Obitus

Probably because managing all of those clicks is going to be more annoying than simply running Targeting Drone. Also, Energy Manipulation was always considered among the best Blaster Secondaries (damning with faint praise, I know) -- and so the perceived improvement that EM is slated to get in I-24 is less impressive than the perceived improvement to Devices, which has been roundly derided for several years.

Personally, I think Mental's the big loser in I-24, given what I've heard as of this moment. Drain Psyche is too good for niche builds and play styles, but in comparison with the new survivability clicks in other sets, Drain Psyche will be too weak for everyone else, post I-24. It seems backwards for the developers to preserve DP's current mechanics for the sake of the former group and at the expense of the latter.

That's true. The lower level (and non-twinked) game and the high-end game are totally different beasts. Still, no matter the level range, there's challenge out there if you want to find it.

I hope you'll forgive me for a little flippant nitpickery here; I understand that you're making a point about collective difficulty not difficulty on a per-AT basis, and it isn't my intention to distort your argument.

That said, your wife's Blaster is not the reason you're having such an easy time. Swap out your Ill/Kin for another Blaster and you may just find that you need the (soon-to-be) improved nukes just to make a credible attempt at matching the above-described pace. You surely won't be as safe, regardless.

In other words, you could make the same objection -- vis-a-vis collective difficulty level -- about just about any buff any AT receives, but Blasters definitely deserve a significant upgrade. Your Ill/Kin's very existence is actually a pretty good argument as to why Blasters deserve an upgrade.

Ice Slick also slows movement and (IIRC) applies a -fly debuff. By itself, it's a better control than (post-proc-nerf) Bonfire.

(Also IIRC, Ice Slick doesn't accept procs. At least the Controller version didn't, the last time I checked. Given that Earthquake does accept procs, Ice Slick's lack in that area has annoyed me for some time.)

Still, you're right: a set like Fire Control probably doesn't deserve to get a near equivalent to Ice Slick for the cost of one IO. Hell, if all we're concerned with is the comparison between Fire Control and Ice Control, the former probably doesn't deserve anything at all.

But the KB-to-KD proc isn't limited to Controllers and Dominators. If a Blaster wants to grab some extra control out of a procced Bonfire, or if a Storm Defender wants to turn Tornado into a consistently viable attack power -- it's hard to conceive of an objection to either of those two scenarios. The devs' proposed fix to the proc is, I think, the best possible solution to an unwieldy problem.

So just to be super-duper-redundantly-crystal clear, the proc will still take away all knockBACK effects from Tornado and Bonfire; the knockDOWN on those powers will simply be less consistent?

Awesome solution, if so.

And it's arguably better, against anything that doesn't die to a stiff breeze. I know people have mentioned scatter in this thread, but I believe it's been under-emphasized at least in recent postings. My IOed-to-the-gills Fire/Mental Blaster is capable of fantastic offense, but if she's facing anything that doesn't die in the first two or three hits, the spawn scatters to the four winds. If she's got teammate with a taunt aura or some sort of consistent AoE control, then yeah, the Blaster'll do more damage than my Mind/Fire Dominator.

But solo? The Dominator kills at roughly the same speed, much more safely. And yes, the Blaster has Drain Psyche; no, even when I play directly to Drain Psyche's strengths, DP still isn't nearly as good (from a safety standpoint) in practice as Domination-powered Mind Control effects.

And Mind Control isn't even a particularly good primary for leveraging AoE damage. Fire Control kicks Mind Control's shapely backside. Hell, if all you care about is leveraging AoE damage, any Dom Primary with an AoE immobilize can give you Blaster-comparable (solo) kill speeds without much trouble.

The only tangible advantage the Blaster has is that the Dom loses a lot of its damage potential when I exemplar. (Blaze, Fireball, and Rain of Fire are all level 35+ abilities.) Oh, and if I need a regeneration debuff for some reason (can't imagine why I'd need one in the post-Lore era, but whatever), the Blaster obviously has an edge.

Now all of that said, it's not my intent to argue that Blasters should be given Dominator-style perks, or that they should have their damage boosted by the 100+% it'd likely take before the holistic comparison even becomes close -- but I would like to see Drain Psyche revisited in I-24; the power is both too weak and too strong, and ideally I'd like to see the Blaster AT get a little more on the offensive side than the proposed Snipe changes, as I understand them.

In any case, it's nice to come back after a long break to find that Arbiter Hawk is (finally) looking into Blaster balance.

Yeah, be especially careful of Scrapyard's nefarious "run-away-like-a-headless-chicken" attack.

IIRC, I bought one of those for 1800 like a week after Freedom released, so no, don't think the price was raised.

Apparently*, Ms Simone wasn't yet a comic book writer when she made her site, and when she went on her campaign to solicit industry opinion about the site. She was a fan. Depending on your vantage, that little factoid could put a whole new spin on the discussion.

