What can the other secondaries do better than /Shield?
tldr version: SR is a one trick bad pony, fire armor/invuln could use a boost too, leave shields/WP/regen/dark armor alone.
Let's look at what makes 'good' sets good, and 'bad' sets bad.
The Good:
Shields: You can defense cap this set, AND you get a really great offensive ranged nova power. The one-two punch from Shield Charge and a good primary PBAoE usually means all the minions of a group will be dead. Has some all right health recovery, and in theory you can build for smash/lethal cap with One With the Shield, but high +defense and offense is the name of the game here. The ability to boost your teammates' defense as well and have +attack as a toggle are icing on the cake of a great set.
Regen: You take the toggle heal, two click heals, a click mega regen, and Moment of Glory and have the whole set right there. Quick Recovery is icing on the cake. Resiliance and Revive are optional. Very straight forward to play set, although it requires some skills in order to survive.
Dark Armor: Looks crappy at first, but when developed is a very powerful set. Anyone who's fought Ghost Widow knows the power of PBAoE life drain, and the psi resistance DA gets is probably the highest in the game. If you cannot kill a dark armor in 15 seconds, you can't ever kill them at all. This set also syrnegizes with dark melee very well (DM gives -tohit, an end drain, and a single target life drain). Also has the perk of having extra controls/perks in the set you can use.
Ninjitsu (yes I know its a stalker set, so sue me): Like super reflexes, but has many tricks up its sleeves. Built in caltrops, a PBAOE detaunt, a self heal, and that fun confuse/sleep powder makes this a great set for survival as a stalker. Most importantly, it combines being able to cap defense with having a great self heal. Works very well with either DM (see above) or ninja blade (due to divine avalanche and melee/lethal capping). This is the set super reflexes "should have been".
Willpower: Has amazing self regen (almost as much as a regen scrapper, go figure) which kicks in the more bad guys you have around you. Other wise you get a good mix of defenses and smash/lethal resistance. A great all around set that 'feels' right, and can make for some very tough tank/brute tanking builds. This is the set invulnerability "should have been".
Electrical Armor: This set would be mediocre except for one thing: the insane endurance generation/damage you get from the set. If you can build your scrapper (or brute for that matter) to last more than a few seconds, you will decimate most enemies. Power sink works as a good control in a pinch if you decide to go the -end route with both primary and secondary, and you do cap energy resistance without even trying. When things get really hairy you can use the teir 9 go nuts with capped resitances. Still, its a 'soft' defense set compared to others. This is the set fire armor "should have been".
The Bad (or 'meh')
Invulnerability: Just a mere shadow of its former self, although recent changes have aleviated that some what. It can still be a respectable set if you really work to cap out your defense and get your endurance recovery under control, but other wise is kind of "meh" compared to the above.
Fire Armor: Has some pretty good extra offense (Firey Aura, Burn Patch, and another build up), an endurance drain power (combustion) but unlike shields or electrical you pay for that offense dearly. You need a lot of IOs to get the immobilize and knockback coverage most other sets give you, and resistance based armors kind of suck in general after the Global Defense Nerf. Ironically this makes a great offense heavy scrapper set as you can double build up and burninate the crap out of a spawn, but falls down flat if you start getting shot at.
The Ughly
Super Reflexes: Where do I begin? In order for this set to function properly, you need to take most of the powers in the set and slot them well. This means right off the bat you have a tough, tight build. Endurance becomes a problem fast as you are running no less than 3 toggles (more if you need to get tough or weave). The passives scaling up resistances when you are down on your luck are a nice touch, but again you have to take *everything* just about on most builds. On top of it all, other than quickness the set offers litterally nothing outside of the +defense.
This means you have a super tight build where you have to watch your endurance very carefully, you have very little room for extra 'fun' powers, and you are a one trick pony that if you run into so much as a COT earth mage quick sand patch you are pretty much screwed. Never mind enemies like Malta Gunslingers that "cheat" and never miss.
Now while you can build a good super reflexes that is defense capped and survives easily enough under regular play, you can do the same with a little IO work for a */ninjitsu stalker, or an invuln character, a soldier of Arachnos, or in this thread's case, a /shield character. And unlike Super Reflexes, those characters are not one trick ponies. Now everyone will be crying that shields/WP/regen (again...) should be nerfed, but in this case I think that Super Reflexes should be reworked, and given more utility.
