Umbral

From a DM/* perspective, it looks rather solid with a couple problems. You don't have the recharge in MG to get the high recharge attack string, and you've put a bit too much recharge emphasis on Siphon Life. Siphon Life is the least recharge intensive power you've got honestly so you could pull a slot out of it without much loss of effect.

Other than that, it looks like you've got way overkill on endurance. Assuming you meant to get the other passive accolades, you'd have 4.79 end/sec recovery, .9 end/sec passive drain, and, assuming you managed to get the +rech to attain the high recharge attack string, only 3.59 active drain (Hasten included). Without ever touching Conserve Power or Dark Consumption, you'd have a .3 end/sec endurance surplus. You could easily sacrifice some of your +end and +recov set bonuses for more defensive bonuses since you're not really packing much in the way of it. Also, though you've very nearly got Dull Pain perma (you've only got 3 seconds of downtime, including animation time), you're packing way more +hp than you should need. You can easily do without most the +hp set bonuses (assuming you were aiming for all of the passive accolades).

At the very least, I'd get rid of Conserve Power and many of the +hp, +recov, and +end set bonuses in favor of more +def (which you're pretty low on). At the most, I'd do this:

With saturated Invinc, it's softcapped to s/l/f/c, only 3.1% from softcap on n/e, can run the MG>Smite>Siphon>Smite attack string, perma-DP with the hp cap, and 52.7 hp/sec damage recovery discounting the DP heal. With FA on and saturated DC, it's endurance sustainable. With a single target, it's sustainable without FA on. My only problem with it is that it doesn't have Shadow Maul, which means that, though it excels when there are multiple targets around, it isn't really capable of mowing through them, but that's something I can live with.

Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.601
http://www.cohplanner.com/

Click this DataLink to open the build!

Level 50 Natural Scrapper
Primary Power Set: Dark Melee
Secondary Power Set: Invulnerability
Power Pool: Leaping
Power Pool: Fitness
Power Pool: Speed
Power Pool: Fighting
Ancillary Pool: Body Mastery

Hero Profile:
Level 1: Smite -- KntkC'bat-Acc/Dmg(A), KntkC'bat-Dmg/EndRdx(3), KntkC'bat-Dmg/Rchg(3), KntkC'bat-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(5), C'ngImp-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(5)
Level 1: Resist Physical Damage -- Aegis-ResDam(A), Aegis-ResDam/EndRdx(7), Aegis-ResDam/Rchg(9)
Level 2: Temp Invulnerability -- S'fstPrt-ResDam/Def+(A), RctvArm-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg(7), RctvArm-ResDam(9), RctvArm-ResDam/EndRdx(13)
Level 4: Dull Pain -- Dct'dW-EndRdx/Rchg(A), Dct'dW-Heal/Rchg(17), Dct'dW-Heal/EndRdx/Rchg(17), Dct'dW-Heal(19), Dct'dW-Rchg(19)
Level 6: Combat Jumping -- LkGmblr-Rchg+(A), Zephyr-Travel(13), LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx(15), Zephyr-Travel/EndRdx(34)
Level 8: Siphon Life -- KntkC'bat-Acc/Dmg(A), KntkC'bat-Dmg/EndRdx(34), KntkC'bat-Dmg/Rchg(34), KntkC'bat-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(36), Theft-Acc/Heal(36), Theft-Acc/EndRdx/Heal(39)
Level 10: Resist Elements -- Aegis-ResDam(A), Aegis-ResDam/EndRdx(11), Aegis-ResDam/Rchg(11)
Level 12: Swift -- Run-I(A)
Level 14: Super Jump -- Zephyr-Travel(A), Zephyr-Travel/EndRdx(15), Zephyr-ResKB(37)
Level 16: Unyielding -- RctvArm-ResDam(A), RctvArm-ResDam/EndRdx(31), RctvArm-ResDam/Rchg(36), RctvArm-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg(37)
Level 18: Health -- RgnTis-Regen+(A)
Level 20: Stamina -- P'Shift-End%(A), P'Shift-EndMod(21), EndMod-I(21)
Level 22: Dark Consumption -- Oblit-Dmg(A), Oblit-Acc/Rchg(23), Oblit-Dmg/Rchg(23), Oblit-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(33), Oblit-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(33), Oblit-%Dam(33)
Level 24: Resist Energies -- Aegis-ResDam(A), Aegis-ResDam/EndRdx(25), Aegis-ResDam/Rchg(25)
Level 26: Soul Drain -- Armgdn-Dmg/Rchg(A), Armgdn-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(27), Armgdn-Acc/Rchg(27), Armgdn-Dmg/EndRdx(29), Armgdn-Dam%(29)
Level 28: Invincibility -- LkGmblr-Rchg+(A), LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx(39), GftotA-Def(39), GftotA-Def/EndRdx(43)
Level 30: Hasten -- RechRdx-I(A), RechRdx-I(31), RechRdx-I(31)
Level 32: Midnight Grasp -- Hectmb-Dmg/Rchg(A), RechRdx-I(37), Hectmb-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(40), Hectmb-Acc/Rchg(40), Hectmb-Dmg/EndRdx(40), Hectmb-Dam%(42)
Level 35: Tough Hide -- LkGmblr-Rchg+(A), LkGmblr-Def(42), GftotA-Def(42), GftotA-Run+(43)
Level 38: Boxing -- Empty(A)
Level 41: Focused Accuracy -- AdjTgt-ToHit(A), AdjTgt-ToHit/Rchg(43), AdjTgt-ToHit/EndRdx/Rchg(45), AdjTgt-EndRdx/Rchg(45), AdjTgt-ToHit/EndRdx(45)
Level 44: Physical Perfection -- P'Shift-End%(A), P'Shift-EndMod(46), Numna-Regen/Rcvry+(46), Mrcl-Rcvry+(46)
Level 47: Tough -- RctvArm-ResDam(A), RctvArm-ResDam/EndRdx(48), RctvArm-ResDam/Rchg(48), RctvArm-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg(48)
Level 49: Weave -- LkGmblr-Rchg+(A), LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx(50), GftotA-Def(50), GftotA-Def/EndRdx(50)
------------
Level 1: Brawl -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Sprint -- Empty(A)
Level 2: Rest -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Critical Hit

