My Energy Melee thoughts.

wut

@macskull, @Not Mac | XBL: macskull | Steam: macskull | Skype: macskull
"One day we all may see each other elsewhere. In Tyria, in Azeroth. We may pass each other and never know it. And that's sad. But if nothing else, we'll still have Rhode Island."

I don't think I ever said that the set was fine as is. In fact, I think I elucidated my opinions on EM needing a bit of AoE damage love in my first post of this thread quite well. What I have been saying is that the ST performance is perfectly reasonable and that many players neglect to pay proper credence to the mitigatory benefits that EM has. EM doesn't need to have the ST damage fixed or to have the secondary effect changed. The only problems with EM are that it is no longer the incredible frontrunner on ST damage that it used to be so now everyone gets hung up on the less than stellar AoE damage.

Not when the other sets that are in the same neighborhood as em in single target ability are ridiculously better in the aoe department, in both damage and mitigation.

EM needs it's old ET back, or improved aoe abilities. Until then it's an underperforming set.

Yeah, but you don't set up a game based on players that don't really know what they're doing, lol.

I think that anyone that is at all familiar with the various melee sets knows that em is underpowered compared to it's competitors, and it should be more and more apparent as team size increases and/or foe numbers increase. And since this is an mmo, and 99% of the play involves multiple foes at a time, obviously aoe is usually more valuable than single target, even if you ignore the imbalances vs competing sets already mentioned.

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.

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

DM was pretty decent aoe-wise when they initially increased melee attack range and it accidentally made it ridiculously easy to hit 5 targets with a movement before the attack. Since they fixed it, it's pretty mediocre, but you can still get 3 pretty easily and pretty reliably, and don't forget to weigh in the fact you get it a lot earlier than dragons tail and it recharges a lot faster as well. I'd say the two sets are similarly mediocre to weak in aoe abilities when all these factors are considered.

But DM eats MA's lunch with the heal attack, it's build up power and it's single target godliness. I'd love to see MA and EM get some love similar to what DM got not very long ago, look what it did for DM and look at the positive effect it had on so many players.



I'm not sure where you're getting these numbers from, but I can assure you, DM absolutely destroys Elec in single target damage. Maybe you're talking about low levels, but with a full array of powers, elec is near the bottom when competing for single target output. Of course that is balanced by the fact Elec has outstanding aoe abilities.

Again, DM is capable of far more than 'respectable' single target damage, it's at the very top with a few others. I do agree with you that utility is another balancing factor and DM has that in abundance, and its a great point to bring up.

Maybe EM could be given some added utility as a way to improve the set. Maybe add some end drain that is given to the user with some of the attacks. And why does ET still need to do self damage now that the animation is glacially slow, lol?

True.

I guess I haven't had the same experience as you with the stuns. The one aoe stun you get in WH is unreliable and pretty short imo. The only reliable and effective mitigation is stacking single target stuns which is underpowered when competing against sets that have better and/or multiple aoe mitigation techniques.

I agree it doesn't need a vast overhaul. I like your chain induction idea, or the other guy who suggested turning TF into a thunderstrike type attack, this could also address the mitigation gap that exists.

They didn't totally overhaul DM, just a few minor changes and it went from an underplayed set to one of the more popular ones.

There are no really bad sets, but imo, its at the bottom when competing against other choices.

I don't agree with you that ET 'had' to be 'fixed/nerfed' though. I don't have a problem with sets being balanced in different ways - in that one set could have 9 solid powers and another could have 7 subpar powers and 2 great ones, or 8 subpar ones and one godly one, but that's just personal preference either way.

I also do not agree that rage or granite armor 'need' to be 'fixed' for the same reasons. But theres another good reason they don't need to be fixed - they're very popular sets, unlike energy melee at the moment. And they don't 'break' or 'hurt' the game, because SS doesn't have a monopoly on play, nor does stone armor, because both sets have obvious drawbacks to compensate for said powers. Sure rage itself is a very powerful power, but without rage, SS would be a pitiful set. Same thing with granite armor. But that does go to 'how' the sets are balanced, and that would be our personal opinions/preferences. You can balance a teeter tawter with nine similar sized stones on either end, or with nine similar sized stones on one end and eight tiny stones and one larger stone on the other, so long as a whole they end up being the same weight.

