Trickshooter

Is crying a defense? Because that's probably what I'd end up doing.

^This right here. Footstomp breaks the formula in order to compensate for SS having only one AoE.

For those curious, the damage formula is:

((Recharge*0.16)+0.36)/(1+0.75*Radius/5-(0.011*Radius/6)*(360-Arc)/5) = DamageScale

So for Frozen Aura:

((20*0.16)+0.36)/(1+0.75*10/5-(0.011*10/6)*(360-360)/5) = 1.424, rounded to 1.42.

With Footstomp having a 15 foot radius, it would normally have:

((20*0.16)+0.36)/(1+0.75*15/5-(0.011*15/6)*(360-360)/5) = ~1.095, which would probably be rounded to a damage scale of 1.1, or about 48.94 damage instead of the 63.17 it does now.

Do you just mean Frozen Aura should do more damage in general? Because it currently does the correct damage for it's recharge, radius and PBAoE nature; it doesn't suffer any kind of penalty for having a control in it.

Why wouldn't they be? This isn't new behavior for these IOs.

Performance Shifter and Panacea already grant healing and/or endurance to a target if they're in a power that hits an ally. Numina, Miracle, and Regenerative Tissue have been slotted in ally-only heals since they were introduced and they've always only ever benefited the caster.

By "powers tab" do you mean the real numbers display stuff?

If so, the +Endurance from Lifegiving Spores won't show up there, as it's not a change to any Endurance or Recovery stat. It's essentially a 1% heal, but to your endurance bar instead of your health bar.

To start, I agree with the majority that Energy Transfer's change was heavy-handed and it had a negative effect on the overall performance of the Energy Melee set that has yet to be addressed, BUT...

If I remember correctly, it was changed because it was considered a long-standing anomaly (having ridiculous DPA) and they finally had the time to go back and review it. In fact, I remember Castle stating that he still had an internal email from when he was first hired about Energy Transfer because he noticed right away how far ahead it was compared to other powers.

PvP was not the reason for it's change. The only role PvP played was as a data point that players could easily see for themselves. That is to say, back then, if you intended to use any other melee set for PvP, it was almost universally considered "not as useful as Energy Melee would be", and most of that was attributed to the very quick burst damage of Energy Transfer.

The reason it's not fair to blame PvP has to do with this line of thought:

Almost every power that ever worked in PvE by targeting a Foe was already able to work differently in PvP since Issue 4 when PvP was introduced. If Energy Transfer's PvP damage was the real cause for concern, it could have been done separately between PvE and PvP long before the change to Energy Transfer's animation.

Damage values, debuff values, and mez durations have always been able to have separate values based on whether the target is a "Critter" or a "Player". That's how we had things like non-resistable damage in Blaster attacks and Scrapper criticals, non-resistable debuffs in Defender primaries, and triple damage on players in Controller primaries back then.

The Issue 13 changes simply gave the devs the tools to do something similar with all powers.

Just a quick note (4 days later :B), Mids actually has the incorrect endurance cost in Lifegiving Spores.

Lifegiving Spores actually drains 1.04 endurance every 4 seconds (so about 0.26 a second, which is about half the cost of typical support set toggles). It grants 1% Endurance every 4 seconds though, so even unslotted, as long as the caster stands in the AoE, it only costs about 0.01 endurance a second to keep on.

Anyway... out of curiousity, why does neither build include Regrowth?

It heals the caster for 50% more than Empathy's Healing Aura, but only takes 2 seconds longer to recharge and only costs 0.52 more endurance to use? It even animates faster than Healing Aura. And it gives a 30 second stack of Bloom.

Small thing, but ToHit debuff enhancements are Schedule B, so the total -ToHit it can offer on a Defender is around -9.75%.

Unless the Controller version is vastly different from the Defender version, the heal should be much higher. On a Defender, it's 11 ticks of 60.85 healing, which is a Scale 5 Heal (same as Absorb Pain).

I wasn't talking about the Absorb part, I meant that the Heal over Time adds up to about 60% of the heal of Empathy's Absorb Pain but in an AoE.

IIRC, Mids is bugged and not showing the +Absorb benefiting from slotting, but testing was done and it is affected in-game.

