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The 4th option is that energy aura for scrappers and tankers can be different from the brute's version. Actually, fire melee gets a similar treatment. As mentioned before, this might make the brutes mad. 
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Interesting how all 3 ATs with Fiery Melee have different sets. The Brute/Scrapper ones are the closest, but not the same.
Deamus the Fallen - 50 DM/EA Brute - Lib
Dragos Bahtiam - 50 Fire/Ice Blaster - Lib
/facepalm - Apply Directly to the Forehead!
Formally Dragos_Bahtiam - Abbreviate to DSL - Warning, may contain sarcasm
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Originally Posted by Shubbie
Im very good at taking a problem and making it worse.
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The 4th option is that energy aura for scrappers and tankers can be different from the brute's version. Actually, fire melee gets a similar treatment. As mentioned before, this might make the brutes mad.
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Interesting how all 3 ATs with Fiery Melee have different sets. The Brute/Scrapper ones are the closest, but not the same.
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what's the difference besides the ordering?
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The 4th option is that energy aura for scrappers and tankers can be different from the brute's version. Actually, fire melee gets a similar treatment. As mentioned before, this might make the brutes mad.
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Interesting how all 3 ATs with Fiery Melee have different sets. The Brute/Scrapper ones are the closest, but not the same.
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what's the difference besides the ordering?
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Greater Fire Sword's damage scalar is lower on a Scrapper than a Brute (2.28 vs 2.44).
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The 4th option is that energy aura for scrappers and tankers can be different from the brute's version. Actually, fire melee gets a similar treatment. As mentioned before, this might make the brutes mad.
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In this regard, I can only speak for myself, however:
If the devs were going to replace CP in scrapper /EA with a different power, they'd certainly have to be most exquisitely careful in picking that power such as to avoid making ME angry.
The cake is a lie! The cake is a lie!
Spirit chaser, I can just see Castle reading that message on the board as he snickers and types out 'Repel' on the scrapper and tanker EA powers list...
Yeah if he replaced CP with Repel I doubt there would be many upset Brutes or cries for him to make the change on Brutes also.
You know, the thing is, while I don't really LIKE repulse, I do have to admit, I've always thought it would have been a far better power for brutes scrappers, and hell, even tanks, than it is for stalkers.
Though of all of these, I'd say it fits brutes best. Unfortunately, unless all of CP's functionality were incorporated into another EA power, I really wouldn't want the power changed out. Too many people use it as is.
Also, It isn't as if I want to shortchange scrapper EA, after all, I'll probably make a few of them...
The cake is a lie! The cake is a lie!
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Rethinking what I posted earlier, a 3rd option they could go with. Make the effects not stack from the same caster. which would more or less force the user to only use one at a time. effectivly doubling the durration.
but I agree Spirit, there are probably a few billion things they could do with CP to change the powers effects while keeping it similar to how it is now.
personaly I wouldn't mind seeing some end drain resistance added into the set somewhere. I suppose CP would be a good a place as any to add that.
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Can someone please explain to me how a toon with two CP powers would either be overpowered or jilted in some way? You know my brute has taunt, but there's a pool I could take that would give me provoke as well. The presence pool. But you know what? The world still turns.
Leave CP alone. Leave the epics alone. Everybody wins.
energy needs a taunt aura, if it has the gfx(not the effect) of repulse i would be happy.
ea HAS a taunt aura. 1 taunt enhancement with your regular slotting makes the taunt duration on ED last longer than your recharge.
There are many arguments about whether the changes were enough, but those arguments were NOT about ed taunt. It's great.
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Rethinking what I posted earlier, a 3rd option they could go with. Make the effects not stack from the same caster. which would more or less force the user to only use one at a time. effectivly doubling the durration.
but I agree Spirit, there are probably a few billion things they could do with CP to change the powers effects while keeping it similar to how it is now.
personaly I wouldn't mind seeing some end drain resistance added into the set somewhere. I suppose CP would be a good a place as any to add that.
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Can someone please explain to me how a toon with two CP powers would either be overpowered or jilted in some way? You know my brute has taunt, but there's a pool I could take that would give me provoke as well. The presence pool. But you know what? The world still turns.
Leave CP alone. Leave the epics alone. Everybody wins.
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The question of whether or not /EA matches up to the norm on overall survival and utility depends a lot on what you compare it to. There are numerous strengths and weaknesses to /EA, as there are to all sets. They've been rehashed many times over the course of this thread. I'm just going to list the rankings as I see them, and comment a bit on why I think what I do as a summary. I'm not listing stone here. Stone is great, but as often as not, a stone brute is almost a different AT.
