Reduce the nerf on energy transfer.

From what I'm seeing here, the major issues people are having with ET are:
1. It's a second long-animating heavy ST hit in a set that already has a long-animating heavy ST hit.
2. Because the damage lands at the end of the animation, it takes too long to deliver on fast-moving teams.

I have a wacky idea for a way to resolve the above problems and make ET a truly unique attack power: make it a toggle.

Activation animation: as the old palm-thrust ET, forming a continuous beam of energy between you and the target for as long as the toggle remains active.
Activation time: 1 second.
Activation period: 0.25 seconds.
Endurance cost: 1 end per activation period (4 end per second, about 10 end over the current ET's animation time).
Recharge time: 20 seconds
Range: 10 feet
Effect:
Scale 0.456 energy damage to target (per tick: damage over 2.5 seconds equal to current ET)
Scale 0.375 special damage to self (per tick: damage over 2.5 seconds equal to current ET)
9% chance for mag 3 stun for 9.5 seconds (per tick: cumulative chance to stun over 2.5 seconds is approximately 60%)

The obvious benefit here would be the ability to immediately begin damaging an enemy, and effectively continuously hit him with Energy Transfer for as long as you sustain the toggle, while still being able to use other attacks on the same or other targets. The obvious drawback would be to continuously pay ET's health and endurance costs! If activated in 2.5 second bursts, it would have approximately the same effect as current ET; if the target is killed within 2.5 seconds then naturally the cost is less. To avoid abuse, the toggle should probably suppress itself after a certain time limit, as an indefinite-duration auto-hit damage and control power, even with a steep HP and end cost, seems open to exploitation to put it mildly. But even with that limitation, something like this would put EM back on top of the heap in its specialty: horrendous levels of ST damage at a steep cost to the user.

I have severe doubts that this would ever fly, but as long as we're talking...

On my em/elec brute, I have ET up a lot, and it actually ends up taking a huge toll on my survivability, i've found myself to be saving ET and TF for lieutenants and bosses.

I had a EM/Elec brute who didn't get ET until after the change. Perhaps its not knowing what I am missing, but I have no desire to see the power changed. It works fine for me, which granted isn't a team heavy playstyle, but there it is.

By only working ''fine'', it isn't energy transfer.

>.>

Funny to see WH get brought up. I said about it perhaps needing a buff but I do believe it was said that all the aoes were fine or something near to that extent. I could try digging things up but I'm lazy.

My first prolonged experience with the EM set was after the nerf so I wasn't spoiled by the previous version. I now have a level 50 EM/WP brute. I've solo'd him almost exclusively (enjoying the red side content instead of speeding past it). I found I grew to like the EM set. Not so much from a "uber powerful" perspective but more from a "I smash you now!" perspective. The TF and ET animations are very brutish.. even "incredible hulk-like" in the way they feel. And while there are ST chains that do more damage then what I've got... they don't exist at the level of recharge I'm running. I specifically selected EM because I could build a 200 DPS toon with only 37.5 global recharge. I could have done the same thing with claws and fire, but I went with energy because it was a new set to me. After playing the set for 50 levels one thing I'm quite pleased with that I hadn't anticipated was the benifit of having the chance to stun in every attack. Stacking stuns not only allow me to shutdown the incoming damage from a single hard target when needed, but I can also strategically shutdown toggles and debuffs. Furthermore, ET and TF have increased accuracy which help considerably when fighting +3s or better and against NPC's with +defense and/or tohitdebuffs. In all, there's really very few holes in this toon. I'm quite satisfied with the way it plays, and the tools EM brings is a big reason why.

Sure, I'd be happy to see something buffed, but I don't think the set is broken by any stretch.

There is your problem. Most of the time you were solo. While solo you tend to miss the things that end up being frustrating on teams. You can look at the mobs health and decide what attack that you have ready that you should use to kill it. You can jump up in the air, grab a drink, take a bio break and smash that minion with TF for a one shot kill. You can see that LT has just enough health to kill him in one shot with ET.

Now you do the same thing on a team that is heavy on the AoE and you just ended up loosing endurance or damaging yourslef and doing very little or even 0 damage to anything else. I have one shotted minions with KO Blow before TF finished. Was not trying to be mean, its just that teams move so fast that you cannot pay attention to everything that everyone is doing. Solo EM is still a monster for brutes even with the reduction in cast time for ET. On teams however you end up hardly contributing alot of the time.

If the devs insist on the 2.67 cast time, I still believe EM would make a comeback if the damage was done right away with the old animation of 1 second followed by 1.67 seconds of your toon catching their breath a couple times while they are hit with the HP loss. This would keep the longer cast time and prevent double stacking ET in one BU useage and allow the attack a greater chance of causing damage to a mob while on a team.

Bored and started reading this thread...

Funny people start proposing improvements to Energy Melee and point to Whirling Hands. I can agree, WH is woeful, but altering the set's capabilities through an attack not every EM set gets?

What I mean is, Stalkers don't even *get* Whirling Hands...Is the Stalker version of EM fine, then? Both it and Martial Arts suffer from 'meh' on the ATs they reside on and altering WH and DT probably isn't the only point of the set that should be changed to fix that.

IMO, you're better off dropping the notion of improved damage changes. But that doesn't mean there is no hope. There's always secondary effects or increasing the sets' mitigation levels: improving the stun chance, increasing duration, add in knock-, foe -regen to pound down the big targets...

As far as I know, they don't balance melee powers by secondary effect so adding or altering them wouldn't require a change to endurance costs or recharge values.

Do the sets that compare with EM on single target damage also compare with EM on mitigation? If DPS were the only balance point, FM would be way out of line. EM is a set where every ST attack has at least a chance of the same mag 3 stackable hard mez. I'm aware the value of this is debatable, but it's not nothing, and ignoring it when discussing balance is at least slightly disingenuous.

It's been mentioned several times already, but it's worth repeating: the "speed" issues with TF and ET have a lot to do with when the attack effects are delivered. It'd probably take some animation tweaks to justify (and we all know how popular those are), but if TF and ET delivered their effect within a second or so of activation and then wound down, both the perceived speed and the actual utility of the powers would be notably improved.

I'm not sure what a character could do for 1.67 to 2.33 seconds after delivering a powerful blow that wouldn't look silly, though. Rub their knuckles?

Hm, what if ET started with the double-punch lunge and huge blast of energy, the energy halos around the fists then disappeared, and the charge-up portion of the current ET animation played as the halos restore? And for TF, a leaping two-handed uppercut, with the remainder of the animation being the landing and return to fighting stance.

Well, I'm not BaB.

I think we're getting into the distinction between "the secondary effects of all sets are balanced, separately from other considerations" and "set balance takes secondary effects into consideration." The first is plainly not the case and probably never will be (or indeed can be, given situational utility). The second was false when the sets were made, but then at that point the devs had a very poor understanding of what aspects of power design would turn out to be important in determining the value of a power (to put it charitably). If that's still the case now I'd be extremely surprised.

Edited to add:

I doubt Total Focus will change. The power is used or cloned by several different ATs and powersets. Actually, I was never concerned about TF back in the old days, I used it and was happy with it, even though the big ker-smash, anime, bullet-time, temporary suspension of the laws of physics animation was a little annoying.

Why was it annoying? Because for all of that build-up, the effects of the attack were anti-climactic.

My problem with the new Energy Transfer is the locked-in animation. If the attack were Interruptable somehow, like by the loss of a valid target, that might make it more useful. Except, the interruptable 'Melee Snipe' is the province of Stalkers, not Tankers... Why have the Devs decided to inflict a Stalker power on us poor Tankers?

Be Well!
Fireheart