What do you mean by "big targets"? If you mean AVs, they don't inherently resist damage debuffs. Damage debuffs in general aren't affected by 'rank', only by level (but everything is affected by level). The only thing that resists damage debuffs is damage resistance, but it's still based on damage type. So damage debuffs are really only ever terrible on targets who have high resistance to a damage type that they also fight with (like Infernal, who resists Fire and fights with Fire attacks).

I believe it actually ticks every 4 seconds.

Unless a lot has changed, I believe Wild Bastion is a pretty powerful heal. Just over 400 HP unslotted on a level 50 Defender in an AoE. That's about 60% of the Heal of Defender Absorb Pain, but in an AoE. I assume the idea with Wild Bastion is... you put Absorb on allies to protect their health bar while it slowly fills from the Heal over Time.

The Heal over Time on living allies is the same strength as Empathy's Absorb Pain. It's a lengthy recharge for just an ally heal, but the recharge is balanced for it being a rez (which I think all recharge in 180 seconds).

The set IS a lot of Heal over Times, rather than upfront heals but this is also a set with +Resist(All), +Absorb, and a -ToHit/-Damage toggle.

Edit: Oh, and only one power even needs an ally. That's gotta be worth something, right?

^ This is what I remember.

The set's Recharge Slows and Controls (like the original, stacking damage-less sleep of Frozen Aura) were just too good at slowing down incoming attacks. That made for slower Fury generation. Combine that with a set that was poor at single-target damage and had only Frost (with a shorter range than it has now) for AoE damage and it was just not a good set for the Brute AT at the time. Original Ice Melee was clearly designed with Tankers in mind and that design didn't translate well to Brutes.

Ice Armor wasn't as bad on it's own, but it was still a set that combined Slows, End Drain, and then Hibernate which was pretty much "heal your wounds, lose all Fury".

The two being a thematic pair certainly didn't help, either.

It's also important to keep in mind Fury used to be much more difficult to maintain. The rate at which it degraded was slowed down in Issue 18 (with the devs instead making it much more difficult to reach higher amounts of Fury).

I can't say I recall 'all ATs needing a unique powerset' being a reasoning. Afterall, CoV launched with Brutes having no unique powersets.

I'd say these days, with Ice Melee's better AoE potential and the change to the Fury mechanic in Issue 18, the Ice sets should be okay with the Brute AT. Fury is easy to build at the start of combat, which wouldn't be hindered by Recharge Slows (since an enemy would need to use all their attacks first to feel its effects), and with Fury degrading slower, it would be easier to maintain these days than it was in CoV beta.

The only real issue I see is Mob AI, which runs away if no attack will be recharged in 10 seconds.

By level 10, Beginner's Luck is reduced to only +7% ToHit, which results in less than 1% better chance to hit than you'd be getting with a single Accuracy TO in each attack. Don't rely on Beginner's Luck passed like level 5.

Outside of Scourge, Corruptors do only about 67% of the damage of Blasters. Also, it's difficult to compare Blaster Psi Blast to Corruptor/Defender Psi Blast because damage scales were shifted amongst powers.

Blaster Psi Dart is the same scale as Corruptor Mental Blast.
Blaster Mental Blast is the same scale as Corruptor's Telekinetic Blast.
Blaster's Telekinetic Blast is the same scale as Corruptor's Will Domination.
Blaster's Will Domination is almost the same scale as Corruptor's Subdue (0.08 less).

Subdue only as an 80% chance to Immobilize; it's not guaranteed like Blaster's Subdual.

Regarding Martial Gloom, his stunning kicks are melee only, so if you want to avoid them you have to stay out of melee. This really isn't an issue with Kinetics or Psi Blast, or even Corruptors, though. It would be the tactic multiple ATs and powersets would have to use at that level.

As you said, that's probably mostly due to Repel. Repel costs as much endurance to run as 3 toggles on a Melee character, and drains 1 Endurance every 0.5 seconds for enemies knocked away. If an enemy is close enough to be affected by multiple tics (or if they just don't get knocked away), they'll keep draining you at a rate of 2 points of endurance a second in addition to the cost just to keep the toggle on.

Repel should not be a power you keep on like Dispersion Bubble. You turn it on and off when absolutely necessary.

