Arcanaville

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I have a base 55% chance to hit the Night Widow I mentioned. Say she has enough defense to floor me - 5%. Now I have approximately +33% accuracy, which raises that to 6% maybe. (if I have it backwards, the difference is microscopic).

Now, I add 91% to-hit buffs with the insight and build up, which caps at 95%.


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That's backwards, but also meaninglessly so. 55% base to hit and 91% tohit buffs means 146% base tohit before accuracy. To get anything approaching flooring you would require on the order of 140%+ defense and tohit debuffs combined. Nothing I know of has a combination of defense and tohit debuffs on the order of 140%, which is why I thought it was a bad luck streak. But if its happening repeatably, then its more likely a bug.

To be honest, I've been noticing some accuracy oddities on both blood widows and night widows. Actually, anything that flies in general. Not terribly blatant ones like you are mentioning, but oddities nontheless. For instance, I'm perceiving (but haven't accurately measured) a hint that powers like brawl are hitting hovering targets more often than ranged attacks. I haven't gotten around to conducting a real controlled test yet, but of course it seems everything that hovers gets a lot more defense from hover than we do (i.e. rikti drones). Which doesn't quite explain brawl.

Honestly, its been hard to set aside hard core testing time when I have somewhat less playing time than I used to (more busy with work).

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Regen gets something: it gets to be regen. It will be easier to knock out of hide when this gets eventually fixed, but it has superior damage mitigation on average.


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With our below average HP, it gives as much mitigation as the +Def sets against enemies with high Acc.


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Nope.


A normalized comparison of a defensive set like SR and a regenerative set like regen converts SR's defense into a multiplier relative to SR base regeneration, compared to the regeneration multiple that regeneration confers on a regen. The actual health of each is not a direct factor in the comparison.


If this sort of health-based comparison was valid, it would imply that SR scrappers outperformed regeneration scrappers at lower levels (separate from any power selection issues), and regeneration scrappers gained performance at high levels as their health increased. This doesn't happen.


Lower health does create issues like increased vulnerability to one-shotting, but that is a separate issue from average mitigation, and a corner case issue normally. It has no bearing on typical performance, and most definitely regen's performance is not "as much mitigation as the +Def sets against enemies with high Acc."

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So why does /regen have to be the most gimped then? All the other deffences have +def outside of hide to help them avoid being knocked out of placate... but /regen gets nothing, so anything more then one opponent and placate is ruined almost all the time. Doesn't seem fair to me, it's not like dull pain can be spammed or anything, it still is somewhat situational.


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Regen gets something: it gets to be regen. It will be easier to knock out of hide when this gets eventually fixed, but it has superior damage mitigation on average.

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In regard to the arguments over particular skills not being worth the animation time they take to deliver, this has been a long-standing request of mine to the devs:

Include animation time in your power balance calculation.

For those of you who don't know, geko has explained some of his power balance work here on the boards in the past - he's got an excel spreadsheet with all of them listed out and a ton of calculations to show how much damage something should do, how much endurance it should cost, and how much recharge it should have in reference to similar powers. The one thing that I noted that was missing from this calculation? Animation time - the time it takes to use the power... which is a very large part in how people build their characters, a big matter in gameplay, and quite often the difference between one set and the next. (See Archery / Claw's woes and why people love Ice/, Dark Melee, and Energy Melee / Manip.) It has also been addressed several times in powers that have suffered from it before - Katana back in Issue 2, for example, and Twilight Grasp. Any set - any power, at that - that is supposed to be a quick use, quick recharge low-effect ability should be quick to use.

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It should be included. It *has* to be included, or balance gets horribly thrown off (i.e. Trick Arrow). But there is a reason why it *isn't* included.

At the moment, activation times and animation times are strongly coupled, and animations cannot be changed on the fly by the game engine. So animation times cannot be tweaked by the power designers to balance powers - they can change the damage index with a push of a button, but it takes an act of god to change the animation of a power.

Set a power activation too long, and the set can underperform with little way to fix it. Set a power activation too short, and the set can outperform strongly with little way to fix it short of hitting it with harsh recharge penalties (which will make the set underperform, especially at lower levels).


