What powerset would you buff?

For a set I would buff? Empathy

1. 6 of 9 powers are worthless solo. 2 of the useful ones are up 1/3 of the time without billions spent on a build - and even then it's only a little over half the time.

2. on groups the powerset is good at low levels and weaker than buffs the higher you go. It also does not scale to larger teams. Fort and AB are the best powers in the set, but (for obvious reasons) didn't get the group buff treatment for incarnate content. That still leaves the 2 best powers only buffing 3-4 and 1 people out of 24 on a raid, making them distinctly less useful than something like cold that retains full effectiveness no matter how many people you have in the group.

3. half the powers are reactive in a set that provides nothing in the way of CC resist or even defense.

Solution:

Both RAs get duration doubled, but get the Destiny treatment of diminishing returns. Have it full strength for 60 seconds, half strength for 60 seconds and quarter strength for 60 seconds. In the grand scheme of things, it's only a 16% buff in damage healed/end recovered and that's stretched over an extra 90 seconds. But it can be made perm now. Solo play is more stable instead of the god/mook thing we have now, and the powers aren't completely eclipsed by the Destiny's.

HO, HA, and AP get the Blaster inherent treatment allowing the Emp to heal others even when held.

The rez is currently the worst rez since all of thme now give full health and this one gives nothing else. Make it so it targets self if you are dead. A self rez makes this another power usable solo without a huge power boost. Even better, make it buff live targets with a long duration, single use auto-rez, so you can buff targets likely to die and not have to break to do it during a fight. (that last one might be a bit much, but I really like it)

Give clear mind psi resist (and the area buff to go with it). It's the only break free I know without some added benefit, and psi makes sense given the name. Also would give the set a resist damage mule.

Fort gets duration and recharge doubled (or even tripled, putting it at around 4 minutes like other buffs). You can't keep it on more people than before, but less rebuffing. Not so much a buff to the power, but a QOL feature.

Electric Blast

ok this one has been mentioned a couple of times before but I felt like people missed a few points.

1. Animation times are too long
This goes for Short Circuit and Tesla Cage. Short Circuit is a PBAoE that requires the caster to spend a long time in melee range, which can be the most dangerous for any blaster. Additionally Short Circuit's damage does not compensate for the long animation time. Tesla Cage's animation just has no reason to take so long and be so ugly. If these two powers keep the same animation time the damage should be adjusted to reflect that.

2. A blaster is not a controller
It's nice to be able to drain a lot of mobs to zero endurance when I'm on a team with others. However a blaster's main focus should be damage and I don't feel that the lack of damage in the set should be because of the endurance drain present.

3. Tesla Cage as a tier 3
You've seen this before and I would like to explain myself a bit. The tier 1 and 2 recharges on elec blast are 4 seconds and 8 seconds respectively. Normally that's not a problem but in a blast set with already low damage attacks, and no tier 3 attack, it causes a problem. So if the recharge times remain the same on the tier 1 and 2, Tesla Cage should become the tier 3 blast much like Cosmic Burst from the Radiation Blast set.

4. Voltaic Sentinel
I've thought about if VS should have lightning bolt at it's disposal but that might make the pet a tad overpowered. Either way, this pet needs to last longer in combat.

5. Tesla Cage and Voltaic Sentinel
It's probably a bit too much and might break the set, but on a personal note I'd love to see TC as a tier 3 blast and be able to keep Voltaic Sentinel

All powers that drain the enemy's blue bar.

I'd make mobs actually need endurance to use their powers instead of being able to fire off their big guns on a "sliver tick". I have no problem with them being able to brawl me on a sliver tick, but if I have floored their endurance they aught not to be able to clobber me with something that should require at least 10-15% available.

Make (MM)pets benefit from +rech powers. (And thus, also be affected by -rech powers)

I'd balance the Ancillary/Patron Pools. Most notably: Weapon Mastery for Scrappers/Stalkers (and actually, Stalker Ancillaries in general).

Exploding Shuriken costs the same amount as Ball Lightning, but does about 3/4 the damage over a smaller radius and less range, plus has no secondary effect. The hell?!

There are four specific powers I want enhanced:

Mastermind.Mercenaries.Serum needs its duration at least doubled, preferably tripled, so that it actually lasts the full duration of an AV fight.

Mastermind.Ninjas.Train_Ninjas needs to also double the innate +def of Genins; once you get the third one, +7% def(all) doesn't even make up for the innate accuracy increase that enemies get for being higher level than they are.