SR is almost certainly better (though not by as much as it used to be). You have superior aggro control, easier access to very high defence, your passive scaling resists are better than the static resists /EA gets, you have coverage against almost all attacks, and your defence resistance, your crowning glory, is at the hardcap. Nothing can take your protection from you.
WP is also almost certainly better. You're reasonably good at just about every type of passive protection going, and IOs can now let you shore up every single type of protection you feel you want more of.
/DA is almost certainly better, although granted, it's NOT a hands off set, or a set that works well for a newer player. The value of DA is often highest in really tough environments, where it's variety of tools can make a huge difference.
/SD gives you a somewhat harder time softcapping, but in exchage, you get much better resists, +HP that are up all the time, universal protection, extra damage and of course you get shield charge. If that weren't enough, the enhanceable nature of SD's Defence Resists, and the stackability of AD means that highly IO'd /SD with HOs can hardcap DR just like SR can. That's a MONSTEROUS advantage that EA cannot ever have solo.
/Fire is now less survivable in many situations, though of course more survivable in a few others. Fire gets strong earlier, and adds much more to damage than /EA could. The fear in burn will save your behind in AE content that was designed to cripple melees, and Fire has a good solid role in PvP, where EA is now second tier after the elusivity nerf.
/INV is... well Invul is better or worse. In most ways I personally think Invul and /EA are now so close that it's probably just not worth fighting over.
/Ele? you can now make a solid argument that /Ele needs help more than /EA does. You get some very powerful sapping power, and it helps a lot, but in my opinion, on the whole, that little heal in ED flipped the order of these two sets. The thing is, the CP issue exists here as well. A small change to the CP power for both sets could arguably be the same, and could balance things out very well. I can think of rather a lot of ways to do that.
Sure there are a hundred little synergies with each set I haven't addressed, I haven't talked about IO costs etc. but there's the rest of the thread to review for the details.
The bottom line as I see it: /EA, like /Ele puts too many of it's pennies in endurance management. That costs it performance elsewhere. Tied for second last isn't the worst place to be, all the brute sets are playable, and obviously, dominator energy assault needs help first (I'd argue that energy melee needs help first too now!) but I think one or two little extra perks in /EA would be reasonable.
Why is there a problem with CP? A scrapper with modest recharge, chaining two CPs would potentially violate some basic principles about performance, and would badly outperform an /EA brute in terms of endurance management... and that's really saying something.
The devs could do all sorts of things, but I'm hoping that when /EA gets reviewed for proliferation, it gets modified with a little extra capacity for survival.
Counterpoint: /EA is actually going to be a much stronger set blueside than it is redside. There's not nearly as much psi over there...
The cake is a lie! The cake is a lie!
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Can someone please explain to me how a toon with two CP powers would either be overpowered or jilted in some way? You know my brute has taunt, but there's a pool I could take that would give me provoke as well. The presence pool. But you know what? The world still turns.
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Currently, I don't think anyone can perma conserve power. If you have two conserve powers, you can chain them to make it perma as SpiritChaser mentioned. First of all, do you think that it is ok or not? I think it's not clear. It's probably not too big a deal, it's not like one can perma a tier 9 god mode.
Actually, SpiritChaser nearly said it all. Let's say two conserve powers are fine. Do you really need both of them? Of coz, you can say that if you don't need it, you don't need to take them. But since power proliferation is a unique opportunity, something extra can be done if two conserve powers are redundant.
If you look at the last few posts, you can see that we all want to preserve the essense of conserve power. Suggested substitute powers all have an endurance component that can be made equivalent in strength to conserve power. Hopefully, the proliferated set can be better and the substitute power can be ported back to brutes as well.
I think EA is not broken. Probably, we are just a bunch of passionate annoying people who think that something more can be done. And hopefully, you don't feel that we're trying to make it worse. 
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ea HAS a taunt aura. 1 taunt enhancement with your regular slotting makes the taunt duration on ED last longer than your recharge.
There are many arguments about whether the changes were enough, but those arguments were NOT about ed taunt. It's great.
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Regular slotting? How can 18 seconds be more then 30 seconds.