(* -I say apparently because I spent way more time than was healthy reading up on the subject as a result of this thread. I neither knew nor cared who Gail Simone was before.)

That's the thing. He keeps posting quotes as evidence, but not all of those quotes unambiguously support his position. Some of those quotes, as I read them, actually tend to counter his position.

It's as Venture said: when you accuse writers in this day and age of sexism, you're not going to get an entirely honest response. The writer responses posted in this thread range from sheepish apologies to apologetic excuses ("it was peer pressure") to apology-tinged alternate explanations ("It's just bad writing."). You could take the generally sympathetic tone of those responses as evidence that the writers agree with the feminist-slanted premise of WiR, or you could take it as evidence that the writers don't want to touch the issue with a ten foot pole.

Personally, I think the only thing that's clear about the whole issue is that you can track a trend that resembles whatever definition of WiR you care to use. What isn't clear is what the trend means. More importantly, I think, it also isn't clear what purpose the misogyny charge serves even if we stipulate that the charge is accurate in the general case. What may be a fair argument with respect to a general trend cannot be fairly applied to individual examples, or else you end up with every writer, regardless of his/her history, questioning his every move on the basis that some self-styled critic will label one of his storylines "problematic," or "egregious."

I emphasize those two words because they have been used repeatedly, and they have moralistic overtones. Likewise, when TG balks at Venture for calling this discussion an exercise in feminism, his rebuttal carries an accusatory note: "Does Gail Simone count as a feminist just because she's a woman?" The answer, of course, is no; Gail Simone and many of the WiRers in this thread are, however, engaged in a feminist exercise. You don't have to quote renowned feminists to frame a discussion in feminist terms, just as you needn't quote famous chauvanists to demonstrate misogyny.

And that's the crux of the matter: for all of the appeals to authority in this thread, both affirmative appeals and appeals of negation ("we're not discussing feminism because we didn't cite X, Y, and Z!"), the whole discussion lives or dies not by authoritative confirmation or denial, but by a subjective reading of what is implied (or not), rather than of what is explicit.

In any case, the comic book industry has always been aimed at boys. Trying to read misogyny into comic storylines is a little like trying to parse a beer commercial for sexist stereotypes. You may find what you're looking for, but you're gonna look like a parody of academic pedantry for delving so deeply into a subject so shallow. If you want to assert that comics are misogynist, better simply to point at the bewbz and be done with it.

They do. iTrial mobs (and Praetorian DE, in tip missions) operate at 64% ToHit, as opposed to the normal 50% we see everywhere else. That's before we consider buffs or particular attack powers with intrinsically high ToHit values. (Like, say, Knockout Blow or Fire Breath.)

Whether iTrial conditions have any relevance to Lore Pet ToHit, I can't say -- but I tend to doubt it. IIRC the devs even confirmed in the Issue 20 Beta forum that Lore pets would see a dramatic improvement with Nerve Alpha. Wish I could look for that post, but it'd be long gone now.

The Interface DoTs stack 8 times. The debuffs stack 4 times. Or so I understand.

I tend to agree with your approach. If I were going to craft a build specifically for the purpose of soloing at max difficulty, I'd probably err on the side of offense and lean heavily on Inspiration-combining macros. When you're soloing, Inspirations will drop like rain anyway, so it seems a shame not to make full use of them.

And death isn't a big deal in this game; what's more important is how convenient it is for your build to recover.

Still, you'll have problems with (as you say) Vanguard and Arachnos. Conservatively, I'd say that there's at least one more faction on that list -- Rularuu. Rularuu are, at present, pretty easy to avoid; you basically have to go out of your way to find them, but they are out there, and I suspect we'll be seeing more of them soonish. It'll be interesting to see how the player base responds to having both a healthy chunk of the IO system and the most effective Inspiration-based defensive tactic (stacked Lucks) nullified.

Yes, exactly. And even perma-PA Illusion Trollers have a pretty significant downside in this conversation: they don't kill loads of targets very quickly. Their best defensive asset (Phantom Army) tends to scatter foes, and Illusion doesn't offer on-demand area Containment.

You can pretty easily create a build that can either kill max-difficulty spawns quickly or survive most max-difficulty missions comfortably. Depending on your subjective definitions of "quickly" and "comfortably," you may find it's near impossible to find a build that does both.

It's definitely impossible to find a build that can both kill quickly and survive comfortably all factions at max difficulty.

So after going over bopp's numbers I found that I did make a mistake last night; I somehow copied the numbers for GFS without the extra Fire DoT damage. So the numbers I quoted for the GFS chain should look like this:

The Fire Sword numbers should be the same. The two chains are more-or-less tied, as bopp showed, with the understanding that the GFS chain will pull further ahead in absolute terms as damage buffs rise. (And with the understanding that, as before, GFS is a better bursty power for normal content.)

