Seldom

The devs mentioned the "one aura" limitation for those who requested path auras+other auras. This seems a wonderful way around that...Though honestly, I would LOVE for the option to be given to sprint, hover, and fly as well, so that one doesn't have to just run fast to combine path auras with other auras.

This is actually far easier, thanks to incarnate powers. The old temp power combos that could clear the room only so much are overshadowed by high tier judgements that can clear ambushes in a blink. Destines, particularly rebirth and barrier, mean you can dogpile the AV with little difficulty. Lores focused on Reichsman squash him ASAP.

Ishould be able to assist, barring any unforeseen family situations.
I have:
Bots/ff mm
Mind/psy dom (with invis/tp for stealthing even in master runs)
Ill/emp controller (again, wth invis/tp)
Rad/kin corr
Crab spider
Just let me know what you would wish me to bring.

Credit where credit is due:

PowerpointPB: smashed things, lobster-style
Queen Frosteen: blasted things to bits, and was the only one who found Galatia
Kral-Raiden: fearless chunk of rocks that never flinched
Iron Mistresss: the bubbles and hardware made things easy and safe
Neutrio: blasted, healed, boosted, blasted...to be honest we didn't let him heal much but he was great.
D'lya: excellent tank, and gave a great tip for hami
Kinetic Kay: sped things up, and made kral as happy as could be

Great work all!

Sorry for the bad screenie, I was rushing as to not drag it out longer:


A fantastic team, and my final master badge. Color me very happy, and pleased as punch to have some great players on Champion.

This will begin forming in under an hour! (5:30 Central, 6:30 EST)

Just to note: if you have signed up but cannot make it that's fine...bu the earlier you let me know, the better. That way the team isn't twiddling their thumbs awaiting your arrival. Send me a tell @chicagodoodler if this comes up.

As a reminder:
This is happens tomorrow!

Currently I'm working on my dark/storm/leviathan controller, and enjoying it quite a bit. With high recharge you can get permanent haunts, umbra beast, multiple tornadoes, multiple lightning storms, permanent coralax, and almost permanent water spout. (6 seconds shy on water spout) It's like being a mastermind of pure chaos.

....Of course it's also darned good at debuffs/control. Heart of darkness and thunder clap overlap nicely. Between the two you can't just permanently stun things, you have permanent double stack AoE stuns for bosses. Shadow field is 10 seconds shy of permanent, so you have a hold/debuff patch around with all the freezing rain, snow storms, and hurricanes. Not to mention it's a visual hoot.

First things first, for doms in general: immobilizes are situational. Controllers live on them for damage, dominators shrug at them. They are low damage controls that allow all aggroed enemies to keep shooting at you, and are often aggro-heavy enough to make certain that it is you they want to be shooting at. They are still good at strapping foes down that want to run up and play a game of melee, but this value is dependent on enemy groups. Ranged enemies like council it's far less handy, while nasty close-quarters foes like warriors become way easier.

ST holds are always you bread and butter "hold still and die helplessly" power, AoE holds are so-so panic buttons unless you build for recharge, in which case they become more reliable not just through availability, but through pairing them with a more available domination button. Bam! boss-class group hold, with better duration.

Sleeps are situational, usually as a 'saving them for later' control for when a group could be a problem but your team doesn't want to wipe 'em out yet. Confuses are pure sweetness, even better than on controllers, as they work on just about anybody and last a looong time and work well with your 'kill stuff' secondary. Confuse, then get in there and do as much damage as you can. Or, if you were going to ignore them, let them thin themselves out.

For trials:
Each trial has spots that different controls sets do well or badly against, many times changing dependent on team build/behavior.

BAF: Immobilizes are great vs. the minion escapees. All controls fail vs. the lieutenants that try to escape, though. Confuses are handy for the boss' reinforcements, as you turn the nasty unwanted reinforcements on each other. Immobilizing them, however, is dangerous at the least. Sleeps work on ambushes if the league is ignoring them. Stun, holds are, well, just that. The higher the level shifts, the handier they becomes. (Controls scale in duration vs. levels) The AV's are uncontrollable, but drain psyche still helps vs. their regen.

