Trickshooter

If they weren't disappointed by Blasters having Melee attacks in May 2004, I don't know why they would now.

The Blaster one looks really interesting in how well-rounded it seems for Blaster needs. It reminds me a lot of how Ninjitsu is for Stalkers.

And now the Blaster Secondary just needs a set to go with Archery to round it all out (which will pave the way for a mild Trick Arrow revamp hint hint hint hiiiiiiiiint.... hint)!

Speaking of the Black Feathers, are we ever going to see a fix to their Unresistable -30% Resistance caused by the Nether Energy patch that their Nether Arrow drops?

I reported this in Beta. A single -2 Black Feather completely removed all my Elec Armor Brutes resistances within seconds.

Just straight animation time is actually not really a problem anymore. Trick Arrow has the fastest average animation time of all the support sets.

One of TA's main issues though is... how many of those fast animations have to be played firing arrows to reach a similar perfomance level of other sets that only have to use 1 or 2 powers. That's what tends to make TA feel slow.

For reference, fastest to slowest is:

Trick Arrow
Cold Domination
Kinetics
Poison
Force Fields
Time Manipulation
Sonic Resonance
Thermal Radiation
Storm Summoning
Pain Domination
Empathy
Nature Affinity
Dark Miasma
Radiation Emission
Darkness Affinity
Traps (because of Trip Mine and Time Bomb)

You'll notice that some of the really powerful sets are near the very bottom. Goes to show how much people will ignore how slow a set is if it gets the job done really well.

I'll forgive you if you forgive me for disagreeing with you.

The fact that it is considered late-blooming at all should be indicative of some kind of balance problem. Oil Slick Arrow and EMP Arrow are crutches holding up 7 other limping powers*.

*Maybe 6, Poison Gas Arrow isn't so bad, anymore.

By "later powers" I assume you mean Oil Slick Arrow and EMP Arrow. I doubt you would ever have to worry about either one getting nerfed in order to better the performance of the earlier powers.

The earlier powers perform poorly because they have poor values. Oil Slick Arrow and EMP Arrow perform well because they are well balanced. Believe me, if Oil Slick Arrow and EMP Arrow were in need of nerfs, so would many similar powers.

For reference, Oil Slick Arrow at 50 only does about ~100 points more damage over 15 seconds than Rain of Arrows does in 1 second. All at 3 times the recharge of Rain of Arrows. And EMP Arrow takes a 60 seconds longer to recharge than Controller AoE Holds, all for about 7.5 seconds longer Hold, and it comes with a penalty for the caster.

Again, no need to worry.

It's not about appeal, though; it's about performance. I don't like Radiation Emission, but I would never wander in to a thread like this and suggest it should get a buff that makes it more appealing to me, because I know it doesn't need one. The issue isn't how well it works, because I know it works well; I just don't enjoy it.

Meanwhile, I love Trick Arrow, but it is noticeably weaker than other support sets at offering support. If someone comes along and says,"Trick Arrow is crap and is useless," I will probably be one of the first to show up and defend Trick Arrow's pros. But that doesn't mean I pretend it has no cons, and if someone asks me what gives Trick Arrow a bad rap, I have a long list to read off to them.

From a business standpoint, this game makes money from the players' desire to roll alts. The drive to make more characters is a major part of what will make a player on a free account give their money to NCSoft. Powersets that are outliers create a problem for that business model.

A powerset that underperforms is a powerset that won't entice someone to roll an alt with that set, which is potentionally lost revenue.

Likewise, a powerset that overperforms is a powerset that will make similarly categoried sets feel less like they're worth playing. Again, that leads to NCSoft losing potential money.

You know what would probably be really interesting? If the Devs gave us a way to rate every set in-game (that way more than just forumites would take part), the results of which updated dynamically and was visible at character creation. The Devs would get to see which sets are considered good by most players, and players would get some kind of way to judge the performance of a set before they played it (outside of the numbers, which plenty of people love to make clear that they don't care for >_>).

Can't check straight from in-game. The powers info box comes up empty for Genetic Corruption.

Has this actually been tested? I only ask because in the Mids database (which should be up to date with the latest changes, but could be wrong, of course) the Sleep is flagged not to stack.

Foes are flagged as Autohit from what I can tell, but it also accepts Accuracy enhancements (don't know if it actually does in game, though).

For reference, this is what I see:

Base: 7.15 second Mag2 Sleep at 50 (66% Chance), -11.25% Damage(All)

Efficient: 7.15 second Mag2 Sleep at 50 (66% Chance), -11.25% Damage(All), +30% Regeneration

Offensive: 7.15 second Mag2 Sleep at 50 (85% Chance), -11.25% Damage(All)

Defensive: 7.15 second Mag2 Sleep at 50 (66% Chance), -14.96% Damage(All), Self +5.625% Resist(S/L/T), +7.5% Resist(F/C/E/N/P)

No offense, I love Trick Arrows as well, but I'd rather have a set that everyone could enjoy, instead of a set that makes me feel special because I'm one of the few that can make it to 50 without giving up in frustration.

Seriously, I was beginning to wonder if I'd had it wrong all these years because no one else was agreeing.

This is how it was described by one of the developers when we got the changes. People brought up how unintuitive it was, and were told that it was a limitation of the engine.

