StratoNexus

I like most of the MA dominator set. I am worried about the cone. I don't generally like these types of powers in any game I play. I much prefer the way CoH cones have always worked. That said, the game has room for an option such as facing cones that I would skip, but others will enjoy.

I do like that you can use it out of combat for styling.

Loyal, not so sure. Gives into his violent tendencies, selfish, heartless? Indeed. Stick him in the Rogue Isles where he belongs.

Aurora's body was controlled by Mother, she seems not terrible after she is rescued, but we have very little info about her. She may not be switching sides by being a hero. Pendragon was also not a Cole supporter and seemed alright, if flawed.

97% = 22% + the base 75%.

I don't think this power is as amazing as you think since it has significant limitations, but I do like that the new design mentality for blasters allows this kind of powerset to be designed. It bodes well for both the older blaster sets as well as the future of blaster design.

Not that I would be at all upset if they put the mez protection back in /Fire.

The mez break isn't what impresses me.

The set has the new standard sustain power (this one is a toggle) AND a minor bit of self heal, plus a no animation time self damage buff and a great movement power.

And it has FOUR aoe effects!

My DP/Fire blaster uses TP to leap into the middle and FSC/HOB. Now I can do that without spending a pool selection!

Indeed, first thing I thought of was this thread and spring escape.

I guess in any situation where you use comparisons to suggest a buff, the reverse is always an option. I don't think that is the intent, nor do I think it is a likely result.

Hey, when playing a blaster I want to be sure the defenders can see me too! Plus, this is CoH. Costume narcissism is very important, at least it is to me and lots of other people.

While this is a very tiny concern, I have occasionally had some trouble picking up an ally's location due to their stealth. When it matters I almost always have used the team window anyway, and with the reticle it is very easy to locate any ally. However, I sometimes just click on their avatar and I can remember a few times where I was spinning my camera looking for someone, rather than using the team window. I tend to think of that as operator error, "Sorry I let you die, I wasn't fast enough finding you," but stealthy allies are ever so slightly harder to pick up that way when playing a buffer. Not anything I would normally think of as an issue though.

Well, it wasn't done just to show they are even, it was done to show WP was significantly better. Enough better to try and push for buffs to Invuln.

The regen and recovery will last longer than the base recharge of the power, so you will have options as to when to use it. Even if you forget to click it and the regen and recovery does shut off in the middle of a spawn, if you are in no immediate danger, there is no reason you have to click it immediately; if you go 6-10 seconds without, you aren't going to crash your end.

If you are threatened and feel the need for the +regen RTFN, a PBAoE KB is only going to be good.

I have found that SoW works decently to help push me above normal. For my scrapper, I took Resurgence for concept and used it, but it was horrible. The recent buff to it has really helped make it a nice click to recover when you get in over your head.

This is likely not strictly correct. They were not intended to have it all the time, but I am pretty sure they were intended to be able to have it part time through inspires (not the same soft cap in the sense we think of it today, but the ability to temporarily rise above).

I would be perfectly OK if any and all of my soft-capped characters were nerfed, but I am less OK if inspires do not let me cheat the system. How inspires work is one of the things I love about this game relative to the painful cooldowns and limits on consumables in other games. I much prefer the limit on the number you can carry, as opposed to the number you can use per fight or unit of time.

It is true my regen scrapper has little of that commodity and my Invuln is benefiting from gobs of it on top of the small resistance to debuff/drain.

However, the WP tanker has 47.5 Sm/Le, 41 F/C, 54 En/Neg, and 36 Psi. Even before the IDF, the endurance could be problematic, but only against enemies with drain.

But we have likely beaten this horse enough and I must admit I am now fascinated with the concept of trying to get buffs for Invuln. I definitely had more issues leveling my Spine/Invuln than my Kat/Invuln or Staff/Invuln, so without outside mitigation, I can see some Invuln issues.

This is especially surprising since my WP scrapper is fire, which has no mitigation from the primary, and yet is still solid. Of course the WP scrapper has been Frankenslotted with mixes of set IOs since level 17 and the Miracle proc, while the Spines was all SOs with a few commons and no miracle.

So many variables. I am eager to see more of Starsman's results.

If only..

I love QR. I am still upset my Regen Stalker cannot get it. I agree it is way better utility than the end drain/recovery debuff resistance.