Lambda:
Confuses help thin the ranks of foes, and group confuses can help dispatch crates/containment cells even. Stuns/holds give time and safety to take out those glowies too. Immobilizes can slow down ambushes inside, but will draw aggro to you. Immobilizes are also handy as Marauder jumps around, holding mobs back to his previous locations as the team moves on. Confuses turn them on each other, and can remove single problem targets. (I hate augers, love them once confused) sleeps also hold them back snoozing as the team moves on. No controls work vs. marauder, though he is vulnerable to psy, even when enraged, and drain psyche helps with -regen.

Keyes:
Wormhole can clear 'guarding' enemies from around consoles so that they can be charged up ASAP. Sleeps are great for grabbing glowies in the first reactor, as are holds/stuns. Confuses help get guarding bots to help clear each other. Sleeps help pacify bunker respwans to just run back in and grab more glowies in the third reactor, and stuns/holds can do the same but don't last as long, so you must hurry. No controls work vs. anit-matter, though drain psyche does help kill his regen.

UG:
Nothing special here. Sleeps see little to no use, except for groups the team can bypss, but the trial has so many kill portions this is not frequent. Immobilizes are also less used.Confuses help speed, and holds/stuns protect. Drain psyche rocks, controls are 'meh' vs. the AV.

MoM:
Confuse helps thin the minions that show up out. It also is handy against the mirror versions of the players that show up in the portal portion. Holds/stuns help protect Aurora. Wormhole and TK can be used to force eyes of the storm into position against Penny Mayhem. In the well portion, TK can push Tilman away from the well once she can be controlled, turning the whole trial around if done right. Drain psyche rocks, controls are 'meh' vs. the AV.

DD
Again, stuns/holds/confuses are handy to protect from mobs. Sleeps and immobilizes less so, as the league will usually move in and kill stuff in fixed locations. Drain psyche rocks, controls are 'meh' vs. the AV.

Magi;
See above.

I'm not for 'boosting just to boost" The upside with energy melee, in the beginning, was that you had fast, strong single target burst damage, with control vs. single targets as well. The downside was that you were bad vs. crowds and could damage yourself. Then they slowed down energy transfer, and reduce the magnitude of total focus. Now you have a slow burst damage set with reduced control.

Is the set good? Yes, I still like it. But it isn't as good at the things it was good at at first, and while the adjustments were necessary, the 'overperforming' portions were downgraded without anything else bing upgraded. This would be fine if the set were overperforming in all areas, but the set had definite weaknesses along with its strengths, and its strengths were brought down without anything done to normalize its weaknesses.

The set is good at:

• delivering large chunks of damage in large portions
• single target minion/lieutenant control
• continuous control over time (stuns layer well)

The set is bad at:

• AoE control
• AoE damage
• quick damage delivery
• staying healthy (hurts itself)
• fast control

There are several places the set could be improved. Putting the damage upfront in either total focus or energy transfer would alleviate the QoL problem of "too much damage too late" also known as corpse-blasting. Total focus' mag 4 stun gave burst control to compensate for its long animation, that would help survival vs. hard targets. Stun gives a long animation with almost no damage...it should either be a faster control, or have damage in line with its long animation. The problem with the latter is that energy melee already has that in spades. If the set is about killing tough targets, it should at least give better crowd mitigation to guard it while it locks in its longer animation that sometimes incur extra damage. This could be through Upping whiling hands' stun rate, or by making "stun" give crowd mitigation.

Ooh, don't forget "Call to Arms." 6.25% recharge in 4 IO's.

My personal suggestions:

The most obvious to me are energy melee, battle axe, sonic resonance, trick arrow, force fields, poison, ice control, mercs, and ninjas. I do not have experience with beast mastery, so no comment there.

Energy melee:
The secondary effect (stun) is great, but is redundant; control is all about magnitude threshold vs. targets, and it is strong enough to hit bosses sometimes, but never strong enough to stun much more, but never does anything else.

