Starsman

There are other things that I can think make it hard (not impossible) like the duration of the pets vz durations of holds. Doms mez is shorter lived than Controller's mez.

You can in theory make the pets summons last a shorter window than the controller equivalent (since these pets are indirect mez effects,) but then doms are supposed to do more damage so you have to also rebalance all the pets to do more damage than the controller equivalents too, and somehow balance that with the shorter duration.

Pet balancing is the hardest thing in this game, and the reason why there are so few mastermind sets.

BTW, Electric Control's Jolt also work by summoning pets and both versions summon different pets appropiately balanced for the specific AT.

Dont take me wrong, I would love to see such an effort placed, I'm just trying to clarify that Illussion control is not as easy to port as many think. There are a lot of design gotchas.

Just a side note here: Illussions is designed in a way that it does not need containment, the "bonus damage" is simply granted by pet damage instead. Containment was intentionaly designed to not help that set too much. Another thing that makes damage balancing of the port difficult.

For a new set with new art, THAT would be awesome. Specially if they manage to also use the same FX to make enough ranged and melee attacks to make a water assault set to go with it.

And was part of a paid expansion. Although not sure how many electric "control" sets that existed didnt make it. I know of ST hold, and immob powers that did make it in. I'm very likely missing others, will have to go diging about to see what else I dont remember.

Illussion control, last time I heard, has big issues with Dominators. Mainly: domination does next to nothing for the set, since active pets are not affected by it. They would have to design (argue over, fight eachoter, settle for) some form of new mechanic that will take special advantage of Domination.

Actually making Doms secondaries is "easy" since they are mostly attack. The problem lies in synergy. The only Assault set that was created that would not fit a primary was Elec Assault and its very likely Elec Control was already in the roadmap.

If they were willing to port assault sets that did not tie-in with the primary, things would be insanely easy and doms would be able to have much more options for secondaries, if not primaries. I would like to see such a direction since most ATs dont have that conceptual lockdown.

I would love to see things like Weapon based assault sets, fighting arts with ranged options (martial arts with shurikens and perhaps even a "chi blast") or a Kinetick Assault (all animations in the melee set work for ranged attacks, actually it feels like short range blast set.) I guess next time I poke the devs I will bring that one up and see if there is any reasoning there.

I just know, for a fact, that assault sets are not harder to make than blast or melee sets.

There IS the issue of testing time. Even if creating/proliferating the set was easy, Dominators are not extremely popular and their sets cant be shared with other ATs. Despite ease of putting the sets together, all sets take the same amount of balance testing. The devs get less bang out of their time by focusing in Dominators.

As for dark proliferation, the devs have come out publicly to note why Dark had not been proliferated. They said clearly that it was because of power overlap. They want to be careful and avoid having AT's having multiple overlaping powers. Although they have not said it out loud, it's my understanding that every time this happened in the past (power overlap) it is considered a "mistake" or an "oversight".

Not saying it's not going to happen but it seems less likely. I never considered it to be too controversial to give blasters a heal. There had never been a thematic set that waranted it before.

With Doms, we already had a set that would thematically warant it, Earth Assault, and they didnt do it. I would not mind if they did, though.


I WOULD call it proliferation. I would also expect it to be free set. A brand new set will very likely be a premum set, just like Beem Rifle and Street Justice.

BTW this cool idea crossed my mind this morning for a better pet power in Dark Controll: Shadow Theft. A target AoE that spawns a pet for every affected enemy, the pet will rank one rank bellow the affected target and die once that target dies.

Example: Boss is hit, a Lt spawns. Minnion is hit, an underling spawns. AV is hit, an Elite Boss spawns.

The "shadow" would be just a plain black humanoid, size based on the rank.

This is a semanthic argument many will disagree with. But lets just focus in one word: Average.

Average is not "meh". "Meh" isn't even a proper word, but an expression of aphathy or indifference. Average is the middle of the road, and for me thats just plain "good". Above average is great and 5/5 would be amazing.

