docbuzzard

Umm, so? A storyline does not impact the design of the AT. I don't see how that could be any more clear. Yes, khelds were designed with an epic storyline. However, they were not a well designed AT. VEATs were designed with a crap storyline. They are a well designed AT.

Now yes, someone else might have used the term epic in a sense the devs didn't initially mean for khelds, but I'd say his meaning is closer to the truth when it came to VEATs.

I find it amusing that you compared them to controllers and defenders elsewhere since that's completely off base. Those are force multipliers. Khelds are not.

Also your general disdain for the VEATs is something I find odd. I would assume you know how they work, but then to dismiss them with nonsense like "taking the leadership pool on another AT is the same" is totally inane. That isn't even vaguely comparable, especially redside where no other AT has even defender levels of leadership, much less the VEAT powerset values.

Are they buffbots? I suppose that depends on how you define the term. My crab hands out the equivalent of fortitude to everyone within range, and yet blasts with the best of them. He also has status protection to match a tanker. I don't have to spend any effort buffing, and yet the team is greatly improved by my presence and I get to happily blast away. That's a fun AT to me.

Now I won't say he's the greatest soloist, but then I didn't make my build that way. The beauty of the VEAT builds is the amount of flexibility available. You can go in many different directions and make them effective.

No, people like the VEAT buff because it is a force multiplier(this is of course dependent on the VEAT actually taking the team buff powers, they are not actually inherent, their inherent is minuscule actually). It makes everyone on a team better rather than just adding one better individual.

A kheld only acts in an additive fashion when joining a team. They don't offer buffs or debuffs which make everyone more effective. A team stocked up with khelds would be so so, a stacked team of VEATs is a superteam.

As for desirability, let's not fool ourselves. Khelds are nowhere near the top of the heap in "I need one of those" when you are picking a team for something hard. In fact, I'd say they are bottom of the heap. If I've got a slot open for DPS, I might grab one, but I'd take a blaster or scrapper first. Sure a kheld might be well built and played and be as effective as that blaster or scrapper, but I'm gonna play the odds and assume it's not. They are harder to build and play, and if I assume a general level of not overly high competence, a kheld will be less useful to the team. If I know a player, and know he's good, then sure his kheld is more than welcome. However out of the blue, no dice.

I do like the idea of the inverted inherent somewhat. It would at least give them force multiplier appeal.

OK, time to prove you wrong then. Let's compare to War Mace, since I happen to like that one.

Electric melee has four AOEs. Two are many target ones, two are five target.
Jacobs ladder 8 s recharge 62.56 damage to up to 5 targets. Hard to get a whole lot in there because of the small arc(50 degrees) and reach(7'). Nice short recharge though, which is atypical of electric melee. It's one of the better performers really even as a single target attack since the rest of the set is full of slow animations.

Thunder Strike- here's the bread and butter AOE. 10 target maximum, 7' radius and 40.04 in actual AOE damage. It does do more to the initial target, but we're talking AOE here. Recharge is 18 seconds (and the animation really sucks at 3.3 seconds).

Chain Induction- Now that it's been fixed, it's a fair AOE, kinda. I have to say waiting a long time for a pretty meh power like this is rather silly though. Again you have heavier damage to the first target and some carried over to others. 5 target maximum, easy targeting since the jump takes care of that. AOE damage is just 38.93, which is nothing to write home about. Recharge is 14 seconds.

Then we get to the 'crowning glory' of the set, Lightning Rod. This power has the stupidly long recharge of 90 seconds coupled with the strange effect of doing most of it's damage in a tight radius. Outer radius is huge though (20') which is nice.

55.61 damage close in
77.8 to outer radius.

So in effect, it's like the other AOEs in the set which try to enhance single target work for no apparent reason. The one big plus of this is the 16 target max.

Ok, how about War Mace:

Whirling Mace
46.71 damage to up to ten targets in an 8 foot radius. This is on a 14 second recharge. Thus you do more damage to a bigger area than thunder strike, with four seconds less of recharge. Easy win for war mace.

Shatter
Ok, we have a narrow cone attack here, but roughly the same as Jacob's ladder (45 degrees for this vs 50 for JL), however the radius is longer, so you probably get more targets in with this. Damage 95.09, which is very nice. Recharge is 12 seconds. This seems to fit the formula with JL, doing about ~50% more damage for 50% more recharge.

