Twilight_Snow

I were trying to herd Artemis. However, I ran a little slow, and they threw caltrops as they ran after me. When I looked back, I saw a trail of caltrops. I kinda like the view. If the caltrops don't disappear, I can make a really long trail of caltrops.

For electric armor, it needs end drain and -recovery resistance. As a resistance set, it is susceptible to all kinds of secondary effects. It needs a bit more protection than resistance alone, as long as it is thematic.

For energy aura, the request for end drain and -recovery resistance is mostly for thematic reason in my opinion. As mentioned, attacks with such effects have an energy component for a lot of cases.

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Am I a [censored] for asking for both? Does that make /EA overpowered?


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Well, this is a question that the dev has to answer. From the improvements that the dev have proposed, I have the feeling that they are trying to keep the changes to a minimum. Basically, the main complaints about EA is the protection holes and the lack of survival tricks. So, they just patch a hole and give us a trick, which is a heal. In principle, players will now lack the main thrust for complaining.

It seems like changes for thematic reasons is just something extra beyond the minimum. For example, capping energy defense and end drain/-recovery resist don't really overpower the set, but on the other hand, they are also not something responsible for gimping the powerset.

A trail for foot acupuncture

I'm a little surprised with the proposed change to EA. I usually think that the dev consider concept/theme > balance. I'm surprised that they motivate the change talking about balance and protection holes.

I'm a little disappointed that a lot of the thematic suggestions(see section B in the first post) don't go through. Some of these suggestions are quite minor and players don't even need to respec or reslot their powers, and the suggestions are just thematic to energy aura.

The dev stands pretty firm not to give us psionic defense. I guess this is clear to us what they think energy is, i.e. energy as in sci-fi, and categorize mental energy as willpower. I'm ok either way, but probably some of the people here might be disappointed. I'm surprised that the dev bother with toxic, and sort of funny that the toxic resistance is added to energy protection, which doesn't seem to be related to toxic at all.

I'm not surprised with the dev playing with energy drain. If they want to add some tricks to the set, they need a click power. Since there are only 2 clicks in the set, if they don't want Tier 9, energy drain is the only choice. I'm surprised that they decided to add a heal. If I want to stick with the energy theme, I probably would propose an aoe damage debuff with a self damage buff for energy drain, which matches the energy theme and also no re-slotting is needed. But well, I welcome the heal if the dev think it is appropriate.

Nobody except dev have the statistics to do a thorough analysis, unless a person uses herostat to collect statistics over a long period of time. Most analysis that can be done by players is something like dps for example, neglecting secondary effects and utilities offered by the power set. Such analysis only provides an indication of the problem of a power set, and I believe most people who do such kind of analysis are aware of it.

There is a huge diversity in the character's build and playing style. Some are brutal brute, some are stealthy, some solo a lot, while others are team oriented. Each will have a different opinion on energy aura; and very often, players will have conflicting experience and opinions. I think it is good enough for everybody to express their own experience of energy aura and suggestions.

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I think we need an /EA Summary Thread for the /EA Summary Thread...
:S

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lol *I smiled* I'm sorry. I believe I can do a better job.

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Damage Mitigation = 1 - ((1-Resistance) * (0.5-Defense) / 0.5)


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This is the right formula. If you multiply it out, you'll get
2*Def + Res - 2*Def*Res

I believe FrostWeaver just use 2*Def + Res. It's not quite clear what she used in her table because there is probably a mistake in a couple numbers. 2*Def + Res is just adding up the mitigation. -2*Def*Res is needed because the resistance is not mitigating all the attacks, but only the attacks that go through your defense. The extra term will take that into account.

However, the correction is only a few percent at most for this case. So, it won't change the numbers in the table qualitatively.

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Is there a reason that you're giving numbers without any enhancements whatsoever? The Devs may not be balancing with IOs in mind, but they sure as hell are doing so with SOs in mind.


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Practically, enh should be taken into account. For this comparison for example, no end reduction enh in the powers, and no slotting in earth embrace don't really represent a realistic build. Unless it's low level, I don't remember playing a melee toon that I need to keep on resting.