But again, I think the devs should focus on 'fixing' sets that get little play, rather than fixing sets that are popular without being monopolistic.

Again, I'd disagree with you, because you'd be changing sets that one, are not being ridiculously overplayed in comparison to other sets, which would seem to at least provide some evidence they are not ridiculously out of whack, and two, you'd be angering the large fanbases of each set based on nothing more than your personal preference in that you don't like 'how' they are balanced.

Better to create a new set than head down that road. It's been suggested before, but if the devs really wanted to make everyone happy, they could create second sets as an option for players. I actually agree with you in that I personally don't like how SS is dependent on rage to compete with other sets, mostly because I don't like rage, lol. The crash is beyond annoying, and the end hit is more crippling, imo, than many people seem to feel it is. So why not create a second SS set with slightly different mechanics - this way you create another option for players without removing an option so many have grown to love. On top of that, it's a hell of a lot easier to rework a set that already exists with all the animations and what not, yet most players will feel like they're getting a whole new powerset.

Not innacurate at all. The set was ET, right or wrong, that was the power that made the set worth playing. Even back then, the set overall was an underperformer because aoe is king on teams, and since this is an mmo... lol. With ET, at least you could run around and score kills with your quick hitting gold power, albeit late in your career. Now, the only thing the crown jewel of the set does on teams is kill your health and endurance bar. Sure, a second or two doesn't seem like much on a calculator, but it's an eternity in game play feel and results. It's been suggested before, but simply having the ET damage occur immediately would negate some of this problem.

Great points.

No, I think it is more a case of the general population of the game not being young (as in very few new players relative to "old timers").

Generally when something goes from being perceived as good/great for years it is then ingrained into the makeup of the game. A reduction (especially a pretty heavy one in the case of EM) is never going to be received well, or moved past.

If we had a constant and sizable influx of new players combined with a similar rate of attrition for older players such changes are absorbed more smoothly.

The EM changes are like trying to tell a guy that has been driving a 300hp Charger for years that the 76hp pinto is just as good. He simply won't buy it no matter how you dress it up (ie arguments that EM is still numerically near the top for st damage, which ignore massive overkill and corspe blasting). You'd have a much easier time selling that Pinto to someone who has never owned a vehicle before (ie wasn't around when EM was actually good).

This game simply does not generate new players and at the same time old players don't go away (compared to the player stream of almost all other MMO's). So there is very little they could do to restore EM to its former glory short of restoring it to its former glory. The game more than ever has moved to an AoE damage focus so even if EM was restored it would still be a substandard set for anyone who values reward rates in the game.

On a personal level, I deleted my em/fire brute and my em/regen stalker after the EM nerfs. The reason was almost entirely because of how they felt compared to before. Swimming in molasses on sets that require quick reaction time on heals leaves a crappy taste in my mouth. A lot can and does go wrong on a /fire or /regen toon that is relatively squishy in the time it now takes to animate the top attacks. Being locked into ET for nearly 3x as long as before and still losing the HP was resulting in defeat too often for my liking. It seemed pointless to me and was unfun.

Edit: I think a lot of people fail to realize that the EM changes didn't just result in a fairly significant reduction in damage output, but also resulted in a significant reduction in survivability for many pairings. For my two EM toons it felt like a double nerf, because it was.

Your analogy is only fair if you include the fact there are still 300hp chargers in the game, along with some 600hp corvettes, lol. So of course nobody wants to drive the pinto, except pinto enthusiasts which are rare...

Exactly, and those people that enjoy having 300hp under their foot don't swallow the reduced EM power well and just moved on to different sets.

The corvettes are AoE sets and the ZR1 corvettes are when you combine a strong set with shields

I was deliberate with the analogy because even as powerful as old EM was it was nothing compared to the supercars like a dm/shield or fire/shield.