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The only powers this would actually be justifiable for is probably the crash based blaster nukes. Having them capable of exceeding 16 targets would be a nice upside to so much downside relative to the pseudo-nukes.|
Originally Posted by Cainus
Yes, but lets not forget that the # of affected targets was reduced because the damage was percieved to be higher than intended. So, while individual damage might be higher than originally intended, there was no limit on how many targets were hit. If you do end up reducing the damage value, I would ask that you also do away with the target cap to balance it out.
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SC sure as heck doesn't warrant such a change.
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Well at least this post makes it sound like you are no longer off in la-la land. For those wondering this will change the scrapper version down to 106.36 base damage (for the main aoe). So basically half of what it does now.|
Originally Posted by Castle
Good catch. I was looking at the original power, as I designed it, rather than the reworked version that was done later. For scrappers, it is scale 3.6 on the Minion_Pet table, which is a far cry from the scale 1.4 on the Minion_Pet table I originally designed for it. I vaguely remember someone (Synapse? Sunstorm? I'd have to dig into check in notes to see) asking me if they could update it to include AT Mods in the damage scales and saying yes.
Hmm...yeah, ok. I can very easily see what happened here. Shield Charge when released was set for a scale 1.7 damage to all targets within 20' of impact, with 0.7 scale bonus within 3' of impact. When the change to allow AT scaling was made, the bonus damage was rolled into the overall damage, for a scale of 2.4 to all targets in a 20' radius. At the same time, instead of have Brutes getting a mod of 0.75 applied, they were treated as the base. So, instead of: Brutes 3' scale 1.8, 20' scale 1.275 Tankers 3' scale 2.04, 20' 1.445 Scrappers 3' scale 2.7, 20' scale 1.9125 We get: Brute 20' scale 2.4 Tanker 20' scale 2.712 Scrapper 20' scale 3.6 That REALLY sucks. |
That is a pretty major reduction when it eventually hits. I feel a bit vindicated for mentioning that the original value (133) was a lot more balanced, but that was only as perceptive as spotting a gigantic purple elephant strolling down the street, so I'm not out celebrating or anything.
Unfortunately if/when this goes through it will make FA a lot more offensive by proxy, which may translate to some QoL upgrades to the damage delivery, but probably no significant bump in said delivery.
We'll have to wait and see how it all comes out in the wash and whether Castle decides for a full scale reduction to the correct values or allows some wiggle room in the power.
lolcastle
/gignore @username is the best feature of this game. It's also probably the least used feature.
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Originally Posted by Nights_Dawn
Hazy is right
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Make sure you understand that when we talk about 300 DPS from Fire melee or Dark Melee, we're talking about absolute top end performance - IO'd to the gills, fully saturated AAO, and for Dark Melee, fully-saturated Soul Drain. Also, LUCKY - most people are posting their BEST Pylon runs, not their AVERAGE runs.|
Originally Posted by Castle
There shouldn't be a 50% disparity in max performance here. I'm not too concerned about the protection levels shields can generate; it'll be needed. The DDB Resist is higher than designed, but, again, not really the major concern here.
AAO, actually looks fine. The maximum boost it can generate isn't that large. Shield Charge isn't bad, basically it can get you to 2 scale 0.7 aoe's on, at best, an 19.5 second cycle time (ignoring Arcanatime, for the moment.) Then again, to get that, you've got a +400% Recharge, which is freakin' huge. That leads me to believe the discrepancy lies with the primary sets Fire Melee and Dark Melee. Fire is MEANT to have higher DPS overall, so that's 'fine.' Dark Melee, not so much. I'd have to look at specific builds and slotting to see what's going on there, but that's a project I don't have time for now. |
The problem isn't with Fire Melee or Dark Melee. I did a DPS comparison for absolute top end performance using Super Reflexes as the secondary. Here are the numbers I got before I got tired of the project:
253 Dark Melee (7 targets hit by Soul Drain)Dark Melee is in the lead if it is surrounded by bad guys and reliably hits seven of them with Soul Drain. It's near the bottom if it only hits one. Actual performance in most circumstances will be somewhere in the middle.
243 Katana
238 Dual Blades
227 Claws
217 Dark Melee (1 target hit by Soul Drain)
216 Martial Arts
212 Broad Sword
While I didn't evaluate Fire Melee, the Pylon soloing times lead me to believe that it'd probably be near or at the top, but not by much of a margin, and it probably should be near or at the top.
There really isn't a 50% disparity between Claws and Fire or Dark. If you could make a completely-pimped Claws/Shield Defense, it wouldn't do 300 DPS, but it wouldn't be far off the pace either. As Frosticus says, give it a try, and you'll see.