Proposed solution:

• All energy melee attacks have a chance to stun. If that stun lands, the next energy melee attack have a chance to release a limited, small radius burst of energy against that target, "concussive burst." While most Energy melee attacks have chance to create a concussive burst, total focus, stun, and energy transfer have an almost guaranteed chance to make a concussive burst. Note: concussive burst would be a small radius aoe (5' radius) with a target limit of 5.
• Give stun the old, quick energy transfer animation
• Increase total focus' magnitude to mag 4 to match seismic smash/KO blow.
• Increase Whirling hands' radius to 10', slightly increase damage.
• Frontload Energy transfer's damage, so it has a fast delivery but then a 'wind-down.'

Battle axe;

As mentioned, it has lost some of its flavor over time. It doesn't need much, but the pure lethal damage is very often resisted. As such, give it a chance to 'wound' a target. Wounded targets suffer damage over time, reduced defense, and reduce max hitpoints for a limited time.


Sonic Resonance:

This set lacks means to reduce incoming damage and means to undo damage. If sonic resonance is ever on its own as the team's sole source of support, it suffers more than other buff/debuff sets as it has almost nothing it can do to give the team any more help when things go wrong. You shield your allies, lay down your debuffs, and that's all you can do much of the time. Also, you have no way to protect from psychic damage.
Suggested fix:

• Give sonic siphon a stacking -damage. This means that because of the longer recharge, sonic resonance users can give teams and themselves higher safety the longer the fight takes.
• Make sonic cage a toggle, lower its recharge.
• Give clarity psychic resistance. This removes redundancy with sonic dispersion, and closes the hole that sonic has to psychic protection.
• Give all sonic shields resistance to the side effects carried by the damage types they shield from. S/L give resists to -def. nrg/neg nrg/cold give resistance to -end, -recovery, -tohit, -recharge, -speed.
• As with stalker's energy aura, convert sonic repulsion to a fixed-cost mag 2 stun aura, rather than the continuous cost AND KB cost toggle it is.
• reduce liquefy's recharge.

I only have VERY limited experience with trick arrow, so I'll pass that off to those with better experience. I will say the recharges in general for the AoE debuffs are a tad high, and the set's controls should be better at debuffing, even at the cost of control duration. I will ssay I always feel bad for my TA buddy who lays down his arrows just as we all run past him, all enemies destroyed in our wake. His debuffs are great when they are all down, but in most cases he doesn't get the chance.

Force field:
Force field is very good at what it does, but what it does is limited and almost completely unscalable. It gives so much defense you very seldom need more, but has little to fall back on. This in a setting where other sets give defense with many other tools, so making force field more diverse would make it a much more palatable choice.
Suggestions:

• Give all defense buffing powers -def resistance. This makes forcefields' defense protection the most reliable, as it is far more immune to cascading failure.
• Give force bolt and repulsion bomb 'bruising' properties, lowering the damage resistance of the targets they hit.
• Change detention field into a toggle, lower its recharge.

Poison:
This is perhaps one of the more varied debuff sets, featuring just about every debuff a set can have. It has the luxury of these being clicks, so they last and are not detoggled. On the downside, many repeat applications are pointless as the effects are unstackable, and almost all effects can miss. The values of the debuffs are lower than other debuff sets, despite the fact that this set has a limited area for many of its debuffs, and the set has very limited mitigation or healing.
Suggestions:

• Either improve envenom's -regen or make it partially (or fully) unresistable. Make its -defense unresistable, but unstackable.
• Make weaken's -tohit, -damage stackable. This way the set gives greater mitigation as long fights go on against tough targets.
• Improve poison trap's -endurance, so that it ticks continuously, providing sapping mitigation.
• Make masterminds' noxious gas a minion toggle.