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I haven't read this whole thread but after playing EA lately couldn't the fix be as simple as making Energy Drain more of a clone of Energy Absorption from the Ice Armor set? This would allow you to soft cap defenses easier but not make EA overpowered.


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The first post of the thread contains a summary of the suggestions. Most of the suggestions in this thread can be found in the first post. If you don't have time to go through the whole thread, the first post nearly tells you all you need. The suggestion to modify energy drain is B3 in the summary.

For brutes, EA is an existing power set. So, plausible suggestions are more limited. Proliferated EA probably can allow more radical changes. In this sense, modifying energy drain is actually not a bad idea because it doesn't involve deleting powers, but simply augmenting an existing power with extra abilities. You can refer to B3 in the first post, there are several possible ways to augment energy drain that can improve survival, it doesn't need to be like energy absorption.

As you can see from the several replies below your posts, this suggestion is not quite popular.

The suggestion to change to positional defense is in the summary(A1, the first entry), which is the first post of the thread. It's up to the dev. I believe the suggestion is not very likely to occur, because positional defense is related to dodging attacks, while typed defense is for deflecting attacks. Energy aura is more closely related to deflecting than dodging.

However, it would be nice if the problems that you and several others mentioned can be addressed: power designers can poke holes in typed-defense set easily, and the relative ease to optimize IO bonus for positional defense. As mentioned, these problems have more serious ramifications to energy aura than ice armor.

Actually, that was my birthday party. My birthday wish is to have my body wiggled by the blue stick.

We had a party last night, take a look at how happy we were.
Party photo 1
Party photo 2

Maybe try to keep the discussion on the issues and suggestions about EA. (not to FrostWeaver)

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and I keep telling people, EA is NOT BROKEN Yes, it could be improved, but that doesn't mean it's broken, there is a huge difference.

Broken is not being able to solo on heroic without inspirations or temp powers. broken is not being able to take a +1 boss without help or a +0 EB WITH inspirations and/or temps.


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Yeah, EA is not broken. But you've to know that people are not that strict about their wording. When people say that a powerset is broken/terrible/horrible/underperforming, you've to read the rest of the post to know what it means. Very often, a simple tuning is all it needs when people say something is broken.

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I disagree. The stealth has to go. It's counter-intuitive for a brute. Every other brute has a look-at-me aura except EA. Brutes are not stalkers. They need (fury) and want aggro (taunt in their attacks).


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What you think is in fact very understandable, although the people here tend to say no. You can take a look at my previous post in this thread about stealth on brute.

Regarding whether stealth clicks with the theme of a brute or not, my personal opinion is that stealth doesn't quite match a brute that rush, rush and rush. However, some people do like an alternate theme for their brutes, so it's probably not a good idea to remove it now(I think it's ok to remove it during power proliferation for other AT if the dev wants to).

I think the issue is that there isn't an option for people to choose whether you want to be stealthy or not. Apparently, you can skip energy cloak if you want, however you don't want to miss the defense from the cloak because it helps a lot for defense set. For dark armor in contrary, it's mainly a resistance set with various tricks, it's ok to skip cloak of darkness with minimal impact on survival. If there are enough people who hate energy cloak on a brute, my suggestion to the dev is to move the defense from energy cloak to entropy shield, such that people can skip the stealth if they want, while people who love the stealth can still keep their theme.

Another aspect that you want to aware of is that the stealth in EA brute is designed to be for combat. Energy cloak doesn't suppress your movement, while the stealth from power pool does. Also, the defense from the cloak is not suppressed during combat as well. During combat, the stealth radius is mostly suppressed. Therefore, if you're the one who start a battle, you should have the aggro. However, since energy aura does not have a taunt aura, you do have to work harder to draw aggro from either taunt or various attacks. It is probably more difficult for EA to get aggro if you're not the one to rush in first, but this is most likely owing to the lack of a taunt aura rather than the stealth.

I think stealth doesn't have that much impact on fury as you think. I think EA, as a whole package, is not designed to be an effective aggro magnet. I think something can be done regarding this aspect if EA is proliferated to tanker. For a brute, my suggestion is to move the defense a bit as mentioned above just to offer people an option.

