Muon_Neutrino

I hope you're joking. If I'm a softcapped unstoppable dervish of destruction, why *wouldn't* I want that boss futilely whiffing at me instead of punching the blaster in the face? Sure, on big teams it's not common that I'd have to fulfill that role, but it's hardly impossible.

Confront may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's rather extreme to jump from that all the way to 'no scrapper would ever have any reason to control aggro'.

Afaik, just high-recharge permadoms with one of the fast-activating ST holds, unless animate stone can actually tank one. And I agree that it's the purple triangles that're the actual problem here.

Point of order: PA doesn't break those encounters unless paired with a high-recharge build that can eliminate the downtime. Base, that STF team will still need you to tank recluse for the 60s that PA is down.

Actually, against normal spawns, I wouldn't really care (although I'd be a bit miffed if you simultaneously got rid of the damage) as long as the mag were high enough to still affect bosses. I will continue to maintain that PA is not overpowered against anything below EB grade.

*Fighting* AVs/monsters may not be an edge case, but *marginalizing* them with an extremely-high-uptime PA build would be. At base PA can mitigate these sources exactly half of the time, and you can ask any dom just how effective (or not) it is to control such a potent foe on a less than full-time basis.

I actually do agree that high-uptime PA used against normally mez-resistant boss grade encounters *is* rather overpowered. I would simply prefer to target the 'high uptime' part rather than the 'PA' part. I will freely admit that I mostly want PA in its current state because of its ability to mitigate mez-resistant encounters. I will not apologize for that, though, as I personally see it as countering one piece of bad design (purple triangles on EBs) with another (high-uptime PA). I would *not*, however, see PA as overpowered against those encounters if it had a ceiling on its uptime.

And I *extremely strongly* disagree with the notion of giving doms a nerfed version of PA and not touching the controller version. If it's too potent for a dom to have, it's too potent for a controller as well. Nerfs are sometimes necessary, and while it's not a good idea to completely revamp an existing set, if an overpowered option can be reined in short of that, it should be done.

Right. Sorry, guess I was getting a bit too hung up on the specific changes you listed instead of the general idea. I will stand by my statement that giving them minion level HP would make the power almost useless, though.

If they had higher HP, it would depend heavily on exactly how survivable they would turn out to be. For me the entire point of rolling an illusion dom would be to use PA to tank PToD EBs (note - talking about solo, and EBs rather than AVs). If their survivability was strong enough that between the three of them they could tank the EB for the 50 seconds the triangles are up, then I might still play it (especially if they got a recharge reduction in the process). If they couldn't do that, then I wouldn't touch the set. However, if they tweaked PA for doms and left the set in its current state for controllers, I'd scream bloody murder and not touch the set no matter what they did. That would piss me off mightily.

As far as normal spawns go, I think I would be annoyed if PA was reduced to the extent that I would have to layer another control on top of it in order to actually achieve the level of mitigation I wanted. It's already not the best tool to deal with larger numbers of foes, and if they just dropped dead against large spawns and couldn't even hold aggro on the percentage that they currently can, it would represent a pretty serious nerf to the set's regular every-spawn control (which is not something illusion is usually called out as being overpowered at).

Basically, my take on the whole 'is PA overpowered' debate is that you have to not focus just on the edge cases and to recognize both its strengths *and* weaknesses relative to other control powers. People often seem to take it as a given that PA is overpowered, but I think that conclusion isn't necessarily always defensible, and I would like to challenge those who believe that to quantify why and in what areas they believe it to be overpowered.

I think people get way too hung up on PA's invulnerability. PA is not killable, it is true. However, it's not like the baddies can kill the ice slick patch or the volcanic geyser vents either. Against most foes, PA doesn't provide a level of mitigation that's significantly different than that of a more 'traditional' (and just as 'invincible') control - a foe attacking PA isn't any *more* mitigated than one who's attacking one of his allies due to seeds or not attacking at all due to an aoe mez, after all (especially for doms since they're much more likely to be tossing out boss class mezzes than controllers). PA has a relatively long duration and supplies damage, to be true, but it's also a lot more hit-and-miss in terms of actually mitigating all of the foes in a spawn since it only taunts what it actually hits. I will strenuously argue against any conclusion that PA is overpowered in terms of its use against regular spawns of foes. As I said above, if PA becomes killable (and with an overall level of survivability low enough that that happens relatively easily against normal spawns), I believe that would represent an unwarranted nerf in an area where the set is *not* overpowered.