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Videos of Other Stupid Scrapper Tricks
Castle while you are lurking it may be a good time to bring up the issue with brute psuedo-pets. In particular SC and L-rod as burn is in the same form across all AT's.
It is pretty standard that brutes deal a lot less base damage, but can be offset by having tremendous buff ceiling. Unfortunately when the change went through to set some pseudo-pets to AT specific values this double punishes brutes. It is trivially easy for a brute to hit the pet damage cap of 400% at which point they fail to receive a bonus for their inherent from then on. The result is Scrappers using something like SC are actually much more than 1.5x as good with it as intended.
When you set them to use the same psuedo-pet Brutes are arguably too good with the power compared to scrappers. This would be the case for burn if the fury bonus carried over to it for more than a second or so.
I think a compelling case can be made for brute pseudo pets to be ~30% lower than scrapper ones rather than ~50%.
Its confirmed now that Shield Charge will be getting a huge nerf in the near future. Now with that said please for the love of God do something about /Fire Armor lol.
Virtue: @Santorican
Dark/Shield Build Thread
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I deliberately haven't discussed this topic with Castle since this thread started, except with my public posts, so that I could continue to comment freely. So I'm saying this within the context that I haven't actually asked Castle what he thinks about the situation directly, except what's publicly in this thread. This makes the following statement pure speculation and credibly deniable by the devs.|
Originally Posted by Frosticus
We'll have to wait and see how it all comes out in the wash and whether Castle decides for a full scale reduction to the correct values or allows some wiggle room in the power.
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Having said that, I think the solution the devs will eventually converge on will be to reinstate area modifiers, so that the base damage won't have to be whacked too hard, but that damage will not be allowed to hit a massive number of targets in a huge AoE. I would also expect the cast time to increase slightly to reduce the power's gigantic DPA.
That would allow the devs to reduce the power without a huge numerical nerf to its base damage. If it were me, I'd propose an increase in cast time to circa 1.9s, a slight to moderate reduction in base damage (probably to at least under 3.0 scale), and a reinstatement of a drastic reduction in the splash damage (to no more than half the current base value).
I would also expect this to not happen anytime before Going Rogue goes live. You probably couldn't carve out enough time from all the stakeholders to discuss this situation. Or collect enough firewood and a strong enough stake to start the meeting.
That's assuming the devs look for a purely numerical way out of this. There is an alternative if they decide its worth asking for tech time to add new mechanics. They could make the damage of SC scale based on the distance of the teleport. After all, its intended to be a charge: presumably its conceptually consistent for the damage to be lower if the player has less distance to build up momentum. Have a base level of damage if the teleport distance is basically zero (hitting a target right in front of them) and increase the damage to a maximum of somewhere not too far from its current value if the teleport distance is at least some distance, say 30 feet. This way, you couldn't use it as easily to min/max damage on a stationary target like an AV or a pylon.
I'm always in favor of adding exotic and interesting new mechanics to get out of sticky numerical balance problems myself. But there's a reason why pohsyb hides in a box and the lead programmer only communicates via paranormal video.
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If they have the tech I like that solution. Though since they couldn't make it a teleport-to-target effect, I suspect they don't currently have that tech either.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
That's assuming the devs look for a purely numerical way out of this. There is an alternative if they decide its worth asking for tech time to add new mechanics. They could make the damage of SC scale based on the distance of the teleport. After all, its intended to be a charge: presumably its conceptually consistent for the damage to be lower if the player has less distance to build up momentum. Have a base level of damage if the teleport distance is basically zero (hitting a target right in front of them) and increase the damage to a maximum of somewhere not too far from its current value if the teleport distance is at least some distance, say 30 feet. This way, you couldn't use it as easily to min/max damage on a stationary target like an AV or a pylon.
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Moonlighter
50s include MA/SD, MA/SR, DP/Elec, Claw/Inv, Kat/Dark, Kat/Fire, Spine/Regen, Dark/SD
First Arc: Tequila Sunrise, #168563
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It was sort of like the time I played a MAN build (no primary or secondary powers allowed) just to see how hard it was.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
MA/SRs that played since release deserve a special veteran reward or something. A machine gun storm kick would have been fine: what we actually had was Flurry for Feet.