I decided that I also wanted an EM tank. So I built an EM/Inv brute that I'll cross sides with. Even if I don't take ET, I'll be dishing out more damage than a tank and I'll have enough mitigation, especially on teams where buffs will be flying, to get the job done.

Having experienced all of these (I especially loved the period of time where I'd get laughably easy saturation of Shadow Maul), I can say that, in general, I agree with you, but, I still think you're overselling the AoE capabilities of Dark Melee. Shadow Maul's biggest problem is that horribly long animation time. When you factor in the need to adjust position, Shadow Maul can easily be on a slower cycle time than Dragon's Tail thanks to that long animation time.

I'd have to agree with this, though it's not like MA hasn't gotten bits of love over the course of the game. Storm Kick has gotten some major love over time. Keep in mind, however, that the DM weren't quit in the same scale that would be needed to tweak MA. Similar changes could probably be made to EM (tweaking the damage on a couple of powers), but MA needed a bit more of a holistic change (like a secondary effect unification along with some animation time reduction on EC).

It comes from doing number crunching for Elec ST attack chains when the set first came out. I recall making a number of simple attack chains to provide Elec with decent ST damage that did about only a bit less than the the comparative attack strings for DM.

CB>JL>CB>CI does a base of 60 DPS compared to Smite>Siphon>Smite>MG's base 75 DPS. That's 80% effectiveness for Elec melee. The difference between the two isn't insubstantial, but Elec is capable of some decent ST damage, especially when you load up those attacks with procs. I wouldn't say it's great, but it's not mediocre. It's decent, when you consider what Spines does, though, a lot of this is semantic debate because we're probably using different scales of effectiveness.

End drain isn't what I'd call particularly useful utility. It's one of the least effective secondary effects out there. Even so, EM still has one of the best secondary effects for PvE simply because it takes out targets completely for a decent period of time, even if it is only a chance to do so. The biggest problem with EM's secondary effect is the same problem with DM's secondary effect: it's only really effective on soft targets while using AoE. Tohit debuffs aren't that useful when you're having to stack them up on a single target that will likely be dead before you get more than a couple attacks on them. The same applies to Energy Melee. On the hard targets that both sets are designed to excel at, their secondary effects are virtually useless because (for DM) AV resistance laughs away tohit debuffs and (for EM) AV resistance laughs away mez effects for 2/3rds of the time (though, the fact that you get full effectiveness of secondary effect for 1/3rd of the time lends some greater usefulness to EM's rather than DM's).

The only real way I can see about adding greater utility to EM would be to increase the chance to stun on the lowest chance powers (like Barrage, which only has a pitiful 10% chance, and Whirling Hands, with its 30% chance) so that the secondary effect is more reliable and/or to provide some area stunning for other powers (like Stun: imagine if you could have a 50% chance for a mag 3 stun on all enemies in a 15' radius whenever you used it; there would be no additional damage so it would still be an AoE attack but it would allow the power to stun additional targets without breaking Cottage Rule or generating IO set problems) so that you can actually manage to keep more than 1-2 enemies stunned at a time.

I will admit that my only experience with EM is with my DA/EM Tanker. I designed her explicitly because I knew Dark Regen would overcome the -hp of ET and because the chances to stun would stack excellently with OG.

To me, a set that is comprised almost entirely of bad powers that need to be buoyed by a small number of overpowered ones is a poorly designed set. While it's not necessarily imbalanced (though an argument could be made for SS and Stone Armor when you consider their excellent performance in all areas with easily mitigated penalties), it's bad design. I honestly believe that bad design should be fixed.

First off, the popularity of Stone Armor and Super Strength is almost assuredly tied into their obscene performance in game. If you honestly don't believe that SS's ridiculous performance with AoE and ST damage, along with the respectable mitigation mechanisms it has, doesn't skew its play numbers in an upward manner, I'd have to ask you to stop smoking before you post. The same applies to Stone Armor.

I would say that they do, in fact, hurt the game. Both sets are stronger in virtually all areas than similar power sets and, while they may not have a monopoly, they most certainly command a larger portion of the population specifically because they're a helluva lot stronger than their counterparts.

