Smiling_Joe

You can't use your IO'd out PB as a baseline for performance. Regardless of how prevalent they are in the game today, balance was, is, and always should be determined with Single Origins as a baseline.

And you can't dispute that on the basis that everyone IO's, because I can turn it right around and say quite honestly that the vast majority of my characters and those of the people I regularly team with are equipped with no more than SO's, and NONE of my IO'd characters have builds worth more than 100-200m. It's all anecdotal, anyway.

Now that is some synergy I can roll with. Regardless of whatever problems I might have with Peacebringers - and those problems aren't gimping the archetype sized problems - it was still a kick on the Mothership Raid the other night to tank the Pylons at maxed resistance. To watch the multiple warheads exploding around me and have almost no damage when the smoke cleared was.... yeah, I'm gonna say it... epic. Peacebringers might suffer from more than their share of shortcomings, but their inherent is NOT one of their weaknesses.

The real world has been mighty intrusive, of late, but I'm working on exactly that. Seriously. It involves spreadsheets.

Give me a little time and I'll post my hypotheses. (plural, because I have a couple.)

How high did you level your warshade? Because Peacebringers pre-26 are actually a bit superior to their darker brethren, IMHO. Their damage is comparable, and Peacebringers at the time when there was still a "heroic" were far superior soloists. Voids and quantums were rougher then, and you did ALOT less damage.

But if you got your Warshade to 32 and beyond, you had your damage output tripled over what a Peacebringer could do.

So what happened to Warshades, specifically, to make them such awesome solo death machines? Enhanced difficulty settings. On heroic, you were stuck with one lieutenant and two minions per spawn against which to buff. Now, however, you can crank up the number of enemies you face, and how powerful they are.

Because of this, Warshades are rolling through solo missions at the resistance cap along side two and three pets that add 100-150 dps (if you can get three fluffies out consistently) to damage that is boosted by fully saturated mires. Dwarf Mire - with it's shortened recharge/duration and respectable damage - turns black dwarf into a heavy scrapper that can tank for the essences.

Peacebringers still solo as well as they ever did. Better, in fact. But the ability to increase spawn size was a game-changer for Solo Warshades.

Not only that, but it actually BREAKS hide, so if you - like me - have any notion of using it proactively against high perception targets like Rikti Drones, don't. The entire spawn may well be placated, but you won't get a critical.

Before you take it, I highly recommend getting the temporary power recipe of the same name and trying it out - I believe it does the same thing.

Oh, and to pretty much everything else Zem said (and including the above, for that matter): QFT

I disagree. There has to be a baseline of performance. Brutes recently saw changes to their inherent based solely on comparisons to not one - but two - other archetypes, so there is precedent for comparisons to be drawn, especially where the epic archetypes are concerned.

Before the days of advanced difficulty settings and spawn size sliders, I'd have agreed wholeheartedly. Now, however, Warshades can set the spawn size up to maximum levels and roll through missions at maximum resistance and damage.

Warshades also ARE their own team when solo due to the fact that even an SO'd warshade with hasten can keep two extracted essences going at all times.

Two extracted essences (and I'm not even counting the fact that most builds with moderate IO investment can keep three essences out) add somewhere in the neighborhood of 120-152 dps to a warshade's attack chain whether teamed or solo (assuming around 95% Damage Enhancement). The burst damage in Quasar and Unchain essence provide the same burst damage potential as Dawn Strike and Photon Seekers, and what does a Peacebringer gain to compensate for that difference in damage?

Solo or teamed, Warshades can walk into at least every other fight with near-capped or capped resistances. More often than not they can do that with better frequency than a Peacebringer's Light Form. Nonetheless, a Peacebringer's heals do give them a slight nudge in survivability in high damage situations, and that alone makes them slightly tougher, depending on the team makeup.

But there again you make a good point when you say that a Warshades secondary effects are much more useful to a team than a Peacebringer's, and it's one I agree with. So - again - what does a Peacebringer gain to compensate?

Don't get me wrong; I'm not trying to say that Peacebringers should do exactly the same damage as Warshades, or even that they are gimped to uselessness. All I'm saying is that there is an unjustifiable gap in performance between the two archetypes and between Peacebringers and the other epic archetypes as a whole.

It isn't because the dev's hate Peacebringers, or because Peacebringers were poorly designed, or any other such nonsense. The game itself has changed, and Peacebringers haven't been able to leverage that change as well as other archetypes.


That same logic applies to Peacebringers, though. In fact, I'd wager that defenders have a MUCH easier time finding teams than Peacebringers.

I'm not talking about giving Peacebringers Blaster-level damage. I'm talking about bringing Peacebringers *more* in line with Warshades. Whether that's done through changing/adding secondary effects, tweaking recharge/damage levels on individual powers or through a straight up damage buff is immaterial to me. I have ideas about how it can be accomplished, and NONE of them involve buffing damage to anywhere near blaster levels.