I don't think I would (I'd have to play with my builds to truly figure it), but nor would I trade away the end drain resistance even if they just added the +recovery of QR to ResNrg. At this point I'd prefer to keep the resistance.

My regen scrapper has died too often to drains. My WP tanker has had severe difficulties due to drain. My Invuln scrapper has not had issues with drain since they added the debuff resistance.

This is assuredly a situation where IOs are weighting my decision. No doubt in an SO comparison QR laps this minor ability. But in game, when it matters to me on my builds, I have been able to build enough recovery to make me happy even before I added IOs to my build. But until Ageless, there was no way for me to build to solve the end drain problem even on characters with QR.

But that is only taking recovery debuffs into account. Assuming your numbers make sense (and it seems they do), without factoring in recovery debuffs at all you would need to face about 40 pts of end drain in 10 seconds in order to meet that goal. That doesn't seem out of line with what you can face quite frequently even vs. Freaks, much less Malta, Carnies, IDF, and a few others.

Based on your quick analysis, I think not. You have made me appreciate the value of that drain and recovery debuff resistance even more and also made me realize that putting ResNrg off until later in a build may not be as automatic as I always thought it was.

I am assuming that it is the drain and recovery debuff resistance. My WP tanker's Defense values are generally better than my Invuln scrapper's, so I assume it is not that they are missing me more.

I am not sure the resistance is as insignificant as you think. While Seers and diviners are rough, those rocket guys are brutal too. Again, I am pretty sure it is not defense, since the tanker is better off defensively (although the Invuln has better defense debuff resistance, but I don't think that is coming into play here).

Well, there are a lot of end drain and recovery debuffs we face. So while I agree that it doesn't help me as much against Council as QR would, it might help the blue bar against Carnies as much as QR helps WP. Maybe I am way off. While my Fire/WP scrapper is in the 40s, I don't have enough scrapper to scrapper experience to draw from. So maybe my WP tanker has more end trouble because he does less damage, although I almost never solo, so that seems unlikely.

It doesn't seem that niche to me, but I fight a lot of stuff with end drains and recovery debuffs. Leveling up, QR is certainly better, not quite as much end draining in the lower levels and while I am calling the drain resistance solid, you generally will skip ResNrg until later. I think QR is also better at the high end, but I think the advantage narrows significantly.

It has been awhile since I played into the 40s on a scrapper or tanker without a Miracle (although I have just done it to the 30s on a Staff/Invuln, but the Staff can cheat). Without IOs, QR is obviously significantly better.

Both Invuln and WP have tier 9s which can aid the end bar as well, in the short term and with the obvious need to pay it back (and Invuln pays back much more).

True; and it is true that running missions is similar to a long fight in the fact that we stress our blue and green bars pretty much constantly in CoH. There are differences though. In a mission, you can rest between spawns. While we certainly do not want to be resting too much, there is an amount that is acceptable to most players.

And teamed, there is also the case where an Invuln's slower moving health bar is easier to react to for those pesky human reaction times (barring those high Psi scenarios, of course).

No offense taken and I am glad for the clarification. I actually can't believe I am arguing this. I have often longed to have my old survivability back. I would very much love to see the F/C/E/N/T resists higher. I only want to make sure we are not unfairly touting the strengths of Willpower while hand-waving away the value of Invuln.

It is often said that with IOs most builds are better off now than back before ED. Invuln is not one of those, IME. I was mostly stronger in Issue 4 than I am now I think. Maybe I misremember.

Thank you. Fixing some of everything even before I24 is good.

I do not think it was obvious that is what you meant, but I can see the reasoning. I do not know if I agree that WP is more flush with inspires, but I see what you are saying now. I'll think on it.

It gets really esoteric here, so we likely shouldn't discuss it too heavily. One could easily say that stacking an orange or two on top of Invulns modestly higher resistances is valuable and since we are also talking about pool powers we fall into Starsman's point where Invuln gets more from Tough (and Hasten too).

This is something I have mentioned before, but I feel bears repeating. I needed Ageless on my WP tanker primarily because I kept getting end drops in Lambda. My Invuln scrapper never had that problem (and I am thinking of all the times I was tanking on the scrapper, not the times where someone else was eating the debuffs for me). Oh, the tanker was definitely more study, especially against the psi, but WPs end advantage is not as clear cut, because combining recovery debuff and end drain, the WP got flattened even with QR, whereas my Invuln did not. Maybe I just got lucky on the Invuln, but the difference was enough to be noticeable to me.

