Starsman

Currently, Crushing Impact, with 2 slots used up, gives 3% resistance.

5 of those pups will give you +15% SL Resistance and everyone has enough melee attacks to do this, even if they have to resort to brawl and pool powers. Add a second slot to Brawl just to get 3% resistance? YES Please!

Multi Strike also gives 2.5 SL Resistance with just a 2 slot investment. You just need to find two melee AoEs to slot them in. That can be any PBAoE attack, Damage Aura, melee cone or even the new Cone attack in the Fighting Pool.

It will be easy to get +20% SL resistance just with what I listed above (and there are more sources, especially if you have more than two melee AoE.)

A fire tanker, the weakest of the resit based Tankers, already reaches 70.2% SL resistance with Tough. This will make it trivial for Fire to cap SL Resist, and since it's just a 2 slot investment per power, they dont have to sacrifice their Kinetic Combat SL Defense slotting.

Technically everyone but SR, Ice and Shields seem to be able to softcap SL resistances easily now [in beta].

5 bucks say this wont make it live. At minimum I expect/sugest a tier change to those set bonuses.

I guess his point is that Fiery Embrace (and other damage tools) make sure that once everyone is soft capped to everything, only Fire Armor ends up being on top.

My poor Invuln

Interesting... Based on previous Bio testing, plus subsequent conversations with you, and futher testing... I would had given Absorption a 120% quantitative equivalence at best. But a 213%? That sounds... a bit extreme.

(As far as blasters go, in my eyes, either the Absorption is too high or the Regen too low.)

An interesting thing I have noticed with closer analysis during my testing recently, even with the huge regen Willpower can get, the ticks between regen bursts can be slower than ideal. In my recent Invuln Vs Regen video it can be seen how those ticks sometimes just dont come at the right time, making regen actually weaker than a numerical average would dictate it to be. Not sure how this will play out in this testing, but will see.

I was thinking Super Strength, but yea there is Fire too.

Not only is Frost better than most give it credit for, it has a good range and is considered ranged, meaning it takes range SOs and ranged AoE IOs. Slotting a regular Air Burst set plus the right selection of perfect zingers will leave you with a 14.42ft radius, 7.45s recharge, 94.88% accuracy and a bonus 10% regen bonus. Not bad for a very cheap slotting option.

Also something my chart does not visualize: the power has a 10 target cap. If you are good with cones (I know I am, but I don't have an Ice Melee anymore) you can really exploit this power.

Ice melee is never about the WOOMP factor though. It's more... well like falling asleep in the snow. The "target" of the snow does not realize he is slowly but still quickly getting killed by the cold.

As I said: ST is so low that its not justified even if the set scored over 9000 in AoE damage. I didn't mention it for many reasons. One is that it breaks the seesaw floor. The other is one that can be easily seen in the chart: sets with top notch ST damage perform better in AoE than Ice.

I actually predict this will go that way... for a while.

I quit before GR came out, and back then I would soft cap against SL all my characters. I found it odd that apparently no one noticed how powerful a character with soft-capped SL defense was. My Fire/Fire dominator out-tanked granite brutes (via a combo of Mez and plainly being able to survive a lot of damage.)

Buying Kinetic Combats was also dirt cheap. Everyone only cared about slotting for recharge. Perma-Hasten were everyone's goal at the time. I found it rather... shocking coming 2 years later and hear nearly no one talk about perma-hasten anymore. Everyone now focus on Soft-Capping. Mind you, people still aim for high recharge but it seems to be an after-thought.

In similar fashion, I expect a lot of people to ignore this new resist IOing, until slowly it becomes more popular and suddenly everyone is targeting at hard-capped SL resistances, with Defense as a secondary thought.

We will see, though.

?!

And here I was about to cancel my subscription (in an attempt to focus in other stuff, not out of any wish to actually quit.)

We can customize pets, to an extent. Go to the game and create a Stone controller. Go customize Animated Stone. You can pick a costume and color tint it.

In theory, we can be given a big list of costumes to pick from, and color tint them. Cant pick every piece, but we can pick from a long list, perhaps exactly the same list we see already in the pre-made costumes.

There are a few extra things involved, though. Only animations that match the current power cast time can be used. Also, the animation must make sense with the effects of the power. Total Focus animation cant be used fo Knockout Blow because it just makes no sense the target would go flying upwards after being hit in the head while falling (besides cast time.)

Lets say the devs dare give ANY IO set bonus a 5% smash Lethal bonus.

This means with 4 such sets slotted a Willpower, Dark, and Fire tanks can all hard-cap their S/L Resistances.

Elec and Bio (in efficient stance) will cap with just 3 such bonuses.
Bio in Defensive only needs 1.

4%?

Bio Defense with 1 still.
Bio Efficient with 3 still.
Electric, 3.
Fire, Dark and Willpower? 5.

3%?

Bio Defense soft caps with 2
Bio Efficient soft caps with 4
Electric soft caps with 4.
Fire, Dark Willpower all manage to get 85% Smash/Lethal Resistance.

OK, what about 2%?

Bio Defense soft caps with 2
Bio Efficient caps at 88%.
Electric caps at 88%
Fire, Dark and willpower all cap at 80% but now can also stamp a 3% unique for 83%. Thats not to mention other sources of +Resist.