If PA is overpowered, it is only so when used on things like AVs/monsters/etc, and mostly when used by extremely high recharge builds - in other words, the edge cases. Therefore, if it is to be nerfed, I would *extremely* strongly prefer that it be nerfed in a way that actually targets the edge cases instead of the overall use. For example, if tech exists to do this, one possibility that comes to mind would be to render the power immune to recharge buffs (while still allowing it to benefit from enhancements/alpha). This would quite handily prevent it from being used to perma-tank an AV/etc without affecting its use against regular spawns/EBs. (I would personally like this to be accompanied by a reduction in duration/recharge to 50s/200s so that the timing synchs up better with regular spawn-to-spawn play - at that point, the absolute smallest downtime with spiritual core paragon would be ~30s, which is definitely still long enough for an AV to eat you.)

Um..... my apologies, but I sincerely fail to see why that's an interesting question. At that point the power wouldn't be worth taking even if you did roll the character - what would be the point of the power in that case? They'd just die the instant you summoned them into the spawn. That'd honestly be *worse* than an illusion set where they just replaced PA with some sort of alternative control - it'd be like asking if you would like to play a mastermind set that had no boss pet (and was otherwise on par at best with the other sets).

This, completely. For me, phantom army would be the entire point of illusion on doms. Not because I want to make some ridiculous perma-PA-perma-dom overpowered beast, but simply because it would *finally* allow me to make a dom that can actually get some benefit out of his primary against those STUPID ANNOYING #@(&!(*)($ PToD EBs. I know that they become relatively easy if you ignore your primary and chug purples, it just offends my sensibilities that such a cop-out is necessary in the first place, and illusion would finally allow me to do something about it.

Yeah. It's probably an even better idea to negate the KB on a character like my /energy defender since between no BU and lower base damage his nova is almost guaranteed to not kill everything (heck, even with PBU, aim, and all my +damage bonuses he still only barely kills even con *minions* now), but I don't think I could bring myself to do it either. Nova just isn't nova without a ludicrous KABOOM sending stuff flying all over the place.

I think it'd be a more like 'do I want them knocked back/ragdolled but possibly scattered, or do I want them only knocked down but all still in the same place?' Ragdolling them will provide mitigation for a longer period, but if they end up scattered and it takes longer to finish them off as a result it might be overall more advantageous to suppress the KB.

Uhhh... guh.... guh.... O.O why did I not think of this before?!?! Wow, that is awesome. Add another one to the 'tornado, bonfire, etc' list of powers that this IO is utterly ridiculous in! Thanks!

Right, because the whole 15 seconds he spent typing "Indeed." in response to Memphis_Bill's joke question is totally the reason he didn't answer yours. Can't possibly have anything to do with the volume of questions, or the fact that he was about to leave, or that there might be questions he's not allowed to answer. Totally.

I can't speak for everyone, of course, but I would personally take this. That almost sounds too good to be true, though, with the possibility of permadom. I certainly wouldn't complain if you decided to give it to me though, mind you.

Wait, what? Last I checked, dom snipes still had the interrupt period. At least, according to city of data they still do. They don't really *benefit* much since they don't have easy access to large amounts of +tohit, but I don't see how it could be a nerf.

As far as I know, kismet has always been 6% tohit, not 6% accuracy. The IO's description has also always been wrong, though (stating acc when it's tohit), so if you'd been relying on that, that'd explain the confusion.

Titan weapons is great, there's certainly no disputing that. I think you need to be careful about what you mean when you talk about the 'best' secondary to go with it, though. Dark armor can make a strong claim of being among the very best, but only *if* you invest the influence and effort to acquire the sort of IO build that will let you get away with using dark regen every time it recharges without crashing your endurance bar. Without that sort of build, you'll often be left choosing between staying alive (healing) or doing damage, as you quite often won't have the endurance to do both.

In other words, if you want the best, you have to further qualify that as 'best *at a given level of investment*', because the best secondary if you're using SO enhancements may not be the same secondary that's the best if you're slotted with top-end IOs. At the level of investment possible for someone as new to the game as you are, in my opinion dark *will not* be the best.

it is worth noting that that's not to say that dark won't still work. In general, the melee and armor powersets in this game are reasonably balanced, in the sense that you usually won't be gimped. Some sets are definitely stronger than others, and for any given set some will have more synergy with it than others, but overall it's hard to find a combo that's actually *bad*. A TW/dark will still be a brute, it will still smash faces, and it'll still stay alive reasonably well while it's smashing faces, even if all you're using is SOs. However, if your goal is 'the best' rather than simply 'workable', it's my personal opinion that TW/dark won't fit that goal, for you, at this point. It can be a very strong pairing, but it'll require a lot of influence that you most likely don't have yet. And honestly, I found that finessing the endurance bars of characters with marginal consumption/recovery ratios to be a somewhat tricky skill to master. It's definitely a *useful* skill to have, but I wouldn't suggest jumping right into such a character as one of your first few characters in the game.