There is *nothing* to compare to MA/SR at release. If release MA/SR was a difficulty level, it would award a MasterOf badge. Here's how you can come close to simulating MA/SR at release today: 1. Replace Storm Kick with Flurry (Storm Kick used to do a lot less damage with an animation time comparable to flurry) 2. Replace CAK with Boxing (Boxing actually does *more* damage today than CAK did back then) 3. Replace Eagle's Claw with Sands of Mu (Eagle's Claw used to do Crane Kick damage with Sands of Mu timing) 4. Take only the SR toggles, no passives 5. Take no power pools 6. Slot no inventions 7. Figure out a way to fight even minions, +1 Lts, and +2 Bosses all at once. 8. Whenever a foe casts a pet, turret, rain, or patch, if you don't have at least two purples just use Self Destruct immediately (SR at release: 5% passives, 10% toggles, vs even con minions: 50%; Lts: 62.5%; Bosses: 75%; AVs: 90%; turrets/pets: 105% base tohit) That would probably be in the general ballpark. Oh yeah, and Quickness used to cost endurance (0.01 eps or something like that). Rather unique for a passive. |
I think I got through a lot of the levels by using Aid Self as my primary defense and running at base difficulty.
One thing to remember though, at that time Thunder Kick was actually a decent attack before (in a move that still baffles me) they nerfed it. So I used Air Superiority, Thunder Kick, Boxing, and Crane Kick and just kept the bosses juggled the entire time.
Moonlighter
50s include MA/SD, MA/SR, DP/Elec, Claw/Inv, Kat/Dark, Kat/Fire, Spine/Regen, Dark/SD
First Arc: Tequila Sunrise, #168563
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I agree with the former but not the latter. Shields is "okay" with SOs.|
Originally Posted by Miladys_Knight
Yes, please. It's beyond Uber with IO sets and sucks hard with SOs. I think that was all mentioned in the Beta test.
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It's certainly a little disappointing if you try to compare it to other sets by straight numbers, but it's also more varied than those other sets; obviously the defense isn't going to be as good as Super Reflexes, nor is the resistance going to be as good as Invulnerability. It's got a really good permanent max health bonus to aid in survivability and that nifty, nifty damage buff from Against All Odds that help the set shine... even when you're getting your teeth knocked out.
(One With the Shield does kind of suck, though. Most of the time, I completely forget I even have it. Subjective feedback, of course.)
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Originally Posted by Nethergoat
it's NEVER too late to pad your /ignore list!
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I think this little Shield Charge snafu has demonstrated that the Blast set nukes could be buffed substantially. Reduce the recharge to 3 minutes, make the crash only take away 90% of your end, and remove the recovery debuff altogether.
And buff blaster blazing aura. 
>.>
<.<
>.>
Why Blasters? Empathy Sucks.
So, you want to be Mental?
What the hell? Let's buff defenders.
Tactics are for those who do not have a big enough hammer. Wisdom is knowing how big your hammer is.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
I'm always in favor of adding exotic and interesting new mechanics to get out of sticky numerical balance problems myself. |
Or:
Boost other sets to match.
It's a SUPERHERO game. Let's be SUPER.
Give fire armor some serious boosts, it's pretty bad right now. Boost the damage aura, and give it faster recharge times on pretty much everything. Let the click-monkeys have a set to go wild about.
Moar damage would be good, isn't supposed to be the damagey set?Electric armor ain't too bad, maybe boost up the damage aura. Some minor resist slipped into a power or two wouldn't suck either.
Dark armor, eesh.... Maybe give it some DDR? Or maybe borrow a trick from SR, your hitpoints drop, your resists go up? It's sad that your strongest power is your rez....
For Invuln, how about making Unstoppable useful? Not the bad old perma days, but just cut the power in half. Half the buff, half the crash. Heck, leave the timers alone, even. For that matter, double the base resist numbers for the passives, where they are now are comical.
Stone: Here's an idea: Let them jump a little. Not a lot. But a six inch curb? Seriously? Yes, stoners need to pay for all that ridiculous awesome, but dang.
Willpower is ridiculously fine. Maybe add a little +run speed and + jump to various powers.
You get the idea, I'm sure others can come up withideas for the other sets, or even better ideas for these above. I am tired of nerfs, how about we propose buffs?
That said, it's about time Shields got noticed, they are WAY out of line. Waaaay.
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Thunder kick did too much damage for its recharge. When they tried to buff MA in I6, they also corrected that bug. Unfortunately, the devs really didn't have the numerical tools to properly buff offensive sets at the time, and their buffs didn't so much improve MA's damage as it did make ridiculous powers a little less ridiculous (CAK, EC). So the net result was that MA's single target damage went *down* after the buff to CAK and EC and the nerf/correction to TK.|
Originally Posted by Moonlighter
It was sort of like the time I played a MAN build (no primary or secondary powers allowed) just to see how hard it was.
