Expeditor

With the recent Street Fighting and forthcoming Staff Fighting sets we've seen a far more flexible setup for combos that it would be good to see ported back to Dual Blades. The finishers are generally the longer recharging powers anyway, so such a change isn't going to make (most of) the combos available more frequently per se, just less restrictive.

There are a couple of issues that would need to be addressed..

Firstly currently Typhoon's Edge is the finisher for both Sweep and Weaken on Scrappers, Brutes and Tankers. I'd suggest making One Thousand Cuts the finisher for Weaken (as it already is on Stalkers).

Secondly, Ablating Strike is the finisher for Sweep on Stalkers, with only a 6 second recharge - it's currently gated by having Build Up as the starting power, tieing it to a 90s recharge power (which I think is going far too far the other way!). On the one hand it would kind of make up for the single-target Attack Vitals where it's an AoE for other ATs, but with the knockdown as well it would be just a teeny tiny bit too good. Consequently I would suggest upping Ablating Strike's recharge to somewhere around the 10 second mark, with damage, endurance cost etc. being scaled up with it - I figure any higher and it would push the set's single target damage up too much, but perhaps the bonus damage from the Sweep effect could be reduced a little to compensate for the slightly faster recharge (over the other ATs' version).

So in summary, for Scrappers, Brutes and Tankers you would have the following finishers:
Typhoon's Edge -> Sweep
Blinding Feint -> Empower
Sweeping Strike -> Attack Vitals
One Thousand Cuts -> Weaken

For Stalkers you would have:
Ablating Strike -> Sweep
Placate -> Empower
Vengeful Slice -> Attack Vitals
One Thousand Cuts -> Weaken

A random afterthought: thinking about the alternate animation/power gimmick in Titan Weapons, Stalker's Ablating Strike could conceivably play the Typhoon's Edge animation when the sweep effect is activated, or even be outright replaced with Typhoon's Edge, doing higher single target damage when used before the required combo points are built up, but doing lower AoE damage alongside the Sweep effect when used with combo points.

Any thoughts, glaring issues etc?

We've already had this for a few sets to help bring them up to par, such as Clobber from War Mace and Cobra Strike from Martial Arts, now both good, worthwhile powers. But a lot of sets still have a cookie-cutter 20s recharge, trivial damage stun which frankly look terrible when you compare them to similar utility powers from other sets.

On the melee side we have Energy Melee/Stun. Considering this set's terrible single AoE attack, I'd be inclined to suggest making it an additional AoE attack for the set - perhaps a targeted AoE similar to Thunder Strike, give it a mag 2 5.96s stun and against the primary target only give it another mag 1 5.96s stun, an 8' radius and all energy damage equal to Whirling Hands (damage scale 1.0), adjusting the endurance cost upwards to compensate. It's less damage and in a smaller area than the likes of Foot Stomp and Whirling Smash and it has a shorter stun duration over a smaller area than Fault, but a decent middle ground of solid damage and mitigation.

On the ranged side there's Archery/Stunning Shot, Assault Rifle/Beanbag, Phychic Blast/Scramble Thoughts, Sonic Attack/Screech and Dual Pistols/Suppressive Fire (I know this is a hold under different ammo types, but even then it's inferior to other ranged set holds with a 20s recharge).

Screech offers a damage resistance debuff (in line with most of Sonic Attack's powers) on top of having the same stun duration and magnitude as the others - considering it would be difficult to justify higher damage or an AoE for the likes of Stunning Shot or Beanbag I figure a similar resistance debuff would be a reasonable alternative. For Beanbag in particular, considering the low single target damage of Assault Rifle, perhaps up the damage a little to ~0.5 damage scale (from 0.2), halve the recharge and lower the stun duration a little (~9.5s like Cosmic Burst, which also has a 10s recharge and rather higher damage).

For Scramble Thoughts and Suppressive Fire however I'd be inclined to go with straight-up higher damage, something along the lines of (blasters) Dark Blast/Abyssal Gaze's ~1.4 damage scale DoT, considering Scramble Thoughts crazy animation time and Dual Pistols lack of an Aim equivalent.

Just a random idea I started thinking about after seeing the thread about tauntless Tankers, making the taunt power more useful solo and in teams, including when teaming with other Tankers.

