Spiritchaser

I don’t think it’s ideal to specifically fix EA in PvP in a way that is independent of other sets. I see a need to fix two very broken things in PvP that will both directly modify EA..

First off: Defence. This has been covered in spades, but the bottom line is that defence sets have no valid way to protect themselves from tohitbuffs.

Secondly: Melee in general. Melee attacks are very much more difficult to deliver consistently, particularly in a debuff heavy environment. I’d say it’s far out of whack with any added benefit they provide over ranged attacks. Further to this, melee characters have a far more difficult time of synchronising their burst damage. Even disorganized shambles of Zone PvP teams can relatively easily get three blasters/corruptors/fortunatas (fortunatae?) to fire off their alphas at the same (ish) time. Getting 3 melee toons with buildup up, in melee range delivering their chained attacks to a foe that does not want to be hit? Much harder.

If both these are addressed, EA will probably still be a less widely useful set, by virtue of it’s lack of a self heal, but with sources of external healing? It might become quite valid. Further changes to the meds pool (not a priority, but still worth thinking about) could potentially address even this issue.

There are potential solutions for both the defence problem and the melee mobility problem. They would have to become a significant priority though, since I don’t see the resulting playtesting being simple.

Random Speculation: The first part of the answer to this might actually be to provide some unique PvP rewards of significant power, perhaps something that’s difficult or impossible to trade. With the demand for these will come the demand for improved PvP balance. With the demand for balance will come response.

For that specific character? quite possibly. For the set as a whole? No. that would be a horrible thing to inflict on the EA community.

Nor should such a sacrifice be required.

Now if it were a choice between more health regen and or resistances and that psi def? that's a better choice.

I think we, as a gaming comunity can probably come up with a conceptual rationalization for a great many things.

My EA is natural origin, his powers stem from a perfect mastery of his internal energy, which he can focus around himself. He's the embodiment of the power of his will. If he'd been rolled today, instead of in I6, he might have been /WP, but things have worked out well enough. I've busted out the IOs and pumped psi defence over 30%.

He SHOULD have seriously high psi protection. It's very easy for me to think of a great and various many such reasons why energy aura SHOULD have psi protection, for all kinds of different concepts...

Certainly there's no special conceptual bar against it. Mechanically and balance wise? I'd also argue it's a good idea. I will however admit that depending on what else is done, psi defence may or may not be appropriate. Psi defence would not seem to be specifically mandated as a requirement.

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anit -repel? Sounds fun. I'm not sure if its possible but the concept of a Trick power, an out of the box strength being added to EA is a good one.


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I remember suggesting something like this as a toggle on foe about a year ago... something like a reverse telekinesis with a modest aoe debuff that could work as a taunt aura. Might still be fun to see if they ever do a Grav Armor set, or some such.

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NEVER play a fire/EA under any circumstances. NEVER. EA as it is is just weak defensively. Strong in ultility, weak in defense. EA must be paired with a primary that assists in mitigation. This leaves you with SM, SS, EM, DM, WM, and just barely Axe. FM is strictly off limits.

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I have a philosophical problem with that. I believe that every primary and secondary pairing should be very playable, and that they should all offer a strong advantage somewhere. Fire/EA may not offer the same advantages as Fire/WP, but it should offer, so much as reasonably possible, different and at least somewhat close to equal advantages.

EA offers “utility”. If that utility does not indirectly aid playability what good is it?

If Fire/EA is an especially poor combination, then either there’s a particular weakness in that specific pairing, or each of the two sets is weaker than it should be in it’s own right, or in this case, probably both.

Given the wide variety of changes that can be made without breaking concept or game balance for the rest of the sets, there’s just no excuse to have a nearly unplayable combination.

Why, in the current scheme of things would I make a fire/EA over a fire/SR? Well I probably wouldn’t… And that’s a problem.

Sure, in the age of IOs I can make a perfectly reasonable /EA. In the age of IOs I can make a better SR.

