IceScykle

lame, i was hoping for COT robes

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Hurl + shark blasters

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they got nerfed i14, now its flurry, jump kick, boxing and kick blappers

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They nerf elusivity this issue so they can introduce Elusitivity IOs and Elusitivity global buffs next issue.

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lol

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Someone convince me why it's bad that elusivity reduced to 10% is bad backed with numbers. 10% elusivity is better then no elusivity.

it's not like they took away your defense. and defense isn't as lawls since they nerfed the biggest culprit to destroying defense pre i13, Focused Accuracy, to what 6% tohit? throw in the fact that squishies have resistance to everything(which they shouldnt) and melees have resistance to all debuffs sans end drain(which they shouldn't) coupled with -range.

seems to me everyone is in the same ball park.

it would seem that the people who have the most to lose from the elusivity nerf are peeps with pff, which ya'll should have known it was gonna get hit with the nerf bat.

what about the people with frozen armor, scorpion shield, etc? i didnt see much of them running around pre i13. adding elusivity to them was just a bonus crutch we all liked.

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Elusivity is a crap idea, another mechanic laid over the game to counter addinging DR to defence, why the hell bother adding DR anyway? From my understanding defence protects from the bottom up and "elusivity" from the top down so the more likely you are to hit through defence the less likely you will land because of elusivity. WHY? PB + aim and BU should be like landing free hits, thats the point of those powers (I dont play blasters btw) Because of the two systems the ideal solution for people attacking is to roll "average" rolls in the hope of landing between defence and elusivity. This sums up the whole "castle approach" nothing shines, everyone should aim for average.

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Yeah the problem....our problem...is that we might not get to the point where this game is finally fixed to the point of actual playability. We seem to agree that it will take them like a year to fix even something as simple as elusivity. With those new games coming out, there isn't even a guarantee that this game will be alive in a year. It's currently still a cash cow for NCSoft. I believe it's the second biggest source of revenue behind GuildWars. But the upcoming competiton will surely change that.

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Definitely. I don't think playing dress up with our toons and now enemy toons is enough to maintain any kind of sustainable competitive advantage.

MA seems like it could be a golden ticket, but the current edition of it is pretty weak. I don't think they have years to improve it either.

Every 'feature' in this game is only half complete whether it be pvp, base building, modding, raiding, loot, market etc. Not every game offers everything that cox does, but cox doesn't do a good job on anything it does offer, so unless you take advantage of a ton of their packages we will likely find better games elsewhere.

The only thing holding me back right now is that I really like supers and I have played so much fantasy games in the past that they don't interest me anymore. I suspect a lot of people are like me and just waiting for either CO or DCUO .

The dev i13 vision of "everything the same" is now spilling over into pve too which has people getting pretty fired up. I'm sure if Castle could he'd jam DR into the pve game too.

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I always beleived what we got in i13 PvP was Castles design for the PvE game, a testbed so to speak, his previous posts over the years always had him leaning towards such things as diminishing returns (oh how he hates stacking forcefeilds, full strength for the first, 5% for each other was his preference) just he lacks the muscle to push forward such a swg moment for NCsoft. Problem is hes not a big picture man, hes a number crunching minutae man and cant design by "feel", PvP needed work but where a bolder designer would have changed each power on "feels right" and adjust as it goes Castle would have to have every damn number checked and rechecked a hundred times which is why we got his overriding "game laws" which just ** over everyone with no rhyme or reason

"Im a regen scrapper, watch my regen supress itself if I go into combat"

"Im a storm troller, my main DEFENCE is hurricane, but hey Castle thinks it offensive and with no mez protection my whole PvP experience is just a game of retoggling"

"Im a WP player, please see above"

"Im a energy melee player, why does energy transfer do only 65% of flurry? Its not even a fast attack anymore...."

"Im a kinetic defender, motion is my business, watch as my inertia reduction....um supresses my movement....."