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Honestly I do not think of EA as force fields. I think of it rather as becoming energy. Like you are only partiall physical and partially energy, so there is a chance the attack just passes through you. And I would put the psi defense in energy cloak. Kind of like they can't mess with your mind if they can't see you because you are an invisible only partially material phantasm.


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In my opinion, energy can be more broad. As you and Soul capacitor have mentioned, it's energy. Psionic is also a form of energy. This can open up a lot more possibilities in enhancing the set in several different ways.

Linking energy aura to force field is more like an observation of the current status of energy aura. It doesn't mean that energy aura should be close to force field conceptually, but the design of the current energy aura seems like to be quite related to force field. You might not like it, or you might not agree, but energy aura is like that right now.

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What about stealth buffing?

Does anyone advocate making the stealth from energy cloak stackable with stealth from the concealment pool? With a stealth IO that would give 1078 feet of stealth in PvP. Not enough to hide from an SR scrapper running focused senses and focused accuracy, but enough to hide from standard toons running focused accuracy or tactics.


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It's a valid suggestion, I think. I'm not sure if the dev wants energy aura to be that stealthy.

In fact, regarding stealth, some people don't like to be stealthy on a brute. I know that you like to stealth a lot, but there are some who don't. If I were to change something about energy cloak, I would take the defense out of energy cloak and put it in entropy shield. Then for people like you, you can still enjoy a stealth with no movement penalty. And for people who hate stealth, they can skip energy cloak since it no longer offers defense.

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Frostweaver, how do you rationalize Electric having Psy resistance when EA can't have Psy DEF? Basically, I'm trying to imply that if a set based on Electricity(read:Energy) can be rationalized to have Psy protection, certainly a set based on Energy can.


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I'm not Frost weaver.

For electric armor, the description for static armor says that "Static Shield can also help normalize your synaptic activity, granting you good resistance to Psionic Damage." You just have to cook up something to explain how entropy(most people suggest adding psionic defense to entropy shield) grants you psionic defense.

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Once again, thematics. Force fields are the name of the game for /ea, kind of a 'melee force field' set. On the whole, that implies kinetic manipulation (ie. stopping incoming damage on an atomic scale) fire excites molecules, energy passes molecular vibration from one molecule to another, cold slows molecular motion, s/l moves molecules directly. What does psi do? it screws up your brain with some kind of 'mind force' that has pretty much nothing to do with molecular motion or fields at all. Dark is the same way... it's not something physics has an explanation for, and energy aura is all about the 'spurious physics'. Also, every set has a hole, and I'm much happier with a psi hole for a brute than I would be with...say... a fire hole. And the lack of confuse and fear protection kind of go hand in hand with the whole weakness to non-spurious-physics thing.


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Just for some extra information, force field originally offered typed defense only, and didn't have psionic defense and toxic resistance. I bet players complained so much that the dev improved the bubbles later. Conceptually, force field was not intended to have psionic and toxic protection. I'm not surprised that energy aura is weak against psionic and toxic as I do think that the set is conceptually close to force field. And yeah, the lack of confuse and fear resistance also tells the same story.

But of coz, to bring the other side of the story here, as mentioned by other people, energy aura is also a set without much survivability tricks but have several holes. Other powersets are not like this.

You've to look at it both ways.

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But I went back and read the first post on all this thread and got kind of scared. People want to warp EA into something that it's not. If I logged on one day and found out that From Below, my EA brute that I made back in 2005, my first toon and first 50, with his 300 badges and hundreds of millions of infamy worth of IOs, could not cloak anymore, I would cry. So I don't want to see the set radically altered either. But a few perks here and there would be nice.


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In the first post, I already made it clear that it's simply a collection of the suggestions. If EA is going to be improved, the improvements should be only a small subset of the whole list.

This thread is quite different from other threads that consolidate issues. For AT or powerset issues thread, all confirmed and justified issues should be fixed. For a consolidated suggestions thread, it's not expected that the dev would accept all the suggestions, but just a small part of it. Nevertheless, the whole list is a concise summary of what have been suggested, which is a convenient resource for both players and dev.

For the energy cloak that you mentioned, it's included just because it is mentioned multiple times in other EA threads. It is quite unlikely that dev will delete this power. But such kind of suggestions might be possible when EA is proliferated.

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Why no psi defense?


