Talen Lee

Congratulations! You are so well informed that you can't suspend your disbelief and relax when you're talking about a game universe where people can fly unsuspended! You have earned the achievement 'Ruins Your Own Fun!'

I use ambush farms and I'm an arc author who ran a review thread and stopped specifically due to a low quality of authorial process.

So there's a data point.

Consider; the rationale behind the restriction of controllers and masterminds was server load. There are very few controllers who can generate more server load than dominators with the same primaries. Dominators are not restricted from free players... probably because the devs rightly assessed nobody really wants to play them.

The tank secondary is a case of overlap. There are three other ATs who get a primary that the tanker has as a secondary - it's not that the tanker's 'primary' is being ignored, it's that the tanker gets to ride the popularity of brutes and scrappers.

We're low priority.

Oh, and

I haven't been bitter in this thread yet.

As with reward merits, all it will do is give irrelevant people a greater feeling of control over things they don't need and a goal to work towards.

These people are practically market-parallel rather than actual market agents. Don't sweat it, this change isn't going to make purples meaningfully cheaper.

So much in this thread that I couldn't muster energy to address, but let's see if I can.

Regarding 'easy new' options like Dark Control, any new control set, in order to maximize value for effort, is going to have to be 100% portable between controllers and dominators. In any circumstance where they release a controller primary with a visible secondary to go with it, the 'new' primary had best not obviate that secondary.

For consideration, look at controller storm - it still gets all the control powers the defender gets. There's no great issue with controllers having redundant controls in a secondary, and indeed, getting better controls in a secondary that defenders regard as a primary is a stated difference between the two.

What this means is the cone fear and the hold in /Dark are almost certainly not appropriate ports to a primary for dominators. In other words, Dark Control Is Not An Easy Thing To Make.

Regarding Illusion - the stated reason in days of early castle was that it was a hard set to balance for dominators because it did not benefit at all from domination. When that was said, domination boosted your damage as well. Since that point in time, dominators have received Earth Control that lives in almost the same space, a set that inherits little from domination as a control power, and electric control with it. This is fine - it's part of the more modern understanding of dominator primaries, where some sets benefit a lot from domination (Mind) and others don't (earth), with a higher valley and lower peaks in the latter's case.

Gravity is Fine. You should know better than talking about buffing this perfect special jewel of love that nobody understands.

Stalkers got something, Therefore doms should have. Stalkers have a huge number of easy proliferation options from every extant melee set. Dominators have one AT we can get secondaries from (awkwardly) and one AT we can get primaries from (where we have almost all of them).

Doms were just at the back of the line, sacrifices had to be made, and so, doms were the sacrifice. It happens.

Rogues and Vigilantes are being punished for being weak.

Yeah, it just kinda means more turnaround.

I wish the game gave more 'normal' experiences like this. I love the huge pile of guys.

And the game rolls on.

Me, I had fun runnin the 'non-CEBR' form. Ie, doing it with things like SS/Elec or Claws/EA, and in one case, DB/SR. Lots and lots of fun, though deliberately nonoptimal.

Is Frenzy also affected by recharge buffs? I get the impression CtJ is.

Sure, but I use Call to Justice far more often than I'd ever use Frenzy.

I'm a bit of a peacenik though.

I am enjoying these delicious, delicious tears.

Honestly, guys. You're crowing about how very easy it was to get something that formerly took 2 days in 10 minutes, and acting like it's unreasonable for the devs to dial that rate of acquisition back?

I think we've gotten a bit lost from the original point. I don't know your stance, whether positive or negative on Incandescent Strike. Myself, I'm a fan of the animation, but I'm not playing my Peacebringer any more so what I think of its powers in situ is meaningless.

I was just trying to provide some amelioration and balance to the 'DPA is all' mindset that I feared could be presented. I don't even know what you think about IStrike at all. It's what leads to the forum-based rubbishing on Energy Melee, for example, and I have basically no respect for that attitude.

Other factors? Total recharge time; holes in attack chains; ability to quickly remove individual key targets; endurance cost; positional requirements. My point is that pure DPA does not determine an optimal attack chain. You can build to have truly extreme cases of recharge like say, Dual Blades' three-attacks-that-don't-combo, but that's not what we're really talking about.

Now, you're right; for a large hard target like a 53, DPS is very important. But DPA is part of what makes up optimal DPS; it does not necessarily dictate the whole of it.

Radiant Strike has a fast animation - 1.07, in fact. So 346 DPA vs 214 DPA.

Though honestly, anyone who's that fussed about such things is, to my mind just wrong - this is a game more about burst than about DPS, and individual DPA routines are not meaningful enough to concern me, personally, unless the character is truly obssessive about maneuverability and fragile as a ball of tissue paper.

It comes down to what you prefer; aoe, or single target.

Both have access to the /fire epic, which is great; but fire/psi has Psychic Shockwave and a PBAOE damage aura, which is a very strong PBAOE. mind/fire has combustion, which isn't nearly as great.

My advice is mind/fire, but I'd also advise you just make both and play them for a little bit. You'll get a good idea of what they're like by about level 12.

Yeah, Energy is pretty insane on SOs. You get a full ranged attack pattern by 10, and by 35 you can have a full melee attack pattern that includes Total Focus and Energy Transfer for crying out loud.

It's not a set I'd advocate for too strongly as I am personally very enamoured of melee AOE; but its strengths are pretty evident if you're not going that way.