Carnifax_NA
-
Posts
3064 -
Joined
-
Quote:+Damage powers are superb for Domis though. Don't forget that PBAOEs count as melee attacks as well.Originally Posted by opprime28
Not bad. Two siuggestions...
-Get rid of the slow option in secret venom and replace it with -regen. This would be MUCH more useful in big fights, while kinda pointless in everyday combat, since the bigger critters tend to be the ones you need to cut regen down on, not the smaller ones.
-I'd actually get rid of Sharpen in exchange for Power Boost. It's much less useful, I think, for a dominator, especially when this set only has 3 melee attacks (you've got two powers that aren't attacks at all.) Power Boost would help with the effectiveness of your unique "swap ammo" style power and also help with dominator's weaker mag primaries.
Overall, great idea though, and would fit really well in the Dominator camp.
Agreed with replacing the -recharge with -regen. -Regen tends to be an effect Toxic attacks can grant as well in CoV. -
Quote:It was very nitpicky of me, wasn't itOriginally Posted by Oedipus_Tex
Oh yeah that. Well kind of. Illusion is such a strange offshoot that it's hard to quantify it against other sets. It gets one "standard" pet, and that's more what I mean. The standard, buffable, with-you-till-it-runs-out-of-HP kind as opposed to the invulnerable, unbuffable Illusion-only type.
I agree with the crux of your post though, they made Elec interestingly different. It would have been easy just to slap the standard list of single and aoe mezzes together with Lightning Field and the imps and called it a day. -
Quote:It's one my Ice/Psi (and my Earth/Fire) had to a hell of a lot.Originally Posted by Talen Lee
Ahah, an application I hadn't considered.
It's a nasty little choice: Do I hope he keeps flopping over and fails to get a mez off, or risk firing the first hold, hope it doesn't attract his ire or a counter-mez and I've time to get the second off.
For an Ice it's particulary nasty since the Patch and single hold are the two "Go to" mezzes you're frequently using. -
Quote:A boss on an ice patch isn't. All you're doing is freeing him up from Ice Patch for however long it takes for the power to recharge so he can smash your face in.Originally Posted by Talen Lee
Can you unpack why you think the holds need to lose the -knockback? Isn't a held foe already controlled?
In the case of things like CoT mages this is frequently lethal. -
Quote:Illusion and Fire both have more than 1 pet.Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex
- One of only 2 Control sets that gets two pets instead of 1 (or none)
-
Quote:Because, from my own personal experience, it isn't the End Costs which is the clincher. Masterminds tend to have lots of spare End, despite the increased costs of their secondary and the AOE buff powers.Originally Posted by Techbot Alpha
Whips is really the only useful personal attack for MMs, because the -res build up means that you will actually end up doing some damage, rather than plinking away worthlessly.
Lets look at the others shall we?
Bots; Two anaemic, heavy end attacks. Piddly chance for KB, which the bots have in spades anyway so its not needed. One AoE stun attack which has a horrible chance to stun and costs as much as, say, a Blasters Fireball. More, in fact. Taking Seeker Drones is a much better bet, and protector bots get the attack and the drones free anyway. Also an agrro magnet if it fails to stun, which is often.
Mercs. Ditto, with some -def in burst which, again the pets already have on pretty much every attack. M30 grenade suffers the same as Photon grenade, and is again a huge aggro magnet.
Ninjas. Ok, this one isn't so bad, because the bow attacks don't cost so much and are more accurate from the get go. Just pure damage though.
Hmn, Zombies win a little bit more on the blasts. -ToHit and slightly better, neg energy damage. Life Drain looks pitiful though. Single target which is niether attack nor dedicated heal and costs as much as an AoE? Riiiiight.
I just fail to see how cutting down a bit on the endurance cost of the attacks would be anything oter than a good thing. More people might consider taking them, those that have them get a nice little buff...win/win?
What I'm suggesting as an alternative is to extend the design decision made with Whips and to provide a decent reason to encourage people to take them by providing them with extra / new effects which work as a power multiplier.
I wonder if you could make up fancy new secondary effects, rather than standard debuff ones. Say for example if Arrow attacks each had the capability of adding a "I'm bleeding out" effect where any other attacks which hit over the next 5 seconds did an extra wee bit of Lethal damage (a very minor Fiery Embrace effect, but applicable to just that target when hit by attacks from anyone). -
Quote:I've no problem with them doing damage. I didn't mention removing the damage at all.Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
I don't believe "Masterminds" need an endurance reduction. I'm saying three specific powers per powerset need endurance reduction, because THEY ARE NOT WORTH TAKING. And I disagree that more debuffs would make them that much more worth it, considering support is what your entire secondary is devoted to.