You have a good point about Defenders not getting Peacebringer-level resistances, but then again Peacebringers don't have defender-level debuffs that - depending on the powerset - can bring defender damage up to and even above that of Peacebringers. To say nothing of the fact that player damage resistance is all too often trumped by defense - something defenders can get much easier than Peacebringers.

The problem is that we've been saying - in fairly reasonable and polite terms - that for quite a while. For ages we've said Peacebringers need a nudge to bring them closer to warshades, and we've largely been ignored. Yes, they buffed Kheldians in general a couple years back, and at the time we said Peacebringers were still lagging behind. When we were told to be happy with the changes we got in lieu of more datamining, we acquiesced. Still no changes have been forthcoming. In my opinion it's probably because we didn't make all that big of a fuss.

I could take this opportunity to agree with the sentiment that Peacebringers need a small to moderate buff and bow out of the topic like I've done so many times in the past, but that's just not good enough for me any more.

If we can all agree that Peacebringers could use a buff - and I believe nearly everyone in this thread has posted similar sentiments - then why are we saying in the same posts that Peacebringers and Warshades are roughly equal? Clearly something gave us the notion that they need help.

Defenders didn't need a solo boost any worse than Peacebringers, and they got one. Brutes certainly didn't need what amounted to a buff for mid to low end builds, but game balance dictated the changes. Peacebringers need work. Now's the time.

Cute. But you're being just a little unfair. With the exception of a bit of snarkiness on Dechs' part and more than a little from _Dawun_, the overall discussion - though passionate - has been on topic and focused on the overall points at hand (vise being focused on each other).

And no one has gotten personal. Well, no one had gotten personal until you implied that we're all slackers who post at work when we should be getting paid. Not everyone has the same work hours you know. (he says as he looks over his shoulder.)

Gotta go.

Ask me, the kheldian community could do with a little more passion, and I for one think it's refreshing to see people actually caring enough about an archetype to have a spirited debate about it. If that comes across as arguing, then so be it. We've spent too many years having minor flare-ups and friendly disagreements about problems with peacebringers that ended with agreements to disagree and discussions on how we could learn to live with those shortcomings.

We thought we were being reasonable. Now I'm thinking we might have instead come across as more than a little complacent.

You do, however, have a very good point regarding teaming. I might feel the disparity between Warshades and Peacebringers is a bit wider than you do even teamed, but that doesn't mean my Peacebringer doesn't do exponetially better on teams than solo. The gap between Peacebringer performance on teams and solo is as wide as the Grand Canyon.

My warshade doesn't have nearly so big of a gap between solo and teamed performance, but leave that aside. The exact same argument you just used with regard to khelds being intended for teaming was used for years with regard to defenders' low damage being okay because they weren't intended for teaming.

Yet they recently got a damage buff when solo, did they not?

EDIT - and I wouldn't say no to a buff that affected us in the same way as the damage buff affected defenders. I wouldn't say no to ANY buff.

Are you talking about the Achilles' Heel -resistance proc? If so, then I'm sorry to say that it doesn't stack, even if it procs from two separate powers.

So the part I bolded in the quote would not happen. If it procs, regardless of whether it procs multiple times within its own duration, you will only ever get 20% resistance debuff out of it.

However, in a power like Gleaming Bolt you have a much better chance of keeping that 20% sustained for longer periods.

I have three angry little white glowing...

...wait, there they go again...

...one grumpy little white glowing dot following me who didn't explode.

Yes, you can stack -def debuffs with other AT's -def debuffs. So what? The value of your redundant -def debuff goes down considerably when a Controller throws Radiation Infection out there, just like a Warshade's slows are insignificant in the face of a Cold Defender's Infridgidate. No one will ever say "we've got too many debuffs" because no one really cares once they're redundant. If there's a specific debuffer on the team no one cares if someone else also does that debuff to a lesser extent. At that point the game is more about damage.

And the point that -def debuffs are fairly useless in a situation where everyone can hit consistently still stands. Please demonstrate a single situation where you've seen a team that had a hard time hitting their foes where an ACCURACY BASED -def debuff would have helped, because if you're having a hard time hitting, then you're going to have a hard time applying any sort of persistent debuff that relies on you hitting. I've rarely seen teams that had a hard time hitting, however.

Did you just post this to say you agree? Because your points about Tactics, Buildup and teames that occasionally miss Mako in Elude don't really do a whole lot to support the usefulness of the Peacebringer's -def. Dechs wasn't saying Warshades help teams hit targets. Where did you get that? The point was that -def as a secondary effect in a Peacebringer's attacks is worthless ALL ON IT'S OWN because the nature of accuracy and tohit in this game makes it irrelevant. If you can't hit consistently with your -def attack, you can't apply the debuff. If you CAN hit consistently with it, you don't NEED the debuff.

Forget what warshades do or don't do with their secondary effects. Accuracy dependent -def debuffs are worthless in this game without the need for comparisons of any kind.