The -range was a nice addition and I thought a -damage effect could sit alongside it, -10% for 12s (the same duration as the -range effect) - if it was slotted for a little recharge and the Tanker was spamming it they could maintain -30%, in line with what many Defenders could put out, and it would stack from multiple Tankers. Of course it has a lower target cap than most -damage powers available to defenders, and would require more spamming, so I don't see it encroaching too much on Defender territory.

In addition it would apply a flag to the primary target only (same as the -range effect on Brute taunt only applies to the primary target) - the flag would have a 10s duration.

I had a few ideas for what this flag could be used for, such as adding effects to the tier1 attack only, alongside Bruising. But one I particularly liked was adding a 'mini-bruising' -resistance effect to every attack from the Tanker's secondary, that would be in addition to the current Bruising, equal in effect to the cast time of the power (so an attack with a 2s animation would apply a 2% resistance debuff) and with a duration of 30s. Assuming you had a complete attack chain, regardless of which set you had, you would be able to build up a 10% resistance debuff over the 10 seconds the taunt flag was applied. You could then use Taunt again to reapply the flag and continue building up -resistance or just carry on attacking and take advantage of that 10% resistance debuff (in addition to the 20% from Bruising) for another 20s.

On a team however, every Tanker would be able to take advantage of the taunt flag applied by any one Tanker, much like Beam Rifle characters can take advantage of each other's Disintegration flag. With one Tanker keeping the taunt flag on a single target, every other Tanker could build up to and eventually maintain a 30% resistance debuff. Whereas Bruising doesn't stack from multiple Tankers, this would. As with the -damage it's similar to what many Defender sets can offer, but it's against a single target, takes time to build up and involves attacking constantly.

Solo it would give Tankers a little extra defence (from the -damage) and offence (from the -resistance), but in teams it would allow multiple Tankers to stack those effects to the benefit of the whole team (with several Tankers applying -damage even if a Blaster managed to steal aggro from all of them he'd be hit for less damage).

In particular it would help Tankers contribute damage against hard targets (both directly and by boosting the entire team's damage with resistance debuffs) without giving them higher damage in general, which would be encroaching on Scrapper and Brute territory.

I took the offensive Arachnos pets (Toxic Tarantula and Bane Spider) for theme as well as the toxic damage going nicely with Venom Grenade's hefty resistance debuff. I give my pets ~20% to all with TT:maneuvers and leadership maneuvers, so they're pretty survivable anyway, and I took Rebirth destiny to top them up now and again.

I do have Warworks partway up its tree (from before Arachnos were added) - the boss is pretty good for damage and the battle orb gives defence and a single target heal which would no doubt help.

If you're finding them squishy you might get more out of the various pet set procs - 2x+5% defence and 2x+10% resistance available if you can spare the slots.

I concur.

I've always thought the god-modes, particularly the older ones, could use a little more flavour. Unstoppable for example, could have massive debuff resistances, particularly recharge/movement speed, because hey, you're unstoppable right?

The defence ones could use the most help of course, as has been mentioned, as they tend to gain little if anything from them. If any of them deserve a massive reduction in crash it's these! Giving Elude some +recharge is also a pretty nice and suitably thematic idea.

Not a god-mode but I think Regen's rez could do with having something added to it as well - Fire, Dark and Willpower all have something added to their rez. Maybe 500% regen for 30s, to help keep you in the fight even if all your clickies are still recharging.

Oddly Willpower's Strength of Will doesn't take endurance modification enhancements which it probably should. Adding some +HP (probably less than One with the Shield gives considering the slightly shorter recharge) would be a pretty nice buff.

Just for reference, it's worth noting VEAT Fortunatas already get a crashless nuke - their crashless Psychic Wail has the same mag 3 stun and massive recharge debuff of the blaster/defender version, it even does more guaranteed damage than the defender version, although the 2 additional chance-for-damage ticks are lower damage, all for a mere 20.8 endurance and on an AT that could have ~25% slotted defence to all (more to melee specifically) running through a crash.

We also have Beam Rifle's crashless nuke, Overcharge, with half the recharge of the crashing nukes - considering the devs have been consciously pushing recent nukes away from the benchmarks of Full Auto and Rain of Arrows, this seems noteworthy for the sort of performance they want from a nuke. Ignoring the 'disintegrate' effect, it has a 60% chance for a short duration mag 3 stun and a mediocre 10.5% defence debuff with base damage equal to the guaranteed portion of the crashing nuke. It also has a guaranteed DoT totalling damage 1/3 of one of the chance-for-damage ticks. Where a crashing nuke fails to apply either chance-for-damage ticks Overcharge will actually deliver more damage. And while its total potential damage is almost half a crashing nuke, it also has half the recharge.