That guide is bad. No insult intended to Joe, but bad.

Here's all the guide you need:

For clarification, the high recharge attack string is MG>Smite>Siphon>Smite and the low recharge attack string is MG>Smite>SP>Siphon>Smite>SP.

Shadow Punch: For a cheap build, you need it to fill in your attack string. For an expensive, high recharge one, you don't. With SOs, 1-2 acc, 3 dam, possibly 1-2 end redux depending on how much you need it. For IOs, 6 piece Touch of Death. No recharge is needed because it already recharges fast enough for the low recharge attack string.

Smite: Get it, love it, slot it. 1-2 acc, 3 dam, 1-2 recharge or 6 piece Touch of Death. It'll be the most used attack you've got. You'll want to get enough +rech to be able to use it every 2.112 seconds (the animation time of the shortest interval between uses in the optimal attack string; i.e. Siphon Life's animation time), which is 185% +rech. If you're going for SOs (and thereby the low recharge attack string), that pretty much means you're gonna need ~90% for a seamless attack string, which you're not gonna get with SOs. 1-2 rech IOs will get it for you when Hasten is up though.

Shadow Maul: If you don't bother getting good with Shadow Maul, you're never going to have fun with DM because you'll be killing mobs too slowly. However, you gotta give up something when you're building a toon and Shadow Maul can easily get put on the chopping block. Take it if you've got the power choice, but don't take it otherwise. I generally skip it on cheap builds because I use the power pick for Shadow Punch. 1-2 acc, 3 dam, 0-2 rech, 0-2 end redux or 6 piece Obliteration. For the truly expensive, 5 piece Armageddon.

Touch of Fear: It used to be fun but the amount of damage this power does to your DPS means that you're pretty much going to want to ignore it. You may feel comfortable using it as a set mule (re: power you never use but slot up anyway because you like the set bonuses) or as a rarely used utility power for when you're in danger, but it's going to hurt your DPS bad, which is why you became a Scrapper. For SOs, 1 acc, 0-3 tohit (the fear is crazy stackable with the natural duration). For IOs, 5 piece Glimpse, 5 piece Dampened Spirits, 4 piece Dark Watcher's, or 4/6 piece Cloud Senses.

Siphon Life: No longer that horrible attack that barely healed. Now it's a full on facebeater that still heals rather horribly. Don't use it as a heal. Use it as one of your primary attacks (as you can see from the attack strings I gave you). There is some debate as to whether you're going to want to slot up the healing portion, but, considering you're DM/Regen and you've got damage recovery coming out of your nose, the loss of an extra 10 hp/sec isn't really gonna hurt you at all. 1-2 acc, 3 dam, 1-2 rech or 6 piece Touch of Death (seems to be rather common slotting, yes?).