I think I got through a lot of the levels by using Aid Self as my primary defense and running at base difficulty. One thing to remember though, at that time Thunder Kick was actually a decent attack before (in a move that still baffles me) they nerfed it. So I used Air Superiority, Thunder Kick, Boxing, and Crane Kick and just kept the bosses juggled the entire time. |
Unfortunately, although I was able to prove the changes would have a net negative effect, I didn't possess the credibility at the time to make that charge stick. It wasn't until the Claws "hyperchanges" a couple issues later when I made the numerical prediction that the Claws changes would "turn Claws into a warp-speed buzz saw" and the devs were predicting only a small 7% increase in damage that I think numerical analysis started to drag itself out of the gutter of offensive comparisons (numerical analysis had already started to assert itself in damage mitigation by then, with me on this side of the Pacific and players like Dr. Rock on the other side of the Atlantic, but most numerical analysis on the offensive side of the equation was little more than brawl numbers turned into a sudoku).
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I dont like this mainly because the effect it would have on Dark Melee / Shield would be too detrimental. That set is already not even remotely an AOE monster, and due to Soul Drain (point blank self damage buff) they are always going to need it to be point blank.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
They could make the damage of SC scale based on the distance of the teleport.
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I'd prefer the numerical solution for this reason.
(and no, I don't have a DM/Shield, just saying).
Lewis
Random AT Generation!
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FYI, i read the first couple pages and skipped through to see what the red guy said.
But SR gets a nice boost to survivability with scaling resists, and of course DDR. Im unsure of the number, but /sd can get quite high, i believe using hamis or some such stuff.
my main is ma/sr, and he has outlived a lot of stuff that the /sd didn't make it through...that being said, ive seen bs/sd's kill stuff waaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy faster than I could, single target and of course groups.
Like others have said, I think the desparity lies not in the secondaries themselves, but what IOs can add to the sets when money is no object. I think that when an /sd toon and a /sr toon with infinite influence are compared performance wise, the /sd toon will win out. But if you run just straight SOs, the sr will be more survivable by a lot.
But in the end, as long as no one touches /sr I'm fine. Ive been playin for almost 5 years now, and its right where it needs to be...not the best, not the worst.
And on some of the fire comments, it could use a buff. I've got a kat/fa though and he is f'n sweet. He's got quite a bit of money in him, but no purples or pvps, and he is almost as survivable, in general, as my ma/sr. Most of his defense is lethal and melee, but he has a killer self heal where sr doesn't. And his damage is a lot better
On shield charge...its too good....its just too good, especially with AAO, and they are both in the same set. It detracts from the power also in that you can teleport or charge in with the attack, which i think is a really cool concept, but no one does this because they use it after AAO is going, and I don't blame them.
I propose a simple fix, have AAO not affect SC's damage...do'nt know the programing stuff behind the scenes, but this would probably balance it out, and still let it be good with things like build up and fulcrum shift, and let players use it as intended, from range.
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Next issue, the devs are buffing everyone's damage by 10. They are also buffing everyone's health by 10. They are also buffing the critters by 10 to make them a real challenge.|
Originally Posted by mauk2
I am tired of nerfs, how about we propose buffs?
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There might be a decimal place error in the displayed numbers in your chat windows and in the console in general, but don't worry about that. Especially because in Issue 20 they are buffing us again by 100.
To resolve some balance issues, some things won't be getting the full 1000x buff. Some might be getting only 990x, or even 850x. But really, what's the difference between being eight hundred fifty times stronger and being one thousand times stronger. You're still awesome.
See also: Normalization.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Next issue, the devs are buffing everyone's damage by 10. They are also buffing everyone's health by 10. They are also buffing the critters by 10 to make them a real challenge.
There might be a decimal place error in the displayed numbers in your chat windows and in the console in general, but don't worry about that. Especially because in Issue 20 they are buffing us again by 100. To resolve some balance issues, some things won't be getting the full 1000x buff. Some might be getting only 990x, or even 850x. But really, what's the difference between being eight hundred fifty times stronger and being one thousand times stronger. You're still awesome. See also: Normalization. |
....right.
Snarky much?
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Wow, looks like you were WAAAY off on this one, huh, lol.|
Originally Posted by Nihilii
Third, if Shield is deemed too strong by the devs, they'll know it from datamining, not by listening to random forumites
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First of all, I'm pretty surprised at the supposed mistake on SC, and that it went this long without anybody noticing. Didn't they just recently buff the damage too? Who is in charge of catching that? You guys should hire arcanaville...