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NO psi defense for /EA
NO heal for /EA

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I'm going to agree with the latter of these and disagree with the former, but lets take where we agree first.

No Active heal for EA. Like WP this has always been a set that's been hands off from a survival point of view. You get what you get. Dull Pain? Not my preference, it's still a clicky, but it'd be stylistically better than a heal. A passive + HP or + regen? Sure. A toggle + HP or +regen? Ok, I guess, but a clicky heal is a fundamental change to how the set currently plays.

I have played clicky sets, I like them. I also like the option of not playing one.

Now about that psi defence. Lets say I had the options of adding the following things that are being talked about in these most recent posts:

Passive +hp (10-20% on a passive, hey maybe on both. Trade this off against the +HP in overload, and maybe throw in some +regen on the other passive)
Passive +regen (20-40% on a passive, mix or maybe match with +hp as needed)
Taunt added to Aura, or to Energy Drain (separate issue to be dealt with elsewhere!)
SR style defence debuff resistances. (slottable)
Psi Defence added to entropy shield (7.5%-15%. I strongly favour the lower number, but there's certainly debate on that)

I would argue that every single one of these is both conceptually and stylistically in keeping with the set, that it strengthens the set in meaningfull, helpful ways without overcompensating or making anything like a monster.

Every single one, individually.

Depending on the magnitude of each, all of them taken together could perhaps be too much (I doubt it, but I can see the argument). My only possible argument against psi def would then be that if I had to pick, I would probably take all the other things first.

Making the judgement that +psi in combination with the other bonuses would be excessive is extremely difficult without some kind of testing. I had a really good coffee this morning so I'll be optimistic: Hopefully testing of these, or perhaps other, wildly different changes is going on behind closed doors now!

I found an old level 18 Fire EA on a server I'd forgotten about. Maybe I'll play him after changes... my first Fire EA was... er... well deleted.

Given that it sounds suspiciously like /inv is getting a revision for I13, I have rather high hopes for /EA as well.

The only thing is that I’ve now played every primary except axe and mace with EA, and I’m not sure if I can handle another run through.

Ah well, perhaps we’ll have new primaries to pick from as well.

However we interpret the fiction, there’s a strong reason to have +HP in EA, or indeed on any largely def set.

Def sets are inherently more subject to random damage spikes than are resistance sets. If the health pool is larger, the overall performance of a defence set becomes more “like” a resistance set in it’s response to these spikes, even if regen were to remain the same (the fact that it does not is an additional benefit)

didn't babs get modsmacked... er, "posismacked"? for saying something like that about broadsword?

Although in fairness: /EA is very unlikely to be ported without being examined for performance and such. I'm still thinking that's the best chance.

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Given the extra protection of other sets, I think EA should have enhancable defense debuff resists.


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This is one I'm not sure about. I'd like to see a few changes to EA, more than the debuff resistances increased, and I'm forced to wonder what I'd trade for better debuff resistances.

One thing that's worth considering though, is how incredibly common defence has now become on red side teams, courtesy of the VEAT phenomenon. Most well built teams always had more buffs than they needed, but now many random pickup groups do as well.

If everyone has softcapped def, what's to distinguish the defence based toon?

Defence resistance is one potential answer. If defence debuffs are sufficiently common, and they are, then equipping /EA with defence resistance is a bit of a distinguishing factor.

It's a little ironic that I'm actually thinking of defence debuffs in the context of how they might potentially be adjusted to ADD value to defensive sets.

however, would I take more defence resistance in preference to, say, a +health power, or a +regen power, or psi def? that's not clear at all.

Fortunately the people who ultimately do get to decide, if they decide anything, will get to test it.

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One thing you fail to take into account, and the basis of your lie, is that rest is better than /ea (and electric armor, and regen if it's ported to brutes, and SR, and stone armor outside of granite) is that it gives you -1000 resistance and -10000 defense.