And Peacebringer.Luminous_Aura.Incandescence and Warshade.Umbral_Aura.Absorption both need to grant at least +1 protection to Hold, Stun, and Sleep, preferably +2. Having even a single minion be able to suppress your shields is just too annoying for words when in human form.

I'm less sure of my numbers, but I also have a subjective feeling that the endurance costs on the toggles are way too high in Stone Armor and Shield Defense, and a subjective sense that defender secondaries should get a slight endurance discount.

The following powersets all need some love. Only going to focus on the main things that could be done (not should), but each of these have problems that make them inferior choices at level 50 for some activities (not in all situations).

Empathy : Decent team set, Bad solo set. I have suggested many things in the past, but my current thoughts are that empathy could have a toggle +regen power similar to pain, but add in a confusion proc. Other choices would be to give empathy a status protection power on par with forcefields or sonic's dispersion bubbles.

Pain : Better than Empathy, but with similar downsides. Would be nice to add a fear proc into the healing aura power. It would be very cool if Empathy gave periodic heals and proc's confuse, while Pain gave periodic heals and proc'd fear. Both enhanceable.

Sonic Resonance : Too many problems to go into here. Entire threads have been spent on how to fix this powerset.

Devices : Another set like Sonic Resonance with major issues. Many threads spent on this topic as well.

Trick Arrow : Not as experienced on this set as some, but what I have tried left me feeling that something was missing. Cannot really offer any ideas, but would never play this set again unless it was improved somehow.

Super Reflexes : Have wanted to love this set from Issue One, but everytime I play it again, I am reminded why I stopped playing it before. At the very least, the Ranged and AoE toggles should be combined. Then replace the toggle with something like what energy aura received, which is a +rech per nearby target. I was so upset that this idea was given to EA. I remember suggesting it for SR. So let me try again, lets give SR a stacking +res for each nearby enemy. This would be in addition to the +res scaling with HPs. OR... make the +res start scaling much sooner and cap out sooner. Say start at 75% health and cap out at 60% when 25% health is reached.

Forcefields : Needs more effects such as -res. Add -res to Forcebolt at the very least. Perhaps to the AoE. Repulsion bomb is kinda weak. Increase the damage, increase the stun duration/mag OR something else (like -res, -regen, etc) to make the set offer less of a one-trick-pony effort.

Stone Armor : Entire threads on this set too. About once a year I think to myself to look into this set because a stone tank sounds like a good idea. Then I look at the powers and remember why this set is so unpopular. The devs need to consider how Dark Armor was overhauled and go even farther on this one.

guess thats all the top ones for me.

P.S. I could have gone into Electrical Blast as well, but for whatever reason, over the last couple years, the issues I see with empathy far overshadow anything that I could discuss with Electrical Blast. Anytime you discuss Electrical Blast, the fact that I can drain a Boss Dry very quickly, makes me feel that there is a pleasant balance in the set which I would hate to disrupt just for a little more damage.

Hmmm....

Tanks, in general, have a heavy penalty on their attacks, in the form of globally lower DPE.

Tankers should have their damage per endurance raised closer to parity, by lowering the End costs globally by roughly 20 percent.

To illustrate:

Pick an attack at semi-random. I choose fire sword, because it's used by three very different AT's off the top of my head, blasters, scrappers, and tankers.

Here's the numbers, via Mid's, with Arcanatime:

fire sword blaster

dam 131.2
end 10.19
DPE= 12.875
act 1.584
DPA= 82.83
rech 10s
DPM= 787.2


fire sword scrapper

dam 110.9
end 6.86
DPE=16.16
act 1.584
DPA=70.01
rech 6
DPM= 1109


fire sword tanker

dam 72.96
end 6.86
DPE= 10.635
act 1.584
DPA= 46.06
rech 6
DPM = 729.6


DPE is Damage done per End expended.
DPA is Damage Done per activation time.
DPM is Damage Done per Minute if you spam this power as fast as it recharges.

Notice the blaster and scrapper have tradeoffs: Because of the long recharge the DPM is much lower for the blaster, even though the DPA is sky-high. On the Scrapper, the DPM is much higher due to lower recharge, but DPA is much lower.

On the Tanker, it is firmly in last place.

I would propose a global twenty percent reduction in Tanker End Costs.