The list is endless but castles laws are laws and apply to all regardless of sense

COH needs a new management team, not necessarily new devs but certainly management of them that doesnt see it as "them Vs the players" it worked for Age of Conan and COH are going to have a VERY nasty shock when their niche is well and truely opened up, CO will hurt COH and DCU will smack it silly just on the basis of the "inspired by system" actively encourages homages as opposed to the generic stick.

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So umm...why even leave elusivity in the game at all? If the value is so low that it will not make ANY difference in any scenario, what is the point of all that extra code? Just get rid of it, and don't confuse people any further.

I mean, that's if the devs' goal really is to drive away as many people from PvP as possible. All jokes aside, I'm really starting to think that's the goal.

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Castles goal is to get an equal number of ATs and sets into PvP, that means [censored] anything thats outperforming others and pulling things down to the lowest common denominator. As it stands his retarded design has pool power attacks beating ANY primary/secondary attack which is rediculous.

The good news though is Champions Online will be out soon, even though I dont see myself playing CO for any great length of time it will do untill DCU is out which is currently sounding sweet with interactive PvP missions (and SOE know exactly what not to do to chase away subscribers after the SWG debacle)

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So should we expect in i15 that we can't buff/debuff teammates now?

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I find your hyperbole to be greatly delicious AND amusing along with your lack of understanding of the situation. Post more plz.

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Its clearly sarcasm not exaggeration, I find your post greatly delicious AND amusing along with your lack of understanding of the situation. Post more plz....

....actually dont because your attempt at a condescending and insulting trolling post contributes nothing.

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Hopefully before it reaches that point, the devs will separate out the critter versions of Fire Imps and Jack Frost and make them debuffable.

[/ QUOTE ] This I doubt, because if they wont allow exemptions for the range only pets or pets with one attack, I dont think they are going to make a second set of pet powers just for this. Too much work for them. It is good that you bring up this point because I will ensure that no missions I create will have pets if I can help it because it wont be fair to the players.

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The reason they didn't make an exception for pets with one attack was not that it was too much work (making them affected actually required *more* work), it was because they didn't *want* them to not be affected.

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this

in Castles spreadsheet driven life VS spamming its pathetic electric blast more than once every 3.5 seconds angried up his blood something rotten, what we players dont realise is just how much damage little sparky can produce (warning huge great caveats are required for sparky to "produce" this damage)

What Castle doesnt seem to realise is the game doesnt consist of just standing against an undying mob resummoning a pet racking up optimal damage. This is a MMO GAME not a speadsheet.

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Yep, that was kind of my point. You can't look at a nerf to one power in isolation -- it has to be considered in light of the performance of the other 22 powers at your disposal.

[/ QUOTE ]My Perma-Hastened Ice/Storm performs just fine on Test. She's been making mincemeat of MA missions, including getting to round 3 of Arcanaville's Scrapper Challenge. I'm not an obsessive number-cruncher, so I can't tell you the DPS on Test vs Live or any such nonsense...but she didn't seem to be underperforming one bit. Lightning Storm was firing a little less frequently...but I was still killing things at about the same pace. *shrug*

I don't have a Storm defender...but I'll see if I can get my friend to take his AV-soloing Storm/Elec defender on Test.

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well its good to know a billion inf + build is performing ok...I mean come on... your damage wouldnt have stemed from your "pets" anyway, its from freezing rain, frostbite and copious amounts of epic blasts thrown which can be throw much more often when running so much +recharge that hasten becomes perma, and given that you need BETTER than hasten to get perma hasten its not really a suprise that such an extreme build can chew things up without pets making a difference. Your post is like a fire/kin saying the epic blast nerf doesnt affect controllers much, it doesnt affect fire/kins as they have damage oozing from every pore but tell a earth/ff that they needed their damage reduced with a straight face.

A "real world" build is hit a lot harder than an elitists super slotted death machine.