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There are several aspects about this issue. Several of you are arguing from the point of view of survivability and balance.

You can also take a look at my previous post much higher up in this thread. It's from the point of view of powerset design. The post is only meant to present you a different angle of looking at psionic defense. Finally, it's up to you whether you think it should be included or not.

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The fiction of the game is a bit inconsistent concerning the hit point bar and damage resistance. In some cases, the HP bar represents a pool of points that must be depleted before the character is dead. In other cases it represents a threshold of pain tolerance that must be exceeded before the character is rendered unconscious. It serves double duty.


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I think you're relating hp to the "hp of the shield," rather than the hp of the person. I think overload has a +max hp because your body is overloaded, so you have a higher pain tolerance and can take more damage before you fall.

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Well it was my interptertation, your citation does not limit or null my interpretation. As its not quoted that your depiction of EA's +Max HP is true, i would still take it as Ablative Shielding; which would be the first one, 'The HP bar represents a pool of points that must be depleted before the character is dead'.


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The HP bar represents a pool of points of the character that must be depleted usually. After all, depleting the points make the character dead, not making the shield dead. Also, toxic resistance is usually associated with +max hp, so it's very likely that the +max hp is referring to the body, not the shield. But of coz, the quote is not clear about this, it just says a pool of points, but doesn't say the pool of points belong to what. So, you're free to interpret in any way that you like.

Technically, if the hp increase is referring to the hp of the shield, I suppose when the hp of the shield is gone, your shield is broken and the toggle or overload has to drop unfortunately. Also, the shield should +max hp together with a heal, because it doesn't make sense to have a newly activated shield but completely worn out initially.

I think the ablation of the shield that you're thinking about is better attributed to adding resistance, rather than adding hp.

Mace with EA is pretty and strong! You gotta try it out.

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+Max HP: Representing the Massive reinfocement of the shields, more the 'Ablative' nature of an overcharged Shield.


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There is a post from BaB recently about hp. It's not in the context of energy aura, but it talks about what hp means. I'll cite part of the post below.
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The fiction of the game is a bit inconsistent concerning the hit point bar and damage resistance. In some cases, the HP bar represents a pool of points that must be depleted before the character is dead. In other cases it represents a threshold of pain tolerance that must be exceeded before the character is rendered unconscious. It serves double duty.


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I think you're relating hp to the "hp of the shield," rather than the hp of the person. I think overload has a +max hp because your body is overloaded, so you have a higher pain tolerance and can take more damage before you fall.

For defense debuff, it is actually more common than you thought. For example, the gun shot from council and family has -def. Defense debuff is in fact common, and often comes as a secondary effect of mob's attacks. Usually, one or two defense debuffs are not noticeable, but they can stack up pretty quickly if you have the aggro.

It really depends on your playstyle and your team. Energy aura brutes are pretty stealthy, they have to make an effort to draw aggro. If you just play a stealthy brute, you most likely grab the aggro of a mob or two. In this case, you probably won't notice the debuff much. There are some people who do play an aggro brute, then all the little defense debuffs can be significant.

There is a good reason that super reflex has good resistance against defense debuff. Because the set is a one-trick pony. The defense debuff resistance and scaling resistance are added such that if the defense are going to be overcome, super reflex still have some tricks in its hand.

For energy aura, it is technically not a one-trick pony. The powerset has defense and passive resistance. And you can argue that stealth helps. I think it's not an unreasonable request for EA to have similar defense debuff resistance as SR. Because passive resistance is kinda small, and not every EA brute has a stealthy playstyle.

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I would say that if they want to sit down and fix the psi hole for invuln and fire as well as EA, I would be all for that. The sets that have a psi hole are given no advantage for their psi hole. But this is a game wide AT wide multiple set issue. Not a problem unique to the EA brute set.


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The hole against psi is the hole against psi. If you are going to complain about it for EA then you need to complain about it for invuln, fire, and ice as well.


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I don't really have a definite answer regarding the psionic weakness that EA has. But I'll give you several angles that you can look at, a couple of them are game-design related:

1. What kind of powers have psionic protection?

In CoX, the powers/powersets that are dark or mind related have some form of protection aginst psionic damage, for example dark armor and willpower. Otherwise, psionic damage is usually a weakness of living creatures with a brain(unless you're Philip J Fry).