But what that does mean is that the designers really have to be very careful when initially creating power sets, to make sure that the animation times won't create problems, and whenever they get a chance to redo the animations of a power set, they should be really be careful to design carefully - because they tend to be so set in stone.

Altering the game engine to allow for (small) adjustments to activation/animations is probably one of those things far far down the road but possibly one of those things that would convey a huge benefit to power balancing in the long run.

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Did you mean ally resistance buffs?


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Oops, yes.

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It takes a long time for +endurance to increase DPS much at all IMX. If that's the point of the +endurance power, I'd much, much, much rather just have +offense in some way. As you say, +offense helps DPE and DPS.

(BTW, I don't see "amount of damage before you die" is any meaningful measurement of DPS. IMO, dieing doesn't lower your DPS much on most teams, it just means somebody elses uses a rez. For Mutation (and Dark Miasma in terms of damage not mitigated, I guess) it might actually increase DPS for you to die.

Now granted, I haven't actually spend much time testing whether death and non-death teams do similar DPS. . . And I understand that POV, but I don't agree w/ it)


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No, that's not quite what I meant. What I meant is something more like this, and I'll step through my thought process carefully this time so I don't skip any steps.

First, if you have some defender primaries that are focused on increasing the net damage per second against the foes (i.e. "offensive-oriented") they will tend to end fights faster (of course).

If you have defender primaries that are focused on reducing the incoming damage taken by team mates ("defensive-oriented"), they will tend to increase survivability.

Theoretically speaking, you could balance the two by setting the offensive set so that in the amount of time it takes to defeat everyone in a group, the amount of damage (the team with) it takes is about the same as the amount of damage that (the team with) the defensive set takes over the longer period of time that they are fighting. That balances them in a mitigation sense: the offensive set is "mitigating" damage by allowing the team to kill faster.


But that's not balanced in two senses. First, when the defensive set mitigates more damage, allowing a team to fight for a longer period of time, that team's dpe remains lower than the team with the offensive-oriented defender. Thus, while both dish out about the same amount of damage (because they just defeated the same amount of stuff) and both took the same amount of damage (because the defensive set deflected damage, while the offensive set took less time), in effect the team with the defensive set had to expend more endurance in the same fight.

In effect, conferring more offense (by foe debuffs or ally buffs) lowers net incoming damage per fight, and lowers net endurance cost per fight. Conferring more defense (by foe debuffs or ally buffs) lower net incoming damage per fight, but doesn't change endurance cost per fight. Overall, offensive benefits have a pseudo endurance cost benefit implicit in them. This doesn't have anything specifically to do with people dying or straight dps; I made up a pseudo-metric to (try to) highlight the fact that a team with a lot of defense burns more end per fight than a team with a lot of offense, even when their survivability is comparable.

The +recovery is not meant to increase dps: its simply meant to balance the actual benefit a defensive-oriented defender confers to a team relative to an offensive one.


The defender inherent is already endurance-based; it would not break the defender concept at all if defender primaries factored endurance benefits into balancing. It would level the playing field between defense-oriented primaries and offensive-oriented primaries without homogenizing them, and it would be a buff that could be much stronger for defenders than controllers (if its even given to controllers), separating the two significantly. It would certainly be a buff to force field defenders that doesn't unduely unbalance the set.

There is some small hints of this already. Empathy, a more defensive-oriented (healing oriented) set has recovery aura. Radiation, with more offensive punch, has a weaker recovery in AM. Kinetics, which is more offensive-focused, has transference (significant, but situational). It would be interesting, if the more offense a set had, the less endurance manipulation it had, and the more defense (and less offense) a set had, the more endurance manipulation it had; it would equate having more endurance with in effect being the offensive boost that defense-oriented sets had, to balance the more bursty offensive punch that offensive sets had.


Edit: I forgot to mention the *other* sense in which that isn't balanced. The other sense is that even if offense, defense, and endurance costs are balanced, if one defender set confers a net time benefit in allowing its team to go faster, that team will get more xp/hour. So its okay if defensive-oriented sets have a slight edge on offensive ones, or alternatively if the mitigation in the defensive sets is sufficiently strong that it allows the team to fight at higher difficulty levels to equalize the xp/hour rate, in rough terms.