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Um, why on EARTH would you assume that this is not accounted for?

3 slotted rest is "superior" to base EA even with the defence and resistance debuffs.

well you can't move or hit things as you surrender yourself to the tender mercies of Statesman's fist, but you can't have everything.

EDIT: while cycling through another reply and getting even more distance out of this point might be entertaining, it'd also be most inconsiderate of me, and probably not worth doing. The point isn't THAT important. As such when you check, please remember to factor in the appropriate floors for resistance and defence, otherwise you'll get the wrong answer.

Actually base EA is weaker than Rest for all the damage types.

With brute modifiers, only Base Electric comes close to this, being weaker than rest for all but energy. Base SR has a handfull of environments where it's weaker, and Invul and Ice have one or two such environments.

Other sets outperform rest everywhere.

Is this the end all and be all of set comparisons?

Certainly not. It is however rather embarrasing to find yourself defending the virtue of a set that gives you less chance of surviving than kneeling before your foes yes?

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'Immortality line' actually has REST as being more powerful mitigation than any brute secondary.

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I'll deal with the rest of your argument if and when you get your facts straight. The above statement is false, you might wish to look into it.

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Right Spirit Chaser. Your comments are exactly the reason that I have been coming on these forums for years saying that I have no idea what the problem is with EA. They are exactly why I poke my head in regularly and talk about how much tail kicking my EA does on a regular basis.

Your comments are exactly why nobody would ever play an SR toon or an ice toon or a ninjitsu toon. Those defense debuffs are just so incredibly common and insurmountable that, like my EA brute, no defense toon is worth playing ever.

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Keep in mind that of EA, nin, SR invul and Ice, only /EA has the high level of vulnerability we're talking about here.

Ninjitsu has a heal, ice and invul get dull pain and/or resistances. SR gets massive debuff resistances. EA alone has no way to recover from damage and limited resistance to debuffs.

EA is no more vulnerable to tohitbuffs than the others, but it has other vulnerabilities that the other sets do not. SR hasn't got the psi holes and again, invul and ice can recover. So can Ninjitsu.

Should sets have vulnerabilities? there's no reason why they shouldn't. The question is should a set have far more vulnerabilities than another without corresponding compensation. I think the overwhelming weight of logic is that it should not, and the overwhelming weight of evidence that /EA currently exists in that state.

A last note: EA can be made strong. I know this. It's possible to put all your build focus on defence and end up with something very durable indeed, so much so that it's in the top tier of performance, right up there with IO'd DA and IO'd WP, even up there with moderate stone builds.

This is no-longer EA. The build I've used on pylons, the build I've used to solo AVs or the respec trial isn't EA. It's /EA+Pool+IOs, and it's neither cheap, nor especially important for balance concerns.

Yes the outliers of what is possible do need to be considered for balance, but they are radically removed from the most important balance considerations with regard to what a set is capable of, the capacity of the set itsself.

Does EA lend itsself more than some sets to enhancement with pools and IOs? yes more than some, less than others. This needs to have some small weight, but nothing like the weight of the simple fact that base EA is less durable than three slotted rest.

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Actually, the long and exhaustive post and the seemingly wire tight logic of spirit chaser would be more than enough to get playing a defense toon in CoX banned by any normal court of law. Of course it does not translate into real playing experience.

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I'll assume you ment that in the nicest possible way.

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Have you ever played an EA or a defense toon at all?

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No, never played one, er... oh wait, maybe I have...

Please. I would not be cutting up detailed suggestions about EA had I not obtained some meaningful experience. This is not an especially wise line of argument on your part.

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I play my level 50 EA brute daily with the combat monitors up and the defense debuffs just don't cause a problem. EA's defense debuff resistance is just 10% less than SR's. And the debuffs are not that common to begin with.

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my italics.

EA's defence resistance is not enhanceable by slotting. SRs is. that's not a 10% difference. In fact, it's a night and day difference between immunity and vulnerability.