Again, everyone misses from time to time, whether there's a debuff to the mob's defense or not. If people are only missing from time to time, then where's the usefulness in the effect? And again - in situations where you're missing more than you're hitting, how are you going to apply that -def debuff if you can't hit often enough to make it useful?



-recharge means less incoming damage, so the warshade in the comparison is actually helping the team survive, vise adding to their damage, as you point out yourself right after the quoted text. By contrast, the Peacebringer's -def debuff doesn't help add to their damage. All it does is allow you to slot a single -res enhancement that DOESN'T STACK and rarely fires. I'd hardly call that increasing a team's damage. Besides, if a PB can slot it then so can the Rad in your comparison.

Wow. 19 minutes, huh? Now I don't have any datamining to show this, but I'd be willing to bet my account that you and the AV melting teams you join are the outliers in this game. I'd also be willing to bet my account that you don't have any datamining to show that you're the norm.

And on a team that can melt an AV in five minutes and power through ITF's in 19 minutes you could be on a COMPLETELY UNSLOTTED build and feel uber. No one would notice if your peacebringer is underperforming, because the debuffs, buffs and damage your team is throwing around are such massive overkill that individual performance is irrelevant. Not saying you or anyone else are not performing well on that team - just saying that it's a bit hard to measure personal performance. As in: nearly impossible.

Well, let's do the numbers on that. First, assume a double mire off three mobs average for a 67% damage boost.

Strike, assuming 95% damage enhancement, does 152 points of damage
Smite, assuming the same enhancement, does 239
Drain, assuming 80% enhancement in heal and 80 in damage, does 337 points of healing and 167 points of damage
Mire will do 225.78 points of damage.
Assuming an attack chain with enough recharge to chain strike, smite and drain twice before miring again, it comes out to somewhere around 134 dps. In addition, it has the potential to heal the shade for around 600 points of damage (assuming two drains in the chain)

134 dps isn't top shelf dps, but I'd hardly say it sucks. Never mind if you're on one of those speed ITF's in lag valley with fully saturated mires. It also doesn't take into account the added damage of the fluffies.

No snark intended at all when I say I'd like to see that softcapped PB build. If you've got one handy, would you mind terribly posting it? Sounds like something I'd be interested in.

I actually disagree with your assertion that Warshades are superior with AoE's. Peacebringers have just as much AoE capability as Warshades. I also agree that Peacebringers have more single target potential. Where we differ is in the significance of single target damage. You're not speeding through those ITF's because of single target damage. You've countered with hard targets and AV's, and while I still maintain that AV's are a small part of the game for most people, I'm willing to concede that the single target damage helps the team when up against hard targets, but consider this: A stalker brings to bear far more single target damage potential than a Peacebringer, and has mez protection and higher base hit points. Wouldn't you say the Peacebringer is paying too high a price for that single target damage advantage?

To answer your question about what I personally would like to see changed, I would like to see Photon Seekers have that rather punitive recharge shortened to the point that they can be made perma. Hell, make them unique in the way that an Illusion Controller's Nightmare pet is unique (spawning more while others are out de-rezzes the others) and GUT the recharge time so that they're perma right out of the box.

I would like to see the knockback mag reduced on Solar Flare and ALSO see the damage slightly increased to the point that those who would want to slot it for knockback and damage would see roughly the same performance as now, and those who would see the knockback turned to knockdown could do so and also have a bit of extra damage to compensate for the slightly less mitigation offered by knockdown. I would like to see the mag on Pulsar increased and the recharge decreased slightly to give peacebringers a reliable AoE mez.

In a perfect world I would toss out that worthless -def debuff in favor of a -res debuff, but that would violate the cottage rule and anger players like yourself who value it. And yes, I count your opinion as valid, regardless of how much I might disagree with it. As I've said, that problem is more with the game itself than with peacebringers, and so I don't expect anything to change there. If there WERE a -res component ADDED, it would totally reverse Peacebringers' fortunes. Hell, I'd be happy with something like Bruising for Tankers!

It might also mean trading one or more of the other changes I'd like to see, but I'd be willing.

Okay, it's late, and I'm not even going to respond to the rest of the post. Good night.

EDIT - actually, there were a couple of things I wanted to respond to:


My point is that Archvillains don't spawn alone. If you're ignoring the minions and heading straight for the AV, then so is that warshade, meaning - you guessed it! - he's not buffing off a single mob. And see what I said above about terrible dwarf damage. And again - a warshade has fluffies to add to the damage.


Where are you getting that anyone at all is stating that Warshades are affecting team tohit?

And the ACC IO buffing tohit was a mistype on my part. I well know the difference between accuracy and tohit, the old brain just reverses the names now and then. oops.


Just because YOU and PEOPLE YOU KNOW spend a lot of time doing task forces doesn't make it any more than anecdotial evidence. Judging by the remarks you've made about perma essence boost and IO bonuses and speed ITF's and melting AV's, it looks like you're on a majorly expensive build on an outlier team. Hardly indicative of normal play. Most players don't even have a fifty. If they did, there'd have been no need to lower the level cap for unlocking Epic Archetypes. Was it you that made that point earlier in this thread or was it Bill? I think it was Bill.