Post deleted by Moderator 08

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One day, while discussing this, another programmer who was looking at AI issues came over and began talking to me about the fact that one of the issues causing aberrant AI behavior was the powers recharging too quickly.


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In an alternate universe:

"One day, while discussing this, another programmer who was looking at AI issues came over and began talking to me about the fact that one of the issues causing aberrant AI behavior was that the code wasn't written well enough to deal with variable power recharge times."



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or

"one day while the AI programmer was looking for a conveiniant scapegoat to avoid work I happened to mentioned the +recharge some pets have been getting. They immediately lept up punching the air with an almighty "YES" usually only reserved for procuring a date with an A list film star, "its all your fault" he proclaimed "if it wasnt for the +recharge obviously they would function fine, go on off and fix it, I gots me some pr0n to surf for in my newly found free time". On my way out he shouted "oh and if that doesnt fix the pet AI behaviour its probably that the attacks do too much damage.... or something....cant you just give them all brawl?" So i went away with much to do....."

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What gets me is that evidently most of the people who are really upset by this change have figured out a way to play that most players never even think of or can't afford and also allegedly are so smart in how they play that their pets rarely get slowed due to them having parsed every possible battle configuration. No doubt they feel that the game is being hopelessly dumbed down for the great unwashed masses and I can see their point. Then again they are so smart that they will undoubtedly figure out fun new ways to exploit bugs that the clueless Devs don't even realize exist so I don't know what they are worried about.

In any case they do not represent the vast majority of players but are rather a small and very vocal minority that nevertheless probably have the power to make the Devs pull their hair out in frustration with their apparent expectations of perfection or near perfection from a video game.

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What gets me is that evidently most of the people in disagreement with people upset about the change seem to think said people have been sat around laughing at the devs "exploiting" the game.

This change affects none of my characters, I am not a "pet" player and even my storm corr only uses Thunderstorm as a keep away KB power. However I find the proposed changes insulting, they nerf a great many players but not only that it gives a significant buff to pet using NPCs as -recharge powers are quite prevailent playerside, everything ice, freezing rain, web grenade, lingering rad even psi attacks. Thats not even the worst of it, what really pissed me off was Castle holding up really quite poor powers (in all but the very most extreme and unlikely of situations) of VS and Gun Drone as "needing" to have this change applied to them.

Others have mentioned this may now make the devs look at improving the powers as will have a significant variable removed from its performance but we have had NO suggestion from any devs that this will occur, given their hugely lacklustre response to clearly underperforming powers I dont see a player benefit change coming any time soon. War Mace sucked donkey ding dongs for a VERY long time before it was brought up to par.

This is just a change for changes sake and hurts the weakest of sets once again, fire/kins suffered the least from the controller epic blast nerfs and also from fire imps being nerfed (as imps really counted for very little of fire/kin damage) but a earth/FF troller and fire/energy dom really felt those changes as a kick in the jibblies. A fire/kin doesnt waste their time SBing a imp as its not efficient, a earth/kin does however, no one is claming they are OP and need a nerf are they? (and rockys AI problems has NOTHING to do +recharge being dialed into it, my earth/TA can testify to that)

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I fully understand "why" this is being jammed through, but that doesn't make it a thematic, logical, and well implemented. It fails on all counts lol I honestly hope the devs hang their heads in shame at how poor of a job they are doing in this case.

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Welcome to i13s PvP and Castle knows best, oh and remember when SOE knew what was best and "fixed" SWG to the tune of getting rid of 90% of its subscribers? All comedy gold

On the plus side DCU is shaping up very nicely unless COH2 is well underway I expect a ton of player benefits to appear in COH to try and claw back the vast amount of players they will inevitably lose to the new kids in the niche

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Again, this wasn't done because they were over preforming. It was done because they were broken.

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Please explain to me how casting Speed Boost on Animate Stone was "broken," and how making Speed Boost do nothing for Animate Stone but raise run speed is "fixed." Because I'm not getting it.