I have a Kinetics/Psy Defender and I can tell you it gets better. And with the nuke changes in Issue 24, you better believe I'll be Fulcrum Shift+Psychic Wail-ing my way through every mission. It's just that Kinetics can be a fragile set before you have all the powers or at least teammates to take advantage of some of the earlier powers, though.

You forgot:

Electric Melee
Electric Armor
Pain Domination
Earth Assault*
Electricity Assault*
Thugs

But still, that's only 14 sets in 7 years. About 2 a year.

Meanwhile, in the 11 months since Freedom launched, VIPs have gotten 4 free sets (5 if you count Darkness Manipulation for Blasters), with 2 more on the way.

And then 7 pay-for sets, with at least 2 more on beta right now, the sales of which are indirectly funding the production of MORE powersets.

I'm always scratching my head when people say "My $15 a month used to get me ALL new sets for free!" Well, yeah, but we only ever got 1 or 2 every three issues or so. Since Freedom, we've gotten 4 (or 5) free with the last 3 issues.

*I'll give you that these two sets might be debatable as "new" sets.

For clarity, I'm not claiming that Lifegiving Spores is some end hog. Far from it. Unslotted, it will effectively only cost 0.01 endurance a second if the caster stands in it, which is not going to make a dent in what players naturally recover per second (about 2.08 end per second with unslotted Stamina).

The thing that bothers me is that it's a toggle that costs endurance to grant endurance, and because it costs more endurance than it grants, the caster essentially doesn't get access to that bonus endurance. That leaves it as just a weak heal over time with an effectively small endurance cost for the caster. It's not horrible, but it's not that impressive either, which is why I said that I'd skip it if I had to (my current build plan includes it, but with only the single base slot). This is all while unslotted, by the way. A single slot of either EndRedux or EndMod and the power will give more endurance than it takes away. I'm just not sure slotting should be required to avoid a power making one of it's own buff values be effectively a negative value.

Toggles that cost endurance and grant endurance or recovery are very strange and, minus Lifegiving Spores and (I think) some bonus effects in the upcoming Bio Armor toggles, these kinds of powers typically have no endurance cost.

Obviously, as a team toggle it should have an endurance cost. With that said, I don't think it should be granting endurance. I think the +Endurance (possibly converted to +Recovery) should be moved in to one of the Click powers, and Lifegiving Spores should gain some other effect to replace the +Endurance. Perhaps add 25-30% +Recovery to Wild Growth (1% Endurance every 4 seconds is comparable to about 15% +Recovery, so I'd increase that to compensate for the reduced uptime of Wild Growth compared to Lifegiving Spores), reduce Wild Growth's +Regen to 50%, and then add another 50% +Regen to Lifegiving Spores.

How abooouuut...

Tanker-strength mods for self-Defense/Resistance powers
Dominator-strength mods for Controls
Self +ToHit/+Damage mods second only to Blasters and Scrappers
25%-33% stronger Ally Buffs and Foe Debuffs.
14% stronger Ally Heals

Meanwhile, Corruptors have:
Tiny bit more HP
Scourge
About 15% more damage without Scourge

So I mean...

>_>

Fire/Kinetics is better on a Corruptor, yes, but it's really a special case. You take an AT with a higher damage cap, give them a powerset that lets them hit that damage cap, and then give them an attack set with a secondary effect that Defenders can't be better at and well... you create a situation where the choice is easy to make.

The opposite would probably be... Rad/Sonic Defender? Better -Res and +Damage from both sets for the Defender.

True, but it's still strange.

Going back to my other example, let's say there was a toggle that granted 10% Defense to a team including the caster, but also cast an 11% -Defense on just the caster. Unslotted, it's a net -1% for the caster, but 10% everyone else.

You could slot it up to 15.6% Defense for the team, but the 11% -Defense (which we'll assume is unaffected by enhancements for simplicity) would still leave the caster with only 4.6% Defense.

It's not terrible, no, but should the caster have to slot just to get a non-negative net value from their own toggle's effect? That's what I have an issue with.

I mean, I know WHY... Support toggle end costs have to be balanced for more than the caster getting their benefit. But toggles that cost endurance and grant endurance and/or recovery are still weird to me. It'd be like a toggle that granted 10% Defense to a team, including the caster, but also cast an 11% -Defense on just the caster.