Secondly, I'm shocked that a dev would look at damage in regards to soloing a rikti pylon and be concerned that dm is doing so much single target damage. I chuckled when the poster a few posts after that tried to explain that it was a specific and rare situation where SD was saturated and that DM is balanced in that it has little aoe capabilities, and could only think of the bludgeoning em received despite those arguments.
Maybe they were actually serious about working on a city of sidekicks game...
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The "buff not nerf" philosophy is a vacuous fiction with no rational numerical consequence due to the fact such changes ultimately require compensating alterations which when normalized have an immaterial differential result. Its only game design benefit is a transient psychological perspective shift which is unsustainable.
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Originally Posted by mauk2
Snarky much?
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1. Thats way too many big words to understand after work and a few beers.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
The "buff not nerf" philosophy is a vacuous fiction with no rational numerical consequence due to the fact such changes ultimately require compensating alterations which when normalized have an immaterial differential result. Its only game design benefit is a transient psychological perspective shift which is unsustainable.
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2. What about SC not being affected by AAO?
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Simple language: Buffing rather than nerfing becomes unsustainable because buffing up one particular aspect of the game requires compensating for this sudden increase in strength by buffing other aspects to match the new strength of this aspect. Suppose that, instead of nerfing Shield Charge, all of the other AoEs in the game were brought up to its baseline. Now, the devs have to buff up the mobs to compensate for this new gameplay dynamic (because they were originally balanced around the current AoE numbers), and... we're back to square one again.|
Originally Posted by theheat
1. Thats way too many big words to understand after work and a few beers.
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It's impossible to ever fully and completely balance a game unless you turn it into the video game equivalent of chess. The best that you can do is try to bring everything to a relatively even plateau, which Shield Charge clearly isn't at. Nerfing Shield Charge consumes a significantly less amount of effort than trying to bring up every other AoE in the game (and subsequently buffing up everything else) to compensate.
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thats how arcanaville works. doesnt she sound smrt?
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Originally Posted by theheat
1. Thats way too many big words to understand after work and a few beers.
2. What about SC not being affected by AAO? |
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Well to be fair, you earned it |
Originally Posted by mauk2
....right.
Snarky much? |
.I mean, you really didn't think about those proposals at all before posting did you?
Let me grab what I think is the cutest one:
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Originally Posted by mauk2
For Invuln, how about making Unstoppable useful? Not the bad old perma days, but just cut the power in half. Half the buff, half the crash. Heck, leave the timers alone, even. For that matter, double the base resist numbers for the passives, where they are now are comical.
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! Gimme an Invuln Brute with 35.7% Resist to all elemental damage types and 65.4% Sm/Le before I stack Tough on top for a total of 82.2%! And that's all under a Defense layer that's stopping between 1/3 and 1/2 of incoming damage before considering Set Bonuses. Then gimme an Unstoppable that adds 41% to those elemental types and costs half my HP and Endurance three minutes later. Of course Dull Pain's slotted Recharge is also three minutes and its Heal is 60%, so even if I used it before popping Unstoppable I can be back up to maximum (boosted) HP after my "crash" in 0.73 sec. I'd have a blast tooling around Test Server with that before sending a PM to War Witch saying that Castle & Co really needed some vacation time nao.
Never shoot from the hip. If you do it wrong there's a chance you'll end up taking the recoil to your groin.
Fiery Aura reply:
1. As a loyal fan of Fierey Aura (damn you concept!!) I'd LOVE if the current suggestion of upfronting a good chunk of Burn's damage came to be. If Shields can get a PBAoE attack, letting Fiery Aura have one as well would be nice. As others have posted, prior to Shields, I accepted Fiery Aura's weak defenses as the price for damage, but it feels Shields get to have more damage and more defenses. So if we can make Fire more fragile at the expense of bigger damage output again, I'd be happy.
2. Any chance we can make Fiery Embrace be +dmg to all for the full 20 second duration? The unfairness of this one power still makes me consider not pairing the armor with the melee. (I still do, damn you concept!!)
3. How about renaming Temperature Protection to Burning Soul? Let it keep its current attibutes, and give it a Quickness-like +20% passive recharge. If Fiery Aura is to be good at damaging, and Shields do it by +dmg, making Fire do it by speeding the user's metabilism would be a nice perk to set it apart. (Yes, I know I'm dreaming here)
As for Shields: