do with Resilience in Regeneration, for instance - a power that I felt was hard to justify using a build slot on AND in a powerset that needed some help. Part of me would rather find something to do with the power that makes it stand out/feel more unique, but this may ultimately be what we end up doing with it.

What I meant was that if I change one number in the table of values that define how good an AT is at something, like for instance increasing the Melee_Buff_ToHit of Blasters, every single power that has a Melee_Buff_ToHit type now operates differently when used by Blasters. All I did was change one number, but functionally that change has had huge ripple effects that our QA team would have to ensure were all intended. Class table changes are therefore seen as extremely risky, where risky is defined as "likely to have unintended consequences."

I don't think you'll regret dropping Aid Self to pick up sustain. Aid self is a 1.96 scale heal on the HealSelf table, which means it's healing you for 19.6% of your base max HP on use, before enhancements. It has a cast time of 3.33 seconds and an interrupt time of 1 second, meaning in an average off the cuff build it has a cycle time of about 13 seconds. That's an average of 1.5% health per second if you use it every time it comes off recharge and are never interrupted - but it also takes up 4.33 seconds per 13 seconds of possible animation time. Sustain powers will enhance to just around the same value of health per second, but will only require one fairly short animation per 60 seconds for clicks, or one animation ever for toggles, allowing you to use those 4.33 seconds for offensive output and mitigation via your own status effects. In short, this power will grant you slightly less health over time than using an enhanced Aid Self would if you used it as often as possible, but is costing you much much less to use in terms of DPS, endurance, and interruptibility.

If what you really want is the stun resistance, I'm afraid for the time being you'll still have to take Aid Self. However, Aid Self can't really heal you during a stun, while your sustain power will be able to.

Taking control of a player's character away from that player for protracted periods of time is very frustrating. We agree with this. We would just rather address it from the NPC side (e.g., "Do it right") then hack something into Blasters which fundamentally changes the feel of the AT while only kicking the status protection can down the road.

"Indeed."

LRM is awesome already. Instant LRM would just be ludicrous. If Munitions Mastery needs a boost, I would probably look to Sleep Grenade or Body Armor, not to LRM.

End Drain is rough because it's so binary, and because high-class NPCs such as AVs and GMs have a huge base End pool. I'd personally rather focus on Elec's damage first, then worry about getting its secondary effect up to par.

If we were going to do this to Time Bomb, we would have a way of doing it without granting you any extra powers or making you click any buttons that weren't Time Bomb.

Hmm. That's not really possible within the constraints of how the game works right now. It's a cool idea, but we don't have the concept of "Status Protection that goes away when a status hits it." If it were possible, I would also worry about it fundamentally changing the way Blasters play - one of the last things I would personally want to create is a mechanic or power that encouraged you to sit around and wait for it to recharge before you started the next combat.

If we were going to give blasters a way to mitigate mez, I think we would probably go with "fighting your way out of it", since that feels very thematic and defiance-y. No plans to add this to the AT right now, though - we want to see how this regen/absorb/HoT solution shakes out before we consider adding anything else defensive that might be multiplicatively powerful with that same solution.