Defence debuffs are uncommon? in point of fact they are the most common secondary effect in the game. I may be taking this out of context somehow as you've made a different statement as quoted below, no big deal either way, but we should be clear here.

Defence debuffs are not serious in magnitude? some are small, others, rularuu come to mind, are large. Ever had issues with PPD? watch your debuff monitor on base defence when you get nailed by some of those. Quicksand? even stacked Longbow def debuffs can be a problem if enough hit.

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They may be common on mobs

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you're right they are

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but generally those debuffs have to hit me once to cause the debuff, which they often don't, and when they do it's usually just by one mob, and the debuff does not last that long, and it only amounts to a few percent decrease.

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Take a look at the scramble mind debuff from those tarantula mistresses, or mask of vitiation. Large magnitude psi typed debuffs that you cannot defend against (psi) and which then murder the entirety of your protection. They are usually only from one mob? double tarantula mistress spawns are common, and i've certainly had two masks of vitiation stacked on me before.

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Go out and get a defense toon and look at the combat monitors for crying out loud. Defense debuffs do not spell the end of the game in 99.9% of cases.

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No they don't kill me in most cases. They are a significant and serious threat that needs to be managed, that is, I need to do something to mitigate the situation. They are a threat that has an analogue in resistance, but are more severe in the degree to which it is encountered, and generally in the mechanic by which most builds will resist them. In other words, I have to work harder with a defence toon to manage defence debuffs than I must with a resistance toon to manage resistance debuffs.

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Tohit buffs cannot be monitored by me on the combat monitor so I can't speak with the same specifics. All I can say is that in 99% of the cases my toon avoids and deflects the damage.

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The biggest offenders are Rularuu (observers) Nemesis (vengence) and DE (quartz crystals)

All of these can basically negate your defence, none have equivalents in the world of resistance, either in their severety or the mechanic by which they work. Fortunatas and some other mobs such as some PPD also have tactics or other tohitbuff powers.

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Now I recently respec'd to give my toon a little more defense and am running 43% smashing, 34% lethal, and 41% energy. So it's kind of hard for me to talk about EA's wek defense at this point. However, My I7 build had a 39% smashing defense from CJ, weave, and maneuvers, and I felt it was really overkill. I respec'd out of manuevers and went with 35% and that was fine for the game.

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I'm currently running two softcapped EAs, a SS and an EM. Both hit the caps for smashing, lethal, fire, cold and energy. negative comes in around 38 on both, and psi is 35% and 22% respectively. I also had a fire/EA that was close to softcapping but not there. I do not find the performance comparable to that which can be obtained by equivalent investment of pool powers or IO expenditure with other sets except at the very highest levels. Once def actually hits the cap, then performance is reasonably comparable defensively, and with enough IO recharge to repair the build, offence can be fine as well. A set that underperforms untill all the pools are used and all the IOs slotted will underperform for 80% of the playerbase, and for 50% of the game for the other 20% of the playerbase. (wild guess at those numbers but I'm sure the point is clear enough)

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My defense against negative is 28% and Mids is telling me I have a total of 3% set bonuses to negative. Negative is not a very common form of damage and it is just never a problem.

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I'm uncertain what you fight but I find 38% to be generally acceptable. The EA set does not provide even the 28% you have, and even what I have does not match the immortality line easily available to WP, fire, DA stone or... well anything except electrical actually. Even Invul can be made to do reasonably well here.

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The hole against psi is the hole against psi. If you are going to complain about it for EA then you need to complain about it for invuln, fire, and ice as well.

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Invul has dull pain, Fire has healing flames, Ice has hoarfrost. Ea has an expired jar of headache pills.

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I am sick of these threads. I have been responding to them for years. The devs have not made one change to EA in the 2 years I have been playing my EA toon and you guys have been complaining about EA. The reason is that you guys are just wrong. This complaint about tohit buffs and defense debuffs just goes to show why. You guys must just be completely in the dark about ow EA actually plays. These complaints are off base.