Confront: Just... don't. It's like Touch of Death for people that want to play pseudo-tank rather than pseudo-controller. It'll pretty much be a set mule, which is nice because it's a wonderful set mule if you've got the slots and power pick to spare. I wouldn't take it, but if you did, 6 piece Mocking Beratement and 4 piece Perfect Zinger are gold.

Dark Consumption: Wonderful power. Just wonderful. If you're smart with it, it can allow you to get away without Stamina for a good long while. The important thing to remember is that it's not an attack and there's no real point in enhancing anything but recharge and a little bit of acc because a lot of the +end is gonna be redundant anyway, unless you're aiming for a specific set. 0-1 acc and 3 rech or 6 piece Obliteration.

Soul Drain: It's just as wonderful as Dark Consumption and has pretty much the same slotting mentality. The damage is pitiful, but you want it up a lot and you want it to hit because, in order to give you happiness, it's gotta hit the target. 0-1 acc and 3 rech or 6 piece Obliteration.

Midnight Grasp: MG is your hard hitting wonder. It's incredible. Don't bother slotting the immob because you've got better things to enhance it for, like damage, accuracy, and the all important recharge. For the high recharge attack string, you're gonna want to get all the recharge you can because MG wants it bad (235% +rech required). For the low recharge string, it's still pretty demanding (127% +rech required). 1-2 acc, 2-3 dam, 2 recharge or 6 piece Mako's Bite. The expensive, optimal slotting would be 5 piece Hecatomb because it's packing so much delicious +rech enhancement.

Fast Healing: You have to take it. That's all there is to it. Don't slot it up much unless you've got slots to spare. Give it an SO to keep it company or, if you don't have the space elsewhere, throw in a proc IO. The optimal IO slotting changes a lot depending on what else you're packing. In general, it'll just get a single heal.

Reconstruction: Get it, love it, learn to use it. Only 2 things matter where Recon is concerned: Healing and Recharge. Rech is probably more important in the beginning, but the important tapers off in the end. For SOs, 3 rech, 3 heal. For IOs, 5 piece Doctored Wounds or 5 piece Panacea. Panacea will give you better set bonuses, but, thanks to its less useful enhancement values, Doctored Wounds is still top in my book.

Quick Recovery: Get it, love it, learn to not run out of endurance. For SOs, slot it up for end mod until you get to the red zone (i.e. 3 End Mod). The Perf Shifter proc will also be your friend and, thanks to set bonuses, the opinion on optimal slotting with IOs shifts rather often. I prefer Perf Shifter proc, Perf Shifter End Mod, and a level 50 common IO. Others with more slots to throw around prefer 4 piece Perf Shifter (all but Acc/Rech and the triple).

Dull Pain: Wonderful. Depending on how you use it, it's either a heal with a functional +regen buff or a functional +regen buff with a heal. Either way, you want it up as often as possible. The healing is your first priority though because it'll heal you for more and give you more hit points. For SOs, 3 heal, 3 recharge. For IOs, either 5 piece Doctored Wounds or 5 piece Panacea, same arguments for either as with Reconstruction.

Integration: If you don't take it, you deserve to be slapped upside the head. You should already have endurance coming out of your nose thanks to DC and QR, so slotting down it's already low end cost is rather pointless. For SOs, 3 healing is all it needs. For IOs, you'll want to get its healing enhancement high and, otherwise, use it like Fast Healing for heal set procs.

Resilience: It's great for one thing and one thing only: holding on to your +def IOs. On an SO build, don't even bother because the resistance is so low its not even worth slotting up. On an IO build, your best bet is to just take it at a level where you've got nothing better to pick (like that level 49 power selection) and put the +def IOs (steadfast protection and gladiator's armor) into it. It's kinda like Fast Healing but for resistance instead of regen.

Instant Healing: Not nearly as good as it used to be. Only a pittance (re: 25%) of its +regen is enhanceable, so most healing enhancement is lost on it. For SOs, 3 recharge. For IOs, 5 piece Doctored Wounds or 5 piece Panacea, same argument as came from Reconstruction (strange how there is so much identical slotting, yes?).

Revive: It's an awaken on a 5 minute recharge. I wouldn't ever bother taking it, especially since, if you use it when there are enemies nearby, you're like to die as you're standing up. It's by far the weakest of the self-rez powers in the game. If you take it and slot it, there's no help for you. At most, all it needs is a single rech.

Moment of Glory: Honestly, my favorite power in the set. 15 seconds of sheer unkillability on a 4 minute timer. Because the resistance and defense values are so high, all that matters is getting the recharge down. For SOs, 3 rech. For IOs, LotG +rech, LotG Def/Rech, and 2 level 50 common Rech IOs. The only problem with the power is the long animation time which inhibits the twitch use of the power (which is pretty much how */regen is forced to play thanks to being largely click dependent) thanks to animation time delay and the fact that a decent portion of the effect (~1 sec) is eaten by finishing the animation.