Dirges
allow me to rephrase, longer than the mobs live
Yeah Spirit Chaser I think I have been around this horn with you 50 or 60 times already. There's really not any need to go over it again. Your scale is very linear and speaks speicifcally about protection, mentioning a couple of inceidental perks of SD merely as asides that have little to do with your overall argument that EA is underprotected.
We all know this. That does not mean EA needs a buff. EA has crappy protection. We all know that. EA and elec are both utility sets offering subpar protection in echange for utility. I think I have made this argument a hundred times, and I know that you've heard it from others if not me. Basically, if EA could give me SR's protection and still be EA, that is, still requiring me to take only 5 or 6 powers from the set and not requiring me to take fitness pool, then EA would be overpowered. As it is, EA gives me crappy protection but lets me skip stamina and only requires me to take 1/2 the powers in the set to give me its baseline crappy protection (and some stealth too). I use these powers to do whatever I want with the toon. Elec and EA are utility sets. SR is for those who are only worried about protection. They have to take all 9 powers, and they get superb protection. Nothing else.
So I am not really sure I know what you are going after. Do you want EA to give as good a protection as SR or something? I personally have figured out how to build my toon to be basically softcapped (to everyhing that matters) while still having all kinds of slots for powers I like.
So I think you need to move past the argument that 'SR has better protection, so it needs a buff'
The devs heard that one a long time ago. Everybody seems to know that EA gives crappy protection, and everybody seems to be fine with that.
At this stage in the game, discussion about improving EA has really moved on to thematic elements, like making it tougher against energy because it's EA for crying out loud, or issues of consistency, usually related to the psi hole (which a lot of sets deal with), or problems with defense in general, and often talk of adding regen, heals, etc. And frankly, EA got a buff recently, and for better or for worse, that's really probably all it's going to get, so most of the talk is turning to issues of porting to other ATs. Really, the EA discussion is pretty much over. I am in the camp that really did not see EA as being terribly broken, and I am happy with the last buff. THose who saw it as terribly broken and are not very happy with the last buff, are still trying to keep it going. But frankly, the 'SR has better defense so we need to buff EA' was pretty much thrown out the window way way back at the beginning. I mean sheesh. I should say that SR requires you to take stamina, makes you take all 9 powers, and doesn't give you stealth, so SR needs a buff.
I have always liked EA. I am glad they tweaked it a little. The taunt in energy drain ROCKS, and the heal kind of comes in handy as I notice the ebb and flow of my health bar these days. I am popping fewer greens on my non-Aid Self build.(My favorite build, BTW). I could care less about the toxic resist.
Honestly, I was wanting something somewhere that made the set feel really uber against energy damage. I didn't really know if it was resists, or more defense, or some kind of a something. I didn't know what. But I did want the set to feel uber against energy like elec feels uber against energy. I didn't get that. But basically, I was cool with the set before and I still am, being pleasantly surprised by the minor changes. That's basically it, man.
At this point I would just suggest that you not play EA and be sure to voice your difficulties with AE to friends who might consider playing it. You seem to like SR better because it's better protected. So I will steer you to play SR instead.
Now on a final note, can you give me details about how you would softcap defense bebuff resistance for shield defense? I got an idea for a scrapper.....
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Now on a final note, can you give me details about how you would softcap defense bebuff resistance for shield defense? I got an idea for a scrapper.....
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Take and slot grant cover, and you need to double stack AD (not trivial, not REALLY hard, somewhere in between) and you'll need HOs in AD to enhance the DR in that power.
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Incidentally, I actually have more EA characters than SR characters, though for extreme builds, I'm beginning to think I may prefer SD to both, especially with DM where +regen matters less. Once softcapped, you've got more utility than EA and more survival than SR.
I don't think EA protection is "crappy", that's clearly not the case but neither am I 100% ok with where it is.
I don't have any problem discussing the strengths of IO'd sets, but at the same time base performance relatively more important. We can make monsters out of everything with IOs, ease of doing so matters, cost of doing so matters, maximum power matters. It just matters less.
Once EA goes blueside, I'll definitely be rolling a couple. Spines/EA and BS/EA are almost certain and I might do claws/EA as well, I'm not sure.
The cake is a lie! The cake is a lie!
I wasn't talking about IOs. Back in I7 I had a fitness/leaping/fighting/leadership build with 40% S/L defense. That was good in those days. And I didn't know it at the time, but I did not need fitness. Then I went to a leaping/speed/presence/teleport build, thinking presence would protect me in PvE and give me something in in PvP. teleport and presence helped me a ton in PvP, but not enough under the old system, and presence was messing with my attack chain to use it well in PvE. So once I started getting IOs into the build I did not need all the utility powers for protection, but had already figured out that stamina was a waste, so I went for a convenience build with leaping/speed/fly/leadership build that I farmed SFs with and did all the endgame content with. But when I started doing a lot of ouroboros content and lower level badge missions, and I started running into AVs while soloing, I noticed problems. Also, even under the new system, not having a self-heal in PvP makes life suck. So I have recently started on my second build as an AV/exemp below 28/PvP build that has speed/fitness/medicine/teleport.
I am basically saying I have played EA a ton of different ways, and I would just not have been able to do that with SR. Or even SD. SD has some utility in that it has buffs and the like in the set, but what I mean utility is the ability to play the toon a variety of different ways. And you can do this without IOs. IOs just open even more doors. But I've had the toon super tough before IOs as well as pulled in controls and diverse mitigation methods before IOs. So that is a definite strength of EA is just about unmatched.
I guess mids is broken on the defense debuff resistance. Thanks for the tip. I will roll up a toon and see how it goes.
In I7 I was running my EM/EA with fighting fitness leaping leadership for max def. I think I had about 39% s/l, and it wasn't bad, though with no IO regen and no heal, it wasn't nearly as tough as today's high def builds. I tried without fitness so I could have Aid Self for a bit, but the lack of mobility killed that for me. I really like swift or hurdle, ideally both. Each and every brute I've played without those powers has eventually re-specced back into swift or hurdle or both. If I'm going to go with swift or hurdle, health and stamina are almost no-brainers. Lets face it, health is pretty good for EA, and if you're going to take health... How many powers are really better than stamina, even for /EA?
As far as I know, Mids won't indicate enhanced DR in either SR or SD.
The cake is a lie! The cake is a lie!
If you decide to go for a high defense build with fighting and leadership, the build will be pretty tight if you also take most of the powers from EA itself. If fitness can be skipped, it will be easier to go deep into patron power pools to get pets for example. There is a fun factor here, which is not something you can measure in numbers. If you can skip fitness, you can try something that you haven't tried before. And you can do it just for fun whether it is useful or not.
The flexibility of EA to skip fitness is pretty clear. However, whether this brings you a significant advantage is not very clear. It boils down to what you'll take if fitness is skipped and how those powers help in a particular playstyle.
I honestly don't see any problem with EA being the way it is.
YES, it needs tweaking. It's got some holes, and there are still some balancing problems.
But is it broken? I don't feel like it is.
Hell, we have the only stealth power that stays active in combat. That's very useful for picking our fights. Think Tactical Missile instead of Carpet Bomb. It plays differently than other brute sets, which is part of the problem.
Nameless Hero, Lv 50 DM/EA brute, played since CoV launch.
@Nameless Hero, Insane Sword-wielding Video Game Hero - Also a character in CoH
Yukie Bikouchi, Halfway Lost, and others
If the thread is not stickied, it would be a nice necro post.
I were thinking that we were going to move to a new forum software. I would let the thread rest in peace and not suggest to move it to the new place. Apparently, the move was postponed indefinitely.
I agree that EA is probably fine. In particular, as a stealthy brute with unlimited endurance, I think the weakness of the powerset is by design. I guess the current status of the power set probably doesn't need a sticky, maybe just let it be flushed slowly in the sewer. I bet the thread makes your eyes sore, isn't it?
The value of the thread now lies on proliferation into other ATs rather than brutes. Since heroes have conserve power in ancillary pools, it would be curious to know if it is acceptable to have two conserve powers. If not, there are a lot of suggestions in this thread that suggest alternatives.
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Hell, we have the only stealth power that stays active in combat. That's very useful for picking our fights.
Nameless Hero, Lv 50 DM/EA brute, played since CoV launch.
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Dark Armor has an identical power (Cloak of Darkness), at the same level, that gives Immob protection and +Perception.
Deamus the Fallen - 50 DM/EA Brute - Lib
Dragos Bahtiam - 50 Fire/Ice Blaster - Lib
/facepalm - Apply Directly to the Forehead!
Formally Dragos_Bahtiam - Abbreviate to DSL - Warning, may contain sarcasm
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Shubbie
Im very good at taking a problem and making it worse.
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The 4th option is that energy aura for scrappers and tankers can be different from the brute's version. Actually, fire melee gets a similar treatment. As mentioned before, this might make the brutes mad.