And you don't see a problem with this? No other set so thoroughly hinges on the use and abuse of a single power to make it a viable set. That's bad design of a powerset and bad design of the powers in the set. It's an atrocious amalgam of powers that allows for ridiculous capability to abuse it. SS relies on permanent build up and Stone Armor relies on permanent god mode.

That metaphor is pretty much abandoned when you have to realize that you get to pick which stones you get from the set. You can take only the good powers and go to pool powers and APPs for all of your other needs. If you had to get every power in the set, then it would be a much more apt argument, but, when you can completely ignore the bad powers and only take the good ones (i.e. the 4-5 powers in SS and Stone Armor that are actually worth taking), then the teeter-totter comparison goes out the window.

It doesn't take a set being monopolistic to be overpowered or to need fixing. In fact, I can assure you that no set is going to be monopolistic within the confines of CoX simply because CoX has a lot of thematic choice involved in character creation. Stone Armor might be brokenly strong, but it doesn't mean that everyone and their cousin is going to take it just because it's strong. People that want to play with fire are still going to play with fire even if stone is stronger.

You also have to remember that there are many people that can't stand the poorly designed sets. Even if they're stronger, SS and Stone Armor are complete and utter ******* to level up because it takes so long to get them playable. The low level powers are virtually useless so you have to either suffer through the first 20-30 level of utter weakness to reach the final levels of completely loltastic overpoweredness or farm them up because you don't want to bother with those levels.

Poor set design isn't something that can be ignored. There are a lot of people that play around with sets but abandon them early on because they can't stand how they play. Set design is intrinsically involved in how a set plays and both Stone Armor and Super Strength fail miserably in set design.

Do you really believe that SS and/or Stone Armor aren't being overplayed? Maybe it's just Freedom, but I can randomly pick a Tanker on at virtually any time and chances are better than even that it will either be an */SS or a Stone/*. If they weren't being overplayed, you would see just as many of the 9 other attack sets and 7 other defense sets. I can assure you, the two of those sets are being overplayed, whether you want to admit it or not, and it has to do with those sets being completely borked.

In the same way that I'd rather the devs fixed old existing zones before they start throwing in new zones, I'd rather the devs fixed old powersets where possible before throwing in new powersets. I would love to play a Stone Tank as long as it didn't have a crippling dependency on its permanent god-mode. I would similar love to play an SS toon as long as it didn't have a similar crippling dependency on its permanent Build Up. Try playing either set without using the power in question and you'll see just how broken the entire design of the set is, especially when you realize what Rage (lol to acc slotting) and Granite Armor (lol to dying) do in a holistic manner.

Hell, I bet you can ask any developer on staff about SS and Stone and they'll agree with me that the sets are poorly designed and that they would love to be able to fix them. The biggest reason they haven't (and Castle has actually said this) is because of the player backlash. Of course, if they fixed them in the ways that I would like them to (i.e. in a holistic manner rather than trying to spot fix the set like was done with EM), I doubt they'd receive much backlash beyond the players that are pissed that they now have to rebuild their characters because they don't like how Rage/Granite Armor is no longer the defining characteristic of the set (or because they don't like how they can't automatically own everything's face like they used to).

I dunno if I'm 'overselling' dark melee's aoe ability when I call it mediocre to below average, and saying its about on par with ma's, lol. In terms of shadow maul, if you played fifty levels of DM, you should have positioning down pretty good by then and it shouldn't really be an issue. If you enjoy MA's aoe more, that's fine, but I wouldn't consider either set very strong in terms of aoe ability, and neither one significantly better than the other.



In my opinion, MA is just kinda all over the place and isn't really that great at anything. I think most people who like it, like it for concept and looks, and that's fine, but performance-wise, to me, it was sub par all around. I agree that this is a set that could use a total rework - it should be one of the more popular sets considering the popularity of martial arts overall, the fact it isn't speaks to its playability.



