SpittingTrashcan

I find it interesting that, in a discussion related to optimizing Elec/Elec survivability, nobody has mentioned endurance drain. I've found that Power Sink, Lightning Field, and Ball Lightning can sap out minions quite quickly, greatly reducing incoming damage. It's also effective at dropping toggles on certain problem enemies, particularly Cimerorans who lose their mez protection when drained and thus become vulnerable to KD. Is this no longer considered a viable survival tool for some reason?

Without saying anything about the merits of the idea one way or the other, I don't think the devs agree with you on this. I believe Positron is on the record as saying that allowing you to pull and save 10 enhancements per respec is being generous. It's an intentional part of the design that major rebuilds will cost you something - either more respecs, or lost enhancements.

If you move Blasters into tier 2, then your three tiers correspond to three categories:

Generalists: Controller, Scrapper, and every villain AT except Stalker
Team Specialists: Tanker, Defender, Blaster
Solo Specialists: Stalker.

The first category does well alone, and also contributes to a team. The second category is so specialized in its niche that it suffers somewhat when alone, but excels when on a team. Stalkers do well alone, but their specializations make them at best mediocre and at worst actively detrimental on teams - and this would be difficult to fix without changing the fundamental design of the AT.

I guess I need to be more clear.

When farming, you solo. Then all the stuff goes into your pockets. Arguing that a Blaster is a better farmer because it performs better on a team is missing the point.

Also, as already noted, a Fire/Kin provides more for a team than a Blaster. The Blaster provides good damage. The Fire/Kin provides control, +rech, +recovery, an enormous damage buff, heals, endurance, and good damage. I know which one I'd pick first - though I'd pick a Blaster over a second Fire/Kin.

/Dark doesn't strike me as a very good complement to Stone/. /Fire has two PBAoEs, one of them quite sizable, allowing you to plunk yourself down in the middle of the spawn and just start burning while they flail about in Mud Pots. /Dark's strength is in quick, hard-hitting ST attacks - which require you to get into melee range with each enemy in turn, and while Stone/ has many strengths, mobility isn't one of them.

If you're going to stick with it, though, I would recommend slotting each attack for full damage, and using sets and powers to boost recharge. Slotting for debuff would be utterly redundant - against targets that can chew through Granite + Rooted, the debuffs from /Dark are not going to make the difference.

Account-wide unlocks would be good.
Earnable redeemable unlocks would be good.
Having triggers that currently unlock costumes instead drop costume recipes would be good.
Basically, anything that would give me access to more costume bits earlier on a character would be good.

This is not a game where you show what awesome things a character has done by waving around flashy gear. The badges speak for themselves, and they are completely sufficient as per-character markers of accomplishment. If a level 1 character has Roman armor, he has Roman armor for some reason. If a level 50 character has the Temporal Strife badge, he beat up Romulus. It's that simple.

When people say that /Dark is squishy, I wonder if we are playing the same game.

When people say that Elec/Dark is squishy, I know that we are not playing the same game.

With regular SOs and IOs, pick up Hasten if you can, and slot attacks for accuracy, endurance, and recharge rather than damage. Boxing and Stone Fist are decent Fury builders due to their quick activations, but I'd recommend using all your attacks all the time rather than saving the stronger ones for high Fury.

As for your inf situation, money becomes less of an issue at higher levels - and if you're keen on it, you can play the market game to get more money earlier. Look to the market forum for how to do that - I've never bothered, myself, as just playing my 50s keeps the coffers full enough for my needs, and SOs are entirely sufficient for my leveling characters.

From a DPA perspective, the powers to drop from that chain are Brawl and Air Sup. Stone Fist does 1 DS in .83 seconds, while Brawl does 0.36 DS in .83 seconds and Air Sup does 1 DS in 1.5 seconds. Air Sup has good KD mitigation - but you have Fault.

You do have Fault, right?

Also, what Gruumch said about boosting your recharge, via frankenslotting, Hasten, and/or set bonuses.

1) Elec/Elec is decent. /Elec offers relatively low protection to damage, but it has a lot of other nice toys: extra recharge, a damage aura, immunity to endurance drain, very high resistance to energy damage, two powers that help recover endurance, and especially when paired with Elec/ the ability to drain enemies of endurance leaving them unable to attack. Elec/ starts out slow, but has good AoE damage and a spectacular tier 9 attack. To buttress your survivability, consider working the Fighting pool into your build. Medicine also offers a good self-heal with Aid Self, but see below.