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I like that, although the idea of a +endurance toggle seems counter-intuitive.


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It would be, if it only boosted you; why bother when you can net it out. But an end recovery toggle that boosted everyone within the dispersion bubble does make sense, since its benefits would accrue to team mates as well.

Adding more offense works, but it doesn't so much fix the problem as make it go away. It suggests that the trade of more defense for less offense shouldn't happen at all. That's one way to balance the set against other sets, but then with more offense, defense would tend to have to be reduced to balance the set the way the devs do. If the devs do want to have a range of defense-heavy and offense-heavy defender primaries, then there will always be some stronger and some weaker in net total offensive benefit. The ones with the lower offense and higher defense are in effect being more heavily impacted by endurance, so they need some sort of compensator. And endurance adjustments can't be factored solely in the cost of the defender powers, because offensive oriented buffs help team mates also, so this calculus goes on outside of the defender itself. Team mates have the same issue of being benefited either by an offensive-oriented defender than helps end fights faster or by a defense-oriented defender that helps the team last longer against attacks - but doesn't necessarily help the team last longer in terms of being able to fight longer. The trade is time, and the trade is bit imbalanced unless the defense-oriented set allows some increased offensive staying power to go along with defensive staying power.


Its actually analogous to how enhancements affect attacks. When you slot for accuracy (up to the tohit ceiling) and damage, you increase both dps and dpe. But when you slot for recharge, you only increase dps, and when you slot for endurance, you only increase dpe. In effect, foe defense debuffs and foe resistance debuffs increase team dps and dpe. Ally defense buffs and ally resistance debuffs do not increase either; but in a sense, they increase dps as a percentage of the amount of time you can survive. They don't, however, increase dpe on an adjusted basis.

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Okaaaaaaaay, so how bout them trick arrow defenders?

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Truthfully? Everyone knows the problem is activation times, but the real problem is that the activation times in trick arrow in effect "squeeze out" time to attack. Supposedly, *solo* defenders are partially balanced (on average) on the assumption that the buffing/debuffing in the primary will buy you more damage on the target (or more mitigation on you to last longer to inflict more damage), but trick arrow just sucks up too much time. When you mate it with archery to eliminate weapon draw issues, you buy yourself even more activation time problems. So its deal with weapon draw/redraw penalties, or deal with sucky activation on top of sucky activation and having attack chains you lay out on a calendar.

*IF* you get just the right team, and *IF* you make every single shot count, you can be extremely effective with TA or TA/archery. But you practically have to have a crystal ball telling you what target you ought to be shooting at five seconds from now so you can plan ahead: its just way too easy to waste shots.

If all of trick arrow and archery activation times were cut in half, say, on top of the endurance cost reductions Castle referred to earlier, the combo would actually be quite darned good.

Which brings up an interesting issue. Force field defenders trade defense buffing (which means more mitigation/longer lasting fights) for foe debuffing (which speeds up fights). In any situation where a defender trades more offense for more defense, one thing I think should definitely be looked at is endurance. In effect, FF defenders make fights last longer instead of faster: they should somehow grant a little more endurance to themselves and teams to actually last longer in the fight. It doesn't have to be large, but probably something significant (in dispersion bubble, perhaps?).

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Even if the knockdown were buffable to knockback with just 1 Knockback Enhancement? I don't think I need to tell you that if Torrent was changed to knockdown, but with a higher chance for the knockdown to hit, and then you added a knockback enhancer to change it back to knockback again, that you'd have a better Energy Torrent than before if you wanted a greater % chance to knock enemies back with the power.


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Not the way I use it. The way I use it, its slotted 1 acc 3 dmg 2 rech. Replacing at least one recharge with KB would be a penalty on me. Plus, torrent as it is allows me to knock back several in a group, and then target with single target attacks the one that isn't. Its tactically a better situation than knocking all of them down, and then still having to pick the one you want to shoot while all the others are getting up and still close by.