You know... When I pick an attack that's a rife doing auto fire, I don't want the only point in taking this to be because it confuses enemies or because it debuffs their resistance. That's as silly as the old time when Knockout Blow stunned people but did no damage.
I've nothing against control or support powers, not at all. When it makes sense for that to BE a support power. Shooting people with a rifle does not make sense to be a support power. If these were meant to be support, they should not have been made into the powers they are. Shooting people with bullets, lasers, grenades and arrows should not have to do something that's completely out of character for them in order to be useful. This is like suggesting that the proper fix for Blasters during the Defiance 2.0 debates was to give them stronger secondary effects on their ranged attacks.
As long as we shoot guns at people, I will disagree that the primary functions of those powers should be support. Shooting guns at people should foremost KILL people. Shifting the point away from this destroys the point of the power. If, for instance, Mercenaries Mastermind personal attacks were supposed to be attacks, they should have either been given special grenades or given a rotary barrel grenade launcher with a bunch of control grenades. Say a Beanbag, a Flash Grenade and a Dear Gas Can. I wouldn't be complaining about them being support, then. But instead, Mercs Masterminds get guns. And guns kill people.
I'd just like them to be more useful in the way Whips are useful, as a power multiplier rather than just doing a bit more damage which I don't think Masterminds particularly need in the slightest. -
Arbiter Skittles : A Rainbow hued Crab I spotted in Virtue. I can only hope his battle cry is "Taste the Rainbow"
Form E-11 : A friend of mine came up with this back at release. A crime-fighting accountant who binds his enemies in red tape.
Followed By Ninjas is brilliant! -
Quote:I use a rag on a stick to reach em myself....Originally Posted by Scarlet Shocker
Travel powers are now entirely optional and need only be chosen for thematic reasons - especially if you have Ninja Run and the Jump Pack booster from the GVE edition - the cooldown is not long n it and those powers combined put Super Jump to shame.
Also with a little bit of inf you can get yourself a jet pack (assuming you dind't win one saving/robbing Atlas Park Bank) from the vendors for those harder to reach places.
Oh wait, we're talking about something else
-
Quote:Max != usual.Originally Posted by beyeajus
Still more HP than a Stalker...
1606.4 max compared to 2409.5 max, as per paragonwiki.
SoAs do have a higher potential HP, probably to keep them in line with Khelds, but it's not the norm. -
Quote:I'm not saying that. I'm saying of any AT I've ever played I've always found Masterminds to be the easiest going on the blue bar. So if you're going to make the attacks more attractive the best way to do so is to make the secondary effects more attractive rather than just reducing the End costs for them. My Necro/Dark lays EVERYTHING down (including using Howling as a mez and that's a damn costly power) and yet he very rarely is gasping for End.Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
That's like saying that defence sets are the ones where health is irrelevant because they never lose health (unless they get hit).
Masterminds lose pets. It's a fact of life. In fact, certain enemies are capable of one-shotting pets, and certain enemies are capable of spawn-wiping pets. Once you lose a pet, you have a 20-end summon, a 45-end upgrade and another 45-end upgrade. Even if you three-slot these for endurance reduction, you're still down to half you total endurance all in one shot. And if you happen to pet-wipe (and it happens), that's three 20-end summons plus 90 for both upgrades.
And I don't know about your Dark Miasma Mastermind, but mine tends to run around using Twilight Grasp an Fearsome Stare rather a lot, so there is a cost associated with them.
I honestly don't know why people keep claiming Masterminds almost never use endurance, when my Masterminds are entirely and wholly endurance-bound. Given enough endurance, they can survive almost anything, but with such severe costs... They rarely are. I guess if you assume that you can just let the henchmen attack and never lose anything to anything and rarely do anything yourself, I can kind of see that. But that's never how it turns out for me. There's always that Longbow Flamethrower or Scrapyarders Demolitionist, or Arachnos Drone or Malta Gunslinger or Knives Caltrops patsh or a Knockout-Blow-happy ancestor spirit or SOMETHING that's taking my guys down, and that costs rather a LOT now that our upgrades are AoE.
Saying "Masterminds need an End cost reduction" is ridiculous when you consider any other AT in the game (other than ones with oddball powers available to them which help matters).
