City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

The worst powersets in the game?

Adeon Hawkwood

By Adeon Hawkwood,
Posted on: 2012-06-29 21:03 in CoH and CoV General Discussions

 

Posted

PB's are jack of all trades that do nothing exceptional but can cover a wide variety of bases decently. They were flawed before the buff and still have issues.

Do they suck? Not really. They can be quite good slotted up (especially with the new kb-kd proc).

Are they the tank mages of CoX in the right hands... hell no.

Out of the powersets I've gotten to 50, my least favorite is energy melee. God awful animation times and pathetic AoE with a power that damages YOU when used. My main turned into a dust collector overnight when EM was nerfed into obscurity.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Adeon Hawkwood View Post
I think that the reason Dark Armor has a bad rep is that Dark Regeneration is somewhat odd compared to self heals in other sets. Powers like Reconstruction and Healing Flames are generally intended to be used pretty much whenever you take a little bit of damage. They heal about a quarter of your health (ignoring slotting and MaxHP boosts) but have a low end cost and recharge fast so you can pretty much spam them.

Conversely Dark Regeneration heals about 30% of your hit points per target and has an even shorter recharge than other self heals. It's endurance cost is, however, through the roof because of this. The end result is that DR is not a power you want to use immediately, it's a power you wait to use until your health is relatively low since you know it's going to bring you back to full health pretty much no matter what (assuming you slot for accuracy). The problem is that while DR has about the same HP/End ratio as other powers (assuming three targets) it's a lot more likely to over-heal since unless you're down at about 20% health you probably aren't actually getting three targets worth of healing. Add in that is has a short recharge encouraging people to use it a lot more and you have a power that is perceived as having an unreasonable endurance cost.
In my experience its really big problem is that the normal way players fight is to start at full health, fight until they get to low health, use their heals, and then finish the fight. Works great for Regen. Doesn't work for Dark Armor. With Dark Armor you start at full health, whittle down the spawn and kill all the minions, use your mega expensive heal when there's only a few targets left, possibly one, have to use the heal again to get to full health, end the fight. Its very inefficient.

The more efficient way to use dark regen is to use it at the *start* of the fight or near the start, when it hits the maximum number of targets and can heal to full. You fight until you get to low health, but you don't use it if you don't have to. You run into the next spawn and fire Dark Regen, bringing you to full guaranteed because it once again has lots of targets to hit.

Because you're always using it in high target count environments, you don't need to slot heal to get a heal to full almost all the time. You're using it efficiently, so you don't need to use it often. So you slot it one acc, three end, two recharge, and that's all you need. You don't need more acc, because you only need to hit 3 or 4 targets to heal to full and you'll hit more than that even if a few miss. You don't need it to recharge fast, so 18 seconds is more than enough. 3 end reduce takes the power down to a manageable 17.3 end per use. And in fact using it every 18 seconds is already a lot: you would normally be using it a lot less.

That takes some getting used to, but usage and slotting have to go hand in hand. Slot it like a regular heal and then use it like a regular heal and it will be functioning highly inefficiently and blow all your endurance away. But that's not the power's fault.

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
I leveled the set to 50 with SOs. Linearly. The set is a monster with a high learning curve.
Yes I did that too. That learning curve varies on how quickly your realize the set is really just Dark Regeneration + garbage filler, and play/build accordingly.

 

Posted

Ice Control

Mercenaries

Yeah, those are probably the worst sets in the game right now, before issue 24 hits.

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Quote:
Originally Posted by Haetron View Post
Great resists compared to what, Super Reflexes? It's pretty much got the lowest resist numbers across the board on resist based sets, tying with Fire Armor.

Cloak of Fear and OG are Mag 2 controls. Hardly "great".

1/3rd your endurance bar is not prohibitive? And point me to a guide/build for Dark Armor that doesn't have DR six slotted and doesn't sing it's praises. It's the only worthwhile power in the set, but it's way over the line, and prevents the rest of the set from getting the adjustments it needs.
I tried getting the community to adjust the set more around dark regen, and they screamed bloody murder - they want their 'omg I'm gonna die thank god I only need one enemy to refill health' type of gameplay.

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Posted

I have very limited experience with power sets, since my general trend of gameplay is to make characters in pairs and them raise them to 50 at roughly the same rate. I don't have a lot of alts on a whim because of this. However, there were a couple of powersets that I do notice aren't as good as they should be.

#1: Energy Melee. This set is lacking in... well... everything. The movements are slow, the damage and effects are mediocre, the lack of AoE gimps the set, and the set isn't flashy. Energy Melee is so bad that, when Kinetic Melee was released, I deleted an IOed out EM/Elec level 50 stalker and rolled a KM/Elec stalker from scratch. I have never looked back. The set isn't very good and is no fun to play.

#2: Darkness Manipulation. Maybe it is because I rolled it with Beam Rifle, but I find myself skipping nearly every power in Darkness Manipulation because I can't find an appropriate time to use it. There are some good powers in the set, but most powers require the player to be at point blank range when they use it, and as far as blasters go that is suicidal and clunky to use.

#3: Ice Control. This set is fun to use, but nonetheless I can see several balance issues with it. First, it is based on -recharge, which is only good after enemies have used up all their attacks and thus is outdated for modern gameplay that usually kills enemies before they use all their attacks. Near useless on AVs that seem to maintain an attack chain no matter what, and completely useless on trial AVs who have 100% resist to -recharge. The AoE sleep does damage which makes it incompatible with many interface powers. Ice Slick, while a hilarious power, is nullified anytime anyone anywhere uses an AoE Immobilize on enemies, which happens a lot. The PBAoE freeze requires the user to be on the ground (not just near it), and limits any hovering toons.


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Posted

I regularly get AVs to the hard recharge floor with my Ice Dominator. Just sayin'.