And I used time spent assembling a team as an indicator of how many people were doing task forces in my own admittedly anecdotal evidence. If the majority of the playerbase were running task forces there shouldn't be any time standing around waiting to find players willing to run it, right?


Okay, first of all, unless you're stacking that essence boost for longer than a couple seconds it means absolutely nothing that it's perma. I was assuming that already. And if you ARE stacking it for longer than a couple of seconds, then you're far from the average build, and not something on which balance can be judged. But even with accolades you're only approaching 1900 hitpoints. You're going to have to come up upwards of 30% hit point bonuses from IO's, and I would VERY much like to see that build. Is it the same build that's softcapped to defense?

In either case, however, we're talking about balance, and whether you use them or not the game isn't balanced around IO's. Not everyone uses IO's, and we shouldn't be forced to use them just bring a character up to par with its nearest cousin.


Because the areas at which a peacbringer excells have far less need for it than the areas where a warshade excells, and a peacebringer pays a heavier price for it.

Where exactly did I say that it seems people are playing content with AV's more often than all the other content? That meshes up much more with what you're saying, and I'M saying that you're flat-out wrong. You seem to have focused in on the game that YOU'RE playing without paying too much attention to anything that isn't anecdotal to your personal experience.

But you know what? I haven't done any datamining, either. So let's leave our personal experiences aside and look at what the content OFFERS. The game offers TEN TIMES the content for the leveling experience that doesn't include AV's over what does. Now if people choose to AE Farm or even TF farm to level past that dross then that's all well and good, but we shouldn't be FORCED to do that because a select few like yourself have been successful at it. Balance is based on what the game as a whole offers, not what you and your friends have experienced.


Warshades' AoEs are dark clones of Peacebringers for the most part, with Solar Flare being the exception. Its counterpart, however is Unchain Essence, which not only scatters mobs to the four corners of the map, it also stuns them so that they don't reform in that nice little AoE-vulnerable group in the Tanker's taunt aura for a while. And Warshades also get knockback in Gravitic Emanation.

And Warshades can stealth in, pop eclipse and mire before the target ever sees them, so where are you getting that a Peacebringer has some stealth advantage? And again I'll remind you that no target spawns alone.

And no one is saying that Peacebringers should be AoE specialists. What we're saying - well, what I'm saying is that what peacebringers do get is undervalued by the nature of the game system and the state of the content itself, and that they consequently pay too heavy a price for that.

I grow weary of saying "Peacebringers could use some love, but they also get some pretty good benefits" when those benefits are increasingly becoming irrelevant as more power is given to the players that specifically erase the need for those benefits.

Peacebringers. Need. Change.

And it's bloody well time we started asking for it with a fair bit more insistence than we have in the past.

Fair enough. Depending on what you want to do with your Peacebringer, there are a number of reasons to keep playing one.

First - and one thing that hasn't really been mentioned much to my recollection - Peacebringers are in my opinion much better in human form than Warshades. Well, they're much easier to be good with in human form, let's put it that way. If AlienOne is still reading the forums, I'm sure he could curl your toenails with stories of what his human only WS could do, but then that warshade is IO'd to the gills. A peacebringer on nothing more than SO's can excell as a human only character, comparing to a blaster about the same as a tanker compares to a scrapper, from a damage to survival comparison. You're only problem will be mez. Take dwarf for a permanent breakfree and you've got it covered (arguably somewhat imperfectly).

Next is PVP - see, I have no issue with the statement that Peacebringers are better than Warshades at PVP, or even that they're pretty good at PvP. The only issue I have with those statements as they've been made in this thread is when they're made in the context of Peacebringers being equal overall to Warshades as a result. Yes, they're better at a marginalized part of the game, but they are better nonetheless. If PvP is your thing, I recommend trying it out on a Peacebringer. I had great fun when I did, and all I really did was slot my nova with range and rectified reticle's increased perception. Human/Nova combos do even better, I hear.

On teams, the disparity between peacebringers and warshades still exists, but becomes less apparent. If you're into teaming, then a Peacebringer is a solid, fun ride. In fact, I'd argue that the Peacebringer's inherent is better suited to teaming than a Warshade's. A team of damage dealers really don't need the extra damage granted to a warshade, but the Peacebringer will be well nigh immortal on such a team, and is able to tank and survive better than anyone on the team.

Peacebringers are also frontloaded, in that they get bigger powers earlier in the game than Warshades. It took me forever to get into my Warshade. My Peacebringer was awe inspiring by contrast from level 6 to level 32.

And the powers do look very cool.

If I and others sound like we're coming down hard it's because we focused for so long on what we liked about the archetype that the issues we do have tend to be ignored. The problem with Photon Seekers, for example, has been around for YEARS, and when the first pass of changes to it didn't address all of the issues, we all said "At least it's an improvement. It'll do for now." and nothing ever got done about it again.