Like the way Whips work and provide a resist debuff for example. They're actually a useful support attack for the AT. I'd like the other sets brought more in line with that mentality. -
Quote:I said DPE. A masterminds DPE is basically trivial because once the pets are summoned there's no additional cost (unless one falls over). You can't just analyse the DPE of the attacks, you also have to take into account the damage the pets are doing as well.Originally Posted by Jade_Dragon
Actually, ALL Mastermind powers have a high Endurance cost for their effect. It is not just attacks that have a higher cost the balance the efficiency of the henchmen powers. The only exception is the Power Pool, which makes Pool Powers actually a bit more efficient for MMs.
I don't think there would be anything conceptually unreasonable about lowering the End cost of the attacks, and leaving the End costs of the Secondary where they are. Call it the Mastermind's Inherent for balancing out his personal attacks. If his attacks are going to do such a small amount of damage, then make them efficient enough to be comparable to the End cost of summoning an henchman.
Cutting the End cost by 50% would be in keeping with my analysis that an attack power is about 1/2 of a henchman power. (You have 5 henchmen powers for 75% of your damage, and 3 attack powers for the other 25%. That's 15% vs about 8%)
Alternately, you could make the DPE so it would match the damage to End ratio of a Defender, as if the Mastermind had a 0.65 damage modifier instead of 0.55. Right now the MM's End cost is +25% over a Defender, or 1.25. If we set 1.0 to the End cost of a 0.65 damage mod attack, then for a 0.55 attack to have the same DPE the End cost would need to be 0.846. And that's 67.68%, or a reduction in End cost of about 68%.
So, reduce End cost by somewhere between 50% and 70%. Heck, just dropping it to the same End cost that other ATs pay would be an 80% reduction in End cost.
My Masterminds are typically always the ones where End is rarely an issue at all. My Necro/Dark frequently dumps out all his debuffs and stands there with nothing much to do with all that excess Blue.
My Thugs/Traps (with 2 pistol attacks) doesn't even HAVE Stamina.
So I don't see any benefit at all to lowering their End costs. Personally I'd make their attacks more attractive by adding / increasing the Debuff effects of them rather than just increasing damage.
Although I'd probably support increasing the damage of the PPPs / APPs since at the moment they're laughable and pointless (well not pointless, my Necro/Dark likes to pretend he's a Sith with Static Discharge). -
Quote:Paste is nutritious, tasty and one of your five a day.Originally Posted by dmcfarland907
I am fortunate that I have a regular group of people to team with, and I got into the game through rl friends that schooled me. I can however see why the OP would be frustrated. For example we ran a STF and the empath didn't have clear mind. Buzz, foul, wrong! I would get irritated if someone that was a veat had forgone those signature powers and rest assured my Huntsman would have those and then some.
I can someone not knowing how to play a toon, but that is when you do some research or ask someone. I am a big proponent of accessing the guides on the forums. I don't follow them verbatim but I do get a lot of useful information from them.
I don't pug for this very reason as most pugs are paste eaters.
Om nom nom. -
Quote:My preferred approach is clear to the bank, everyone in and deal with whatever ambushes and then someone goes outside with Fly and buzzes around to annoy all the Flying "death" squads and comes back in.Originally Posted by NightshadeLegree
Some redside teams rush the bank intentionally, just to see how many Longbow they can AoE to death in the resultant chaos at the door.
Then lots of flying bags of XP show up and die horribly
-
Earth (and anything else using Pseudopets) get the Controller versions rather than a Domi specific one. Your durations are Controller level rather than ones with Domi AT modifiers in them.
Doesn't really matter in the case of Earth, since Knockdown is unaffected by Domination and Gases is so fast to reapply a hold that a boss gets quickly held anyway.
The only glaring issue I see is with Arctic Air which could really do with being affected by Domination, there's no real reason is shouldn't be at all. Ice should get a rebalancing pass anyway IMO, Arctic should work with Domination, holds should lose their -knockback aspect and the AOE hold should be ranged. -
Quote:Urrgh, no. I like being able to flit from Nova to Dwarf if I'm getting too much aggro or need to taunt some enemies off a fellow squishy, as well as being able to use a form power for a buff and then switch to another form to fire off powers to leverage it. The idea that my WS is broken is laughable.Originally Posted by dmcfarland907
All the above downsides are correct, and I would endurance can be a problem, but that can mitigated with slotting and io sets. Khelds are a pita. They're still broken. I loath the idea that you have to be in tank or blaster form to be effective and in human form team with the perfect set of AT's. I would say make the squid form your ranged dps form, and give them more abilities, make the lobster a tank form and the human form either a blapper type of form or a scrapper form with couple of ranged attacks and many hth attacks with mez and kb protection. Do the branching thing.