However, this rule is not rigid. If you scroll up this thread quite a bit, I collected the powers that have psi protection. Powers like mineral armor and static shield have their own reason to give psi protection.

For energy aura, it is obvious that it is not dark or mind related. So, the problem is whether there is a good reason for certain power in EA to have psionic defense. Most people suggest to add psionic defense to entropy shield. I find this interesting because I don't know what it means exactly to have a shield of entropy around a body. Maybe it does give psionic defense. Maybe some people with science major can come here to tell us some interesting theory.

2. Thematic weakness of energy aura

The thematic weakness of energy aura is negative energy. There is (positive) energy vs negative energy thing in this game. In fact, you'll find that dark armor is slightly weaker in energy resistance.

In principle, energy theme does not exclude psionic energy. Maybe the overall design of the power set has a sci-fi feel, that's why psionic defense is excluded(this is just my subjective opinion). So, it really depends on the person you're asking whether psionic should be another thematic weakness of energy aura or not, provided the set already has one(or two, if you count toxic).

3. Powerset balance

I believe this is what most people are thinking about. There is nothing wrong to have a weakness in a power set. In fact, it is intended because this is a mmo game. If a toon is perfect, it won't need a team. So, the issue is not really about having a weakness, but if a set has a weakness, does it have certain strengths to make up for it?

The answer is subjective. You for example, think that all the different weaknesses are minor and EA as a whole is great. Some think that the strength does not justify the weaknesses. And it also depends strongly on what you fight, your playstyle and your friends. Therefore, you should expect various kinds of answers, ranging from EA is horrible all the way to EA is awesome.

One thing I'll like to mention is that when we talk about balance and strength vs weakness, we try just to talk about the powerset by itself. So, inspirations, IO set bonus, outside buffs and mitigation provided by your primary set are not included in the discussion. Including these things complicates the discussion as everybody is a bit different.

Another thing is that abilities like endurance management is only indirectly related to survivability. While endurance management is a strength of the set, it does not really make the set multi-faceted in terms of survivability. For example, when the mobs overcome your defense or hit your weakness, sucking part of their end away does not really help. This is the main reason why people like to suggest various tricks to supplement EA. Or simply patch up some of the weakness if it's not convenient to add the tricks, since adding tricks usually involves removing a power.

I think kinetic shield could have +movement speed, since +speed can be thematic with kinetic energy in some way. I don't see there should be a preference for fly speed though.

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But what I have noticed is that in my 2 years of playing my EA brute and respecing into three radically different build concepts is that at no point is the EA set really underpowered or unbalanced in PvE. My final build actually took the LRSF by storm, in fact.


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I'll give my opinion about the issues of EA, and at the same time explain the suggestions that we made.

1. There are several abilities that are thematic to energy aura but not included in the set. For example, energy defense can be self soft-capped, energy protection can give resistance against end drain and -recovery. Most of these things are really minor, but improve QoL and no good reason not to put them in. Please see section B in the first post for a more detailed list.

2. The secondary powerset of brute can be something like super reflex, which is a one-trick pony with well-rounded protection, or something like dark armor and fire armor, which are multi-faceted but have certain weakness. Energy aura is nearly a one-trick pony in terms of survivability but with several weakness in the defense. There is nothing wrong with having weakness, but other sets have tricks to help out with difficult situations.

That's why there are suggestions to increase the defense and patch the holes of EA, such that it can be more like super reflex. Or people suggest to add tricks like debuff aura or heals while keeping the defense holes to make EA a better multi-faceted set.

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Well seeing as you guys will never figure out that the devs are not going to fix EA because EA is not broken, I guess I will chime in with a dream modification.


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I believe most of us who post in this thread can solo relentless missions, routinely defeat EB and even AV. So, we're not really under-performing. The design of powersets in this game is pretty well done, no powersets are really broken. In the forum, gimpy, under-performing and broken are usually used loosely, and referring to comparison with other power sets.

Actually, end drain and -recovery is not just from the sappers. When we fight ring mistress from Carnies, they have mask of vitiation, which can drain endurance and debuff recovery, and hit you easily. Your toggles can drop easily while fighting them.