Talen Lee

Well, yeah. I'm not honestly sure what impact those charts should be providing for balance discussions, since they are talking about situations that don't really happen in this game. Heck, DPS seems a really reckless thing to discuss in City, because this game is much more about punctuated bursts.

Well, I figured I was being particularly polite on the matter - I don't agree with your presupposed premise, and that's pretty much it, so there's no real point us arguing past one another.

I don't know what your suggestions were, because I simply didn't bother reading what you had to say on the matter of buffing. But there have been people suggesting buffs to Whirling hands as fixes to the set.

My current favourite word is callipygian; just because I'm using a word you haven't seen on the side of a cereal box lately doesn't mean it's because it has some special application.

You presume that Energy was fine; you assert that Energy, now, is insufficient for the balance range of play. But you can't prove that, and to be fair, I can't disprove that, because neither of us have anything remotely like provable samples of data. Your assertions satisfy you, my caution satisfies me.

I thought I'd already made it clear that I don't think your opinion in this discussion holds any weight; you think Energy was balanced before the change, which obviously means this change is a flat-out downpowering of something you think was acceptable. I on the other hand, look at the change, played the set after the change, and can both say with confidence in my own experience that the set is still very strong and compares well to other melee sets, and that if it was markedly better, it was probably overpowered, and viewing the development history that the set was downpowered with basically nothing to return for it, indicating that it was too good.

These devs are not functionally retartded. They know how to make changes that are give-and-take, and they didn't make a give-and-take. They just took. Which indicates there had already been too much give.

The 'I don't like it' arguments hold a lot more weight to me than the 'the set was fine, wtf were they doing?' arguments. The former I can see reasons to help, with things like power customization, or maybe even exploring niche ways to improve the feel of Energy - but to act as if the change was unreasonable, and as if Energy Transfer represents the whole set ('fast set' 'theme of self-damage' 'unreliable stuns') strikes me as incorrect on the facts at best.

Furthermore, Leo consistantly raises a good point; changes to Whirling Hands completely fails to address stalkers. If you feel the set is underpowered, you should be looking for fixes to the set. Not fixes to your brute or your tank. And of the three archetypes, stalkers are definitely the one who needs the most help.

Aside from when we crossed the atlantic, I spent the entire road trip to England in a car...

Well, you said 'absolutely,' so I can't argue with that.

more leadership.

I find your argument somewhat specious; energy is not only about attacks that do self-damage. One could just as easily say that ET pays HP to get a power to recharge faster, not to do more damage.

And 'it doesn't sometimes work' is not a great argument against the stuns as a design element. Fire's DoTs are random in their duration and damage, and even if they're not, sometimes fire gets resisted.

That's a good point, the mace-versions of powers would be pretty notably useful.

Don't you realise, nobody in the world likes knockback!?

(Flashbacks to Kinetic Melee beta, forgive me)

While I can understand your desire here, I would argue against it for a reason of alternate animations. The subject of ET's animation is a touchy one, and I doubt any of the people who are still sore about it are going to be sated by having different ways to take an extra 1.67 seconds to do something.

That said, if you like the idea of your version of ET to knock people over sometimes, there's a knockdown proc available to the set Stupefy, which is a 20% for knockback. Not enough to get persistantly annoying, but enough to give you that 'Boom, POW' feeling you might be looking for.

Case in point. While this idea is doable - look at Bullet Rain - it's a little optimistic to think that it's going to do but open wounds to go tooling with the ET animation now.