With these in mind I don't see why there would need to be any lowering of performance if the crash was dropped, unless the recharge was reduced as well - if the recharge was halved and the chance-for-damage ticks were replaced with a guaranteed DoT, I'd be more inclined to use them than I am now.

Been considering rolling one myself actually - I gather both sets work better on brutes, as the bonus damage from combo finishers and fiery embrace benefit from fury but are completely ignored by crits.

SD is pretty awesome on tanks - easy to softcap defence, +HP in True Grit and the tier 9, decent resists and an extra attack/mitigation with Shield Charge - the only downside I'd note with pairing with War Mace is that you're all smashing damage (although I have the taunt set psi damage proc in most of my attacks as well as Taunt itself) and the AoE attacks are all bunched at the latest levels, but the same is true of a lot of sets. Add in the healing/regen Destiny power and you're near unkillable.

For brutes or scrappers I'd be inclined to suggest Broadsword as a better pairing - you get Parry to help bolster the lower defence numbers, earlier AoE attacks and lethal damage to pair with the smashing damage in Shield Charge, not to mention the much larger array of sword models to choose from!

I rather like the idea of a single-target attack, perhaps with trade-offs between up-front damage versus DoT with utility/mez (a-la Ghost Widow's hold) - probably not outright holding AVs and GMs, but perhaps enough to control an AV while purple triangles are down.

I'm looking at switching a couple of sets of 5 red fortune for 3 lotg's and a regular IO end reduction, freeing up 2 slots that I am considering using for the 2 pet defence IOs - this would give an extra 10% defence on top of the ~20% they get from double maneuvers, which would likely do their survivability a fair bit of good.

On the other hand I also have the pet build-up IO sitting around in storage, and 2 of my 3 pets are somewhat underslotted for damage, so even if I did decide I'd use the slots for my pets and not something else entirely I'm not sure I'd go with the defence IOs... ah decisions decisions!

I didn't realise the flyposes were so clunky, half the reason I was even thinking about this is that I've never used them because I'd have to look up how they work! Thinking about it more it'd probably be better done as alternate animations selectable at the tailor as current customisation is (at least selecting a default pose that could still be overridden with the emotes). Teleport could probably use a couple of alternatives too, as I'm sure has been suggested many times before. I know pool powers were quite consciously left out along with ancillary powers when customisation was first put in, but I'd consider them the better choice to spend some time on at this point simply because they're accessible to everyone regardless of AT, alignment and all the rest of it.

As for the macro/bind builder, I'd still find it useful having a simple interface - having a text entry line, a drop-down list of all the different commands, possibly split into sub-menus as the emotes list increasingly is (which I think they're doing a great job of - something else I rarely used to make use of because so many of the emotes simply weren't on the in-game list), some simple help text to give some idea what the command does and what additional input it needs (e.g. a power, a number, a name) - work has already been put in to making these commands available, how about some more to make them accessible in a way that more people will use them?

I find it strange that CoH allows lots of neat macros of various kinds but provides no user-friendly way to access them - many a casual/new player is probably completely unaware that such things are even possible. So wouldn't it be handy if you could right-click on a power and select a "customise" option that presents you with a window to add various functions, such as swap costume, play emote et al, on certains events?

For toggles you would have the "toggle on" event, possibly a "toggle off" event and bonus points if you could get a "toggle dropped" event to distinguish where the toggle turned off because of mez effects. This would be useful for attaching flyposes to the fly/hover powers for example, as well as swapping trays when changing forms on kheldians.

For click powers you would have the "on click" event, but bonus points if you could also have an "on effect expire" event. An example here would be to add a costume change (including costume change emote of choice) when you click your god mode (say, unstoppable) from your normal male-model costume to your huge-model costume (courtesy of the science booster), then switch the costume back when the god mode crashes.

Having a similar interface for building macros and binds would also be pretty sweet.

I'm surprised no one has expressed an interest in ageless radial for Destiny - recharge, a chunk of endurance and debuff resistance, because as much defence as the veats can get it disappears under defence debuffs real fast!