So:

• Way Bellow Average: Terrible
• Bellow average: Bad
• Average: Good
• Above Average: Great
• Way above average: Amazing

It's a very subjectinve thing, though, and not sure if you can come up with a definition that could devend you in court for it's implications. Due to this I prefer when somewhere on their site, the reviewer describe what, for him, his scale means.

Well I dont hate DS9 since I have not seen it . It's on my queue to watch but was hard to *cough* aquire. With it on Netflix that may change. Now if I was not so bussy with side projects...

I am not sure if the devs are willing to give any type of heal to doms in their assault sets.

What about a Soul Drain that instead of boosting damage did a small per target power boost?

Bit of "same old" with a spice of new.

That's why it's a "low hanging fruit". If you want the most likely thing to happen, that would be it. If you want a new set, it's more likely they would spend the time making a new set instead, something like Radiation Control or a gadget based control set.

Wait... they did? I missed that one.... hmmm...

Horrible missconception.

Jobs was always a big proponent of consumer rights. He managed to get music studios to get rid of DRMs. He made software distribution remove device limiting licenses.

Apple is still working on doing what they did with music, for TV and Movies.

You may think an iPhone (the device in the mind of any that claim this) is locked down, but compared to what? I was never able to get any software into my old Blackjack Win Mobile phone. Never was able to upgrade a phone's OS without being forced into buying a new one, still true outside of Apple. Look at Android phone manufacturers that add specialized chips to restore or lock down if they detect a rooted OS.

Look at it as a gaming device and say it's more locked down than a Nintendo Wii, Xbox or PS3.

Apple's "battle" against Jailbreaks has always been extremely weak and just barely enough to make sure grannie can't accidentally have her phone jailbroken and starts getting viruses and other malware.

I don't think this is the thread to discuss these things, but I would like at least to make sure the man is seen in perspective and try to dismiss the myth of him being against consumer rights. I can think of fewer people in positions of power that are truthfully as pro-consumer rights as he was.

Edit to add:
He also was the biggest proponent of consumer privacy rights there is in the industry. In a tech world, where companies are either neutral or pro extremist tracking, his stance is one that I hope Apple continues to hold.

App stores existed before the iPhone one did, so did digital music distribution.

It was not about the core concepts, but more about the delivery. Too large of a topic to go into here. Jobs was just great at getting together, and leading, the right people to streamlilne processes and products for mass consumption, and always knew when to set a firm foot and not allow something to go through until it was streamlined well enough.

I may be a bit off on this, but my understanding is that DS9 production was kickstarted around the same time WB announced they started production on Babylon 5. The production of both shows started at so close dates that the pilot for both broadcasted within a month.

I rememer reading that WB was going to toss the towel after the pilot, thinking there was no way to compete with a Star Trek branded show. It took a lot of convincing to keep the ball rolling into the show, and even then it was hit by a delay of almost a year. Many fans think B5 started at least a "year later" due to this, forgetting the air date of the original pilot.

This entire controvercy is something I grew facinated with, specially since I only got to start watching B5 about a year and a half ago and gubled it all up in a month or two. It seems there is just mentions of it in the wikis (perhaps fans of both shows kept rewriting the other's wikis? ) but the entire thing is heavily documented in many other sites.

Interestingly, other than statements from Rick Berman and Michael Piller saying they never saw the B5 Bible, I never found any statement denying the show was designed on request by the executive staff that had it, and thats what he always accused Paramount of doing.

