Ben_Arizona

But your chance of it happening when you need it is exactly the same whether it's in Aim or Targeting Drone. The difference is that in Targeting Drone it will also be going off during all the other times you're attacking and Aim hasn't recharged yet.

ARGH this misconception. Okay, look, here's the thing. If Gaussian's Chance For Build Up fires off in WWs it has no effect on the odds of it then firing off later when you're in a fight. It is no more "wasted" than your Build Up proc in Aim is when you're standing around in Wentworth's not using it.

The only thing that affects the odds of a given attack being affected by your Build Up proc is whether or not you have triggered the proc-holding power immediately before the attack. The odds of an attack being affected by the proc in Aim right after you hit Aim are the same as that attack being affected by the proc if it were in a toggle you had running at the time. The only difference is that with the toggle, that's every attack instead of just the ones you hit Aim on.

If you have the choice between putting Chance For Build Up in a toggle or Aim, it is always better to put it in the toggle. Putting it in Aim does not increase the chances that it will go off "when you need it". All it does is decrease the chances that it will go off at other times (including attacks later in the same fight) to 0%.

The later arcs in Praetoria have you finding out about Primal Earth in order to set up your character going there. Certain Primal Earth enemies show up in these arcs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fata_Morgana_%28mirage%29

First thing that comes to mind for me.

Also worth noting is that its recharge is ludicrously fast at 40s base. It's an AoE control that's up every fight on dual-origin enhancements. That makes it ridiculously good control for the early levels, while in the later levels it's a solid supplementary trick.

Decent heroside players are used to this with controllers anyway. What seems more likely to me is that whoever was handing out offensive buffs was used to making controllers low priority since they're not really a damage-output focused AT. (I assume you're talking about offensive buffs, since defensive buffs tend to be trivial to keep on the entire team.)

People will get used to the differences with the new ATs. Decent players will, anyway, and bad players will be as bad as they ever were with the old ATs.

"Wild card" is a pretty good way of putting it - it's hard to give a solid list of times you would use it, because it seems like it's more a wide variety of fringe or rare situations. Eventually (for me at least) there just sort of developed a sense of when it was time for the Tornado.

It's definitely not something you'll use all the time, but it's a very nice tool in the box. That's why I get annoyed when people treat it purely as a damage power when talking about Storm.

While a lot of people forget this, Tornado is also an excellent chaos-control power; the KB and stun it flings around make it very hard for enemies to get anything done. Granted, it's not like Mind really needs another panic button, but it's handy against enemies who resist Mind's main arsenal of tricks or when teammates seem dead-set on a team wipe.

That said the main thing I use it for on my mind/storm is frigging Malta Auto Turrets. Nothing in Mind works well on them and I hate leaving them alive to follow me around and try to break my stealth, but since they have KB immunity Tornado and LS can bust them up pretty well.

I disagree that it's useless in the context of the set. The thing is that Jolting Chain is more or less unique in terms of its role in a control set; none of the other sets have an immediate short-term AoE active-mitigation power (there are a few such powers in single-target form with Lift and Levitate). The saving grace of Jolting Chain is that for an AoE soft control it recharges incredibly fast, enough to work into an attack chain and keep your enemies constantly on their backsides in addition to whatever else you might be doing. It also has obvious application against mez-resistant enemies, of course.

It's relatively skippable, but I wouldn't call it terrible or useless. Personally I prefer it over the immobs on a dom, but that's a matter of taste.

Longbow Ballista, then?

(FF/Energy Blast/Energy Melee, and the description specifically calls them out as tankers. Yeah I dunno the NPCs get to cheat.)

I think that's a little oversimplifying. I have no problem with a kin who has other things to do at a given moment than dose up his teammates - a kin has a lot of things to do, and may be too busy Fulcrum Shifting, Transfering, Siphoning things, or just blasting to top you up right now. That is "evaluating situations as they arise in light of the team and making the best choices".

However, I am baffled by a kin who simply chooses not to Speed Boost, even when there's nothing better for him to do. Other than the fringe case of someone who just can't handle their character moving fast, there is no situation where the "best choice for the team" is for people to not have Speed Boosts refreshed as the opportunity arises. Can you imagine an emp who declares that he has evaluated the team's layout to figure out who to Fort first and decided that the team's optimal situation is for him to not Fortitude anybody at all?

Edit: Oh, right, I forgot, we do have threads about that guy. People who are incredibly smug about not taking Speed Boost start them so they can complain about healz0rz.

Unlike an emp's Fort, there isn't even the question of "who do I keep it up on?" Throw the Speed Boosts when you're running from one spawn to another. Don't worry about chasing people down when their SBs run out. Every character does better with SB on them than without, thanks to the hefty recharge boost if nothing else. The only reason I can think of to skip it is if you absolutely, genuinely never team - that, or a misplaced sense of pride in not making your team as good as they could be.

Footnote: I play a kin; she was one of my first characters and my first blueside 50. I try to maintain full team Speed Boost at all times but realize other people have different priorities about what comes first - I just don't understand people whose opinion is that Speed Boost comes never, or after telling people to grovel for it.

The robot damage isn't the main point of EMP arrow. The draw of EMP arrow is the hold: mag 3 with longer duration and larger radius than, Mind Control's Total Domination, Illusion's Flash, Ice's Glacier, and probably the other AoE controller-primary holds I can't be bothered to look up right now. The crash is also relatively mild: you lose end recovery, but it doesn't actually tank your end like a nuke does.

It's a superior AoE hold; the -regen and damage to robots is just gravy.

Right, and I think that's fair. My point isn't "he did it for Brawl, so he should do it for every power!" My point is that the animations for kicking without putting away your weapon have already been made and are already in the game as a result of this. Although Kick does have a longer cast time than Brawl, so that may be an issue.

In terms of "which does the most to eliminate redraw" other primary/secondaries make more sense to rework. But in terms of "which one has the work already been mostly done for", eliminating redraw from Kick is the one that makes sense.

It also might actually prompt people to take Kick instead of Boxing occasionally.

I would actually classify all those characters as elite bosses or AVs. Named bosses who are not EBs tend to appear in a single mission or arc. Recurring characters are all elite boss or higher.

Which is a pretty hefty undertaking, except that he already made "kick without sheathing your weapon" animations for the existing weapons to use with Brawl.

(I don't have characters with every weapon, so there may be some that don't have kick animations already, but I know that at the least quite a few of them do.)

Clearly you need to craft a Revolver, Gabriel's Hammer, and a St. Louis Slammer to work into your attack chain.

I don't know about other servers, but on Champion (in my experience, at least) teams form fairly regularly to take down GMs when they spawn just because they're a relatively small investment of time and effort for two merits. Mostly it's Babbage, Paladin and the Croatoa monsters because they're easy to get to and spawn pretty frequently, but Adamastor, Jurassik, and Kraken teams aren't all that rare either. Lusca does have the "too much effort for too little reward" problem, though.