Go back through the threads and you'll see that whenever an issue has been brought up in the Kheld forums the response has ranged from tepid to downright apologetic. And I include myself as the biggest squid in the puddle there. Like I said in the post you responded to; we're damned if we do and damned if we don't: respond positively to the archetype's problems by pointing out what's still good and we come off as content apologists. Defend your stance on the archetype's imbalances and you're accused of bashing.

Peacebringers have their problems and they are hugely out of balance with Warshades, but if you team even a little it's well worth the ride.

And do you expect us to believe you're going to walk right up to that AV mob and start pounding on the minions? A warshade will do what any other player does: start damaging the AV, and with those minions standing around to saturate eclipse and the mires, and with bodies to saturate stygian circle when they die, a warshade will have done more damage by the time there's just one AV left than a peacebringer would, would have a persistent pet or two to do even more damage and would have more health with which to continue the fight.

What are you smoking? During an AV fight with a team is when a Warshade TRULY OUTSHINES a Peacebringer. First, the spawn is bigger, so there's more to saturate all those buff powers, there are other people to take aggro, so the Warshade can do so in relative safety, and cosmic balance can put a Warshade at the damage cap, to say nothing of the fact that he can stay in nova without worrying about suffering from Dwarf's lesser damage.

Even if the Warshade is tanking though, the dwarf is doing more persistent damage due to the persistent damage buff from dwarf mire - which because of the increased spawn size is significantly buffing the damage.

-Def is a useful debuff if it's autohit or if you have pets whose slotting you can control. If you'll look back and read you'll note that I specified accuracy dependant -def.

If you hit them once, you're going to be able to hit them again without the benefit of the -def, and if they're so high above you that you can't hit them regularly, then - since you have to hit them to apply the debuff - it isn't going to do you any good at all, is it?

People have fought lv 54 foes long before there was incarnate content and hit pretty consistently. In a game where two level 50 Accuracy IO enhancements put you at the tohit cap no one on a team running incarnate level content is going to be below that cap, a defense debuff isn't going to help you that much.

And as far as helping your team goes, debuff set powers like freezing rain, sleet, radiation infection and melt armor are going to do far more than your attacks, making your secondary effect rather redundant, don't you think? Never mind the fact that your team is likely not going to have much problem hitting them, either, because they're 99% of the time also slotted to the tohit cap.

Damage is a better debuff to bring to an AV encounter than anything a kheld can do, and with two fluffies out and blasting and two mires a warshade brings roughly three to four times the amount of that.

Wait no more. Here's the link from Paragon Wiki listing all the story arcs heroside you can do, along with whatever AV's are in them.

Going through with my calculater, I find roughly 50 missions (give or take) that contain archvillains. I count just under 450 missions that don't, and that doesn't count talk missions and patrols.There's more to this game than task forces, although to read the forums you'd think that's all that people ran. If that were true, it wouldn't take so long to assemble them, would it?

When there's a chance for incarnate shards to drop from every lv 50 mob and above, yes, I do really think people care if you helped kill weak mobs that don't matter. When every mob could potentially drop that final tip you needed to complete your morality arc, yes, I really do think people want to kill all those mobs that didn't matter before.

And yet again: that single mob that needs killed at the end will have OTHER mobs standing around him from which the warshade can draw all that power you say it lacks in those situations.

You're not going to make a nova form that's sitting on 2200 HP, because that 2400 HP cap is there to give Dwarf Form more hit points. The White Dwarf power acts like a toggle-based essence boost, giving you 800 more hit points. Fully slotted, Essence Boost is going to give you just under 700 more hit points than you had before. This, added to the 1070 base hit points you already had, brings you right up to that 2400 cap (and a bit past).

However, since Nova doesn't add to your hit points, and your base is 1070, this puts you at 1600-1700 hit points, which is 400-500 more hit points than the blaster's minimum of 1200 hp and right around the same level as a blaster's cap of 1600 hit points.


For roughly two attacks, after the animation time for the form shift is taken into account.



Warshades are demonstrably not inferior to Peacebringers in those areas where you claim they are weak, and no one is saying that AV's and PvP aren't important. Well, no one is saying that AV's aren't important, anyway. What we're saying is that they're such a small part of the entirety of the game that it makes little sense to leave a fantastic archetype like Peacebringers falling short in every other way because they are only adequate at those parts you enjoy. And speaking of which:

Good for you for doing what you enjoy. But you are missing my point. I'm not trying to trash Peacebringers and I'm not saying they are garbage. I'm questioning the justification for the severity of their drawbacks.

Stalkers are good at hard target enemies and PVP, and as such suffer justifiable penalties to the rest of the game. Peacebringers are.... okay at it. Under certain circumstances. They will never come close to the true single target damage specialists, and are not versatile enough to compensate for that by filling in for team-oriented buffers/debuffers.