It's decent when you compare it to spines, but spines is in the basement in terms of single target damage, due to being one of the best aoe sets. And 20% less damage is pretty substantial when comparing the sets, and the longer the single target dmg is applied, the bigger the damage gap. As has been mentioned by others, there were several threads in the scrapper forums where single target dmg was compared and elec was one of the bottom feeders, and from playing the set to fifty, i'd say the comparisons were pretty accurate.

But this brings up an important point. The gap in single target effectiveness is not that great, and on top of that, single target damage is not nearly as useful as aoe ability in the vast majority of situations in this game - which makes the nerf to et without improving em's aoe ability even harder to understand. Because even with it's dominant single target damage pre-nerf, em was an underperforming set*.

*Outside of pvp... it's dominance in the old-style pvp is the only reason it was so heavily played, and the only reason there were post after post of people laughing at players for not taking em, post the devs apparently confused for posts regarding overall gameplay.



My suggestion wasn't just end drain (which I agree is virtually useless in pve), but also end GAIN, maybe in just one power where you can regain a decent portion of your endurance.

Increasing stun ability would be fine, but as i've argued, the sets aoe ability really needs to be improved first, including aoe mitigation. Back when the set was nerfed I suggested the stun be made an aoe deal also, so I like your idea there, lol.

(And just to be clear, I don't think the set needs to be buffed with ALL of the ideas I've suggested just a few, or even one or two to start.)


Well yeah, OG is gonna distort your perception of stun capabilities just a tad, lol.

And lots of secondaries will make the health drain of et less noticeable, but on some sets, not so much.

I guess our opinions on what are 'easily mitigated penalties' differ. If I didn't like the idea of SS so much, I honestly would never play the set, I hate the rage crash that much. I HATE having endurance problems, and the rage crash creates endurance problems, more on some combos than others, but it's still there. And there is nothing more annoying when you're a damage dealer of being made impotent for 10 seconds at a time every 2 minutes. And there are other competiting sets that do single target or aoe better, without that pain in the *** crash. Concept has a large bearing on what I play, but no bearing when I evaluate a set on performance.

Stone Armor is one of the only defensive secondaries I haven't played, and I have no desire to play it because of it's penalties. First of all, getting to granite sure doesn't look like any fun, and once you get there, you look exactly like every single stone armor tanker in the game, your ability to move is shot and you take an additional hit on offense.

But I guess opinions vary.



First off, grownups can disagree without claiming the person disagreeing with them is smoking drugs, lol.

Secondly, to attribute the amount a set gets played is equal to its performance ability, is flawed logic, or this past month would indicate dual pistols is the best set in the game, lol.

Most importantly, we don't have the numbers on how much a set gets played.

Having said that, I'm sure super strength is a very popular set, but I guarantee you that a great deal of that popularity is due to the fact it's the iconic superhero power from comic books. Most kids grow up wanting to be super strong like superman, not swinging around a stone mallet, lol. And it's performance is far from 'ridiculous'. It's on par with other sets in terms of aoe ability, but keep in mind all of the sets aoe ability comes from a single power that you can't access until late game, which is certainly a drawback, when other sets get their aoe capabilities much sooner. And in terms of single target damage, many sets eclipse what SS can do, including some that rival it's aoe abilities. So if SS's performance is 'ridiculous', than there are some sets in the game that are 'uber-ridiculous'.

I don't agree that stone armor is played much more than many other sets. I'm fairly certain sets like WP, Inv, and SD get similar amounts of play, if not more. Sure, its 'god mode' power draws a lot of people to the set, but the negatives of the set, that you feel are easily mitigated, keep a lot of people from playing it (or at least getting to level 32) because they don't feel the negatives are so easily mitigated.





That's simply not true. In terms of SS, stone melee alone has better aoe capabilities and better single target damage. You're confusing popularity for performance again. But I'm sorry Super Rockguy is never going to be as popular as Superman.

And I'd be very suprised if SA gets way more play than competing sets. Sure it has superior survival ability, but it pays for it with crippling movement and damage penalties. You're 'stronger in virtually all areas than similar power sets' argument really falls apart here.


No, there is no problem there, just because you or someone else doesn't like it, lol. A badly designed powerset is one that nobody wants to play, like em.