Where pool powers are concerned, there are 5 that are important:

Fitness: You can do without it for a while thanks to QR and Dark Consumption, and some builds can do without it completely, but it's still nice to have. Don't take it asap, seeing as you shouldn't have any endurance woes until you get some toggles and expensive attacks beneath your belt. The start working on it is your 30s and so that I generally get Stamina immediately before or after Focused Accuracy (i.e. 42 or 45).

Fighting: Tough is wonderful because it functionally multiplies your regeneration against those damage types. Weave is even better because it operates against all damage types and can accept LotG +rech IOs, except that, because it's +def, it doesn't work unless you've got a decent bit of it. Don't bother getting Weave unless the build is packing at least 15% +def. Boxing and Kick are bother pointless and should only be slotted if you're planning on turning them into set mules (5 piece Absolute Amazement and 5/6 piece Stupefy are quite excellent for Boxing if you've got the slots to throw around).

Leaping: Combat Jumping is cheap effective defense and provides a simple spot for the LotG +rech IO and the BotZ set. Super Jump is a great travel power. Acrobatic is pointless. That's all you need to know.

Leadership: Maneuvers is wonderful, Tactics is great, Assault is only worth a single slot (and barely worth the pick at all imo) and Vengeance isn't really a power worth picking thanks to Scrappers' pitiful ranged buff modifiers.

Speed: Seeing as +rech is your god (you live off of click powers), Hasten is, at the very least, your patron saint. Super Speed is nice too, because it's a great spot for a BotZ and it's a fast mover. Whirlwind is completely ignorable.

My default power pools are Leaping, Speed, Fitness, and Fighting.

If the set were ever reviewed to such an extent, I would probably expect Dragon's Tail to be changed to knockup rather than low mag knockback.

I never insinuated that, at creation, the set was balanced around Rage. I said that is is (as in currently), balanced around Rage. SS is balanced at the moment because, even though it has Rage and KO Blow, the rest of its attacks blow.

That's the beauty of heuristic balancing mechanisms, yes?

I'd be curious to see why you think SS isn't balanced around at least the potential for perma-Rage, considering that the recharge is low enough to be perma at SO levels. Plus, though I admit I haven't done a slew of analysis for Super Strength (the doesn't really have more than a cursory interest for me), I've always found it to be rather well balanced, if only because, though it has some that are incredibly powerful, everything else could easily be considered trash.

All attacks (except for a few, such as Claws) follow the damage formula. Castle is supposed to be working on tweaks for it to account for DPA, which is the substantially more important variable where balance is actually concerned. The balance of Super Strength with Rage was actually a lucky heuristic balance generation because the basic attacks that fill up so much of SS's attack string thanks to the long recharges on the good attacks have such horrible DPAs. It has nothing really to do with the formulas. It has everything to do with the abysmal animation times of so many of the attacks.

The loss of 11.22 seconds (animation time + downtime) every 120 seconds would result in an average loss of 9.35% DPS, giving an average result, from your numbers, of 211 DPS. What you're forgetting, however, is the additional benefit netted from having the additional 20% +tohit at all times.

[quote]Now...to even obtain that DPS you have to IO out, much like the other high DPS builds.

I don't see how that's over powered, when other sets get that high as well.

MA being the set all about single target attacks is highly debatable. DM has a much stronger focus on single target attacks thanks to the lack of a real AoE (Shadow Maul isn't anywhere near the same level of AoE capability as a real AoE and neither SD or DC recharge fast enough or deal enough damage to generate real, consistent AoE functionality). MA actually has Dragon's Tail, which is a fully functional AoE.

That's because it already has the additional benefit of higher natural accuracy as well as additional control capabilities (albeit disparate ones).

You Soul Drain calculations are ignoring one very important variable though: recharge. With a similar level of +rech (225% total +rech, 130% global, 95% slotting), Soul Drain has a downtime of 9.468 seconds. With a 30 second effect, that's 76% uptime. Rage is permanent with SOs (and, thanks to the crash, actually generates roughly consistent benefit even with recharge increased past perma). Assuming that the additional damage that Soul Drain provides balances out the significant loss of animation time (2.508 seconds every 39.468 seconds would be a 6% loss of animation time, which is pretty intense considering the piss poor DPA on Soul Drain; especially when you consider that Rage only has to be used once every 2 minutes), the numbers would actually be more like this:

1 target: 38% +dam from SD, 178.5 DPS
3 targets: 60.8% +dam from SD, 195.4 DPS
5 targets: 76% +dam from SD, 206.86 DPS
7 targets: 91.2% +dam from SD, 218.51 DPS

Using the more accurate calculations that factor in the inhibiting factors, you'd make MA, which is already better at AoE than DM, better at ST than DM for all conditions except for when DM consistently hits 6 or more targets with Soul Drain and even better at AoE damage (thanks to your changes making Dragon's Tail even stronger as well). It wouldn't make the set balanced in the least. It would make the set stronger than the existing sets. DM and Fire only manage DPS in the 230 range thanks to procs, which the listed MA attack string actually gets greater benefits out of thanks to lower animation times. What you suggest would allow an MA/Shield with saturated AAO, assuming 100% chance to hit and 2 Heca and 2 Mako's procs per attack string, to generate more than 250 DPS (~283 DPS by my calculations, it was 313 before the Rage crash was factored in) and that would not be balanced.

First off, you quoted my line concerning ignoring Blasters within the confines of the numbers I gave and my commentary was directly in reference to what I quoted of yours. I ignored the use of Blaster pseudo-god modes within the context of the others specifically because they start from such a comparatively low point and require different slotting (re: they actually get benefit from slotting their pseudo-god mode)

You're also assuming that the Blaster has fully enhanced the resistance of Surge of Power, something that none of the others has any need to do. The assumption is the same slotting across all entities, and there is no benefit to slotting +res in the tier 9 for the PB, Invuln, or Elec Armor so I operated under the assumption of the Blaster using identical slotting.

Bringing up the use of the painfully anemic Blaster god modes (12% base uptime 35% average res) in a discussion of real god modes (18% base uptime, ~50+% average res) is out of place anyway. Surge of Power and Force of Nature get nowhere near the level of effectiveness of a real tier 9, even when you stack up other potential sources of resistance, and, thanks to their lower numbers, require completely different slotting than real ones in order to be effective.

Click your powers tab and look in the top left of it. You should be able to see "Combat Attributes" in the top left of the tab. Click that. You'll then get the entire Combat Modifiers window brought up (with all of the values within a nested menu to make navigation simpler, of course). Simply right click the variable you want to see at all times and press "m" (or select the "monitor attribute" option). If you ever don't want to monitor that variable any more, just right click the variable in the new window that shows up (which can be moved around as you wish), and choose the "don't monitor" option.

And then the set would be insanely overpowered. Just... no. Absolutely not. If you even begin to look at SS, you'd see that all of the attacks are balanced around the presence of Rage. Jab and Punch have pitiful DPA. Haymaker is better, but still mediocre. KO Blow is the only truly decent ST attack in the entire set, but it's crippled by the fact that it's on a 25 second recharge. The presence of Rage forces every attack within the set to be made worse to make up for it. Changing Focus Chi to be similar would demand that all of the powers within the set have their damage reworked to make up for the new ability to have BU active for 90% of the time.

I said that because I was excluding them from the comparison simply because they're going to be last no matter what because they just don't have nearly as much survivability anyway. The only one of the 4 mentioned individuals that gets more from the tier 9 equivalent than the Blaster is the PB because the PB goes from middling to capped and has a higher cap than any of the others. Of course, unlike the other 3 mentioned, the Blaster has to enhance the resistance of its tier 9 equivalent, which makes it a bit worse off.

Considering what it would take (i.e. rewriting every power to have a special addendum specifically for Focus Chi), I doubt it would ever happen.

Honestly, MA doesn't need more "real attacks". It's already suffering from the fact that it has 5 ST attacks whereas every other set except for Spines (AoE focus leaves it with 3 ST) and Fire (sacrifices the support power for an additional ST) has 4 (functionally; I count HS and GD as ST because they follow the ST damage formula as opposed to AoE). I might work to make the power a more effective support power, potentially giving it some kind of -res effect or other debuff, but making it a more powerful attack wouldn't really do much to performance considering it's rather redundant to give an attack to a set that is already using up its animation time on it's current slew of decent attacks already (unless you plan on making it better than the normal attacks).

When the tier 9 is activated, all of the sets you mentioned (except for the Blaster) attain their damage caps with all/most of the damage types (the damage types that aren't capped are generally rare enough that they would be functionally ignored by averaged resistance calculation). Without the tier 9, assuming SOs, Elec Armor has the most resists (41% s/l/f/c/p, 75% e, 35.1% n), Invuln is a close second (52.7% s/l, 23.4% f/c/n/e), and PBs are last (35.1% s/l/f/c/n/e). I'm ignoring Blasters simply because they are barely better than pre-Light Form PBs when Surge of Power is up.