My point is that they need balancing, and that I expect that balancing to lead to a buff in some form. Like I've said repeatedly: It's not that Peacebringers don't do a lot. The problem is that the game itself doesn't place enough of a value on what they do.

And fix Photon Seekers. Always that in addition to anything else I've said.

Last I checked, Warshades were the stealthy Kheldians. And since Warshades also have access to teleport friend, who better to stealth a TF straight to the AV than a warshade? Peacebringers can't bring that to a team.

No one in this thread thus far has argued that Peacebringers need to be more AOE centric. In fact, I would argue that they are JUST AS AOE CAPABLE as Warshades. Solar Flare, White Dwarf Flare, Two AoE blasts in Nova, two AoE blasts in human, Photon Seekers and Dawn Strike make for enormous AoE potential. The only people mentioning AoE has been in the context of the Warshade depending on it.

It's not a matter of AoE verses Single Target - it's a matter archetype balance that covers everything from recharge to damage types to the degrees of effectiveness of certain powers (like stygian circle, for example) contrasted with the price for that effectiveness (or the lack thereof, in the stygian circle example).

EDIT - Dammit, Dechs! Got your wall of text in before mine!

I might be in the minority, but I've always liked the nuke. But then that might also stem from my playstyle. I tend to more often than not be in over my head and well beyond the target cap, so I'm often firing off the nuke immediately after photon seekers. The nuke fills in the gaps left by photon seekers, and I've killed multiple spawns simultaneously (after flubbing up and aggroing them both to me) this way.

So long as I remembered to hit conserve power beforehand, it's nothing to hit a blue and go to dwarf to finish off the rare survivor or two. ESPECIALLY now that stamina works in the forms.

How much recharge does your build have?

I agree with your point regarding Build-Up's duration and form-swapping, and Dwarf's mire needs little more than good slotting to be a persistent buff.

It's still worth mentioning, however, that 11.25% is slightly less than you can get get from a red inspiration.

Nonetheless, the counter-point to that is that a warshade will consistently be facing more than one foe. Just like dark melee's soul drain, you can expect an average damage buff based on three to four mobs. There's a reason Dark Melee has been the perrenial FoTM for high end builds, and Warshades get two mires to perma.

Like I needed to tell you that, right?

EDIT - and to be fair, with very little recharge bonus slotting you can also have Build-up every 30 seconds. Now that's more than triple the time of its duration, but it's also more about burst damage than the mire. And if we're going to take form-switching into account, then you also have to do that for the warshade. To get that damage boost, you're going to have to drop to human to use it, so every 30 seconds you're going to have 3 seconds of downtime where a warshade's all-important dps is going to take a hit. And if you want to keep both mires permanent, you're better off to stay in dwarf, when not miring in human form, otherwise (if you went with nova for damage) you'd have to drop to human and go to dwarf to hit the dwarf mire. I'm not even going to calculate the time wasted in 30 seconds doing that, because no one in their right mind would.

Then there's animation times. Build Up's 1.17 second cast time doesn't affect it's burst damage potential nearly as much as Mire's 2.32 seconds. Add that to the form shifting time and you've got nearly six seconds of time where you're not doing any damage. If you're also going to utilize the dwarf mire you can also add another 2.32 seconds for that. So for almost the entire time of build-up's 10 second duration of +72% extra damage, you're animating one thing or another to get almost comparable average damage and taking that time as a hit to your dps. Except for the fluffies, which is considerable and completely invalidates any complaints about mire's animation time. Damn fluffies. Insert my standard rant about photon seekers here.

Sure as you post that someone will have a video of a pb soloing an AV. I know I've come close on a moderately IO'd build. I can take down EB's like Midas from the Incarnate arc. No way I could have done it as an AV.

And as I said, soloing AV's is a VERY small aspect of this game, and to be honest it also ignores that AV's were designed to be team-oriented foes - ESPECIALLY on an A/T that is supposed to be team-oriented.

Also, how is your WS's sunless mire providing more damage than build up? Against a lone AV (or any lone mob) it provides an 11% damage buff. It lasts 30 seconds to Build Up's 15, so total buff against a single mob is 22% verses Build Up's 72%. Even assuming a whole spawn at minimum difficulty, you're looking at roughly 33-55% damage buff for as long as the minions last.

Now if you're talking about stacking dwarf mire with it, then they'd at least be comparable overall....

Not remotely. There is a difference between peacebringers needing improvement and peacebringers being fun, and if anything we've posted has led you to want to delete your peacebringer then please remember the binary nature of internet forums before typing in the name of that peacebringer for the final time:

If we demonstrate in no uncertain terms where peacebringers are falling behind, then people think we're trashing on the archetype. If - as I've done previous to this - we talk about these same things in the context of "they're falling short, but here's how you can get around it" then the false impression is given that there are minor issues at best.