FWIW, I run a couple of binds that switch the auto-toggle between Hasten and Domination when I press the movement keys. (Details here.)

Obviously, you're right that it's more convenient to run perma-Dom without Hasten, but with the bind(s) I barely notice the difference, with the occasional exception here or there. (The cutscenes-make-your-powers-look-recharged bug is annoying, for example.)

My understanding is that Jab's debuff is only applied after the power lands. Activating the power 0.1 seconds before the previous debuff wears off shouldn't work because the debuff is on the target, and thus has no way of knowing when you start an attack; the target can only register damage when it hits.

So basically, I'm assuming that every Jab in the above-quoted cycle will be unbuffed by Bruising. Granted, that's the weakest part of the chain, which means that my averaging method is probably too harsh. And granted, I'll have to reconfirm in game that Jab's damage isn't buffed by the debuff on the first application. (Edit: Reconfirmed.)

Same reason I skipped it

There are builds that can easily survive Carnies, but regardless of your build's defensive strengths, Illusionists will always be a pain in the rear to kill (what with the phasing). For that reason alone, I can count on my fingers the number of times I've voluntarily soloed a carnie mission at max difficulty.

Still, even if a build is strong against Carnies, chances are it's weak against something else. Every build has weaknesses.

Probably the closest I have to a weakness-free build is a Mind/Fire Dom with soft-capped ranged DEF and ~50% Smash/Lethal RES. She has mez protection, solid damage mitigation, solid healing through Rebirth, and can toss a variety of magnitude 6 controls at her foes. The character is designed to have as smooth a performance curve as I could manage without resorting to an Illusion Controller ( ).

But a smooth performance curve is not synonymous with steamrolling. In order to minimize situational weaknesses, you must compromise peak performance. In the case of my Dominator, I also had to accept a kind of generalized brittleness; on paper, the Dom can survive situations my Tanker can't, but she dies a whole lot more often -- can, in fact, die in situations in which the Tanker could AFK safely. To say that the Dom is more generally resilient than the Tanker can be technically true, but also spectacularly, sometimes hilariously, false. By the same token, it's technically true that the Dom has better damage output, but there are also numerous situations in which the Tanker kills faster in practice.

TL;DR -- basically what everyone else said. +4/x8 is overblown on the forums. Some people can and do solo at that difficulty level as a matter of course, but they're either cherry picking their opposition or they accept the occasional struggle. The game is easy, but I think we sometimes gloss over the variety of challenges it can throw at you. Anyone seeking to find the magic build that can walk over every faction at max difficulty is chasing fool's gold.

Thanks. I suspect you're better at math than I am, but I like to pop my head into these little discussions because I always wring my hands endlessly over attack slotting when I'm plotting out builds.

Totally agree about procs, btw; they definitely favor lower-damage ATs, especially those with consistent -RES. And Tankers get the extra advantage that they can slot Taunt sets into most every attack. Personally I have a hard time fitting a lot of procs into my builds, though; extra defenses are just too sexy.

In any case, it's nice to see the range of options quantified. Good stuff in this thread.

FWIW, I think you're relying on Jab too much. The idea with SS is to time your attack chain so that you're only using Jab once per 10-second Bruising cycle (or as close as you can reasonably get to that standard). For instance, my Tanker's attack chain is Jab-Haymaker-Mu Lightning-KO Blow-Haymaker-Mu Lightning-> repeat. (9.678 seconds total.)

My build is probably more defensive than you'd prefer; I chose Mu Lightning because I couldn't quite get Gloom to recharge fast enough to fit into a similarly structured chain, and I prefer the look of the Mu powers. IIRC, the best SS attack chain is Jab-Gloom-Haymaker-KO Blow-Gloom-Haymaker->repeat, but that takes a crapton of recharge in Gloom (+295% or so). If you have room for Punch, you can do Jab-Gloom-Haymaker-KO Blow-Gloom-Haymaker-Punch pretty easily, with the small caveat that your Bruising debuff won't quite be perma. (Chain is 11.22 seconds for an average Bruising debuff of 20 * (10 / 11.22) = 17.8%.)

Might actually be better to just live with a small pause after Gloom if you don't have the recharge to make the former chain seamless, but I'll have to look at that later.

I thought it was intentional -- masculation as the opposite of emasculation. I could see Incarnate content being pitched as if in a beer commercial: "Masculize your build with Incarnate powers!"

Scorch-Fire Sword-Scorch-Incinerate is 280.26 base damage over 5.808 seconds, for 48.25 DPS (ignoring misses). With 95% ED-compliant damage slotting, that number climbs to 94.1 DPS. With Bruising's debuff factored in, we're looking at 112.91 DPS.