If you read the wiki, it also seems to agree:

"In PvE, a suppressed toggle will stop providing all buffs except mez protection. For example, a Force Field Defender is hit with a Rikti Mentalist's Mezmerize. The Defender is now sleeping and her Dispersion Bubble is no longer providing her with any defense. It is still providing mez protection and if the Defender is next hit with a Dominate she will not be held. In this situation, the Defender's teammates will still benefit from the defense and mez protection so long as they themselves remain un-mezzed."

If it doesn't work this way, then it was described to me (and several other people) wrong, and is documented on the wiki wrong, as well.

Now, after discussing it with someone else and really looking at Soothing Aura (the main issue it came up about), Soothing Aura might be exempt from this just because a Heal is not a continuing effect that can be "canceled" (like actual buffs) because it doesn't have a duration. But I don't know, testing will probably need to be done. >_>

Well, I'm not one of the devs, so I can't tell you WHY -Perception tends to come with only a tiny -ToHit debuff in powers. It's just an observation that when it comes to -Perception/-ToHit powers, Flash Arrow is pretty much in-line with what the devs have decided are appropriate debuff values.

Well, the issue I have with Glue Arrow is that it's actually a very poor debuff and what it does well, -Speed, already comes in potent amounts in another power. It's just too overshadowed by every other AoE -Recharge support set power.

Oh believe me, if I were a dev, there are soooo many things, especially in the legacy sets, that I'd love to go back and normalize or rebalance (especially between Defenders and Controllers).

You mean will debuff/damage toggles stop affecting mezzed enemies? No, they will continue to affect enemies.

Any toggle that negatively affects a foe will simply detoggle if the user is mezzed.

I can't think of any example that would suggest that the devs can pick and choose which toggles are affected by the Issue 13 changes. As far as I'm aware, the fact that it's a toggle means that this is how it will work.

Buff effects on the Blaster from his teammates' toggles will do nothing while he is stunned, yes. This was an unavoidable side effect of the toggle changes in Issue 13 that gave us toggle suppression.

Ally-affecting toggles suppress all their effects except mez protection on you if you get mezzed, even if you are not the source of the toggle.

For example, say you have a Forcefield Mastermind running Dispersion Bubble and he has three pets out.

A enemy casts an AoE Sleep on the MM and his pets. The Mastermind is hit and falls asleep and so do two of his pets; the third pet avoids the attack.

Dispersion Bubble's +Defense is suppressed on the Mastermind and his two sleeping pets, but not on the third pet that is still awake. Meanwhile, Dispersion Bubble's +Protection(Hold,Stun,Immob) does not get suppressed because it is Mez Protection, so if the enemy now casts an AoE Hold, neither the MM nor his 3 pets will be affected by it as long as they're within the Dispersion Bubble AoE, even though the MM, the source of the bubble, is asleep.

The discussion started about Corruptors' Soothing Aura benefitting from Field Medic, while Masterminds' Suppress Pain wouldn't, and whether this was a balance issue or not (my point being that Suppress Pain is already superior to Soothing Aura, so I don't think it's a big deal).

I'm well aware of the mechanics of Sleep; I'm not debating that. I'm saying that with the way toggle suppression works...

When someone gets mezzed, all toggles' effects on them are suppressed except Mez Protection even if they themselves are not the caster of the toggle. Which means that if a Mastermind's pets are asleep, the heal ticks from Soothing Aura, a toggle, will be suppressed for those pets.

This is because Entropic Aura has it's +Recharge, -Recharge, and Taunt effects tagged "StealthOn", and Energy Cloak has a -100% Chance to effects tagged "StealthOn" effect for as long as you're not attacking, being attacked, or clicking on glowies.

The idea was that when you wanted to be stealthy, Entropic Aura would not alert enemies.

I haven't tested myself, but I've been told it doesn't work, not even on Scrappers (Brutes are unreliable at testing it since one of the Fury powers alerts enemies to your presence, anyway).

Last I was aware (and admittedly, I haven't tested in awhile), toggle suppression affects the person mezzed, not necessarily the person using the toggle.

By that I mean that even if Mastermind's had Soothing Aura, I don't think the heals would tick on them if they were sleeping, even if the Mastermind was awake.

On yourself? Only if you're lucky enough to get a heal tick out as you fall asleep. Both auras' effects are surpressed by mezzing. If you mean on allies, I don't consider that some kind of real benefit since both powers are in a set with several heals and ally mez protection, anyway.

What I meant was in their main effects. +200% Regen on a Corruptor with no MaxHP buffs is equivalent to about ~13.39 HP/s, while Soothing Aura is about ~11.04 HP/s. And that's just on the Corruptor itself.

Because a regen tick is always 5% of a character's current maximum hit points, regen buffs effectively get more potent with higher amounts of max HP (i.e., a player with higher current MaxHP will regen more Hitpoints during their regen ticks than a player with lower current MaxHP, even if they have the same regeneration rate).

So for any AT being affected with the +200% Regen that has more HP than the Corruptor, the buff will only increase in the amount of HP/s it's equivalent to.

In fact, the only AT that gets less out of +200% Regen than the Heal of a Corruptor's Soothing Aura is... the Mastermind, and even then they only need about 12% in MaxHP buffs to get to the point where the Regen beats the Heal.