I remember some discussions on the old EU boards about having non-Arachnos patrons and patron pools, with attached story arc to unlock (with shiny badge at the end, naturally), and certainly having heroic counterparts would be nice as well.

I also had a vague idea for a series of story arcs involving joining, manipulating and eventually taking over the Hellions (I even got as far as making the first arc in AE), opening up pool powers and, well, patron is perhaps not the correct term given the circumstances, but an ancillary pool as well.

Just because I haven't seen anyone else mention it I'll just pipe in with Crab Spider as a possibility - obviously a rather different visual style than Iron Man, but it's techy, survivable and fantastic firepower. I even have hover on mine which, between swift and mental training, goes at a fair pace for traversing missions.

A wholly selfish suggestion just because my crab spider is awesome - simple enough to implement as the fire-from-spider-legs animations are all largely identical and it would pretty much just follow the format of existing patron sets, except with added fire-from-spider-legs awesomeness

Ranged single-target blast: probably a Mace Blast clone but, for obvious reasons a Gloom clone with toxic damage instead of negative energy would be preferred - would even take a reduced 40' range like Poisonous Ray just to pretend it would be balanced

AoE Immobilise: Web Envelope clone. Adding knockback protection would be nice but wouldn't expect it.

Ranged AoE blast: probably a Disrupter Blast clone, although a Suppression-esque cone attack (with a reduced arc of course), perhaps with lethal damage instead of energy, would be nice - effectively Heavy Burst from your spider legs.

Pierce Armor: Shatter Armor clone, with lethal damage instead of smashing - a good, if infrequent, heavy-hitter with -res for those hard targets.

Summon Blaster: a clone of its Mace Mastery counterpart, because it fits in with the rest of the Crab Spider's pets.

I wouldn't expect it to happen, but a backpacked maniac can dream!

Just a brief outline of an idea but, using the existing base tools et al, the opportunity to have a personal base purchasable with personal inf. Perhaps start off with a smaller plot, maybe 4x4 or even 3x3, with a starting room available of the same size that could hold the basic control and power item and some (shared) storage.

My thought there was you would have the same storage items as group bases (salvage, enhancements, inspirations, possibly with the addition of recipes) but they would tie to shared (account-wide) storage - if you had 2 salvage bins they would both show the same contents, so you couldn't get lots of storage of any particular type of item, similarly restricting the storage of recipes (lets face it, with mail attachments we can all share and store 20 recipes anyway so why not make it available as a neatly accessible bin?)

There would be larger plot sizes available of course, to allow the addition of teleporters and other fun stuff, all requiring additional control and power as in group bases, allowing a player to sink sizeable amounts of inf if they so choose for a larger and more functional base.

My thought at this stage is that these would be individual bases, i.e. you would need to buy a base for each character, and storage bins for each base to access the shared pool. On the one hand this might become quite tedious, on the other if there are decent low-end options covering access to each bin type (3x3 should comfortably accommodate the basics) then it shouldn't be too bad, allows each character to have a base suited to their theme and eats up more inf.

If it was implemented, in some basic fashion, and proved popular, then of course it has the added benefit of potentially making dev time spent on making new base items, decorative or otherwise, more viable as more people would be making use of them.

Anyway, my thought for the day - adieu.

The Incarnate stuff fits beautifully for my power-mad crab spider - started off as a natural, well-trained Wolf Spider, starts stealing tech for his own use (crab backpack, spider-bots), goes on to steal some science-y concoctions (Serum, I also take Fortification to be derived from some manner of super-soldier serum), then starts dabbling in magic with the patron pools (was originally going for Mu but decided on Soul in the end). From there the prospect of becoming a god-like being appeals greatly!

Or just use Energize, heal and all, and change Energy Drain to give +def like Ice Armor's Energy Absorption. And possibly put psi defence into Entropy Shield, add endurance drain protection to Energy Protection and... something to Dampening Field - +10% HP maybe?

How about, for the set uniques:
A ~20% defence debuff resistance for the defence set - this might be a touch high, defence toggles seem to give 15-17% defence debuff resistance each.
A scaling resistance (like the super reflexes passives) that caps at 10% resist to all for the resistance set?
A +10% max HP for the healing set? Although this wouldn't benefit ATs with a low cap, I gather stalkers suffer this issue a lot.