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It wasn't. No one said it was. It was caught in the crossfire. Castle's already said this wasn't really what they wanted. But the only other alternative to fixing what they wanted to would have resulted in a much worse situation.

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Of course the alternative is re-deciding that the "problem" they have known about, wasnt a problem and has been perfectly acceptable for 7 issues still isnt a problem or causing any problems in game except in castles imagination and spreadsheets which are not representative of the game in play

"z0mg voltaic sentinal may be able to pump out MORE than 1500 damage against a mob with zero energy resistence in 60 seconds!!!!!! of course thats dependant on the mob in question not dying for 60 seconds which basically means it has to be an EB/AV but still, cant have that..... oh and as a side effect the players will have their -recharge debuffs worthless against mob summoned pets, Im not sure what problem that fixes but Im sure I can make something up"

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blah blah blah, out of context blah blah pyramid blah blah missing the point blah

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Your comments are summed up perfectly there, you seem to be accusing people of taking advantage of a "loophole" which is farcical, this has been the status quo for 7 issues and certainly known about within the dev team (but not by the majority of players) People will have become used to however this effects their damage output and this will unfairly effect many players.

Personally this wont even affect me, I have long since given up (after many many trys) to gain benefit from VS and my characters are not pet dependant (hell MM is the only AT i havent managed to ever get to 50)

What I find gauling though is sub par powers are being held up as examples of specifcs that need this "nerf" VS and Gun Drone, without any lip service whatsoever of "if we find this affects said power too negatively we will look at what we can do to improve it" That line alone would have shut up 90% of people annoyed at this change, we cannot expect that as a given as player powers have remained broken and unchanged for years previously.

This is just another nerf that they tried to pass off as a buff "yeah yeah it will fix retarded pet ai....maybe....perhaps....in one pet....." and "but dont worry, your pets wont be able to be speed DEBUFFED either..... you know all those rampaging mobs that -recharge debuff your pets.....well ok theres hardly any.....and this will also mean enemy pets are immune from your -recharge debuffs which are much more numerous.....but maybe we will change enemy pets in the future so they can be debuffed again....... honest...."

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It would make so much more sense if we simply were allowed to slot any power with any kind of enhancement.

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No, it actually wouldn't. Some powers would see no benefit from certain enhancements even if you could slot it. What do you imagine an end mod enhancements would do to improve Gun Drone? Oh wait...nothing!

Now I have jumped on the devs myself when they have done things that I don't agree with. Repeatedly.

I am honestly having trouble though, with the 'huge number' of people who suddenly find that -recharge was the only thing making their pets worth a damn.

If pets NEED that type of boost to be effective, then there is something wrong with the pet...period. If Gun Drone is 'useless' without a -recharge to its attack and LS is laughable without a -recharge to its attack and VS is also similarly useless, then these things need a buff. Especially since that -recharge buff was a side effect of something introduced to the game that wasn't initially meant to happen.

When someone comes and posts about how they are shelving all their storm toons because suddenly, they are broken and worthless, its silly.

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What is really silly is that a tier 9 power is totally subpar to others when it is not properly enhanced, including -recharge among others.

While at the same time some other powers that are right out of the box awesome ( like MindLink ) can still get even better because they keep their "sneak -recharge IO slotting" untouched.

Silly indeed.

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Maybe what's silly is that people have a preconceived notion of what a power is supposed to do and don't look at the context of the power and the set it is in.

Lightning Storm is a compliment to the other powers in the Storm Summoning set. Its still a power for defenders, controllers and corruptors. I highly doubt its purpose was to be a stand-alone mini-blaster. It does AoE knockback and some damage. When used with the rest of the storm powers...its hardly subpar.

VS and Gun Drone, and this is just my opinion, both need a second attack or utility function to round them out. That does not mean that they should inherit recharge to attacks from the caster or IO sets.