This is all that is in the B5 wiki (emphasis mine.) The DS9 contains a very similar and brief chunk:

The pilot episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (DS9) aired just weeks before the debut of Babylon 5. Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski indicated that Paramount Television was aware of his concept as early as 1989,[57] when he attempted to sell the show to the studio, and provided them with the series bible, pilot script, artwork, lengthy character background histories, and plot synopses for 22 episodes "or so planned episodes taken from the overall course of the planned series".[58][59] Paramount passed on Babylon 5, but later announced Deep Space Nine was in development after Warner Bros. announced its plans for Babylon 5. Straczynski has stated on numerous occasions that, even though he's confident that Deep Space Nine producer/creators Rick Berman and Michael Piller did not see this material, he thinks Paramount may have used his bible and scripts to steer development of Deep Space Nine.[60][61]

In the end, yes. I twas good that both shows got produced. Thats one of the reasons Straczynski gave to not bother suing, he is, too, a ST fan after all. But DS9 almost killed B5 and had we been talking about some one with less pull and less contacts than he had, the show would had vanished. These "rippoffs" can often, and do ofte, have the nasty consequence of depriving the consumers of great stories and content. This is just one of many similar stories we never have, nor will, find out about.

That power is already available in the patron pools.

Dominators dont get access to "melee boost powers" (Build Up or Soul Drain) by design outside their patrons.

They get Aim or Power Boost instead.

Jobs was never an inventor and he never took credit for being one. What he was was a visionary with a rare talent: the ability to recognize potential. He also was a great marketeer.

He discovered great inventors and gave them the proper direction.

Only ignorant people think he invented the Apple products they love.

The world would be very very different had he not created Apple.

Wait... this actually hapened????

And then people ask why I dont read comics anymore...

I don't know what they doing with the character these days, but in the past, Stark would make nuclear bombs out of his handcufs and some gum, if you leave him long enough unsupervised.

He is the McGuiver of the marvel universe, he just happeend to have come up with a darn well rounded all purpose weapon the day he had to first escape captivity and has since itterated on it over and over again.

If the writers cared, it would be easy to justify him making a new rudimentary armor or even just a mechanical arm exoskeleton to get out of a bind. In fact, you would have to explain heavily why he would not do so.

They dont suck, they bite.

But controllers dont have Dark Misma yet! There is no reason why a Controlelr version of Dark Misma has to be identical to the defender version. Look at what they did to Ice Armor.

Also, you can create all new powers without much work. Dark is a "simple" set type with a simple secondary effect that does not need much thinking. Whatever you do, just add -tohit and fluffy dark FX.

There I think is the problem. It's very unlikely a controller dark misma will be as heavy in control as the current defender version because there would be too much stacking with any control set.


This is what I would do for controller version of Dark Misma:

1. Twilight Grasp stays
2. Tar patch stays
3. Darkest Night stays
4. Howling Twilight stays
5. Shadow Fall stays
6. Fearsome Stare changes to Terrifying Stare cone -recharge
7. Petrifying Gaze changes to Horrifying Gaze -dmg, -res (ST) NEW
8. Black Hole stays
9. Dark Servant stays

This is what I would do for Dark Control:

1. Penumbral Grasp ST immob from Dark Manipulation
2. Petrifying Gaze Single target hold from Def Dark Misma
3. Tenebrous Tentacles Immob cone from Dark Blast
4. Fearsome Stare cone fear from Dark Misma
5. Death shroud dmg aura from Dark Armor
6. Dark Pit Foe Disorient (aoe) from Dark Blast
7. Nightmare AoE Hold New power.
8. Oppressive Gloom stun aura (self harm) from Dark Armor
9. Lich from Mastermind Necromancy

This is what I would do far Dark Assault (warning, have not benhchmarked what this power combination and recharge times and damage rations may require readjusting for it to work decently within the set.):

1. Smite from Dark Melee
2. Dark Blast from Dark Blast
3. Shadow Maul from Dark Melee
4. Gloom from Dark Blast
5. Power Boost from... all over the place.
6. Umbral Torrent from Dark Blast (blaster)
7. Whirling Darkness new power
8. Darkest Night from Dark Misma
9. Midnight Gasp from Dark Melee

I think this leaves Controller version of dark misma very recognizable with very few powers taken out of it.

Hmmm, I guess I can see that. As much as fans love to quote every bit of trivia and "continuity" in the Star Trek saga, the series has mostly been an episodic show throughout history.

DS9 may had been a solid sci fi show, but its an odd ball in the entire Star Trek series. Can see anyone that liked the formula being alienated.