Because Elec Armor starts at the the top (and because they're all presumably balanced, every other set attains the same survivability with the lower resistance through other means), it gets the least comparative benefit of all of the sets and therefore is the least survivable with the tier 9 active.

I'd actually recommend that all non-IO Elec's skip it. Any IO'd build would benefit greatly from taking it, if only to use it for the ability to slot the hold purp (which is actually quite good for the power itself, since it's packing impressive +rech).

Having played it, I've found the psy protection to not be all that impressive, but, of course, the other melees I play a lot are */regen (lol damage type), */wp, and DA/*. Of all of them, the Elec/* definitely feels a lot squishier against psy than any of those other characters.

Of course, the one portion of Elec Armor's survivability you ignore is the end drain. While it's not going to make a major difference in a fight against a single hard target, I've found it helps enormously when fighting hoards of enemies, especially if you slot Lightning Field and Power Sink for End Mod. Of course, then you get into the issue of how effective end drain actually is, but it's still some degree of diversified survivability, giving Elec Armor the benefit of 3 different survivability mechanisms: damage recovery (+regen, self heal), resistance, and end drain. Then again, Invuln is packing a similar number (+hp/self heal, resistance, defense) and probably to better effect from a survivability standpoint, but I don't think any powerset quite compares to the sheer endurance assistance that Elec Armor provides (except maybe Energy Aura).

When leveling both of my defenders, I oftentimes had teammates assuming I was a Dark/* defender rather than what I really was simply because of my name. Of course, I don't think any of them really cared once they saw just how unkillable I made them anyway, so it was kind of a moot point. Even so, all of my characters still have their powersets listed as the first item on their LFT.

That's because Cobra Strike isn't an attack. It's a control power that does a small amount of additional damage. There is actually a completely different formula used to calculate the endurance costs and recharges of control powers, which is what Cobra Strike gets to deal with.

Which is, in itself, a flawed premise, when you consider that there is only a single power that increases smashing/lethal resistance (Charged Armor) and a single power that increases fire/cold resistance (Conductive Shield). By the same logic presented there, the smash/lethal and fire/cold resistances shouldn't be included in the tier 9 because they only exist in a single power within the confines of the set.

As it is, having played with the power on my Elec/Stone Tanker, I'm not as enthralled with it as I was when I first got it. The power is only slightly more useful than Elude on an */SR simply because you're adding more resistance to an already resistance heavy set: most of the +res is redundant and the comparative improvement in survivability isn't nearly as impressive as you would hope. It would be a lot more useful as a +def power than as a +res power considering how singularly focused the set is otherwise.

Dark Melee is only the best ST damage set because of Soul Drain having such a high potential uptime ratio as compared to Build Up. Where the DPA of the various powers is concerned, MA is actually quite good, especially considering the sheer awesomeness of Storm Kick. The problem exists insofar as MA lacks the endgame potential of the other ST damage sets (re: Claws/DB have FU, DM has Soul Drain, BS/Kat/Claws/DB have Achilles' Heel, Fire is just pure facebeatery), the best attack chains for MA require the repeated use of a KB power (which inhibits ST damage considerably unless you've got a wall to back them up against), and MA only has a single standard strength sphere PbAoE (re: the standard allotment is a sphere and a cone).

Looking at the numbers, I wouldn't be completely against some kind of improvements to MA. The AoE issue wouldn't be particularly easy to solve since the devs have shown a certain recalcitrance to changing the IO set category of a power, which precludes simply changing one of the other powers into a cone (most likely Thunder Kick or Crane Kick) to address the AoE power discrepancy, and improving Dragon's Tail to the point where a single power is the AoE equivalent of multiple powers would probably be pretty problematic from a balance perspective.

Where ST damage is concerned, a reduction in Eagles Claw's animation time to such an extent that the power actually has a DPA that would make it useful (considering that tier 9 is supposed to be a capstone, not a largely redundant piece of flash) wouldn't be out of place (especially if they allowed BABs to do it by simply speeding up the "I'm hovering in the air while I get ready to kick you" part of the animation to make it look more natural). A blanket increase in crit rate would probably be a bit too strong, though, if base damage were reduced a bit to reduce the impact of the improvement slightly, it could work.

Of course, none of this really addresses the fact that MA doesn't even have a cohesive secondary effect. It's really just a grab bag of tricks that don't really work well together, and it's not really possible, without a complete redesign, to give the set one without either overpowering it or generating overlap with other preexisting sets.