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interesting point of view, I'm not quite sure exactly how I'm in the dark about EA but I might suggest you try leveling an /EA and a /WP side by side. Might I also suggest you select fire for a primary such that you can study the secondaries in better isolation?

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But I am just not going to get involved in this thread anymore. I have answered these questions a thousand times. The EA sucks threads will never go away. And EA will never be altered by the devs. So why keep this mad cycle going year after year?

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Well, I suppose someone had to say that. Well, at least we've got that over with and can move on.

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EA has a psi hole and a toxic hole.

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Lets not forget a vulnerability to negative as well as to tohitbuffs, as well as to defencedebuffs.

Also, remember that even against things that you're good at dealing with?

3 slotted rest is probably better.

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The fix is the VEATs.


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Let's assume for just a moment that this is a valid line of reasoning, that it's ok to design sets assuming (mandating) the presence of another specific AT, or several of them.

The thing is, In this odd magical kingdom where such is the case, EA still doesn't get the best deal.

SR only has a few percent more you say? maybe, but look at its debuff resistance, which is massive. Sure EA may be over cap with a few SoAs about, but SR gets to be over cap, AND it gets to keep that, almost no-matter what. SR also gets its scaling resistances which are generally superior to your passives.

It takes a reasonable number of SoAs to cap out psi def on an /EA... and if you have that many, you're probably capping everyone on the team. Why would you pick softcapped /EA over /DA, Invul, /Ele... heck any set that gets resistances AND softcapped defences from buffs? Just defence debuff resistance?

SoA team buffs benefit everyone. There will be some small teams, or more probably Duos, where /EA moves to just over the soft cap and sees a more marked benefit than other brute sets, but then... well, er, it had a lot more ground to make up didn't it? and even then EVEN THEN, SR and Nin will probably be better off in the same situation.

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Booooooring. There is nothing wrong with adding a few "gimicks" to the game. Especially if said gimicks improve an underperforming PvP set without overpowering that set in PvE.

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You know, there's a difference between the hard way and the easy way...

The hard way has a much better chance of working.

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I have to agree with FromBelow. I think the game needs to be shaken up a bit, especially in the PvP realm. /EA would be a good place to start. It doesn't have to be with the stealth idea but something original/different, that would be effective in PvP, would be a nice boost to this game.

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I don't think gimicks are the way to bring melee in to high end team pvp, especially if it only works for one powerset.

Sure, the current situation needs to change, but doing so will probably have to be done by a long series of careful rebalances of buff stacking, pool powers, mobility, of the debuffs available to melees, and possibly of arena environments as well.

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Agreed. The numbers on a Tanker are fine. SR on a Tanker is broken.

Which is why and I'll say it again:

+health to the passives; allow to slot heal sets
Improve Energy Defense of Kinetic Shield to 12.75%
Add 15% Psi Defense to Entropy Shield
Add a Taunt effect to Energy Drain



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while we're on the subject of porting, there's an awefully good argument to be made for reducing the +HP boost from overload. A tank or scrapper with accolades would more than hit their cap with overload up. If scrappers were to derive some special benefit from /EA that would proportionatly compensate them for this lost potential, then so be it, but I'm not sure I see how that would be.

I'll grant that there may be some precedent for this kind of hitpoint cap thing amongst regen stalkers, but I don't think it's a good idea, or even that it's strictly the same situation from a balance point of view.

Much better the + health be removed, or partially removed from overload, and that the sum total of all + HP come in around +30% (60% slotted) or so.

Maybe that's 10% per passive and in overload, maybe that's 30% on one passive, maybe that's something else again, but the current mechanic is most definitely not tank friendly.

I would also suggest that some modest +regen could work as well. Dropping the current passives and replacing them with WP's passives, FH and HPT would be valid, though it would run into slotting revisionism.