2) /Elec is having Power Sink, the level 28 power, replaced with Energize. Power Sink is a self-buff on a long recharge that reduces your endurance consumption. Energize is a combination heal and self-buff on a shorter recharge that heals 25% of your HP (enhanceable to nearly 50%), grants 200% regeneration (also enhanceable to nearly twice that amount), and also reduces your endurance consumption.

3) To keep Fury high, attack a lot. Brawl on auto fills in your attack chain with quick attacks that build Fury, and in Issue 16 its endurance cost will be reduced to 0 so it won't cost you End to use. Unfortunately Elec/ has fairly slow attacks, so even with Brawl on auto you may not build Fury as quickly as other primaries.

Elec/Elec will do the job, but if you don't enjoy it there are many other flavors of Brute to try.

If you don't like Tremor because it's a tier 9, you can always ask to get the Tanker power order back. Then Tremor will be a tier 8, and Seismic Smash will be a tier 9, and I'll be selling torches and pitchforks to the angry mob after you for taking away tier 7 Seismic Smash. Not to mention tier 5 Fault.

I mean for crying out loud here, you're essentially complaining about how they moved what you see as a less desirable power to the end of the selection order, and then using that buff to the set as a whole as an excuse to call for buffs to a particular power based on its advantageous position in the selection order. If they switched the order of Foot Stomp and Hand Clap, would you be complaining about SS's lackluster tier 9?

Sardan: Thank you. The reason why it's hard to discern the specifics of my proposal is because I don't have a specific method in mind for dealing with these issues. As I think I showed, tuning rating algorithms is demanding work, it's outside my area of expertise, and it's not my job. My point is that it is the devs' job, and that the job is not done. What I'm saying is (1) that there is a goal the AE rating system should be trying to achieve - that goal being to gather the best possible information from user feedback and use that feedback to present a continuously updating stream of good user-created content; (2) that the current rating system does not achieve this goal, and that this is due to its naive design; and (3) that by expending additional development effort on improving the rating system, the devs can make the AE player experience significantly better.

In short, I am pointing out that a problem exists, that it's more complex than the system we have can handle, that others have grappled with this problem before and found better solutions than the one we have, and assuming that the devs are competent enough to find an appropriate solution. That doesn't mean we shouldn't propose solutions - I'm just recusing myself from proposing a definitive solution on the grounds that I'm not competent to do so.

That said, my personal ideal solution would involve some level of tailoring recommendations to each player, but that's an extremely intensive undertaking. Even if we're going to have a single rating value for each arc, though, we can still get a much better heuristic than a simple average of ratings by factoring in additional data such as arc age, arc delta (is this arc very similar to a prior arc from the same creator, i.e. a fix and republish?), creator history (has this creator published good arcs in the past?), and voter history (how does this voter's vote on this arc compare to his voting record?). I would also, personally, remove the incentives and badges tied to high ratings because it encourages dishonest voting - but that's just me coming from a strongly player-centric view, and with the strong suspicion that creators would continue to create missions just because they want to create missions.

Time to respond and clarify.

M_B, my issue is not with the amount of information being provided about each arc, but goes significantly deeper. A well-built rating system does not make you go hunting for something that will appeal to you - it provides it without prompting. As for this being a rant, it's a fair cop. I was astounded on release of AE that the developers had taken a rating system which they knew had failed to provide any kind of meaningful information on their very own official forum, and ported it almost verbatim as the critical component of their flagship feature for the issue. And lest you think I am exaggerating, yes, I do consider the rating system to be the critical component of a user-generated content feature. If you can't provide fresh content that consistently beats Sturgeon's Law, you've created a place where effort goes to die, and that's unacceptable in a day and age where hard work has already been done to find solutions that prevent this from happening. I'm angry, yes, and it's because I feel the devs should have known better.

By way of evidence that the system as is does not work, I would like to point to the probability that an arc published at this very moment, regardless of how good it is, will ever make the top page of the arc listings for any amount of time. The AE should be connecting players with fresh, high-quality content. It does not. In fact, due to the implementation of HoF/DC, the top arcs on the front page of the AE are guaranteed to be old, likely broken, and not utilizing the latest features of the system. Individual player preferences are not taken into account, and the rewards tied to ratings encourage players and creators to subvert the ratings system.