This is not to mention: I would take it for granted that the 2 type deal will be treated as a IO wide thing. Anything that currently only yields Smashing resistance will in i24 likely yeld Smash/Lethal.

Even with small numbers its going to be hard to avoid this level of powercreep. Heck, just look at what we got now. Kinetic Combats with level 3 can already grant 2.5% to smashing. It can be safely carried in Air Superiority and Fighting>Kick, not to mention any attack you happen to be slottable for Knockback.

I return to my original statement: This is going to be BAD.

Oh well... I guess it was due for Invuln to join the SR club. Everyone will soon have Invuln's Toy, and all Invuln will have is the ability to try to slot for every single hole it has (meaning every damage type but Smashing/Lethal.)

[Disclaimer: I use numbers for Bio here that may not be final]

NERF IOS!!!

....

*reads overview of I24 again*

My goal with the Overseer was that it would be a "hands off" kind of guy, bossing around pets to do the damage and, as needed, restraining the enemies. It's only offensive tools should be the 3 attacks in summon sets.

This chart is the result of an analysis I did long ago on offensive set balance. You do are reading it wrong, Energy Melee is showing at the top for single target, tied up with 2 other sets for 1.8 score.

Since it's relatively old, it does not include any set introduced with or after GR launched (this means Kin Melee not there either)

On the blue number metrics, lower numbers are better. EM gets a good endurance cost score thanks to Energy Transfer being mostly powered by your HP instead of your endurance.

EM does suck for AoE.

False. The problem is not Rage stacking, it's how Rage affects powers that don't belong to Super Strength in addition to how stacking nullifies the -def penalty.

Your solution retains the ability to buff outside powers and removes all penalties, it basically magnifies all that is wrong with the power.

I would go for a utility power instead of another attack. Part of the goal in that was that they would not have too many attacks to pick from.

Those combos crossed my mind, but there are reasons I didnt go for them:

1. I wanted to just do 5 ATs, so we could call these "Non-Epic Pretorian ATs" I guess.
2. Melee sets are overused already. I wanted to highlight sets that are not overused and, as I mentioned in the intro paragraph, end up not getting new sets precisely because the effort brings less bang for the buck.
3. Blast/Control combos are... risky. If you can lock down the group, and use your best attack chain, all from range against locked down foes. Doms can sort of do this already but they are forced to remove a lot of great attacks from their attack chain to do so.
4. Melee/Buff is also potentially problematic. If you are forced to go into melee you need some form of mitigation, be it an armor or strong Mez capabilities.
5. Melee Pets can work, but it’s a bit more fun with Assault Nothing stops you from using an Assault set in pure melee range.
6. Blast/Armor is a possibility that may also work but we already have 4 ATs using Armors, and I already added an additional one here (although using Stalker Armors that tend to be rather different.)

Not saying your points are not interesting, just why I went for these 5.

Thats a ridiculous conclussion. There are two minimum levels of performance for offensive sets, both independent: ST and AoE.

Just because you do very good AoE does not mean you are excused from having garbge ST damage. It's like a playground seesaw. Balance in game is not like a weight balance, but more like a Seesaw. The point is not to keep it horrizontally flat, but to compensate in one side for what is in the other without ever allowing either side to touch the ground.

From that point of view, Ice Melee didnt just hit the ground in the ST side, it broke through the ground and made a hole kids can't get out of without help.

Look at Spines (not in this chart but ammong scrappers it IS also the worse ST set.) It's already confirmed to be getting a buff in I24, for the same reasons: Higher than average AoE performance does not justify mediocre ST performance.

First post and it's to note how the ATs don't compare to a comic book character! I actually call this epic win!!!

PS: Nick Fury and Shield are a more appropiate basis for Sergeants, IF we are to look for a correlationship.

True. Fire/Fire would have two HotFeets. I would propose the changes be mainly on the manipulation side, where needed, though.

First off: Hey Sarrate! Where you been hiding?! Been missing our Taunt Mechanics Specialist!

Now, Second, it's not really power creep, but your second statement does get close:

This is it. ^^^

For the most part, I would say that. In my book Elusivity and Res are more related to each other, each with its pros and counters (elusivity is random, you may be hit by the hard hitting attacks and only avoid the weak ones, or the other way around but you get to avoid also secondary effects, Resist is predictable and more reliable to absorb alphas.) Defense, on the other hand is just so full of holes that it's safer to just give it away as they have.

We are already seeing Incarnate content having higher ToHit to offset the proliferation of Defense.

If you wanted to make IO paths "equivalent" for everyone, the right way (in my book) is to turn all self-buff powers in the game into Elusivity, keeping only IOs, Pool Powers and external buffs (Force Fields, Maneuvers, etc) as the sources of +Defense.

This will change the game so that defense IOing is the same for any player, regardless if they are Avoidance based or Resist based.

If I had a time machine, though (and the power to change anything once I traveled back in time) I would make sure that IOs did not granted defense, and instead granted HP buffs. Unlike what everyone thinks, adding more HP to players is not as exploitative as adding more resistance or defense. In fact, it' the least exploitable of stats in the game, and extremely easy to counter: if you feel everyone now has too much HP, just bump up damage of newer content a notch and you break even. It may make +HP slotting necessary, but that’s part of power creep, and power creep just can’t be avoided. It just can be directed in a more controllable way, and the only way to power-creep survivability [fairly] in this game is via +HP.