Battle Axe and Gravity Control

I've always been an avid roleplayer and leaned far more strongly on character concept than raw min/Max power. Recently, however, I've been looking a bit more into the mechanics of the game and this brings me to my simple question:

Are Battle Axe and Gravity Control drastically underpowered sets?

I've played both and I can't motivate myself to play them even with a good concept because they just seem BAD.

Other than that, out of curiosity, are there other sets that people feel this way about as a whole?

Ice.

I like ice thematically, but every ice set feels very low end to me. They lose powers to bad control like sleep, and always have miscellaneous other drawbacks like the area hold in ice control being PBAoE instead of ranged AoE, or Frostwork being a +hp on a long timer. I don't like the ice sword, and even the defense/armor buffs are very obtrusive and blocky so you can't see your character.

I'm sure someone is perfectly happy with their ice character, just like I'm sure plenty are perfectly happy with their axe or gravity characters, but that's just my 2¢. I feel like ice is generally the underdog of CoH/V power sets.

Gravity control *used* to be drastically underpowered. It got buffed recently, and is now merely meh. Battle axe I have no personal experience with, but it *is* a very late blooming set with all the AoE at the end, so if you didn't play it to a high level that might be part of the perception. Other than that what I hear about it makes me think it's probably more like grav's current situation - not spectacularly good, and overshadowed by other sets (mace most notably in this case), but not horribly *bad* either.

Ice *control* could certainly have a case made that it's weak, considering that it's the only control set that, if there's no cover, has no means of absorbing an alpha other than sacrificing its pet. I don't know about the rest, though. Ice melee used to be bad and got buffed, ice blast still has very good single target, decent aoe, and good control, ice armor feels a bit outdated but still functions reasonably well (and stalkers get a dang good tier 9), ice assault doesn't stand out in any one area but is a good overall well rounded assault set, and frostwork is *really* not a representative power to use to look at cold dom. Ice manipulation I have no experience with, though, so I dunno there.

Gravity control isn't that bad now. I feel that the best changes were made to Singularity's powers: Lift's damage was increased by 63% (and also causes Impact), Crush animates 43% faster and Gravity Distortion animates 57% faster. So not only does Singularity do more damage but he is able to better supplement your own controls. Wormhole is also pretty nifty now but sadly it still does knockback, though a lot of the time you can minimise that by throwing them into the ceiling or into corners (which also has the added benefit of ragdolling them in walls). The other changes are ok but nothing special.

Axe blooms late, but finishes up decently powerful, and the reliable knockdown is good mitigation. It does lose out to War Mace however.

I've only played a few support sets, but I've come to really like sonic. It's outright high resistance debuffs are kind of unique and rare since no one else plays sonics, so whenever my sonic is on the team everyone suddenly turns into a tank.

Battle axe, as an offensive set, feels just fine once you get to higher levels. I have it on a Willpower tank, and while being based in regen the KD effect can buy him a hundred HP or so. I suppose one of the issues is that the secondary effects for battle axe aren't all that great (knockdown and 1.05 accuracy), and since the set does lethal damage it isn't that high damaging either. I couldn't complain if a buff was given.


Gravity control is one of those powers that, while not having as much "flash" as other sets, is definitely fun to play around with. Wormhole as far as mez goes is an awesome attack with so many utilities you could almost argue it is OP. Singularity was a good pet before the buffs it received, and now it is just awesome. The singularity is tough enough that it almost never dies, it's constant repel effect can be used to ward off melee groups, and it layers on mez as well as the player can. Grav got the shaft only in the sense that there are several powers that weren't really needed in the set. Regardless, it is fun as ever to play.

Interesting replies! Many of these sets I don't have enough experience to speak on, though I can say that Ice Armor on a Tanker is incredibly effective as long as you don't mind your character being a 'clicky' Tanker as opposed to one you can leave the room mid-fight to grab a soda. The debuff to surrounding enemies is the icing on the cake... though, I admit the ice cubes almost completely hide your character. An alternate animation might be nice for some people.

It also sounds like I might give Gravity Control another try since it doesn't sound so boring to play.

Battle Axe left a bad taste in my mouth, though. It'll be awhile before I give that one another shot. I ended up remaking the character as Titan Weapons with an axe instead.

the real problem is if you look at high end characters the amount of +rech, +END and +def so dramatically alters the game as to make set balance absurd.

You can run attack chains on 2 or 3 powers
native def over a small amount is useless because you can get it in IO sets
END cost just isn't an issue

so you want sets that have a couple of great powers and everything else sucks, cost a lot of END, and have Res with some minor def. And you want big effect AoE powers that have a long recharge.

so sets that were perfectly good before (like SR) become a waste. And sets that were balanced before become broken (SS with footstomp).

If you are not getting IO sets the game looks very different

Ax is a late bloomer, and might never bloom really nicely without IOs. With IOs it gets plenty beastly, and was pretty solid even by the 20s. At least ona Brute/Scrapper you'll get your good attacks fast enough, but for a tank they may come a bit too late for my taste.

