JuliusSeizure

It's not all about Rain of Arrows...

FA + Flame Thrower is amazing with a Tar Patch, and Range Enhancers allow these skills to have superior geometry than a targeted AoE. If you and your pet stack Petrifying Gaze on a Boss, Ignite will offer some absolutely wicked damage.

Dual Pistols will allow you to stack -resistance on hard targets (Piercing Round+Tar Patch=-50%). You can also stack very large amounts of -damage with /Dark by using Toxic Ammunition. Hail of Bullets offers defense to all 3 positions during its animation, and you are already leveraging -ToHit that should put you near the soft cap.

All three sets offer something slightly different. Archery offers very high damage and the highest Accuracy of the three. Dual Pistols has a lot of synergy and is very adaptable-- particularly when paired with a debuffing set. Assault Rifle has the highest total AoE DPS, with Buck Shot, M-40, Flame Thrower, Full Auto, and Ignite.

It sounds odd, but I experienced the same thing when I first got the skill. By the time I was level 35 and had it fully slotted with accuracy, it almost never seemed to happen again.

Were you by chance level 32 and had just received the skill when testing?

The recharge on a skill takes place after it has finished animating. Jab animates in 1.07 seconds. You had the recharge down to .57 seconds, so that would be one Jab every 1.81 seconds, roughly, with server ticks.

I'm not so sure that proliferation will continue now that the ATs are no longer tied to a respective side. But who knows.

I'd love to have a War Mace Scrapper.

The Buzzsaw build was a DM toon that used IO procs to leverage the (then) superior DPA of Shadow Punch and Smite to make a viable attack chain for Dark Melee. You did this not just because the skills animated quickly and received the most benefit from procs, but also because they had the best DPA in the set at the time. Meanwhile, Jab has the worst DPA in the entire Super Strength set...

Super Strength has large amounts of +damage through Rage, particularly if you double stack it, thus you would rather use high DPA attack. It's better to use a chain that employs an APP/Patron attack and Punch/Haymaker between KO Blow smashes: Mu Lightning->Punch-HayMaker->repeat for example. Several APP attacks work quite well, particularly Fire Blast.

If you are going to double stack Rage, why would you not want to run the highest DPA attacks available?

I agree that Ninjas could use a a bit of love.

Oni is not bad, but it would be nice if the DoT for his immobilize were compressed to two seconds because he tends to use that skill a lot. His Breath of Fire attack could use an increase from 30 degrees to at least 45 degrees, and he represents the majority of the AoE damage for Ninjas but has terrible targeting geometry compared to other tier 3 pets.

All that said though, I am still impressed by the amount of damage that Ninjas does.

Nova is the weakest of all Nukes (but it looks so pretty). It should probably do more damage to the targets, having a final tick of damage be assessed to foes about 2 seconds after its animation to emulate the impact of getting slammed into the walls/ground.

As for Lightning Rod, I feel that it and Shield Charge offer too much AoE potential for melee toons. However, they are only doing full damage to a 10' radius. The nukes are hitting 25' and 30' for full damage while having superior secondary effects.

And yes, secondary effects on skills within a set do not play a role in the recharge/balance equation. But the nukes do NOT have normal secondary effects, which are generally multi layered and greatly amplified relative to the sets they are in. Not every attack in Radiation Blast has a mag 3 hold attached to it, nor does every attack in Dark Blast offer -62.5% ToHit. (And again, Nova should be buffed by either having its damage increased with a delayed tick, or have a mag 3 stun added to it.) While the Mag 3 hold/stun on some skills might seem superfluous, compare that to the mag3 AoE holds for Dominators and Controllers-- these skills just offer mez and little else and still have a 4 minute recharge. Blasters/Corruptors can get massive damage and a mag 3 mez.

Here's the thing though, these skills don't just do damage; they also have massive secondary effects.

• Inferno has a DoT that increases output by over 50%.
• Thunderous Blast has massive -endurance and will shut down the recovery of most enemies for 20 seconds.
• Psychic Wail is a mag 3 stun and neuters recharge.
• Atomic Blast is a mag 3 hold and adds massive -defense.
• Dreadful Wail is a mag 3 stun and also debuffs resistance.
• Black Star effectively grants the equivalent of soft-capped defense through a ToHit debuff of 50% for Corruptors and 62.5% for defenders.

The powerful secondary effects on these nukes is one of the reasons the recharge is so high, and I would not want to see them removed or reduced if the skills were to become less potent with a correspondingly lowered recharge. So no, I would not want them to become something like RoA, FA, or HoB. I want them to decimate a spawn like they currently do, whether it's through damage or potent secondary effects. And right now, there is only one reason that I don't use a nuke every time it's available: 20 seconds of no recovery. The Nuke on my Fortunata is not situational, I use it every time it's up for both the Mag 3 stun and the opening damage, and I do this because there is no -recovery period.

Regarding the yard sticks you have used in the Nuke debate-- RoA and Full Auto have NO secondary effect and are entirely lethal damage. HoB has a variety of minor secondary effects, none of which even approach those of a true nuke, but also has a higher recharge because of this. In fact, take note that HoB has twice the recharge of RoA and FA, an attribute which seems to pay for the access to exotic damage and secondary effects. If the damage of the current Nukes were lowered, they would probably still have a 4 minute recharge just to pay for their exotic damage types and powerful secondary effects.

Furthermore, Furtunatas received a cashless nuke in exchange for drastically reduced damage potential-- it's at Defender levels of potency rather than their 1.0 AT modifier. It also has a full 6 minute recharge, so even with a dramatically lowered damage the skill was not granted a reduction to recharge.

Given these metrics that are used for balancing Nukes, particularly where the potency of secondary effects weighs on recharge, I feel the best approach is to simply remove the -recovery period and maintain the skill's current level of -endurance, which ranges from -40% to -100%. There is no reason a Nuke has to be used by sacrificing your next 20 seconds of gameplay.

How about we leave them as is, and just push for the -recovery to be removed or toned down? The endurance crash and long recharge should be more than enough compensation for their massive damage, so let's just get rid of the -recovery period.

Lord of War

Option 1. The old assets drastically need updating, and the notion of retaining them adds way too much clutter.

Time Bomb->Poison Gas->Team Teleport to middle of spawn?

Defense is superior than resistance primarily because there is gobs of it available in Pool Powers, to all positions/types mind you, and through the IO system. Things would be a bit more even if resistance had any meaningful values available through IOs or pool powers, and if it were at least equal to the values granted to defense, if not doubled.

Smashing/Lethal defense of 3.75% is roughly equal to 7.5% resistance, and the highest bonus available through resistance is a paltry 1.86% in PvP sets... this is not fair at all, and a good step would be making resistance values at least equal to the numbers granted to defense, which would still be 50% of the mitigation granted through defense.

PvP recipes have earned me far more than I anticipated. I bough about 80 Panacea recipes on Redside in the months leading up to GR, roughly 15 of each recipe and 4 uniques. The End/Heal/Rech alone is netting about 500 million profit a sale, while the Heal is at nearly 700 million profit a sale.

The other PvP investments are also panning out well, but only Shield Wall has come anywhere near the Panacea bonanza.

I was pretty surprised about the salvage market being so stable.