I'd take percentage increase and leave the rest alone myself.

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Windlacer, I'm suggesting changing knockback to knockdown on AOE's only, if that hasn't been clear before.


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Actually, if the devs *were* to make a change, and I had the choice, I would make single target attacks knockdown and preserve knockback for AoEs, not the other way around.

The reason is that with single target attacks, the primary benefit of knock is the momentary damage mitigation, and I can at least make a credible attempt at chain knocking. But if I hit a group with torrent, I want them all pushed back, because I can only continue to apply KB to one of them; I'd like the others to be unable to close to melee range while I do. I'm in favor of increasing the KB percentage on torrent, but not suppressing it to knockdown.

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oh, i would've attacked friendlies? what if I'm next to an enemy and click AS and the nearest teammate is 10 ft away?

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Then you have nothing to worry about. But in the heat of battle, its not easy to consistently target foes while under confuse, and any AoEs you use will hit everything in the area of effect, friend or foe.

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i don't pvp too much so i dont know about the +per

I have gotten confused once, maybe the enemy just stacked 2 confuses on me and the power only resists 1?

what's the point of confuse though? I just ran behind my group and waited for it to end

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That's the point of confuse: it forces you to take yourself out of the fight, or risk doing collateral damage to your own team.

Nice clean guide Amauros. Small correction: Elude has a 20 second crash, not a 10 second crash.

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You wrote "Ice Defenses do not stack with power pool defenses". I tried to figure this out from first principles if this is still true, but I could not. So I will just ask the question:

Do Ice Defenses do stack with power pool defenses now?

In other words, is there any benefit from getting say, weave?

Thank you very much. (I just started playing an ice-tank, so I have a keen interest in the answer. )

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They didn't used to; I'm still sweeping the AT-specific descriptions for instances of that stuff and trying to get a 1.3 version that corrects them all (I forgot how many places that stuff was mentioned).

Galactiman is correct: power pool defenses now appear to offer defense to melee/ranged/aoe/smash/lethal/fire/cold/energy/negative/psi (i.e. all types) and therefore stack with any defense.

They also stack with force fields, based on the bubble being stacked, and as far as I know, there aren't any cases of an entire set of defenses no longer stacking with Ice defenses (which are damaged typed). Short answer is that as an Ice tank, you should benefit from any power pool defense you can buy, any power pool defense aura (i.e. maneuvers), and if a defense buffer is on your team, you should get some benefit from defense buffs as well (although that is a tiny bit more complicated because of which buffs stack with which defenses).

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All I said was that calling the gap between 40% defense verses 30% defense trivial because its "only mitigating about 10% more of the absolute incoming damage" represents an essentially irreparable misunderstanding of how defense works all together.

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Good thing that nobody called the difference trivial, then; you can flog your straw man in peace.

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Strawman, meet dictionary:

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triv·i·al adj.

1. Of little significance or value.
2. Ordinary; commonplace.
3. Concerned with or involving trivia.
4. Biology. Relating to or designating a species; specific.

5. Mathematics.
a. Of, relating to, or being the solution of an equation in which every variable is equal to zero.
b. Of, relating to, or being the simplest possible case; self-evident.


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Dictionary, meet Centerfire:

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My characterization of 40% +def vs. 30% +def: "noticeable, but not particularly important except at the margins, i.e., AV fights".


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Just wait until these guys get around to looking and debating Trick Arrow.

That will be a good debate. Anyone know what the damage is like in comparison between the Oil Slick of a defender and a the Oil Slick of a controller?

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Trick arrow is broken. What sort of sides will there be to a trick arrow debate anyway (sometimes after some missions my tr/ar defender just wants to shoot her own contacts).

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IMO you can't look at FF the way you analyze it.


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Actually, I have a sketch outline of an analysis of FF - for both defenders *and* controllers - that I started a long time ago on a lark after Concern made a joke about it. If I were going to do an analysis of FF, it would take all those things into account. Just a cursory examination of all those things, and how they affect the set, demonstrates to me that anyone saying "its obvious" hasn't thought about it long enough.