I might appear to be coming down hard on peacebringers in this thread, but make no mistake about it - I'm a peacebringer player. I play the archetype to the exclusion of most others, including warshades (although I do have a warshade, too). I like the self-contained buffs and the self-reliant nature of the lighter side of squiddiness; I just think the price is too high. Just after posting last night in this thread I jumped over in game and hunted a few incarnate shards on my PB and had a great time doing it. In fact, I'm betting that once more incarnate slots are released you're going to see more than a few PB's come off the shelf.

But that doesn't mean they don't need fixing.

That would be a valid argument if a warshade needed to fight more than one mob to be more effective than a peacebringer.

But never mind that. How often in this game are you going to be facing just one mob? Even a solo Warshade on the minimum difficulty will have three mobs per spawn on average, giving it more than enough of a boost to "sustain itself."

By the time it's down to a mano y mano with that last mob, that last mob has taken quite a bit of splash damage from the fight with the first two.

When you're talking about AV's, you're talking about content that is designed for teams. How often in this game is a warshade going to have to go up against an AV without at least a partial team for support? Given even one or two teammates and any kheld doesn't need help with sustaining itself.

And when a warshade is fully mired, slowing, perma-mezzing and perma-eclipsed and nuking bodies and surrounded by pets the av is taking considerably more damage than that peacebringer can bring to bear.

There's a difference between surviving an encounter with an av and winning an encounter with an av. And again I'll make the point that AV's are a very small part of this game, especially when we're talking about solo performance. Again I'll point out that a teamed kheld of either flavor will have no problems, and the majority of av encounters come on enforced teaming situations like tf's.

Really? You're going to call the -def a useful debuff? If you have to hit the target to apply the debuff, then what the hell is the point of making it EVEN EASIER TO HIT?? And the game isn't designed around IO's. Just because the Achilles' Heal can be slotted doesn't make it a valid secondary effect.

The black dwarf is going to be in melee range anyway. He doesn't have to close the distance to use the heal. Human form is also going to be running inky aspect and has access to further stuns from Gravitic Emanation, so closing to melee range again isn't going to be a problem.

It also doesn't make sense to discount stygian circle - it can nearly refill a warshade's health bar from one hit point with only one body hit (and don't bother arguing about the need for bodies - you can't swing a tentacle in any given mission without hitting at least one body. They're not hard to make.) Reform Essence and Sublimation will give you about half a bar. Essence boost does better, but the heal comes after a delay. I died alot before I learned not to use Essence Boost reactively.

But has it occurred to you that warshades' siphon life clones don't heal as much because warshades don't need the heals as much as the peacebringer? You said it yourself: a warshade can rock the aoe's while fully mired, fully eclipsed, perma mezzing and slowing while the pets fire away too. A warshade is facing considerably less incoming damage than a peacebringer.

I believe Ice Armor is full of win because - as a defense power - it helps blasters get to the soft cap for S/L defense, at which point any resistance they have becomes more or less moot against most foes.

But never mind that. Comparing defense shields to resistance shields is an apples and oranges argument that will never, ever hold any water here.

When it's all said and done, it's not that Peacebringers don't do anything - it's that the game doesn't reward them for doing it. Peacebringers are a single target archetype in an AoE game, and there's no fixing that.

There's no excuse for Photon Seekers in their current form, however.

Task forces are hardly solo affairs, though. I was under the impression that we were talking about a solo kheld, for some reason. If you've got a team behind you, then you're not going to have to worry too much about buffing yourself anyway.

But the point was that in light form you don't even have the option. With Eclipse you can stay in human form or pick the more damaging nova form. With light form you're stuck with sub-par damage in most of your human attacks.

Oh, maybe I misunderstood about the teammates. I inferred that from this:

...in the context of Dech's remarks about def debuff being irrelevant in a game where everyone (like your teammates, I assumed) runs with acc slotted to the 95% cap.

I might have to go back and re-read those parts, then.


WRT slotting, you didn't say anything about that - I did. My way of trying to see both sides of an issue by bringing up points that might run counter to what I'm thinking.

You're dangerously close here to making the same kind of argument that you accuse Dechs of making with the APP's - just like you won't get Dech's APP powers for the vast majority of the game, you're not going to go up against EB's and AV's for the vast majority of the game. You're argument also assumes that you'll be ignoring nova form completely. It really doesn't matter if my resistances are capped or not against a hard target when I can go nova and at least slow its attack rate enough that I can out-dps it.

Besides which, a well-slotted eclipse will give you upwards of 22% resistance and fill almost half your endurance bar off of one enemy. A well-slotted Stygian Circle will give you almost half your endurance and almost completely refill the average warshade health bar off of one boss, EB or AV. (average health bar, meaning somewhere between 1070 base and the 2400 max, depending on form and accolades, and well-slotted, assuming SC's 400+ BASE heal off of ONE boss-level or above corpse.) And before you point out that against a single hard target the corpses won't last forever, I might also mention that the Warshade also gets two siphon life clones (well, siphon life wanna-bes is more like it) for additional healing.