Ice control:
This set was made way back when the devs claimed slows were a form of control, and the set shows it. So my suggestion is to run with that. Give ice's slowing powers a chance to hold any foe whose recharge and/or speed is debuffed below a certain point, encasing them in ice. this effect would be called "frozen over," and would be unstackable. As such a foe "frozen over" could not be held again by an ice control until the effect wore off. "Frozen over" would be a mag 3 hold, so it would not control bosses or higher, but would carry with it a -max hp effect,a s the foes become more vulnerable in their brittle, frozen state.
Suggestions:

• chilblain: low chance of "freeze over"
• Block of ice: low chance of "freeze over"
• Frostbite: low chance of chance of "freeze over"
• Artic Air: low chance of "freeze over"
• Shiver: medium chance of "freeze over"
• Ice slick: low chance to "freeze over," add -recharge, and -defense. The idea being that the unsure surface reduces the enemies' agility, and the -rechagre is from the cold slowing the enemy. This also gives ice slick more uses as it still is functional after a foes immune to knockback is immobilized on it.
• Flash Freeze: remove damage, medium chance to "freeze over"
• Glacier: medium chance of "freeze over"

The end result is a control set that, though it sports low damage, can reduce enemy's total hitpoints to make damage go further. The many debuff effects, when stacked actually add up to higher control, and all effects have a chance to have an added hold vs. most enemies.

Mercs: Higher upgrade adds 'tracer rounds' to soldiers, giving their attacks fire damage. Reduce all control powers' recharge. Reduce serum's recharge.

Ninjas: give all tier one and 2 ninjas high innate defense. Because yes, they are ninjas.

That's "all" I'd do.

There is no 'best' considering the variety of mechanics thrown at players. That said, there are some standout powers that help in certain trials...

BAF:
Kinetics' siphon speed is the only thing that can slow down lieutenants. Patch damage/-res effects are good for clearing the doors as escapees flee. High S/L/E resists work well vs. the bots and their hight tohit attacks.

Lambda: High ST attacks help vs. containment/turrets, psy damage is good against marauder.

Keyes:
Healing is great. Invisibility allows fast bunker access. Wormhole clears terminals ASAP. Taunt makes leading the AV far faster.

MoM:
Psy resists are great. Telekenisis can turn around Tillman in the well portion. TK/tp foe/wormhole can bring the storm minions into proper range reliably. Healing helps in the portal portion.

Underground:
High energy/S/L resists and confusion resists help here.

TPN:
High ST damage, psy resist help here quite a bit, as does taunt.

DD:
Healing helps, as does ST damage vs. essences.

Overall healing, psychic resistance, energy resistance, and enemy placement controls find far higher usage than in most other game content.

Hello. The title says it all pretty much. I'll be running a "Master of" run for Lady Grey's task force Sunday, July 29th. All to get this little shiny:

Want to get it too? Come to the Rikti Warzone at 5:30 PM central (6:30 EST) in the Rikti Warzone on the 29th, and we will start as soon as all members are assembled. If signups do not attend by 6:00 central (7:00 EST) your spot may be given to another player. (Sorry, just don't want to leave the team hangin' too long. )

Info, for those who need it:
The Lady Grey TF is an 8 person level 45-50 tf in the rikti warzone. A master run will require no deaths and no temporary powers. While I will not turn away anybody of any AT or 'proper' level, I highly recommend bringing a 50. Also a good mix of ranged/melee/control helps a bit with the Hamidon mission, but again, bring what you want first of all. (Hamidon's 3 Mitochondria types are weak vs. melee, ranged, and control respectively.)

I will be doing a 'normal' rather than speed run just to be cautious, unless the team is good enough to safely bypass things, in which case yes, we can kick things up a notch with the fastness and all. The two most dangerous things are Hamidon (4th mission) and the pylons in the rikti warzone. The pylons, just avoid them, the hamidon will just need some teamwork and, if necessary, [Essence of the Earth] inspirations. I can and will provide these to any team members upon request. Also note that while master runs disallow temp powers, incarnate powers are all good and can make these runs smooth as buttah. So bringing an incarnate will make you just that more awesome.