All I said was that calling the gap between 40% defense verses 30% defense trivial because its "only mitigating about 10% more of the absolute incoming damage" represents an essentially irreparable misunderstanding of how defense works all together.

*IF* I were to do an analysis of FF, it might occur to me that FF controllers do not have the same access to accuracy debuffs that FF defenders do, so the gap between 30% and 40% - which is a difference of 100% in admitted damage - can easily get wider, to 30% verses 45% net effective defense, which is a 300% difference in admitted damage.

I'd also look at the overall census of defense: specifically the lowered power pool defenses (typically no more than 5% on average), separate from the special cases (Ice tanks, SR scrappers, etc). I'd also note that the gap from 30% defense to the tohit floor - 15% (and stable in I7) is not easily achievable for any set without primary or secondary defenses, and thus its far more likely that an FF defender could get to the floor with additional power pool support, a controller is much less likely to do so.

Whether the overall impact is better for defenders or controllers given the addition of power pool defenses and primary/secondary defenses is a simple question of conducting a census of all of those possibilities and averaging them out, or determining the mean case, which ever you can justify. Which apparently is supposed to be obvious just by glancing.

I don't find it obvious at all, or I would have just done it long ago.

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Because, having actually played a FF/* Defender for 600+ hours, I'd clearly have absolutely no understanding, either practical or abstract, of how a 10% variance in +defense affects overall survivability.

I stand by my statement. Your objection is frivolous. The gap between FF/* Defender +def buffs and */FF Controller +def buffs in I7 will be noticeable, but will not be particularly important except at the margins, i.e., AV fights.


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If you really want to settle this debate on the basis of resumes, just let me know. If your 600 hours of experience says there's no real difference between 40% defense and 30% defense, I can't help you. If this is how you classify a "frivolous" objection, no one can help you.

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Night Widows are probably my favorite creations, with the possible exception of Jack in Irons. geko designed them, and I built their powers. (Jack was a big team effort, I just love the way he looks.)

The majority of their defense come from their Precognitive abilities. The Stealth doesn't add anymore than three slotted Stealth would for a player. The Smoke Grenade, on the other hand, is brutal if you are lower level than they are.

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So starting from +3 (you are starting off with only 55% chance to hit), and then adding +91% tohit, gives 146% base chance to hit. Then there's about 8% defense due to stealth, and indetermined (but implied significantly higher) inherent defense (precog), and then a +3 smoke grenade (which I think is operating at something like 150% of normal). Hmm, it sounds like a bad luck streak; I don't think I can get that to work out to very low net accuracy without presuming extremely high inherent defense on the night widow, or a really really strong smoke grenade.

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Rep? as in Representative?
No one person who plays a scrapper, blaster, tank, controller, defender, Peacebringer, Warshade, Brute, Stalker, Corruptor, Master Mind or Dominator has a right to speak for me or anyone else in the forum community.

That's why these forums are here - so we ALL have a voice. Now, if there is a company hired Mod who acts as Liason for each AT -- well, that's not a great idea, either. Even CoH has got some folks who are more personable than others, and more likely to get their ideas passed, while the not so charasmatic person might not be able to "represent" very well.

No, like it or not, the current system of an occasional PM and posting on the forums may be a bit slow, but it does seem to be effective. I say leave well enough alone.

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Err... rep as in Cryptic representative. As in, while you are exercising your voice, the idea was someone would be specifically responsible to actually be listening.

Think of it as each AT's assigned advocate within the dev group.

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If I understand the I7 defense changes correctly, that 40% figure is the relative difference, not the absolute difference. In absolute terms the Defender's shields floor enemy to-hit, while the Controller's shields get enemy to-hit down to about 15%. So as a practical matter the Defender's shields are only mitigating about 10% more of the absolute incoming damage than a Controller's. That's a difference, sure, but it's hardly this earth-shattering, orgasm-inducing one.


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That's not a proper way to look at mitigation. The difference between the scrapper resistance cap and the tanker one is only 15%. The difference between I7 SR defenses and perma-elude is only 17%. Its very easy to notice the difference between those two. Looking at it the way you do trivializes the difference in a way that bears no resemblance to the true overall effect on survivability.


