Lazarillo

With Aurora cursing Calvin in her last moments over the monster he'd become? And/or Calvin finding out that Aurora was Mother Mayhem's dominant personality all along? Either way, Scott deserves the worst he can get.

I still like the idea of him sneaking up to Anti-Matter's space station now that Keyes himself is down, and deciding "**** it, I'll nuke 'em all from orbit", and getting his own raid in response though, personally. It's (a)very Calvin Scott-ish, and (b)an excuse to have an epic battle in front of a space window overlooking the Earth.

I think it says at least a little about the balance mindset that when someone brought up the tendency of Praetorian enemies to scatter to the four corners of the map at times, Castle went off on a tirade about soft-capped Blasters chaining their nukes.

Nothing's wrong with the story...when you play through it. In fact, the Praetorian arcs themselves are quite good.
It's more to do with the fact that all of what was good about them gets ripped out when you leave at 20.

Ah, yeah, chalk that up to a big "d'oh!". For what it's worth, I like Sonic's Shockwave.

I think the biggest difference is in the ATs that get them. Shockwave is available only to Brutes, Scrappers, and Stalkers, who are all based around doing damage in melee. Knocking enemies out of that range doesn't do much for you, and in some cases, actually hurts you, since in 2/3 of those also have defensive powers that depend on having enemies bunched around you.

On the other hand, Umbral Torrent is given to Blasters, who are focused on doing damage regardless of the enemy's range, and rely in major part on what control effects they can find in order to stay alive. Yes, that means you're going to have to be careful when you use it. However, that's still doing better than Shockwave.

For what it's worth, I agree it's not the best setup. But presumably the devs didn't want to duplicate Nightfall from the epic pools, so it's what we get. And I stand firm by the idea that it does better overall than plain ol'Torrent from the other sets, at least.

Presumably, the same person who arranged for Mike to go at it with a Russian wearing nothing but a towel.
Or possibly that person's Praetorian mirror.

I'm not sure that bodes well if they're just now bothering to note that players want Kheldian sashes.

People the cones? Whut?


Anyway, if it were just a chance for the effect, I might see making it into knockdown, but the fact that it does Knockback 100% means it's clearly meant as a good control that also happens to do good AoE damage. In that regard, making it knockdown would make it less useful as a control/survival tool. Similarly, if it was the only AoE, that might be one thing, but Tentacles still plugs along nicely.

Dark Blast would never really have been all that great as a Blapper set, and heck, even moreso if they'd left in Nightfall and kept the reliance on cones. But hey, no fear, Dark's got two new single target attacks of reasonable power, so you don't need to supplement with melee attacks anyway if you don't want to!

Oh and the "decrees" to the heal? It actually heals more on a Blaster than a Defender or Corruptor, and deals a greater proportion of damage, to boot.

If you want AoE/damage king, there are plenty of sets that can pull that off. Dark is about control and survivability, and it's looking great to me from that approach. Most of your beef seems to be that the set doesn't meet your expectations, but honestly, those expectations don't sound like anything remotely close to what Dark Blast was in the first place.

Also, side note. Y'know what sucks? Having to retype a post three times because of that durn logout bug.

It's not on Youtube, that I can find, but there's "The Worst AMV Ever", which also combines Johnny Cash and the Bebop movie (and in fact what I was expecting this to be a link to, originally). It's a short little 15 second joke video, but it's pretty dang funny, if you can find it.

Heck, they wouldn't even have to create a new zone. The "regular" zone is still there when the fog machine is turned off already.

As has been mentioned, coming in i21, we have a mechanical solution to this. And, in the case of Dark Astoria, it's a pretty awesome one. With combat phasing, it's Dark Astoria until you complete the arc, and then...

Master of Lambda was somewhat understandable in the past, since going for it basically meant that anyone who used such damage was absolutely useless against Marauder, with his 100% resistances to Smash/Lethal. They could still help thin out the ambushes, but the badges were effectively impossible unless you focused on exotic damage.

This has since been fixed, however.

Depends on the timing. Sometimes it might work the way you described. The rest of the time, it encourages players to completely ignore buyi--crap! The door! Gotta get out before it locks!

I wonder if they could change it so that Anti-Matter's recharge stations could be damaged before he starts using them? Maybe make it so they couldn't be outright destroyed beforehand, but brought down to 1 HP, or the like, so that he at least gets some power from them, but this way, melee fighters could divide and conquer to keep Anti-Matter from healing himself back as much.

To clarify, I know how Entanglement works. I just don't know what it does to me other than "minor debuff that I can probably ignore if I'm not Disintegrating". Similarly, I know how his PBAoE debuff works as well, but I'm not really familiar with what the effects of it are. And in both cases, it's rather hard to notice and pay attention when there are other, more significant issues that I'm also trying to simultaneously manage.