I could be mistaken. Surrounded by foes a WP will regen a good amount of HPs in 20 seconds. I am not being simplistic because I think it helps my case though, I am being simplistic because of limited time. Whatever both sets mitigate in the first 10 seconds stays, but after that many enemies could be dead. Sure, this means Invincibility is giving less defense, but it might not need as much now and now would be the perfect time to heal back the damage, but of course WPs regen is lower because it doesn't work on corpses.

OTOH, sometimes it takes a few to collapse the spawn, and both sets take a beating during that time. Now that you are surrounded, WP is rapidly healing while Invuln has merely steadied out. It is a pretty complicated set of circumstances and I have only barely begun to scratch the surface.

No one can tank anything for themselves. If you are solo you are just fighting. But putting aside the odd terminology, I am having difficulty understanding your premise. Are you saying it is wrong that some enemy types make you lower your difficulty while others do not?

Indeed, but I do not need to construct scenarios such as that to demonstrate the point. Starsman specifically mentions tanking, which favors mitigating incoming damage over 10-20 seconds, not 4 minutes. Invuln certainly is not a stellar performer in that scenario unless the damage is heavily weighted towards Sm/Le (which, of course, it normally is), although if Dull Pain is available, they do much better. But WP is just as susceptible in that shorter scenario and they are more susceptible to Sm/Le.

Ironically, my WP tanker's weakest link is Psi. "But, but, I am good at Psi, right?" But still way better than Invuln, naturally.

Interesting. I have run my WP tanker against the DA content and cam eout feeling very strong (need Ageless to shed those debuffs sometimes though). I have not yet tried it on any of my Invulns.

I skipped Tough on my primary Invuln for a long time. I'm an Invuln damnit, I shouldn't need Tough.

I saw nothing in your video that would demonstrate an issue tanking. You should consider including the herding in your next series. The Invuln survived plenty long to tank for a team. After a rough patch at the beginning of what you show, there was also quite a nice stretch of the invuln being very stable.

Commenting on this again. One luck would make quite a difference for the Invuln in that video who would then almost be defense capped, whereas the WP would still be sub 30%.

I've been trying to argue that power and slot cost line since the infamous scrapper comparison of 2005(?). But calling Invuln a set with no utilities is not accurate in this day and age.

Have to read the fine print at the end of the video.

Indeed, I am a big fan of the immortality line and believe that type of look has a very strong correlation with general play. But I also try not to underweight the value of preventative mitigation. Longer fights almost always favor regen. So while the test does demonstrate all three methods of mitigation combined, it does so in a way that emphasizes the benefit of regeneration (and for a variety of reasons undervalues Defense).

I think WP does have a smoother curve, especially over a whole mission. But in individual fights, you can often count on Invuln's health to move slower, which has qualitative benefits for human reaction times. Of course, I may be tainted by all that Sm/Le damage we normally face. I know my WP characters usually have a slightly easier time with Arachnos than my Invulns.

I've always found the to-hit buff in Invincibility more useful than most forumites give it credit for and Unstoppable is more effective than SoW (with a much harsher drawback, for sure), but I do love my WP characters as well. Since they buffed Resurgence, that has been much nicer on my Fire/WP scrapper (my tanker does not have Resurgence, doesn't die enough to warrant it).

I like ignite, very useful against EBs and AVs and also immobilized bosses.

M30 grenade is a standard AoE, always fun and the chance for KB adds modest control.

LRM is fun and does good things in an AoE. A bit long on the recharge, but its damage level is high enough to warrant that.

Burnout is fun, if you can stand the end penalty (and with the new sustain power, I imagine you can). Full Auto on Full Auto could be giggle inducing. This could free some slots, maybe for more in Tough and/or a Kismet in Combat Jumping (possibly a fly speed in Hover).

Sadly, I did not get to run it even once, and I really had enjoyed it the several times I ran it on beta. Even still, I don't think this power can be slotted with that proc, because it is not a damage power.

And I don't have any problems with a blaster using a PBAoE KB; sometimes that can be very handy.

So if you are not in jeopardy, you just wait to use the sustain when you won't cause scatter. If you are in jeopardy and need the sustain quickly, PBAoE KB will be helpful to give that regen a few seconds to function.