(Incidentally, I am biased toward a player-centric rather than creator-centric perspective, for three reasons: first, I am myself more a player than a creator; second, players outnumber creators by a significant factor; and third, the developers are naturally biased toward the needs of creators because they are creators more than players - but on the other hand, creators are better served when their work is more likely to be seen, since this is the primary goal of most creators, and this is an area where AE fails creators as well as players.)

Using the votes of a community to determine ratings and rankings for items submitted over time is not a simple thing. In fact, it is very complicated, and a lot of smart people have spent a lot of time and effort on figuring out how to do it well.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about:
http://blog.linkibol.com/post/How-to...-Proud-of.aspx

My issue here is not that the devs should have used any particular one of these algorithms; different situations demand different approaches, and the AE is not a link aggregator, nor a film rental service, nor a search engine, nor a major online retailer. But what it shares with all of these is that its value is extremely dependent on delivering to the user something they want, and that it does so by analyzing information given to it by other users. The major difference? AE's algorithm is dumb as rocks, and that is why it fails.

My intent with this post is not to chastise the devs for doing the simplest thing that could possibly work, given the time and resources available. My intent is to point out that (1) it does not work, (2) that something else could work better, and (3) that making it work better would be worth the effort. I have arguments to support all three of these, but this post is already reaching the limit of attention span so I will lay them out another time.

At the highest levels of optimization, builds seem to converge on a point that strips away whatever made the component powersets unique, in favor of passive mitigation (usually through defense bonuses) and maximum DPS. I understand why, but it seems vaguely depressing to me that you get the best results by ignoring the unique tools in a powerset.

If you'll excuse me, I'll be over here, playing my tiny violin.

Yes, you did and are missing something: the fact that all of this is entirely expected, a natural consequence of porting the set to Defenders without any changes to the powers themselves, and not in any way noteworthy or worth complaining about.

I will agree that Corruptor Traps could use some help - but if the goal is to help Corruptors specifically, the appropriate method would seem to be making Time Bomb more usable, as it and Trip Mine are the two Traps powers that are naturally better for Corruptors due to their higher AT damage mod. I for one would love to see a version of Time Bomb that is not largely useless.

As for PGT, it had one problem that was fixed two times, and the unnecessary fix wasn't rolled back after the necessary fix was applied. Merely returning it to its former tick rate for its chance to induce vomiting would make it an entirely adequate soft control power without reviving the proc-bomb issues.

Primary versus secondary and AT mod are two completely mechanically independent ways of expressing an AT's strength in a domain. Making a powerset a primary means that powers from it can be chosen earlier. Making AT mods for certain aspects higher means that powers that use those mods are stronger for that AT. Generally, an AT that has a primary whose powers all use a certain set of AT mods will have those AT mods relatively high - but this is not universally true.

The best example of this is Dominators. Although Dominators have a control primary and a damage secondary, their control mod is lower than a Controller's, and their melee and ranged damage mods are significantly higher than a Corruptor's, even though Corruptors have ranged damage as their primary.

AT mods and primary/secondary are two tools that the developers can use to balance ATs. They are frequently both used toward the same effect, but they are independent.

Okay, once again, from the top.

The effect of a power is determined by the interaction of two sets of statistics. One is the power's base statistics, and the other is the AT modifiers. Powers are designed such that their effects are a multiple of the AT modifier of the character that uses it.

Corruptor Traps and Defender Traps are the same powers. But Defenders have a higher AT buff/debuff modifier, so a Defender using the same Traps powers will have higher buff/debuff values. For exactly the same reason, a Defender using the same Traps powers will have lower damage values - because the Defender's AT damage modifier is lower than a Corruptor's.

The example of Claws is not analogous in the slightest - Brute Claw attacks actually are different powers than the Scrapper attacks of the same name. They have different power multipliers for damage, endurance, and recharge, and if a Scrapper were given Brute claw attacks, they would not be the same as the Scrapper's current claw attacks.

So, no, Traps was not in any way buffed for Defenders. And if you think that the Defender's higher buff/debuff mod is unfairly biased toward heroes, I am sure you will find no lack of disgruntled Defenders who feel they sacrifice far too much from their damage mod for that buff/debuff advantage.

It looks from these numbers like Traps is exactly the same between Defenders and Corruptors - except that Defenders get a higher buff/debuff mod, so they get greater effect from the same power. If this is a buff to Traps, then Defenders also have "buffed" versions of every other buff/debuff set - and "nerfed" versions of every blast set.

They do. And they did when the set's tier 9 was a PBAoE sleep with no damage.