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Problem is, as I see it, that /EA isn't able to easily pimp out all their defenses like SR is through the multiple positional def IO set bonuses, which is why I made the suggestion that the values should be increased.

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An EA brute? not so easy, although actually possible.

An EA TANK?

Very easy indeed. So much so that any significant increase to defence values is likely to be a barrier to porting, and In my mind, porting is greatly desireable. It's the best hope we have for a review of the set.

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- Up the defense values of the EA armors slightly (not by a huge margin, but by something like 5% or so)


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Again: I'd strongly suggest against doing so, and for the record, I'd also suggest that 5% can only qualify as a rather extreem increase in protection...

I'd much rather see more varied resistances, some psi def, more hp, some regen, active protection from some drain effect, a combination of the above, or maybe something else entirely.

I'm sure most or even all of these could be made to work, I do have some reservations though:

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. Higher defensive values to both shields and a little bit higher positional defense to energy cloak

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There's no critical reason why EA, when ported to tanks, would need to use the same power structure, but I think it would be preferable if it did. For whatever that's worth. If EA defence values are raised much, then Tank EA will be trivially easy to softcap for most damage types. This is probably a problem. It's nothing new, SR potentially has this issue now, but I submit that it's best avoided.

With regard to elevating positional def in E cloak, keep in mind that low defence values don't really contribute much to survival. I'd suggest that instead of increasing positional def (presumably to protect against psi) it would be better to add actual psi defence.

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2. Self Heal placed into set, with res to toxic (like reconstruction/Kuj-in-Sha)

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There's nothing wrong with this functionally, no reason at all it couldn't be fair... but EA has never had a heal, it's been a set that functions without one. Adding a heal is a fairly fundimental change to the feel of the set.

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3. Merge 2 passive resistance powers to make room for self heal

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Just the usual caution here about the problems with fundimentally changing what powers there are in a set and how they can be slotted. It seldom if ever gets done. Presumably a solution that does not swap out/remove/add powers would be preferred.

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4. Add perception to energy cloak or entropy shield (same level of perception that you're granted from Danger sense from Ninjitsu)

[/ QUOTE ] I can't for the life of me think why they havn't done this... sigh.

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6. Scalable resistance like SR.

[/ QUOTE ] This has a couple of problems... partly it's intruding on one of the things that makes SR unique, partly it's the leapfrogging issue, but it's also going to be interesting to balance the fixed and floating portions of the resistances... not saying it couldn't be done, but it's not a straight forward thing to be trying to do.

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7. Make energy drain a taunt power, have it give + recovery, foe -recovery for 10 seconds.

[/ QUOTE ] seems reasonable. There is a pressing need for SOME kind of taunt power in /EA, and it'll only become more pressing when the set gets proliferated.

Again, not saying these cannot be done, but I don't think it'd be the cleanest way forward.

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DM is gimp enough now that Castle is looking at buffing it come I13. *Shrug* So I think that has some merit.

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WRT DM, I think we'll just have to dissagree, at least here, or I'm going to end up realizing that I've derailed things.

WRT EA though? keep in mind that of all the imbalanced sets in the game, /EA has only recently been promoted to most wanting. For a long time there were far more serious balance issues to deal with. War mace, BA, the entire blaster and stalker ATs... It's arguably only been in the last couple of months where /EA has had a reasonable claim to priority one. As I recall, Dark armor stood in a priority one position for rather longer than that, way back when you couldn't have more than one armor toggle on at once.

Also consider again: We are talking about a brute set here. EAs can still solo on relentless, solo pylons, solo AVs, solo TFs and trials.

Sure EA for brutes may be relatively weak but it's the low point of a fairly well placed subset.

I have a few issues with that list... DM as a gimp scrapper set? Traps gimp for cors? Stone armor gimp for tanks? I mean seriously now...

That said, I can't argue with the picks for brutes.