Just to be a math geek we'll compare areas: JL 21 sq ft.
Shatter: 25 sq ft
oh, and for the full circle of TS vs WM it's 154 sq ft for TS and 201 sq ft for WM.

Then we have Crowd Control, 67.15 damage to up to 10 targets in a 180 degree arc with a 12 second recharge and 8' radius. (area is 100 sq feet)

Let's compare the damage over a period of time(say 5 minutes) with each hitting the maximum number of targets. Only one target in LR will get max damage however.

Electric melee- JL- 37 activations for 5 targets and 62.51 damage. Total is 11730.

TS- 16 activations for 10 targets and more on the single target. 695 for that one target, and 40.04 for the 10 total which gives 6670. So 7369 damage.

Chain Induction: So 21 activations for 5 targets with 54 damage on the first and 39 on the rest. So this comes to 4243 damage.

Lightning Rod: you can pop this off 3 times. Damage will be 56 damage on one target, and 78 on the other 15. Total damage is 4346 (ooh barely edged out Chain induction).

Total: 27688 damage.

Now War Mace:
Whirling Mace 21 activations for 46.71 damage to 10 targets. This comes to 10009 damage.

Shatter: 25 activations for 95.09 damage to 5 targets. This comes to 11886 damage.

Crowd Control 25 activations for 67.15 damage for 10 targets. This comes to 16787 damage.

Total: 38682

Thus War Mace is doing about 40% more damage over time.

If the numbers look a bit funny, I rounded off in the sentences above, but didn't in the calculator. This was a constant for both sets, so again a wash.

This comparison is also probably more kind to electric melee than it should be since the best performer, Jacob's Ladder, will almost never hit five targets. I don't know if I've ever nailed more than four and I herd things up to optimize this. I do consistently hit 10 with whirling mace and crowd control however (and thunderstrike for that matter). Now I suppose I could add in more damage for LR since in theory the higher small radius damage could hit more than one, but even if I gave it to all 16 targets, it wouldn't change things in the big picture by much. (2k damage, which still leaves the set well behind WM).

Every set gets a hug boon for +recharge until you have an attack chain which can't fit in any more AOEs due to the animation times. This is a wash.

It's here because I started this thread back before tankers had electric melee to ask it was worth trying. The first response said it was just peachy, and there was nothing else for two days. I thus made the tanker because I didn't see the other responses until later. Granted, I might have done it anyway just for the sake of variety, but then again, maybe not.

I know this might come as a shock to some, but it is possible to gauge comparative effectiveness of sets across ATs. I can get a feel for how ,say, SS(or stone melee, or fire melee, etc) is compared to Elec Melee by playing both on a tanker (and I've played most sets on tankers and brutes).

It is not rocket science to realize that, yes, surprise surprise, a brute will do more damage with electric melee than a tanker. However that doesn't mean a brute can't do better with a different set.

I'm fully patched and still getting the shifts. I'll have to wait for the devs to fix this one.

A while back I made an attempt to get an all rad team together. It didn't go too far since a lot of the players(who I knew locally in person) migrated to WoW, so I didn't really have much to work with. However what little we did was pretty sick.

At one point a team of three characters, 1 grav/rad, a rad/rad and a FF/dark defender curb stomped all the AVs in the Faultline arc, even with the rad defender still being in DOs. Adding in that bubbler made it completely safe, though they didn't really add much offense at all.

Bad idea. You need to stack like effects to really get where you want to be. With one /cold and one /sonic you aren't going to be anywhere near either the defense or resistance cap.

Do:
3 sonic/sonic(hell make then fire/sonic if you like)
1 fire/kin

This way you will easily be at the resistance cap all the time, have very high status protection when necessary, debuff resistance like a madman, and still get the wonders of FS eventually to cap damage.

Or conversely

3 fire/cold
1 fire/kin

Then you easily softcap defense, and get the mean variety of debuffs from cold (and with SB, they are up nice and often), and the oh so pretty wonders of FS.

It's always better to stack like things rather than taking a hodgepodge given the way mechanics work in this game (assuming you aren't way past the caps).