That's just "lol, really?" worthy. Really? Scrappers have as much in common with Brutes from a design standpoint as they do with Tankers, especially since, from the design standpoint, they're actually more similar to Stalkers: they both operate as hard target killers (just look at the inherent) with defenses existing only to allow them to survive in the more dangerous melee position. Brutes are intended to be in the front gathering everything around themselves, just like Tankers, except that Brutes are doing it to allow themselves to deal more damage whereas Tankers are doing it to keep the hate off of everyone else.

Keep in mind that Stalkers also have Melee as their primary and Defense as their secondary, so you're not allowed to use that as a supporting argument, not to mention that Brutes share more sets with Tankers (all but 1 Brute primary and all but 2 secondary) than they do with Scrappers (5 out of 10 primaries and 2 out of 10 secondary) and Scrappers share more sets with Stalkers (all but 1 primary and all but 1 secondary) than they do with Brutes. If you actually look at the ATs beyond the cursory details (re: "I play my Brute and my Scrapper similarly so they're more closely related!"), then it's quite apparent where the actual similarities lie.

First off, this guy is an idiot. Getting more damage recovery when you're already packing boatloads of damage recovery won't do you as much as allowing your already substantial damage recovery to act upon a smaller pool of incoming damage. The comparative benefit of 5 more hp/sec when you're already recovering 100 hp/sec is paltry compared to the benefit you'd get from simply taking a what defense bonuses you can get and reducing your incoming damage by 20%.

Think of it this way: you've got 100 hp/sec damage recovery. You are given the option to either decrease your incoming damage by 10% (10% resistance or 5% defense) or increase your hp/sec by 10. The hp/sec option would allow you to survive 110 (100 + 10) hp/sec of incoming damage. The damage reduction option would allow you to survive 111.1 (100/.9) hp/sec of damage. The damage reduction option is actually better.

Now, the most important thing to realize from this is that, thanks to the IO set bonuses you've got available, it is a lot easier to get substantial damage reduction capabilities (in the form of +def set bonuses) than it is to get substantial damage recovery capabilities.

The first set bonuses you should aim for are +rech set bonuses. Once you've gotten as much of those as possible, you should get positional +def set bonuses, with more melee than ranged and more ranged than AoE. You can rather easily get ~20-30% defense to all three positions, which will amount to a 40-60% reduction in incoming damage which will do boatloads more than increasing your 60 hp/sec passive regen rate to 70 hp/sec.

This, right here, shows how little you actually know about it. It's not a question of when the pet is summoned. It's a question of the delay between when the call for the pet to be summoned is sent and when the pet is actually summoned. If there were a simple work around, the devs would already have addressed it, especially since they are professional coders that have actually looked into the issue (Pohsyb has actually commented on this exact issue a number of times as it applies to the other powers I mentioned and said the exact same thing).

The Transference and Transfusion problems have been around since the very beginning of the game and have been a major thorn in the side of anyone that actually uses those powers. The problem has a substantially larger effect upon those powers than the problem with Chain Induction summoning its additional jumps because, at the very least, Chain Induction gets to deal its damage: Transference and Transfusion don't get to get their primary function accomplished because the pseudo-pet is the primary function. If it hasn't been addressed in over 5 years for powers in which the problem completely eliminates the benefit of using said power, what makes you think that the presence of Chain Induction similarly having a problem with it is going to make the problem all the more important to solve?

Honestly, the fact that you honestly think that it's a simple solution while similarly admitting that you're not a professional coder like the people that have actually said that it's a rather complex issue to solve and have looked at the code itself repeatedly over the course of the life of this game makes wonder why you don't think you, yourself, are the one looking stupid. I'm going to refrain from simply calling you stupid or outright making a statement that calls out your lack of insight on the problem combined with a similar ignorance of your own inadequacies because the Mods have gotten onto me for doing that in the past, but I'm pretty sure the message still gets across.

The actual reason we have been told as to why Incinerate deals more damage than the other equal cost attacks is because of the method in which Castle has decided to balance out DoT attacks: any damage more than 3 seconds after the initial strike is considered "free". Incinerate gets an extra 27.5% damage because it takes 4.6 seconds as opposed to 3.6 seconds (the effect is initially applied .6 seconds after the power activates) to deal all of its damage. The additional 27.5% damage is then ignored by the damage formula in order to account for the lack of burst capability.

Honestly, as much as I tend to disagree with Stormfront on matters of game and set design, it could be possible to generate a set that operates heavily on the use of DoTs in order to apply the effects. I wouldn't make all of the damage completely DoT dependent, especially on an AT that counts on immediate damage for a large portion of its survivability, but allowing for 50% of the damage to be up front and the other 50% to be delayed over the next 6-10 seconds would allow for the greater damend and rech) ratio that would allow for greater overall DPS but lower burst damage capability while preserving the ability to inflict damage quickly enough to actually take out targets.