Yes, I understand that some people will be affected, but I don't think they are affected to the degree where the toon is so much less effective, that they need to shelve it.

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Its not that people will shelve them because they are much less effective, people are disgruntled because they can see "weaker" sets getting weaker. We dont have fire/kins in here complaining because quite frankly fire/imps is not where they get their damage from, the majority of that is from hotfeet, but poo man from earth control however needs all the DPS he can get Jack frost too (yeah yeah this magical fix will resolve all AI issues they would ahve us beleive but people on test are not reporting this)

VS and Gun Drone are just insulting powers in their current state even with their current "game breaking" ability to recycle their attacks faster. The cost to summon these is 26 end per minute which is rediculous, to put it in context if the crappy patron epic pets were on the same cost to existence ratio they would cost 104 end per summon, so you would need an accolade before even being able to summon it and these are powers in primary and secondary sets.

Many other summmons cost 26 end but not per 60 seconds, we have

Dark Extraction
Phantom Army
All patron pets
Dark servant
Fire imps
Phantasm
Fly trap

and probably more, all with longer durations, ranging from 200 seconds (dark extraction i beleive you can still get multiples of them out as well) to perma. I dont think anyones asking for GD and VS to be perma but even if they were it wouldnt make much of a difference as they still recycle the one crappy attack as opposed to the much better "pets" listed above and I never ever thought I would be calling a patron pet better than anything.

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2 Phantasms, 2 Dark Servants, 9-12 Imps I think...oh how fire control was really crazy

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My Ill/Rad used to have three phantasms with three decoys, partially overlapping perma-PA, and however many spectral terrors I felt like at the time concurrently.

I think a speedy fire controller could get 15 imps out at once at least for a while.

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wasnt 25 the theoretical cap? There was a "history of" thread around somewhere that people were claiming as such

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Cool, so the devs are willing to incorporate unintended features into the game.

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Haha, no. The floodgates were opened and there was nothing the developers could do but instigate a server wide rollback which would have pissed off too many of their paying customers even for them. Being forced to do something isnt giving.

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Means there's probably a reason they don't want this particular unintended feature in the game, don't you think?

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of course, Castle being the math and spreadsheet worshipper that he is see that in a particular instance with a particular build with a particular set while being under the influence of particular external buffs a pet MAY be summoned that deals fractionally more DPS than he could stand for.

Gamebreaking = player benefits

Inconsequencial = player detriments

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I always wonder what else is coming down the pipeline that they've neglected to properly data mine, and how significant a change will they implement to fix the "problem?"

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haha, looks like PvP in i13 really was only the beginning

On a side note Im wondering just what Castle has against "pets" or what it is that he sees in them that makes them unstoppable engines of destructions. Remember the whole Patron debacle? "Villain epics are more powerful than heroes which is why they cant respec them...." lol.... these were sets with a pet with a 4 minute lifespan and a 15 minute recharge and were a gigantic failure in all aspects (including RP lol) Those were keep in excremental spec for 6 issues before minor lipservice was finally applied to them.

Perhaps some time away from math, spreadsheets and tables would do Castle some good, pick up a character and play it on live.

Oh and as for my personal position, I have very few characters with pets and certainly dont rely on them for damage, my stormie uses thunderstorm for a rousing game of keep away and knockback on mobs when I eventually summon it.

I have had several electric blast characters and VS isnt worth it, 26% of your blue bar every minute on a pet that doesnt even do a t1 blast, hell it does the same damage as POWER THRUST which isnt even a damage power

Lets see what Castle thinks of VS, well its listed as a dominator t9 alongside, Bitter Ice Blast, Blaze, Thorn Barrage and yes, Psychic Shockwave. Roffle, thats sure worth fighting to 38 for. Im actually most annoyed about VS being singled out by Castle as one that was OP, I have tried over the years to make it work on several characters and its just too rubbish to be viable (even in its current "gamebreaking" state) when considering other powers you can use instead.

