StrykerX

This is actually the set's biggest problem (at least for some people). It's fantastic for making an over the top gun fu character (now if only we had a secondary with martial arts attacks to pair it with) but some people want a realistic pistols set, like Malta Gunslingers use. After all, if a cop started tossing his gun around like that on the tactical course he'd be laughed off the range and sent for a psych evaluation... I'm sure a lot of people with police or cowboy characters hate the DP animations.

All the pets with targeted heals seem to wait until someone has lost at least as much health as they heal before using them. As far as I know this is based on observation rather than conclusive "proof", but a lot have people (including me) have observed it.

Whether slotting for heal is bad or not really depends on your pets though. If they tend to die in two hits, you want them being healed as soon as they are damaged so slotting the heal can be bad. For instance, I don't slot Protector Bots for heal because I want them to top off my (usually near-softcapped) bots whenever they take a lucky hit. On the other hand, Demons are resist based... they can take a couple hits without dying. Additionally, the Ember Demon has an AoE heal that he seems to use whenever anyone near him is hurt (or maybe even whenever it recharges). Based on that I do like slotting Ember Demon for healing, but how much depends on my primary. On my Demons/Thermal I'll slot him more heavily since the Demons will all have very good resists and therefore will be able to drop lower without getting killed by the next hit. On my Demons/Dark one SO worth will probably be enough.

Essentially, you want to look at how much they heal for versus the hit points of your tier one pets. Decide how low you want the tier ones to drop before getting healed and don't enhance the heal beyond that point.

I tend to get annoyed with both Executioner's Shot and Shout due to the long animations. It's not a huge deal, just an annoyance. I think increasing the portion of the damage that Swap Ammo changes to 50% or so would be perfect... DP would still be average to slightly below average in total damage output, but it would actually be able to use Swap Ammo to overcome resistances. Right now most of the damage stays Lethal so you only get a minor boost.

It's not that I hate the set, I just think it's about 10% behind where it needs to be. Not bad enough that I won't play it, just a bit annoying... I can definitely tell a difference in how fast it takes to drop a spawn compared to my archer. It's not really being a min/maxer (I do play sets other than Fire ), just seeing that mobs I 3-shot on other Blasters need a fourth hit to take down.

I believe the Ninjas' defense is around 7% for the Genin and 14% for the Jounin. Ninjas/FF would be softcapped, but that's all you'd have... hard to hit pets. I'd rather go Ninjas/Dark, since their defense would still stack with your to-hit debuffs but you'd also get -resist and -regen debuffs and a nice heal. But then I find /FF annoying... slower setup (both due to the time it takes to bubble and the extra endurance used on top of the already end-heavy summons and upgrades) and boring to play since all you do is sit there and rebubble every few minutes and knock a few things around with Force Bolt if you get too bored. /Dark is more active and it can stack enough to-hit debuffs to effectively softcap the ninjas while also helping you kill things faster.

I'm not a fan of /Poison just because it's too single target focused. Demons/Poison would probably be a great AV hunter, but I suspect /Dark or /Traps would be a lot more effective against ordinary spawns. On the bright side, demons tend to like melee well enough that Noxious Gas should be reasonably effective without having to manually reposition pets.

The animation times on the tier one and two blasts are the standard 1 second and 1.67 seconds. However, the cone and targeted AoE definitely have longer than average animation times and the tier 3 blast is just painfully slow. Overall it is slower than Energy Blast, which is a set people complain about longish animations on. The animation times seem similar to Sonic, making it about the second or third slowest blast set.

The damage is pretty average using incendiary rounds, and below average using other shots. The problem is that incendiary ammo has no secondary effect other than damage yet does about the same total damage as sets with secondary effects (incendiary ammo is almost exactly equal to Energy Blast in damage) and using other ammo types puts Dual Pistols near the bottom of the list on damage.

However, all this is from a Blaster perspective, where Dual Pistols' secondary effects are really too weak to make much difference and there are far more damaging blast sets. For a Defender I suspect DP is a lot better, since they get much stronger debuffs and can stack them with debuffs from their primary. The flexibility to be able to slow, damage debuff, or defense debuff enemies means a lot more on an AT that actually cares about debuffing things than on an AT that focuses on killing stuff as fast as possible.