I recently leveled up a Ax/Shield brute, soloed most of the way in regular content, and hit 50 plenty fast. Did the First Ward with her and even against the newer content in the mid levels did fine. Now, at 50s, fully IOed but not incarnated, I can run +4/x8 with her just fine. Gets dicey vs some debuffing enemy types, but otherwise, not too bad. If incarnated, it'd be a cakewalk.

Not sure what more you might want out of a set except perhaps to bloom sooner.



As for Gravity, I liked it all right before the recent changes, but it was pretty weak on offense. Haven't dusted off and brought out my old Gravy, so not sure how effective the new changes are, but I hear they make the set a good deal better.

-I'd rate Ice Control the weakest Controller primary (or close to it), but I don't think it's weak. All trollers are powerful.

-Battle Axe should do more damage (at least on a tank). I haven't tried it on a scrapper/broot.

-well while im at it..

Time Bomb should do double its current damage.

Full Auto should have a wider arc, or faster recharge, or more damage, and it should obey the animation time/damage ratio for PvP.

what else.

Elec Blast should double the amount of end you gain from the target and/or make it 100% of the time.


-I've always thought bleeding damage would be interesting for claws (more blades more cuts). I like the idea of being able to "interrupt" your target (even tho this would rarely be an advantage). It might be easier to stop a engineer from summoning a FFG, or a Rikti Communicator from summoning a portal, or Aid Self in pvp etc.

I'm thinking 3 ticks of 1 damage per attack (even if you miss?)


/ramble

I've never played Gravity myself because the power order has always been horrid. At first it didn't even have a pet. It's slowly been brought up to par.

I always liked Battle Axe and Mace for their cool animations. I have about 95 levels of Battle Axe and yes, it's a slog to get to the best powers and yes knockdown/knockback is more of a curse than a blessing. But it's thematically appropriate and it looks cool. You're unlikely to play on a team with a bunch of other people using those sets, so there's a uniqueness factor as well.

I feel anything that does Psi damage is underpowered because of how incredibly common and strong late-game opponents' psi resists are and how underwhelming the -recharge effect is most of the time. At least the lethal and smashing folks get a break sometimes.

Ice stuff is usually third fiddle to other sets. Cold Domination is great and I understand Ice Armor has a place, but Ice Control and Ice attack sets are also-rans to other stuff. Like Battle Axe, it seems like it's more something one chooses for flavor than utility.

There might be an argument for Electric Blast and End drain but I'm not going to make it. As a blast set I think it mostly serves to give people who took ice blast a group to feel sorry for.

Force Fields need something. It's the set you take if you know you want to hit the pool powers really, really hard, and that's just painful.

I've heard that Battle Axe and Broad Sword are basically clones from a couple players now.

However, Broad Sword is one of my favorite power sets and Battle Axe is on the other end of the spectrum. I'm starting to wonder why that is now.

Mind Control - Lacking in hard and soft control and damage. The 90s aoe mez inflicts sleep rather than the more conventional stun. Both of Mind's TAoE hard controls combined have less uptime than Flashfire; in exchange for this disadvantage you pay twice the power choices, slots and IOs. It doesn't have either an ST or AoE immobilize, so it lacks persistent containment, benefits less from proc/interface damage, and cannot lock AVs in place for Lore pets to chew on. So not only does it have craptacular damage, it can't use many of the best tools that players have to fix craptacular damage.

Blasters - have the weaknesses of both squishy ATs (no mez protection, weak inherent defenses) and melee ones (little force multiplication, little support power). They're pigeonholed into being good at only damage, but don't do more ST or AoE damage than the high-damage ATs and receive few advantages in compensation. Many powersets are poorly designed e.g. Elec - no T3 blast; energy - unreliable KB; fire manip - melee attacks (on a lower damage scale than the ranged ones no less) on an AT whose unique advantage is high ranged damage.

I find radblast is underpowered as you two lame lvl 1 blasts that recharge fast but do almost no damage, you aoes are either pb or have a slow travelspeed

for the defense debuff you have to hit your target

I have to agree with what has been said about Mind control on a Controller. However, on a Dominator it's awesome. You don't have to rely on containment for damage, and Mind provides a large variety of control types to handle many situations. Also, permadom makes Confuse and especially Mass Confusion extremely broken, especially once you get enough recharge to basically alternate Mass Confusion and Total Domination every other spawn (maybe working-in Terrify/Mass Hypnosis if your team is moving quickly or pulling multiple spawns simultaneously).

Confuse also lasts much longer than most holds, so with Domination and perma-hasten levels of recharge, you can stack enough of it to permanently confuse archvillains or giant monsters, should you wish to.

For solo play, you get Mass Hypnosis quite early, which nullifies the alpha entirely and allows you to hold/confuse every target in the spawn individually before letting fly with AoEs from your secondary.

So yeah, Mind seems weak on a controller (I have not tried it myself, so I can't judge from experience) but it's borderline broken on a dominator.