Thus, the Tanker Fire Sword becomes:

dam 72.96
end 5.49
DPE= 13.289
act 1.584
DPA= 46.06
rech 6
DPM = 729.6

Notice how this differentiates the Tanker's numbers. The DPE is now better than the blaster, as befits a dedicated melee toon, while the DPA remains much lower, as a nod to the blasters status as the Damage Archetype. The Scrapper is still the king of melee damage in this comparison, which is as it should be.

(NOTE: I skipped brutes on purpose, because applying a standard 70 percent fury to their attacks yields numbers that are embarrassing to relate. Sorry.)

I have a lot on my list so I'm going to break it up in smaller posts.

Ice Control:

1. Frostbite- Remove the -kb on the power.

2. Arctic Air- Remove the delay.

3. Shiver- Make it a Neurotoxic Breath Clone but with a guaranteed Special or a 75-90% chance Special. The special should be "Target Held for 2 seconds" BUT you can slot holds in it so you have the potential to max it out for 4 or 5 seconds or greater. This will make Shiver Perfect for Alphas Stoppers and it should give you enough time to let AA, Glacier or Ice Slick do its job. If someone would complain that this is OP then you could balance the power out by reducing the values of the slow and -Recharge in the power.

4. Ice Slick- As someone else mentioned make this power unresistible to bosses or lower. heck add some -Res to it as well.

5. Flash Freeze- Take out the damage and make it a Static Field Clone.

Mercernaries:

Medic- Remove their AOE and Stimulant and replace it with a weaker version of Temporal Mending. Replace Stimulant with a power that does the same thing but is a PBAOE and it grants only half of the normal -10.38 mag.

Spec Ops- Like others have said give them the bonus the NPC's get when they are stealthed. Reduce the timer on their control attacks by 1/4-1/2 of what they are currently.

Commando- should get the same treatment as Spec Ops if applicable.

I would definitely change the nuke powers on most blaster so that instead of a -1000% recovery they would get a -100% recovery, and -50% endurance instead of -100%. Then blasters can keep their toggles up and actually do some minor stuff instead of being completely useless for 20 seconds.

Might add more later.


EDIT: Despite liking Ice Slick, I'm not a fan of removing Frostbites -KB power, since that is quite useful in its own right. From letting Tornado rack up damage, to when you have a PB on the team who wants to let loose with their AoE powers, removing the -KB to accommodate for ice slick removes some potential advantages, and there's a good chance that another toon on the team has an AoE -KB power on them.

Why are people anti-stun towards Energy Melee? I like it. I just don't get it.

A few sets:

Sonic Reson.
FF
TA
Energy Melee
Ice Control
Gravity Control (even a bit more than what changes are upcoming atm)
Beast Mastery (MMs in general w/ pet customization )

To name a few...

Super Reflexes: Something to bring it on par with Shields. I've always wanted a scaling taunt/damage aura power like Against All Odds or Rise to the Challenge that does damage, increasing the damage done with each enemy that comes near you. The rationale being that they're not hitting you, but everyone around you. Other than that, maybe tighten up the range that the passive +res comes into play. The mentality of being amazing at 1hp was sort of tossed out the window with Defiance 1.0.

Mercs/Assault Rifle: I rarely play MMs as is, and the first one I tried was Mercs and wowzers was it not fun. Left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. I'll extend the notion to all of the "gun" sets. It's not exactly superhero-y to shoot a gun. To carry a gun, a grenade launcher, a rocket launcher, a flamethrower, and have that "fully armed" feel can be fun if you do it right. Having 4 "shoot doodz" powers isn't, if you ask me.

Stone Armor: I kinda think the whole set could use a revamp, though that might not ever happen. I've got little to no experience with it, but all I've heard are horrible things. Do you really just drop everything and run Granite and that's it? 'cause that sounds horrible.

Battle Axe: Numbers wise, it always looked like a gimped War Mace. Which is sad, because Battle Axes are awesome. Another set I haven't played, but I've also seen nobody else play.

Martial Arts: Slightly biased here, but a smidgen more AOE wouldn't hurt (even more so on the Stalker version), and Storm Kick always looked like a cone attack to me. Cobra Strike and Crane Kick are literally identical powers with different secondary effects, so maybe a little bit more diversity there.

Peacebringers: I got one to mid-20s and just couldn't keep going. The attacks are weak, the secondary effects are "meh", and the overall feel and visuals are a bit lackluster. I'd hope that after Stalkers they're the next on the list to get a look at.