DP does look good, but Archery is superior to it in almost every way (at least for a Blaster) and AR is superior in AoE damage. Essentially DP is a (very slightly) weaker Energy Blast that can trade knockback for more team-friendly secondary effects... not a bad Blaster set but not really good at anything except looking flashy. For Defenders it's better, though still nowhere near the top, and I have no idea on Corruptors because I don't play them much.

It's not that villain ATs are weaker, they just have different roles. There's no pure tank AT redside... some Brutes and some Masterminds make good tanks, but others don't. Likewise there's no pure damage AT... Stalkers and Dominators both do significant damage but also have protections or controls. Villain roles are less clearly defined than hero roles, but that doesn't make them weak if you learn to play them properly.

I'd suggest trying a Mastermind simply because it's completely different than anything you can play as a hero. If you want to avoid boredom pick an active secondary like /Dark, /Storm, or /Pain and you'll always have something to do even though your pets are doing the damage. /Traps is also great... it's slower than some sets but it mixes good protection with nice debuffs. Bots/Traps is one of the best AV soloists (really, one of the best anything soloists) and Demons are a lot of fun and go well with most secondaries (I love both Demons/Dark and Demons/Thermal, and I'm sure Demons/Pain or Demons/Traps are great too). Just avoid /FF and possibly /Thermal if you want an active character and hate the "buff every four minutes" playstyle, and avoid /Poison unless you want to focus on AV hunting. It's too single target focused for normal play (not that it's bad, just not as great as the others).

Oh, and remember that the attacks in Mastermind primaries can be useful at low levels but once you hit the 20s they do laughable damage for high endurance cost. I'd recommend skipping them all (or respeccing out of them) unless you want one for its secondary effect (mainly the stun in Photon Grenade, the heal in Life Drain, and the -resist in all the Demon whip attacks).

Looks right to me, though thanks to ED you're looking at more like 95% from enhancements so you'll need more like 110% global. I know some people overslot Hasten just to get an extra 5% or so recharge, but to me it's not worth it... a couple seconds downtime is no big deal and generally not worth "wasting" slots or spending hundreds of millions more inf to fix.

Actually they do have poison. The Hellfire users (Hellfire Demonling and Hellfire Gargoyle) both have Toxic DoTs, just like the whip attacks do. Many of their attacks do as much or more Toxic damage as they do Fire or Lethal.

That means demons do Smashing, Lethal, Fire, Cold, and Toxic damage... that's more variety than pretty much any other set.

Yep. Essentially Brawl has a separate full set of animations (male, female, huge, male flying, female flying, etc...) for every single weapon type in the game. Well, more specifically every combat mode, and each different weapon uses a different combat mode plus I think a couple other things do too. That means there are literally dozens of Brawl animations that are all slightly different depending on what weapon is to be held in the off hand, plus the shield bash, sword pommel strike, and kick animations. That's an awful lot of new Kick animations to create (even if they can be mostly just cut and pasted with a few tweaks) to eliminate redraw from one pool attack.

I'm pretty sure Assemble the Team also ignores global recharge.

Well, look at it this way... an average level 50 character with a decent solo build (not a farmer, just a reasonably slotted character that isn't focused on group support) can average around 500 inf per second running missions. An optimized soloist can earn three or four times that. So if bidding low takes an extra 30 seconds on the market, you just cost yourself 15-60k inf or so.

Now obviously most non-farmers don't actually focus on spending every possible second killing things, but the point is that if you could have gone out and mowed down a few level 50 spawns in the extra time it takes you to fill a low bid instead of a buy it now price (like a second trip to the market to pick up the salvage once it fills) you need to save more inf than those spawns would have provided for it to actually be profitable.

(That said, I do generally refuse to pay stupidly high prices for salvage just on general principles, but I'll drop a few thousand to get it right away rather than bidding 200 and having to go back and pick it up later because the convenience is worth the 10 seconds or so it takes me to make the inf back. )

That's the correct value (though a bit hard to interpret since Red Tomax uses the raw data values which can have odd units): 7.5% defense to Ranged, AoE, and Melee. With decent enhancement (like a couple of defense IOs) it goes up to 10-11%, which isn't half bad. Especially for the other bots since they get double shields for 20%+ defense.

And since it's only positional defense, yes, some psi attacks ignore it just like they do on Super Reflexes.