And using a sets best power, isn't 'abusing' it, lol. Babe Ruth was a great baseball player, but he wasn't great at everything. In fact he kinda sucked at some things. Wasn't a very good basestealer. Didn't move around very well. Nope, all he did was 'abuse' his swing and hit homeruns. And he was a very popular player. And there were other great players through history that were great in their own way. Some were imbalanced like ruth, others were more balanced. I like diversity. You would seem to prefer a team full of players that were decent at everything but not great at anything. Sounds pretty boring to me, but again, opinions vary.



When these comparisons I'm using were calculated, they were calculated with the best powers from each set, so your point doesn't apply here.


Again, what you consider poor set design, is your opinion, and you're welcome to it. The devs may even share your opinion.

But your arguments that these sets are overpowered simply is not true. There are several sets that compete with or exceed SS in terms of single target and aoe performance. And while SA is the most survivable set, it is clearly eclipsed by every competing set in every other area due to it's limitations.

Now in terms of 'fixing' sets, it's simply bad business to fix sets that your customers clearly enjoy, and enjoy in large numbers, unless those sets are ridiculously overperforming - and clearly they are not. I personally, don't enjoy being underpowered for 30 plus levels on these types of sets, and I'm sure I'm not alone. But theres a better solution to simply changing a set so many enjoy and pissing them off, to appease a few other customers. You simply make an SS2 and a SA2, which shouldn't take much longer than it would to rework the first set.



Yeah, maybe it is just freedom, lol.

But like I've said, performance wise, SS and SM are very similar, yet I'd agree that SS gets more play than SM. But again, it's not because of performance, it's because one is SUPER STRENGTH (superman, hulk, spiderman) and the other is stone melee (???).

I absolutely do not agree that stone gets much more play than competing sets, at least from my experience. Do you only run STF's, lol?

And it's not about me 'admitting' anything, I'm not being dishonest. I simply don't agree with you. Sure SS is very popular, but I don't agree that it's due to being overpowered, because there are sets that are on par and better out there. And I don't agree that SA is being played considerably more than it's competitors - sure it has a survivability edge, but it clearly pays for that with severe disadvantages.



I don't disagree that those 2 sets are reliant on those powers, but I don't agree that makes them unplayable or broken, and I can assure you I'm in the vast majority. Granted this is just personal taste, we like sherbert and you don't, you like vanilla. You want them to change sherbert, piss a lot of their happy customers off, and make you happy by turning it into vanilla. The better solution would be to add vanilla and keep sherbert. SS1 and SS2.


I've said this several times - opinions vary. And being a business, they're simply being smart not doing something that would enrage (pun intended) a very large portion of their player base. Castle tried to 'fix' rage a while back by adding a ridiculous no recovery to the crash, which resulted in countless rage crash deaths on test, enraged players and a withdrawn 'fix'. Was his opinion a good move there? I'd have to say hell no.

I'd support 'fixing' SS if nobody was playing it and/or there was nothing on it's level performance wise. That simply is not the case, so 'fixing' SS would do nothing more than piss off a large chunk of their paying customers. If they have a 'holistic' change in mind for ss, then offer it as a new powerset and make everyone happy. Same thing for stone armor.

I have little doubt SS is still leaps and bounds more popular than the other secondaries. What are you typically seeing paired with shields? I find shields/SS to be a very common toon on my travels. For good reason too, if you want to make a very offensive tank it is near the top for sure and very easy to softcap.

Well, I commonly see Fire Melee or Electrical Melee paired with Shields.Just last night when I rolled upt he WP/EM Tanker and went and did the Sewers.I was on a 7 man team that has 2 other tankers.Both Shield, and both Elec Melee.

I havnt see any SD/SS Tankers for a while.

They've proven time and time again that they're willing to do this, so I wouldn't be surprised if it happens.

@macskull, @Not Mac | XBL: macskull | Steam: macskull | Skype: macskull
"One day we all may see each other elsewhere. In Tyria, in Azeroth. We may pass each other and never know it. And that's sad. But if nothing else, we'll still have Rhode Island."