Anyway, enough with chit-chat, let me get to the signups:

Please copy this list and add yourself to the list to sign up.
(also, please note whether you need the badge or are just there to play/help)

1. Dreameater lvl. 50 mind/psy dom (needs badge)
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.

Re: the OP-

Energy melee: kinetic melee is all but energy melee 2.0. Energy melee was reduced in performance due to a couple powers performing differently than castle was comfortable with, but these did not carry with them buffs elsewhere. As it is it's burst damage set with one marginal AoE, and an all but non-damaging slow control hit. All its burst damage is delivered slowly, its plethora of stacking stuns are often redundant and delivered mostly to the single targets that die quickly, offering nothing against extra foes that are dealt with on a one-on-one basis.

Poison: (especially masterminds) the mastermind poison tier 9 still has a 5 minute recharge and 10 target limit. This needs to be a toggle with 16 target limits. Poison also boasts focused debuffs and very limited mitigation, yet its clicky debuffs do not stack with many applications, and can miss. As such poison though it seems to be designed around a 'limited but tough debuff' schtick has lower debuffing capabilities than dark or radiation in exchange for powers that miss, it has less healing and control, and the debuffs are half value against extra targets hit in a smaller radius.

Sonic Resonance: The focus of this set, resistance buffing and debuffing, is accompanied by a lack of soft control or layering and a tier 9 that is alone in bringing mitigative debuffs and is at base set to a one tenth uptime. Additionally, its pure resistance without any other layers of damage mitigation leave allies vulnerable by death via attrition and has nothing to consistently redirect or make up for this. This problem is most glaring when the set is on a team without other team support or control.

Trick arrow: it was very good back in beta testing, then got knocked down without subsequent ratchets upward. In a game that is increasingly based off of adaption, this is still a locational debuff set that has long recharges and many powers to do debuffing that other sets do more quickly and flexibly.

Many of the procs from single target sets are balanced against just hitting one enemy. The chance to hold is in the single target ranged for a reason; they don't want characters group holding mobs via rain of fire, ball lightning, frost breath, etc.

The other issue to merging is the bonuses...PBAoE sets tend to be survival-based, as they are meant to be used in the thick of things. Defense bonuses, hitpoint/regen bonuses, even resistance bonuses are found in PbAoE sets. Targeted AoE? Only one set has one PvE defense. Given their history, I doubt the devs would give all the close AoE +defense/hp/regen survival tools to sets that are more bent toward ranged AoE's.

Also, ST sets tend to have stronger bonuses, many times for fewer slots. This makes me think that they made bonuses so that if you are better against single targets, you are hardier, while if you have a bunch of AoE's you lose access to those stronger bonuses by being able to kill lots of things fast.

Beyond the types of the bonuses is the number. Most power sets have limited number of a variety of types...single target, an AoE or two, a soft or hard control, you get the idea. This variety sets a limit on how many times a player can dip into bonus pools, as one power set may be able to take advantage of, say, a bunch of kinetic combats, whilst another cannot because of the set type limits. Merging sets would simply mean everybody could max out to the 5 rule ASAP. Variety AND limit of options in IO sets is an integral part of their balance.

Honestly I wouldn't have a problem, so long as the theme of control via misdirection remained. I would be adamantly against giving phantom army to doms but bumping its recharge, just because its uptime is already low without crazy +recharge. It is a core pseudo control in a control set with already poor control. If the 'it cannot be up as often' approach would be taken, I would rather they give the power more uptime but make it immune to +recharge. I know the very thought of having an illusion dom with absolutely no possibility for perma-PA is rage inducing to some, but there it is.

Hm. It would be cool if dominators got an invisible pet 'summoner' that, sort of like carrion creepers, spawned huge numbers of phantoms based off of enemy targeting, (rather than summoning vines) but they would be short lived. This would cause continuous bouts of distraction, but as soon as the distracting phantom disappears, the aggro has a chance to go back to the dominator. This makes it more dangerous, (removing the 'invincibility' option) but the higher number of phantoms would also give them better distraction, thus better control.