One Dark Armor change

I find it funny that the number of toggles keep being represented in an adversarial light to dark regeneration. Do they use the same resource? Yeah, definitely. But every single toggle has the promise of reducing the need for dark regeneration. I have a /dark brute that runs every single toggle possible, and once you can stack oppressive gloom with cloak of fear, You can all but ignore minions by the crowd. Even if you have death shroud giving fearful foes the chance to fire back, it has its base 5 second cower minimum, serving analogously to a HEAVY -recharge effect. The -tohit is just gravy on that.

Do I run low on endurance? Yes. But I should, I have resistance to every damage type in the game, have two toggles that are impermanent -all debuffs/damage/toggle to low ranking foes, and a 1 to 100% hp heal in there too. Doing that forever is just crazy. I know that if I turn of CoF, I'll get hit with more damage, thus having to use dark regeneration more often. Same goes for Oppressive gloom. It's all a balancing act. Turn off death shroud for longer fear effects, but less damage? Turn off cloak of darkness, but loose the ability to fight near unnoticing other enemies? Turn off the tiny ticks of damage from oppressive gloom to take full attack effects, thus taking bigger hits with the debuffs they cary?

The set rewards you for knowing how your character can use each of these powers. The cutting of both heal/endurance might be friendly early on, but once dark armor has all its tools, the huge heal/endurance plays VERY well with all the other death delaying powers in the set. Dark armor is odd in that its survival scales oddly based on enemy rank, but that's balance for you. Dark armor is a crowd fighter, and a powerful one at that. With all the powers working, heals aren't that needed. But you can take some damage spikes before a crowd gets fully stunned/feared- and low and behold, this powerset offers a spike of healing. Funny, that.

I'd like to see CoF fixed, it sucks without 5 or 6 slots in it.

Sorry if I'm late to the party.

Change Dark Regen? No need, it's fine. Sure, the initial end per activation cost is high without enhancements, but for that you get the most incredible heal in the game. An acc and some end redux and a large crowd? Instant full health. Arcana has covered the math perfectly. (not that I could do half that good.)

Change CoF? Sure. Either some better acc or less end/sec, but not both.

There's a reason my Radiation Armor set idea mimics some of Dark Armor bits and pieces.

This is an interesting discussion. I can see both sides actually. I am not ure the proposed change is the be all fix though, but I would agree in general with JayboH that DA could use some kind of tweak to make it more "fun" for free players.
The forum community, and likely the entire player base, really does have a short memory most of the time.
On one hand:
DA is really potent, because IO's get around everything if you slot well.
DA is really potent, even on SO's- at level 50 when you have all the slots the game offers.
On the other:
DA really is endurance intensive. Really, I am not kidding.
DA needs KB protection. This comes from acrobatics if you play for free= power picks and another toggle to run.

IMO, the free players are not going to play characters with the incarnate system in mind. Time will tell of course what most free players decide to do with accounts in the end, but i think the majority will simply stay free. I want to elaborate on my memory comment above also- you know, a few years ago if you came to the forums and said "what goes with DA" the answer would be "endo light sets like claws or maybe katana if you dont want to constantly chew blues and rest between every fight". If you suggested a broadsword/DA scrapper people would pray for you. Builds were super tight, and slot starved well into the 40's.
I see a lot of suggestions about "just slot endo redux". Sure, at what cost? it's funny, if you read threads here, it's like every build question is for maxed out incarnate characters. if you slot all that endo redux in your character at say, lvl 25- guess what? your character will have to skimp on somthing else. Like damage, or recharge. So now you have free players smahing along through a mission, realizing that hey, this guy just doesnt smash as good as that willpower toon I made. why? because for the first, what, 40 levels or so, DA characters are slot starved. You cant slot out all those toggles, the heal, all your attacks when you have slot limitations.
"But you cant do that on other sets eigther!!" Correct!! But you dont have to. Regens can get by on integration until the 30's. Willpower can get by on autos until the 20's lol. The only one I think that comes close is SR, and even that comes into it's own in the mid 30's.

DA is just a slog on SO's until almost the end game in the 40's. There's always that feeling that you just need to slog through untiul power X! But when you get there, the difficulty has ramped just that little bit, and you need to slot this...well when I get to power X it will be better!! and eventually you are lvl 40 or so and you finally have some extra slots to put into your last few attacks for that 3rd dmg SO. In the mean time your other characters have been monching everything for the last ten levels.
Or you deleted that guy at lvl 30 because you just didnt like him anymore.

