Should Energy Melee Get More AOE Damage ?

I have pondered this question ever since taking my level 42 Ice/EM tanker out of hiatus. The most recent opinions regarding Energy Melee have been negative. I have seen numberous post recently either advising that a player not take Energy Melee or claiming that the downgrade has greatly weakened the set. When I looked at the overall perspective , I could not see how simply doubling Energy's Transfer activation time and decreasing the stun in TF would severely weakend the set, except in the case of Brutes who benefit more from fast attacks. While EM has no doubt been weakened, I still find it powerful against single targets. I am a heavy hitter man who loves powers like KO blow , ET, TF, Seisimic smash so while slower I still find EM quite satisfying. Unfortunately, I find myself weaker in teams.

My Tank is quite durable but I am continueously outshown by all other sets because of their greater AOE attacks. I jump into a crowd and hit Whirling Hands then they jump into a crowd and hit Foot Stomp, Lightning Rod/Thunder Strike , Tremor, Combustion/Fire SWORD Circle and make me look like a chump. I then quickly become the secondary tanker/scranker for the team. I just cant contribute enough AOE when compared to others. I do have Taunt toggles but often the mob is dead so quickly that I might a well leave them off. This would be even worse for some other sets like WP and Invul.

Energy Melee lost some of its strength with the recent downgrade but it received nothing in return. Its very low AOE damage was not increased in any way. I understand that Whirling Hands is a Tier 5 Power and therefore probably should not match a Tier 9th like Foot Stomp or Lightning Rod. Nevertheless the developers should ponder this question as well.

There is another factor; Scrappers getting Energy Melee. If they do and Energy Melee is not changed at all, then why would anyone roll a EM tanker ? Playing a Scrapper would play more to EM's strengths so there is no logical reason to make an EM Tanker other than having that prestigous Tanker symbol by your name. While some may nitpick me on reasons to roll a Tanker, it is not the point. As far as effectiveness goes , there would be no reason to choose an EM Tanker over an EM Scrapper...unless of course there was more AOE in the Tanker EM similar to how Fire Melee has 2 AOE powers for Tankers and only 1 for Scrappers.

The solution of giving EM more AOE would be simple, change Total Focus to an AOE like Thunderstrike where it still does Extreme damage to the target but only does moderate damage to enemies around the target. Another solution which would be more controversial is to decrease the damage of Total Focus and change it to an AOE while maintaining only one Extreme damage attack, Energy Transfer and then reinstalling the original faster Energy Transfer animation or speeding up its current animation so the single target damage is not reduced by too much from losing the extreme Total Focus. The end result of the latter change would be slightly less single target damage and significantly greater AOE damage.

I myself believe that Energy Melee should have its AOE increased, especially for Tankers who need it most for Arggo control. With its current weak AOE potential, I believe it is an inadequate primary compared to other primaries for maintaining arggo and if Scrappers are giving Energy Melee, there would no reason to play an EM tanker unless some improvement occurs. Since Tankers should not have more damage than Scrappers, AOE improvement is the best way.

How would you answer this question ?

I am of the belief that a tanker is made by his primary and not so much by his secondary. You seem to constantly tie in the performance of the secondary as indicative of the performance of the primary. I don't agree.Tanking ability in, many circumstances, has little to nothing to do with your secondary. On that note, Energy melee is a secondary for tankers and NOT a primary. Please understand that.

Sure, adding more dmg to Whirling Hands would be nice, but I don't see the correlation between you being relegated to a secondary tanker and this single underwhelming power. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that the power is fantastic, but I don't see how you are tying the two together.

If you are all that concerned about damage- be it AoE or ST, you probably should have just rolled a scrapper to start. So yes, I will nitpick on your point there- if you want a damage heavy AT, why would you start with one that you know will be extremely hard pressed to achieve on the high end what a poorly built scrapper can achieve on his worst day? It is pretty much a fact that it is considerably more effective and easy to make a scrapper achieve survivability that is close to a tank than making a tank achieve scrapper levels of damage.

And you seem to contradict yourself, you are saying you want EM's aoe dmg potential increased, and you seem to be jilted by the fact that scrappers do more damage than tanks, but then you say that the damage should not have more damage than scrappers. What do you want?

WP tankers have a little more trouble maintaining aggro sometimes, and that is probably the only secondary I would see having issues with a secondary like EM. If your primary is Ice Armor and you have problems maintaining aggro- you are doing something wrong. I will say it again- if you are an Ice Armor tank and have issues with aggro, you are doing something wrong. I believe Ice armor is the most aggro ******* set available to tanks. I would also not throw Invulnerability in the same pot as Willpower for aggro management. Invuln is far ahead of willpower in the taunt department.

One more point. As far as "nerfs" go- there is never a promise of receiving anything in return of a powerset being nerfed. I don't know why you would expect it to be so.

Yes. Since the ruined ET anyway, they should leave the animation in place, nerf the damage appropriately, and make it a pbaoe.

I'd rather they just fix the set.

It did one thing good before...quick burst damage.

It's not a DPS set. It's burst damage is wasted on teams, as it's animations are so long, that enemies wind up dead before you hit them.

It just needs fix. I love it's energy glowing fists. But the new ET animation is still ugly, I never cared about the stun nerf on TF. My complaint is the new animation for ET.

I said keep the old animation and just lower the damage, but :P nope.

I think that WH would be just fine with the same dmg if the chance to stun were changed to a straight stun.

Dmg mitigation is something that was lessened in the last nerf.
Mitigation through stun decreased and mitigation through killing decreased.

I play brutes. I happen to have 2 wp brutes. my EM is full accolades and full IOs, (purples, numinas, miracle, regen tissue, lotgs etc), but cant compete with my stone melee which has only one accolade and a hodge-podge of various SOs, IOs and partial sets.
On paper the EM brute looks much better-- better def, better res, better regen, more HP etc. But when it comes down to it, the dmg mitigation of stone melee allows the SM/WP brute to outperform the EM/WP one.

But, more dmg to WH would be nice too. Maybe more helpful to a tank than a brute, idk. But my EM brute could definitely use more dmg mitgation from his attack set.
As is, it's slotted with the Absolute Amazement -tohit proc, which is somewhat better than nothing when it comes to mitigation.

I don't think EM should get AoE damage. I'd rather have it do the ST damage it's supposed to do. To have a ST oriented set with a -HP power roughly equivalent to -200% regen if you use it often ending up in the bottom for DPS is completely laughable.

I'm talking IOed out. ET hurts you more the more you use it, and EM benefits less than any other set from procs because of its long animations and lack of powers to slot -res procs. The disparity isn't that big on SOs, but even there I'd still argue having a -HP power and a sorry excuse of AoE should automatically put that set in the number 1 spot for ST DPS, and it isn't.

I actually skipped over Total Focus. It just....yeah. It's like a fricking Kama-yami-ha or something; by the time I actually HIT, the thing is dead.

If TF was made a PbAoE, now, THAT I could live with. I still love ET, but the longer animation and still the same -hp is rather annoying. I didnt know it did -regen too?

Mostly, my tank is built to grab aggro, and then laugh it off (nearly capped S/L without unstoppable, thanks to Tough) so damage tends to be someone elses problem...but it would be nice if I wasn't totally lacklustre in that department.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

My suggestions for EM has always been to make Total Focus a Thunderstrike clone but with a little less splash damage and more ST damage. I wouldn't mind the animation changed to something under 3s as well.

Oh, and I disagree with Billz. ET wasn't ruined, in my opinion. I enjoy the new animation and the nerf was long overdue. With that said, I have shelved my EM/ELA Brute but I blame WP, SR and the newly proliferated Claws more than Energy Melee (I only have time to play so many brutes. :P).

Every set doesn't need strong AoE damage. Though we know that AoE damage is superior for a lot of "power progress" purposes such as XP/time or inf/time, it's not a good enough reason to make everything slanted towards that.

A regular refrain from the few people I know who still play the set (primarily because they still want to play characters who pre-dated the ET change) is that they get sick of stuff dying to teammates while they animate ET. A big chunk of CoH's playerbase is addicted to this game because it features fluid, fast moving combat. Having part of your attack chain be "take a coffee break" doesn't mesh well with that.

