Draeth Darkstar

Wow, holier-than-thou-art much? What right do you have to judge people for enjoying the numbers behind the game versus playing the game however you enjoy it?

Please do something to make this an option, not a forced costume change. This will ruin every costume I use Celestial on currently.

Changing parts out from under us instead of making them new options has a long history of being very unpopular with the playerbase. For every person that asked for this to change there was at least one that liked it the way it was (Hi!).

That looks excellent, but it is in addition to the current look, not instead of, right?

This?

Precisely.

This is something of a tangent, but, the animation cycles faster with higher movement speed bonus, such as from Super Speed, doesn't it?

WHOA! Spoiler warning, man.

Golly, I guess I must have missed the point. Oh wait, no I didn't.

When the high end sets are closer to the pack (by a huge margin, in most cases) than the low end sets, no one wants to compare to the low end sets, because from a mechanical standpoint, that just leads you to comparing to something that's so mechanically inferior that you'd only play it for concept anyway, which isn't particularly relevant to a discussion of comparative power in the first place.

Which is what the end of my previous post was written to respond to; I simply happen to take particular offense to misrepresentation of the Mastermind archetype, as it's my favorite and has a nasty tendency to get shortchanged.

The support sets do not have serious outliers. They have two very widely segregated groups: great sets and sets you only pick for concept.
Addressed previously. Yes, Fire Blast is head-and-shoulders above the other Blast sets (unlikely to be nerfed since it's still worse than most melee DPS), and yes, Titan Weapons and Super Strength have a bit of a quantifiable lead on the other melee sets, which is also unlikely to change, because there's no good downward mark to aim for, as the melee sets don't have a good average, they're more of a stack from bad to good, and the Devs have been slowly improving the bad ones.
Exactly what armor sets do you have a problem with? The only three that stand out in my mind are Stone, which has largely lost its niche as "unnecessarily durable at a cost" since every armor set is now unnecessarily durable, Regen, which takes more player finesse to get similar performance out of than the other sets, and Super Reflexes, which just lacks utility.

Any cry of "Overpowered!" in the name of a support set being better than Dark or Rad is... basically insane. Both of those sets are at least as good as Kinetics, and they're both significantly more versatile.

Did you actually read that post?

Masterminds really don't have any "uber" sets, in global balance sense. They have 3 primaries that can achieve some of the ridiculousness that the true outliers in the game have, but even the most ridiculous Mastermind combos are weaker than the top-end melee, control, and corruptor/defender combos, and they're certainly weaker than the true gamebreakers like Ill/Cold, Dechs' Triform Shade, and THB's Arch/Mental.

And again, you're misrepresenting where these sets lie. If anything, the Mastermind sets look something like Demons=Thugs>Bots>Necromancy>Ninjas>Beast>Mercs.

The only powerset groups in the game that have any truly dramatic overperformers are the Blast and Melee sets, which have Fire, and Titan Weapons/Super Strength respectively. Every powerset group has outliers that underperform, in some cases severely dramatically, which is why you tend to see people compare to the high end: the overperforming outliers in most cases are less obvious and less extreme. Mercenaries, as a set, since you like this example so much, is unbelievably bad compared to the rest of the Mastermind primaries. Truly. Outrageously. Terrible. It is, in fact, one of the worst powersets in the entire game.

Bots, Thugs, and Demons are relatively balanced with one another. They have feasible pros and cons and are fun and effective to play. By Median, these are the average performers, and they're also the most comparable to the performance of the other ATs, which makes them the best balancing point for Mastermind primaries.

Necromancy has a bit less raw power than those three, but is still pretty effective without excessive micromanaging and has a strong niche in debuffing tohit when fighting single targets.

Ninjas have some problems. They have stellar ST DPS, but their AoE is lacking, bad AI makes them struggle a lot more than the above sets more frequently, their Tier7 is inefficient, and they're really hellaciously squishy. They can be used effectively with intense micromanagement.

Mercenaries and Beast Mastery are your real outliers. Both of these sets have significant design problems that really hold back their capabilities. I'd really rather not get into the whys in this thread, because it's been done to death in various other threads, so if you're really curious, go look in the Mastermind forums.

To the OP: Cold Domination has better top-end debuffs than Radiation, and Poison can hit higher on single targets as well, so that's a bad example. Super Strength no longer has the best DPS even with stacked rage, so, again, bad choice, and... Kinetics is pretty much the only Support set that significantly contributes damage output other than Storm, which is much, much harder to quantify than %damage buffs, so... I'm not sure where you were going with that one.

That's Synapse, silly.

Citadel is the one that's full of nazis.

Actually, if all I cared about were IO bonuses, this thread wouldn't exist. Most characters can benefit an awful lot from a 4-slot Kinetic Combat mule (read: Boxing or Kick). This thread was started because I don't like feeling forced into taking powers that I will never, ever use to get to powers that I use 100% of the time: Tough and Weave; and no, not for IO set bonuses, though that is a perk, for the base functionality of the powers: making the character more durable.

Please take your horrifically condescending, know-it-all attitude somewhere else, now. Thank you.

Isn't the standard weekly maintenance... Thursday morning?

If you would be willing to directly express that opinion to Synapse, I think you may have a better chance of convincing him to reevaluate the current setup than anyone else has had.

As I stated in the OP, I24 is changing pool prerequisites to worklike APP/PPPs according to the coffee talks. That means the first two powers are available at 4, taking one power opens up the next two, and taking two powers opens up the fifth one.

This is about half of the basic logic behind why I feel this should happen.

The other half is that, according to the new design paradigm, the pool powers are supposed to each be useful and stand on their own merits. If that's the case, then there should be no need to be forced to choose between two powers that do essentially the same thing in Tier 1 of Fighting. If someone wants the pool for the extra attack chain, they could Take Boxing/Kick, then the other, then Cross-Cut even if Boxing or Kick is switched with Tough, and people who don't want or need the extra attacks but want more durability can get exactly what the new goal of pool power sets is: powers that are useful to them.