On paper, DA fits right in with the other sets. In reality, DA levels up poorly. Comparing sets at lvl 50 is a 7 year tradition for these forums. With Freedom, the guru's here really need to step back a bit, remember those debates from 4 years ago. Put yourself in the free players shoes. What if you were brand spankin new to the game, and the whole game to you was making new characters to level from 1-50. Not, core-alpha-lore-cardiac-radial. Heh, look through the forums right now. See how many questions are answered with "just pick incarnate blah" when someone asks how to deal with problem x.

So, does DA need a buff? No. A buff would make it superior at lvl 50, or with IO's, or with incarnate abilities..... DA needs some kind of tweak though I think to make it level better. I do not think the heal is the answer, but it would help the endo issues. Maybe some of the res should get shuffled around and murky cloud gets turned into an auto. Maybe death shroud should have a minor recov debuff added to it, and an effect where "for every foe in range your recovery is increased". Maybe DA should finally just have KB protection added in so free accounts dont need accrobatics.

I dunno the answer. But I know DA is just not as fun to level on SO's as some of the other sets, despite its merits at lvl 50. There is room for sets that are late bloomers- but DA takes that to the extreme.

Id say allow it to cap dark energy rez, but that may be like giving regen recharge resistance

It's tough to come up with a balanced scenario since I doubt using dark regen less than once a minute is the norm for taking alpha strikes on teams.

I have always looked at DA as being similar to Invul and Regen but with a few power changes. Its signature power used to be CoF, just as how with Invul it is invincibility and with Regen it used to be Instant Healing (when it was a toggle). Fast forward and we get these nerfed sets into the ground, while invincibility did not get hit as hard as the other 2 I think CoF suffered the worst of the 3. There needs to be something done about this.

Now about the DR issue I really do not have much of a problem with it since I use the IO proc to gain some end back. In a huge group I can sometimes go from almost no end to full with the IO just as I go to full health. So there is some hope around this issue. We just need to put our efforts on getting CoF changed. I asked Castle about this back in the day and he said they are not going to change it, but I think we need a new set of eyes on this. Maybe Synapse will agree with us on this on CoF being too nerfed or not worth the end costs. I think though at the very least they need to fix the accuracy issue because of how bad it messes up the streak breaker like the others have said. I too have noticed significantly more missing when I have this power running than when I dont. I just cant afford to run tactics to make up for it.

I just wanted to throw in, totally off topic, that Stupefy: Chance for KB proc in OG is hilarious. I lol everytime some random foe goes flying backwards for no apparent reason. It is horribly inefficient though if that type of thing matters to you.

The only change I would like to see made to Dark Armour is if Dark Regeneration's tohit check was removed. I know it's just my own rotten luck, but I've lost count of how many 5% chance to miss rolls I've had which've cost my Katana/DA his life.

Maybe a slight radius increase to Oppressive Gloom too, but that'd be pushing it.

I particularly like testing Tanker types versus Banished Pantheon, I mean +2 them, always herd a group with an Avalanche Shaman, Death Shaman and Storm Shaman for all their different and sometimes stacking secondary effects then survive!

If its easy with an SO build then I doubt you have a self res power for tier 9 and if its hard then I will almost guarantee that you do have a self res power for a tier 9. When you have a self res for a tier 9, it's been said that the extra likelihood of debt is more than balanced out by the ability to earn more xp/time.

Dark relies very much on accuracy, when your tohit is heavily reduced you can have problems never mind all the other secondary effects the Banished Pantheon can inflict.

The problem with both Dark Armour and Fire is because they both lack defense they can get hit by every secondary effect going.

In Dark Armours case perhaps it could do with better resisting tohit debuffs. Firetanks may not have as big a heal but theyre not relying on accuracy.

Yeah their problem is more about recharge.

What I would love in DA would be one...just ONE...passive. Not so much from an endurance perspective, but the set has TOO MANY FREAKING HOTBAR BUTTONS.

The best one I could come up with would be Murky Cloud, which would also probably need a name change. Don't lower the resistance values, just make it always on.