Before the ET change, EM was the pack leader in single-target DPS. Now, it's not leader in anything, and the multiple long animations make it distasteful for multiple reasons. While the debate back when the change was made suggests that the devs may be painted into a corner on ET itself, they aren't on the rest of the set. They could improve the set's single-target DPS using changes to other powers. The set was never particularly impressive in the levels before you got to ET, and those earlier powers look like the best option for improvement.

Whirling Hands does blow, and I'd love to see it improved, but what I really want back is the ability to do strong single-target damage. If I could get that without being able to take my hands off the keyboard for like 2/3 of my attack chain, that'd be spiffy too.

I just want my old really fast Energy Transfer animation back... They ruined the set by slowing it down to a crawl..

Oddly enough, Energy punch does LESS damage than Barrage does. I checked on Mids AND tested it in game, before my respec.
What's up with that?

I know there are people who will have taken Stun, or who like it, but is it REALLY necessary in a set where ALL the attacks have stun effects that can stack?

Given Total Focus is a monster endurance wise AND animations time wise, they really should cut down the animation time. Its just not worth its tier 9 space right now...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

I, in no way, deny that the old ET was overpowered. It DID need nerfing.

But that's not what they did. A proper nerf would have been to get the damage in line with the power and with the rest of the set.

They didn't do that. They turned a fast animating attack into a painfully long attack that doesn't even look like a single target attack anymore.

It looks like you're punching someone in the face with a bomb.

I don't want anyone thinking that I want a return to the old, grossly overpowered energy melee. I don't. But I also don't want the set left as it is.

For a soloist, EM can still be a DPS monster on single target damage, but only after cranking up the recharge buffs to 11. The fact that its mitigation is so piss poor means that you must pair it with a secondary that can handle heavy loads. It's abjectly pathetic AoE output means that the set has been diminished past the point of equality right down to the bottom of the pack. At least Axe has solid mitigation.

Castle will never grant my wish that ET be turned into a PBAoE. You know why? Because then he'd have to change what IO sets can be used in it.

So what COULD be done? I actually have an answer for that.

Give energy melee the claws damage tweak. That's an equation that changes the final damage of an attack based on its activation time. Then, and only then, would the slow, ponderous, boring animations be worth the wait.

Calculating now. Numbers upon my return.

EDIT: HA! Toss that plan in the trash.
Barrage: Minor buff
EP: Minor nerf
BS: Minor nerf
WH: Good buff
TF: Minor nerf
Stun: Good buff
ET: Bad nerf

Checking now to see if the set is even internally correct.

Remember that Tanks also get EM (where I'm coming from) so...it would need to work for them as well, not just Brutes.

And I agree, the animation change is what really put me off.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

As a tanker set there really isn't any primary that goes well with it any more.

Willpower would be able to eat the -HP in Energy Transfer. But stunned mobs wander, and that means you aren't holding aggro on them any more. EM is a very team unfriendly set for a tanker.

Dark Melee could use the stuns, and Fire needs a lot of control. But both of those sets rely heavily on self-heals. 3 second animations mean dying helplessly. And again, stunned mobs wander, so it does nothing to make Burn worthwhile.

Shields, Invulnerability, Ice, Electric Armor - EM does nothing now that other sets don't do better, with less sitting on your hands time as well.

EM is a powerset without a reason to exist. It does nothing to help a team tanker, and it's slow and boring solo. I mothballed my level 50 fire/EM tanker with a server transfer, mostly because the character used to be a lot of fun, and I couldn't bear to just delete a level 50. But I grind my teeth trying to play the combination now. First she lost her primary; then, her secondary, and there just wasn't enough left of the character to bother with afte that.

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My EM/FA brute does massive ST damage, just, y'know, slooooowly. Once he's got Fury built up he 1-2 shots most things.

That said, since he's IOd out for a lot of recharge and kills stuff in 1-2 hits, the thing hurting me the most isn't the enemies, its ET.

Either ET being made AoE (like BaBs is, iirc) or TF being sped up would be very nice. ET may be goddamned slow but at least it hits hard. TF doesn't feel like it hits nearly hard enough to justify the ponderous animation.