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So Arcana's contention is, essentially, that ~10% more absolute damage mitigation makes the Defender's overall capabilities with the set at least arguably superior to those of a Controller despite the fact that (a) that damage mitigation is of no personal benefit to the solo Defender, whereas it's of tremendous personal benefit to any Controller build that includes a pet; (b) any Controller already gets far more mileage out of the set's knockback and repel powers, inasmuch as he can better manage the aggro that those powers draw; and (c) any Controller is concededly superior with the set's ST immobilization/phase, and its AOE knockback/disorient (note that a good phase or a good disorient is better than a +defense buff as damage mitigation, inasmuch as for the duration of the effect the target(s) aren't attacking at all).


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My contention is, and has been from the beginning, that the FF set is arguably as effective if not more for FF defenders as for FF controllers, which was the general statement. You're saying that *if* the two are solo then an FF controller can get more out of FF than a defender because of pets, which is probably true but is a synergy problem with FF and other sets, not a statement about the FF set itself.

Originally, the statement was that it was trivial to prove that FF is stronger for controllers than defenders; that a simple straight-line argument demonstrates this. The *original* simple straight line argument is full of holes. They may be resolvable by resorting to much more complex analysis, but its still neither obvious, nor simple to demonstrate.

The fact that you can easily hand-wave the defense numbers away strongly implies to me the rest of your argument similarly hand-waves away a lot of other potential problems.

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I'm not a great debater, and I especially hesitate to be opposite Arcanaville, whom I respect a great deal from other posts and threads, but I do think I see the other side's view, and I'll be happy to try and represent it as best I can.


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Well, in this case you don't have to be, since I agree with you and Concern that there are potential synergy issues with defender and controller sets, separate from the direct benefits each might get out of a set individually. But synergy problems should probably be looked at in a more holistic manner, and within the AT and not across ATs.

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I find your argument to be not marginally dishonest.

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It's always great when trolls self-identify; makes it easier to add them to my /ignore list.

*plonk*

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As others have pointed out, he was supporting you, Centerfire. Ironically enough, he was using the definition of "marginal" that you defended earlier, while you apparently put him on your ignore list based on the definition Arcana used.

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Well at least one person got it.

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Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.

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Arcanna, I am very much in agreement that blasters should have their attack chains pretty much laid down by the time they hit their teens but I don't think that blasters need situational powers in addition to what they already have in their secondary.

What you described as a replacement to nova is something that I would consider a great secondary power. I think that blasters can have a good attack chain starting out and then as the levels progress pick up powers that can be helpfull in certain situations. The final powers though should allow them to basicaly upgrade their ranged attack chain at a time when they really need that attack chain to be strong enough to deal with the masses of mezzing mobs.

I am with you in regards to making the first powers the bread and butter, I just think that the bread and butter can get better as time goes on.

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I don't so much disagree with this sentiment as I have a parallel one. I have an aesthetic dislike for a situation where, say, we could make a full attack chain with power bolt, power blast, and torrent at low levels, and then eventually, we can "upgrade" that chain to power blast, power burst, (new) nova. It orphans powers and takes up power slots. I'd much rather "upgrades" come in the form of self buffs, like build up. So I see "upgrades" mostly coming from the secondary: build up, boost range, power boost, conserve power, for example. In effect, I'd rather have my power bolt work better over time, than have my power bolt replaced with a "better" power.

Doing it that way gives us more options to put other powers in the primary that are there just for variety's sake - either situational powers, or powers that aren't necessarily "better" or "worse" but are subject to player taste (i.e. TK verses CAK in the MA set).

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My suggestion? This may be controversial and it may have been said before.. but I think we should get rid of "True" nukes and replace them with Full Auto/Rain of Arrows like powers.


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It's been said before. Yeah, I was the one that brought up how much more usefull it would be for blasters to have non-situational powers like scrappers do in their primary sets.

My rational is different though. We already have situational powers in our secondary sets, so whey do we have situational powers in our primary set? Really, why? That just doesn't make any sense.