Changing Khelds so substantially would be a horrible idea. If you don't like how they play then don't play them and maybe suggest a new EAT which works as you'd like instead.
I'd agree with the people who said the worst aspect of SoAs is having to wait 24 levels before you can actually play the AT you wanted rather than a rather bog-standard pseudo-scrapper / pseudo-corrupter. -
Good suggestion.
My only reservation would be that it gets an extra AOE rather than the more usual cone. But then again so does Earth Assault. -
Quote:What's that about? Destroyer Burn Masters seem to be able to see me from AAAAGES away. I suspect some evil dev decided they didn't like Masterminds when they were developing them.Originally Posted by Minotaur
The difficulty is not so much that the individual mobs are harder, the scenarios in Praetoria simply mean you're fighting more than 3 at a time more often solo (and correspondingly more on teams) due to the ambush structure.
Some of the badguys also seem to have enhanced perception, meaning unless you're very careful you'll fight 2 groups at once a lot.
-
Quote:I assume by the same mechanism where reapplying a buff extends the life of that buff, as in reapplies it.Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Seriously? How does that even work?
The delayed debuff gets reset to happen in another 2 minutes because it's set not to self-stack for some bizarre reason.
There's therefore a pretty simple fix for it, remove the "Effect does not stack from same caster" flag from the -defense debuff.
Indeed it does.Quote:Out of interest, does Maneuvers stack with Tactical Training: Maneuvers? -
If you secretly hate your duoing partner and want to drive them insane Demons/Storm or Bots /Storm. Otherwise I'd personally go with Necro/Dark or Pain.
I love Necro/Dark as a combo anyway. Tis wonderful fun. -
Quote:MMs already do significant damage for basically no ongoing end costs via their pets. That's why the personal attacks have such a high DPE cost.Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Defenders don't also have overwhelming damage from six henchmen, however.
Personally, I'd like to see Mastermind personal attacks either given a significant damage increase to where there's a point to using them or given a significant endurance reduction to where it's not a detriment to use them. Or both.
I'd personally give them more of a secondary effect in some way (other than Whips which have it already). Give Pulse Rifle attacks -Damage, Dual Pistols more -Defense, Necro more -ToHit (and a buff to Drain Lifes heal since it's the only set lacking an AOE and the heal is currently laughable), maybe some DoT bleed damage to Archery (cos I can't think of anything else) and a half/half -resist/-defense to Mercs rifles.
That way you make them worthwhile in terms of being debuff/support attacks for your pets and makes it worth slotting them for Acc & End Reduction and using them as such. -
Quote:Oddly enough the three domis I have are Earth, Ice and now ElecOriginally Posted by PhroX
It's not too bad on Earth, at least one of their two main "every spawn" controls - Stalagmites - benefits from Domination.
Ice though has it really bad. In terms of stuff you'd actually want to take, only your ST hold, and your "oh crap" AoE hold get anything from dom
Domination is still epic regardless. You get a free Blue Bar, Mez protection and a single target hold which you can now use to cherry pick bosses out of the fight. (ok it'll never be as epic looking as a Domination Stalagmites but few things in the game are really).
Does the initial shot of the Elec chain confuse work with Domination. It technically could/should, which lets you at least get something out of it by targetting the boss initially. -
Quote:This is true. Mind you it's also true for Earth Dominators.Originally Posted by kojirodensetsu
So I roll up an elec/elec dom. What do I find out? That domination doesn't work with the sleep, knockdown, and confuse powers. Going to have to delete my dom now.
You tend to get controller levels of mez duration as compensation though. -
I watched Warcrow get eaten by them last night while my Broadsword/Fire Scrapper injected one of those +Recovery Temp powers (I love them so much) and went to down on the lot of em,
Once I cleared the map and ambushes I must have dragged Warcrow to safety as he was back in the Resistance hub when I got back there.
I love fighting them now (unlike the bloody Clockwork) -
Quote:"Wait for Tank to herd please"Originally Posted by firespray
Now, with all the ATs mixed up, no one is quite sure what their team role is. I expect this to get better over the next few months.
"Sorry, my Fort can't hear you because she's too busy pulling with Psi Tornado"