These changes do seem pretty mean spirited, theres been no "we may increase damage if it negatively effects certain sets too much"

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And yet ED turned out to be a benefit to the game in the long run. Those who will not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

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Opinionative, you have no idea what tha game would ahve done had ED not arrived in the form it did. Its an opinion I share though, I too think ED was best for the game.

However developers are not infaliable seers with powers to identify what is best for the game longevity, after all look what SOE did with SWG. The decimated their subscription base and never recovered, they had to rescind a refund offer because of the amount of people returning the trials of obi-wan. Whats really funny is that before Jack left he stated in an interview that what SOE did with SWG was right for the game, mind boggling..... with all evidence of how to destroy a games player base before him he still thought it was a good idea.

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Just because you see "scourge" appearing over somethings head doesnt mean the damage being done is awesome, 1 pt of damage scourging is still only 2 pts of damage. If VS was perma its still unlikely to be worth taking over other powers especially as a tier 9

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I can assure you, in case you had any doubts, that VS does not do a mere 1 point of damage.

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I assure you, in case you had any doubts, that VS does indeed suck in all incarnations. I also assure you, in case you had any doubts that it is not a viable tier 9 power even in its current, super game breaking form with its mighty ability to recycle its one attack faster than 2.5 seconds.

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Powers like Lightning Storm, Voltaic Sentinel and Auto Turret are precisely the powers that were targeted by this fix. Making exemptions for them would defeat the purpose, don't you think?

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Voltaic Sentinel really needs its life-cycle fixed to 4 minutes.

Originally, VS was immobile. (Like Auto-Turret.)
That meant having to resummon it every mob or two, so it was given a low recharge.
That was in the days of multiple pet summonings, so it was given an equally low lifetime to avoid stacking many of them in one spot.

Now that so much has evolved around it, we're left with a pet no different than others, but with a re-summon every minute.

That's annoying. And it's not in line with all the other pets that last 4 minutes.
I've been trying to get some attention to this since VS became available to Corruptors and Dominators. In light of this latest change, maybe it's a good time to fix VS's problems.

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wouldn't be opposed to buffing VS's life span, but no longer than Lightning Storm imo.

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Just because you see "scourge" appearing over somethings head doesnt mean the damage being done is awesome, 1 pt of damage scourging is still only 2 pts of damage. If VS was perma its still unlikely to be worth taking over other powers especially as a tier 9

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But what about exemptions to this fix. Thats what most of us want to know about. We already know its possible for some exemptions because there have been reports that the defender lightning storm still behaves the same as on live as on test yet the controller/corrupter/mastermind version of the power is now uneffected by recharge. I do think at the very least if you are making the powers not take recharge any more and if they arent able to be targeted anyways then maybe you can up the damage or change the recharge itself. I just really hate for lightning storm to become worthless outside of boss/av fights.

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Powers like Lightning Storm, Voltaic Sentinel and Auto Turret are precisely the powers that were targeted by this fix. Making exemptions for them would defeat the purpose, don't you think?

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wait VS was singled out because its ONE and ONLY crappy attack was recycling too quickly? This is something that costs 26% of your blue bar to summon EVERY minute, its damage is pathetic, its AI retarded and on top of that a tier 9 secondary power for dominators.

I gotta know, what kinda Voltaic sentinel are you thinking of/or run on the dev servers? I can only assume its some form of giant electrical hamidon-type entitity spewing untyped unresistable damage and has hoards of lvl 54 boss type electrical gremlins surrounding it. Now that would need a nerf, I admit it, however the VS we have on live for ALL ATs sucks [censored] and it being a dominators lvl 38 power is just one big middle finger.

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I love the sharks, but they aren't flurry or jump kick.

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you know things are bad when flurry is the highest damaging attack in game and peacebringers are dream characters.....

Im gonna make a ice tank and take jump kick, kick, boxing air sup and flurry, will literally be like having 5 ETs...all long before lvl 35.....