So, I advocated makeing the nukes high damage powers of some kind. Perhaps some powers could be designed like Head Splitter but with a range of 40' so that you would basicaly have a line attack but one that recharged fast enough to be used about twice a fight and did head-splitter sized damage. You could hit a boss and cut right through all the minions to get to him.

I am fully supportive of the nukes being changed to non-situational powers.

However, I don't think that _Castle_ can actually do anything about the actual design of the sets.

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Back when this was discussed the first (second, third, fourth?) time, I disagreed with this sentiment. My reasons are now the same as they were then: I would much rather the blaster primaries' damage be attack-chain balanced without taking the tier nine powers into account at all, and then the tier 9 powers be added as extra bonuses, than having the blaster primaries balanced on the presumption that the blasters will eventually have another high damage attack way out at 32. Given that blasters start off with no mitigation, its much more critical that blasters get their "meat and potatoes" attacks as early as possible: I'm actually an advocate of designing blaster primaries so that they could make (relatively) full attack chains within the first three attacks they get, and having *all* other attacks be situational additions.

In otherwords, I'm in favor of having *more* situational attacks, provided that the non-situational ones that are left are themselves reasonably adequate.

I.e. if I could make a full attack chain with bolt, blast, and burst, I'm fine with torrent being the situational attack I use as an opener for the knockback, say, or occasionally to kick foes that are rushing forward. The problem isn't that blaster primaries have situational powers: situational powers are good for diversity. The problem is that because of recharge scarcity (powers take a long time to become available in general) we're always tending to have to use situational powers *outside* their optimal situation.

32 is too long to wait for a "necessary" power, so by my definition, it has to be situational. Whether its high damage somewhat slow to recharge like full auto, or higher damage even slower to recharge like nova is mostly a matter of preference (I like the more frequent damage of FA, but standing rooted while applying a DoT has serious disadvantages over stealthing in and firing a nova - its not unambiguous which one is better).

*IF* the level 32 power is going to be useful constantly, instead of on long timer, it should be something that is situationally (but usefully) beneficial in other ways besides being forced to be infrequent. The best candidate for "frequently available but much more situational usage" powers would be (PB)AoE soft control. For example, while I would hate hate hate to lose my nova, I would at least think it was a fair trade if I got the equivalent of something like a very high order PBAoE knockdown with significant chance to disorient. That would be almost as good of an opener on groups as nova: less damage, but possibly more effective against LTs and Bosses. Something like that on a 90-120 second base timer could be used every couple of fights.

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Any chance we can get the aoe's for Elec/ and Energy/ Buffed? Maybe Sonic/ too. I find it odd that Claws and Spines can out aoe these sets two aoe's combined (And Elec/'s are DOT's, one of which has to be delivered in melee) once they get their level 32 powers and slot them at level 33.

I mean, sure it takes them a long time to get to 33, but to get from 33-50 takes a lot longer than from 1-33, and during that time, Energy/ and Elec/ blasters will have worse aoe damage than two Scrapper sets, while having similar (in Energy's case) single target damage, or in Elec's case... worse single target damage.

I'd also talk about Fire/ Brutes also being able to out aoe these sets two combined aoe's with JUST Fire Sword Circle, but they can't cross over to COH yet.

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On the energy/ side, torrent is more or less fine. Its low damage, but relatively fast activation and has KB mitigation in it (although the 50% chance is about the worst possible percentage that can exist, and it really seems like the scrapper APP torrent has a much better KB effect).

Its explosive blast thats borked. Its a high level power, but it has lower damage, longer activation, slower recharge, and higher end costs than torrent. The only thing going for it really is range, and an AoE KB power like EB makes more sense as a close-up power like torent than a long range one like EB (because the knockback at such long range doesn't offer the same situational damage mitigation benefits).

Explosive blast should probably be change in one of the following ways:

1. Increase damage from 2.5 to at least 3.5
2. Decrease recharge and end costs by 33%, and reduce activation time to the same as torrent (~ 1.1 seconds)
3. Alter the knockback to 100% knockup