If we throw a purple damage proc in Scorch and include the Tier 3 Reactive (or Spectral, or Preemptive) Interface DoT, then the number rises to 168.91 DPS.

Scorch-GFS-Scorch-Incinerate is 315.9 base damage over 6.732 seconds, for 46.93 DPS (ignoring misses). With 95% ED-compliant damage slotting, that number climbs to 91.5 DPS. With Bruising's debuff factored in, we're looking at 109.8 DPS.

If we throw a purple damage proc in Scorch and include the Tier 3 Interface DoT, the number rises to 158.11 DPS.

It's not a major difference either way, but as your build piles on more procs and more damage bonuses (as bopphaholic seems to prefer), the gap will widen in absolute if not proportional terms.

I'm not an expert on Fiery Melee (though I have been considering a new FM Tanker), and it's possible I made a mistake somewhere. Before I plugged the numbers into my spreadsheet I thought the GFS chain would win at the outset, but probably lose w/ Hecatomb + Interface. Turns out to my surprise that GFS is worse from the get-go, though not by much. Anyway, to the extent that you can conclude anything from the numbers above, I think it's fair to say that if you plan to use IO and Interface procs, you should be wary of longer-animating powers, almost regardless of their damage.

Or perhaps it's fairer to say that longer-animating powers bear a second look, at least in a long-term DPS context. In regular content, against low-hp targets, you may well be better off with GFS. (Incinerate + GFS will very nearly two-shot a +0 minon @ level 50 with typical damage slotting. All you need is another 0.9% in damage buffs, whether from overslotting or global bonuses. The difference between two and three-shotting minions doesn't show up well on paper, but it's a pretty significant qualitative difference.)

Pets tend to operate at 75% base ToHit, which is why you can be soft-capped and still find yourself getting hit all the time by Malta Gun Drones, and why even Elite Boss Recluse in the final Patron-arc mission can WTFpwn soft-capped characters for seemingly no obvious reason. (Recluse summons a bajillion pets; if you go into that mission with the usual pop-3-or-4-Lucks mindset, you can go down in an eye blink.)

Not sure if the trend holds true for Lore pets. Regardless, without help, Lore pets will miss a fair amount of the time.

Oh, and good thread.

And I feel your (apparent) predisposition to define issues along racial/ethnic/sexual lines is absolutely stifling.

The difference between your approach and mine is that -- though you may not intend any personal offense -- when you characterize someone's writing as misogynistic you've passed right past the let's-talk-like-rational-adults-about-your-work phase and gone straight into if-you-disagree-you're-morally-bankrupt territory. If you wish to discuss things with your friends in those terms, or to use those terms in your own self-reflections, then more power to you -- but when you toss the sexism label around in public you are chilling the free exchange of ideas rather than provoking it.

You seem to be very sensitive about how certain story elements can be interpreted; I'm just telling you my interpretation of the sort of criticism bandied about in this thread. Better to start with, and heavily emphasize, the idea that the story in question is poorly written, rather than painting it in terms that are emotionally charged.

But hey, we're just a couple of random dudes (or dudettes) on the intarwebz. Disagreement is nothing new; the only thing remarkable about this disagreement is the piquant interaction of self-important rhetoric with the spectacular unimportance of the conversation.

Comic books have always been aimed at boys. Whether that's right or wrong; it's the truth. Complaining that trends in comic books reveal male bias is a little like complaining that women's basketball isn't given equal time in Sports Illustrated. You may be right, but you're also stating the obvious.

Oedipus uses the word, "overwrought," and he's right: the sad thing is that all you have to do is look at the title characters to see male bias in comic books. Most lead characters are male. Thus, many of the stories about those males heavily feature females cast in the role of significant other. Thus, danger and tragedy will tend to hit females for shock value.

That support characters are often used as fodder to motivate lead characters isn't any great revelation, whether those lead characters are male, female, or self-reproducing creatures from another planet. That use of support characters ain't always good writing; it often isn't good writing, but hey, we are talking about comic books here.

The question isn't whether you can track the so-called WiR phenomenon in comics; clearly you can. The question is whether tracking what appears to be a self-evident consequence of the subject matter serves any useful purpose. Are we implicitly to accuse every writer who falls into the trap of writing for her audience of sexism? Are we hoping somehow to force the comic-book industry by political correctness fiat to print an equal amount of female-lead-character titles without regard for their viability in the existing market? Cause that's what it'd take before you start seeing the helpless husband cruelly murdered as often as the helpless wife.

I just don't see any point to this line of criticism, unless it's to gather around and pat each other on the back for our exceeding sensitivity. As one of the industry quotes TrueGentleman supplied says, it's a matter of good writing. Criticize the writing, not the writer. And no, you really can't accuse writing of misogyny without also smearing the author. Sorry, the misogyny label is just too emotionally charged to be tossed around with a casual, "No offense, dude."

Or, um, dudette.