Again, the circumstances where a warshade will run afoul of those enemies is rare, especially if you follow the Kheld arcs.

It's not really a matter of slows vs knockback. Those warwolf minions will be stunned enough that slows would be gratuitous anyway, and the damage aura, fed by a healthy mire from the stunned minions, will help mitigate the lt's with extreme predjudice, leaving you to gravity well the boss.

But that's not the point. The point is in addition to knockback Peacebringers get the most worthless secondary effect in the game. You've mentioned several times in the threads above that with the apparent implication that it is actually beneficial for Peacebringers to have, and I'm only being a little hyperbolic when I say that it's actually a detriment.

It's a detriment in that in a game where foes are as easy to hit as walls an accuracy-based defense debuff is laughably irrelevant, but its presence in a powerset is still a limiting factor for balancing the set's damage and mitigation.

Talk all you want about making foes easier to hit for poorly-slotted teammates; I won't plan my slotting around builds I cannot see or control. With the slot crunch hitting kheldians as hard as it does, something has to be sacrificed (unless you want to start talking about IO's now) and that something is either damage, accuracy or endurance.

I could slot less for accuracy (I suppose that was the original inent?) but then my dps has to go down while I spam the attacks that are slotted for def debuff.

Not by much, but in the end it's far more efficient to just slot for acc/end/damage and ignore the def debuff. Besides, it's not THAT hard to hit an enemy in this game.

My issue is that I always see the defense debuff talked about as though it's an even tradeoff for other secondary effects, and it just isn't. Not remotely.

Like I said before, the problems with defense debuffs (and, for that matter, with the game's overwhelming smashing/lethal resistances) aren't problems for Peacebringers specifically so much as they are problems with the system in which they exist. And if Castle's post in the stalker forums is any indication, the developers are done adjusting archetypes to cure systemic problems.

But I'm done being an apologist for an archetype that clearly needs help.

Bill, I too am a huge fan of Peacebringers, and in fact prefer them over Warshades, but I have to disagree with some of the points you made. Light form might have the longer duration, but it has an exponetially longer recharge AND a crash. Eclipse can be made perma.

And saying that you've got the chance to get a "wasted" Eclipse because only one enemy got hit is misleading. Eclipse, if used correctly, is fired off before any of the spawn is dead. I suppose you could argue that Eclipse could miss its accuracy check, but when has anything been difficult to hit in this game? If you're having a hard time hitting with Eclipse (which has the same base accuracy as most of your attacks), you'll have a hard time hitting at all, and survival becomes a moot point.

I agree where dwarf form is concerned. Totally not needed when Light Form is up. I do miss Nova's damage, however.



I agree whole heartedly that the powers being compared are fairly equal in terms of utility - although I might point out that Stygian Circle requires only one power selection - but I've never bought the whole "the body requirement is its drawback" argument. When have bodies been hard to make in this game?


Just wanted to quote this so I could say AMEN!

I agree that it takes someone willing to use it properly, and I'd go on to say that using it properly isn't exactly a hard thing to learn. But I would never go so far as to say it is in any way the equal of the mitigation that Warshades get. Warshades get persistent damage and stuns with the occasional hold, and every attack carries a slow and is of an exotic damage type. Peacebringers get an occasional hold and an occasional stun, and half of the damage from their attacks is one of the most heavily resisted types in the game. I'm not even going to count the defense debuffs each attack does. Accuracy-based defense debuffs as a secondary effect are a joke for anyone but a mastermind who can control the accuracy slotting of their pets.

It's not that Peacebringers get less, it's that the game engine doesn't value what Peacebringers can do. In other words, like stalkers, Peacebringers' problems in this area are more systemic in nature, and I'm not looking for any change here any time soon.

I've never seen it so much as a case of 'shades hating on 'bringers so much as fans of an entire archetype wanting more for their fellow kheld drivers on the light side.

The more comparisons Warshade players draw between Peacebringers and Warshades, the happier I am.

Something a little more sig-sized, then?


I like big belts and I cannot lie.
You other khelds can't deny
That it looks real hot
When it's tied in a knot
And the end hangs by your thigh!

Ahem! You asked for it.

Let's see if I can remember all this...

If I had a sash
How I'd dash!
How I'd sing!
'Bout my really wide belt
And its long, dangly thing!

I wouldn't care if it cropped
Through my waste
Or my thighs.
I'd pretend all the laughs
Were just envious sighs.

Oh if I had a sash
How hap-happy I'd be!
I'd never use Light Form
So my teammates could see
Just how spiffy I looked
From the mission's front door
To the spot
Where I died,
Lying splat! on the floor!

(Anybody got a wakie?)

So gives us our sashes,
We wants them today!
We're feeling quite naked
Plunging into the fray
Without wide bolts of cloth
To cover our middles

Come on, show us some love!
Can't we have just a little?

:: puppy dog eyes ::

This. Don't make me sing the sash song again.