The biggest problem I'd still imagine would be a lack of thematic unity. With absolute diversity of damage types, you wouldn't really be able to generate a sensible theme without delving into something origin specific (re: Wand/Orb or Gadgets). It might make more sense if there was a primary damage type chosen for all of the powers and then a second damage type was picked for specific powers to flesh them out more fully, though I still wouldn't allow for the complete plethora of damage types to be accessed without some excellent comic book logic backing it up.

As for ideas to improve the set, beyond what critiques I've already given, it might be an interesting option to provide each power with an additional control/debuff effect that provides a small benefit based upon the presence of an existing DoT on that target. It would be similar to the combo system but different enough to maintain uniqueness while simultaneously providing the Blaster set with the ability to slightly prolong its lifespan through naturally occurring means so that it can actually capitalize on the additional benefits of the DoTs.

For example, power 1 deals however much extra damage over the next 6 seconds; power 2 deals a similar amount of extra damage over the next 10 seconds and, if used while the target is suffering from the extra damage of power 1, subjects the target to a 10 second -dam debuff; power 1 would only have its additional benefit when used while the target is suffering under the effects of power 3, which only grants the additional benefit while the target is under the effects of power 6, and so on.

It would generate natural attack strings within the set to capitalize upon the debuffs that the player finds most useful or tactically beneficial and, because of the simplicity of it (re: the powers only depend upon a single other power for the effect rather than a series of mode activation/deactivation as is done with Dual Blades), it would allow for interesting tactical manipulation of the benefits in question.

The only problem I can imagine is that I'm not entirely sure it's possible for powers to check for the presence of existing effects upon a target, but, I believe it might be possible, as seen with the Mystic Fortune buff.

First off, it's Dual Blades, not Duel Blades. Dual implies the use of two. Duel implies the use in a one-on-one confrontation.

Secondly, just because Dual Blades and Willpower were released simultaneously does not mean that they are matched powersets. Thematically, they have next to nothing in common except that they're both nominally "normal" powersets. You could just as easily claim that Katana and SR are matched primaries because they're similarly "normal" and were released simultaneously. If anything, they are theme neutral because they don't have a "partner" in the sense that Dark, Fire, Ice, Stone, Elec, and Energy do.

As to whether the devs intend the use of matched powersets, there is some evidence that it was originally intended as such (Dark/Dark is the biggest piece because of the sheer degree of synergy between them, Fire/Fire as well), though not as much elsewhere (Stone/Stone, Ice/Ice). Moving on to the newer sets, it's still debatable as to whether Elec/Elec has much synergy beyond the combined ability to drain endurance (which is more a demonstration of secondary benefit synergy than powerset design synergy), and it's hard to believe that Energy/Energy has much in the way of implied or real synergy.

Personally, I believe that the only real sets that were intended to be used together were Fire/Fire and Dark/Dark, which meshes with the logic that the Cryptic devs originally intended it that way (most likely out of an evolution of the older Champions inspired freeform system). None of the others really present a definable intended synergy that isn't just as well expressed with other powersets either in the original release form or the current form. Fire/Fire's only real spectacular synergy though is Fiery Embrace's greater effect upon Fire damage than every other damage type. Everything else is completely neutral. Dark/Dark is really the biggest outlier simply because it allows for stacked fears, the primary covers the secondary's high endurance costs, the secondary provides for the lower AoE damage of the primary, and a number of other noticeable synergistic benefits so it's probably the only real intended full matched set combination.

Do you even know why it does that? It's not something they specifically planned on occurring. It's an issue with the jump being a pseudo-pet that is summoned at the location of the target at the same time that damage is applied. Because of the delay in the pseudo-pet being summoned and the pseudo-pet arriving, if the target, which is also the conditional location target of the pseudo-pet, dies, then the pseudo-pet no longer has a location to be summoned to, causing the pseudo-pet effect to simply not occur. It's not as simple a fix as removing a line of code that forcibly inflicts the dead target prohibition.

It's for this same reason that if the target of Transfusion, Transference, or any of the numerous other targeted pseudo-pet summoning skills is killed before the pseudo-pet is actually summoned, the power fizzles. If it were as simple as telling the game to ignore whether the target is dead or not, all of those issues would already have been addressed.

If you don't know the actual root of the problem, please don't try to address the solution in a completely ignorant manner that assumes it's as easy as you blindly think it is.