And Energy Melee departs the penalty box...

Well, any attack can potentially corpse blast occasionally. But TW attacks aren't exceptionally slow in the grand scheme of things, even without momentum, and I didn't observe it happening any more often than with other power sets I've played. If anything, TW is LESS prone to corpse blasting, because you open with the slow attack, and then use the fast attacks, and often, enemies die before Momentum wears off. Then you reposition yourself to attack another enemy and start over.

Rage on Footstomp is a constant 80% damage buff typically over 120s in 130s.

Build Up is a constant 80% damage buff typically over 10s in 31.32s.

A damage buff is applied to Superstrength more often than is applied to Energy Melee.

As far as I recall how single target attacks go the amount of typical attack chaining, damage, to the end bar of EM compared to SS was fine before the change to EM, EM had great DPA, StunPA making it awesome in PvP. They lowered them.

Over the peaks and troughs the damage buffs (rage and build up) give the powers an amount of potential DPEPS, there is an amount with Footstomp to the endurance bar (before 0 End) which was greater than the amount of potential DPEPS of Whirling Hands, because they're Max 10 PbAoEs, they're damage is multiplied over 10 targets showing an even wider gap in potential.

At 50 I would expect SS to farm quicker than EM.

I ain't up for subjective thought on this so I am currently breaking the sets down in excel.

Assume the smallest farm room full of mobs. It's like being at a house party four times over the recommended firesafety limit of people.

Using AoEs only, /SS would clear up the x amount of mobs before 0 end.

/EM will clear up the same amount of mobs (roughly) before 0 end.

The difference is that /SS has done the amount of mobs alot quicker.

Assuming great end rec on both characters /SS despite crashes never runs out of end /SS will leave the room first ready to farm again.

In order to over come that difference, base figurewise, Whirling Hands could have its level of damage the same as Footstomp, leaving its recharge where it is, quicker than footstomp.

Thats where I am at so far, I been here and there so off and on, and still not scratched the surface cos a whole set should be compared rather than one power to another plus the attacks dish out different quantities of different dam types.

I'll admit to not reading the thread, but I've had a few ideas for EM over time and would like to put them forward.

Total Focus: The stun be made AoE around your target, but only the stun
Energy Transfer: Change the animation, it'd keep the current animation time, but you do the damage -instantly-. You thrust both hands forward like the end of the current animation, then recoil back and shake off the self damage before being able to attack again. This makes sure you always get the damage to your target without unbalancing the changes through changing DPA.
Stun: Increase the magnitude of the stun to one-hit stun Bosses, give it an AoE mag 2 stun.

Energy Transfer will always hit your target without teammates killing them first. Total Focus and Stun will add extra damage mitigation through the AoE stun, a reward for focussing on harder targets in groups since that's where your damage would shine, while also giving solo mitigation because who doesn't like AoE mez? No change to Whirling Hands because Energy Melee really isn't an AoE damage set.

EM just needs something, some useful area, where it shines. The devs did a great job of normalizing it. They normalized the heck out of it.

Iirc, it's not the set with the top ST chain. It certainly isn't in contention for the AoE king either.
The control it offers isn't that useful either. It's primarily ST control. But at the same time you're walloping that single target so hard that a significant chunk of the control time, the target is dead. Unless the target is of a rank/level such that the stun is well resisted.
WH doesn't offer the level of control of other AoE powers available from other sets.

So, perhaps increasing the ST chain's damage, increasing the control of the AoE, [or the lower tier ST powers even?] seem to be the ways to go. There're multiple options on how to accomplish these things.
Another option would be to give the set some additional AoE, but I am not sure that really helps EM have a niche.

Personally, I think I would like to see the utility of the ST chain increased.

I play the set by quickly rotating through targets in a spawn and then using WH as finishing move on the multiple mobs who're hanging on by a sliver of HP. Seems like the way to go afaict. But the whole quickly rotating through targets bit is harder since the animation times have increased.
Stun a boss, smack a minion or two, defeat a Lt, smack the boss, WH the lot, repeat.

I love the look of the pom-poms! It's what made me roll up two energy melee tankers and an energy melee Stalker!

That said, the only thing they really need to do imo to fix the set, is return ET to it's old animation

EM needs a small change to make it feel like a solid set. It does great ST dmg, and the stuns are fine for mitigation. I find the stuns do as well as my other characters that have a knockdown effect- while not reliable per se, over time it is a constant form of mitigation that does make a noticable difference.

My gut feeling is that total focus should be turned into thunderstrike. It would keep its animation, and mag stun, and still do big dmg on the targeted foe. It would then also do some moderate aoe on surrounding targets- but then also include a mag 1 stun to them.

This way, the longer animation is justified because the dmg is increased with aoe splash dmg, and also stun is added to help mitigate incoming dmg. I would see this being used well in the set- EM really is a set somewhat focused on taking out the hard targets. So you use this on a boss or liut, the target takes a good chunk of dmg, and his minion pals take some dmg and possibly get stunned also.

This change would increase EM aoe potential some, which is one of the big complaints, and would help in sort of a back door way with the crazy long animation time on TF as it would make the animation time worth while- lots of value packed in to justify lots of time.


Also- so far as ET, I agree with the idea posted earlier the dmg needs to come right away followed by self dmg, which could leave the animation time the same but make corpse blast much less common. This change would keep the power as is so far as normalization but removes the headache of corpseblast.

So with that ET change, we would put the old ET animation back, but then add a recoil animation for the self damage?

It would take an act of divine intervention to get the developers to change EM to what the players actually wanted.

Although Synapse did change Regeneration so maybe, just maybe he(assuming Synapse is a guy) will hear our cries.

A sudden random whimsical thought just came to me. What if Stun was changed to a Siphon Life type power, except you regained endurance? Keep it as a high-ish/stackable stun, but increase the damage and have it regain some of your endurance, a Siphon Energy.

Edit: Or, change the animation to an Energy glowy swirley grabby Siphon Life copy and let it do the same damage/stun it currently does but add both +endurance and +defence (Energy/Ranged). Increase the recharge if unbalanced. This adds synergy and common place with the new Energy Aura.