Edana

Nothing has changed directly, but burn doing up front damage with no fear effect means that you can get full damage without an aoe immobilise. The most commonly used one seemed to be Electrifying Fences, which had a -kb component; preventing Footstomp, Thunderstrike, etc from contributing toward survivability.

This only really becomes a factor above 41 though, so a bit late in the career to be worth a vast amount in this context.

Not quite impossible; if they were tuning their difficulty setting right to the edge and only just managing to kill spawns in I17 then the slight change in damage output could result in them dying a lot to those same mobs and spending the entire time in debt. Twice as slow levelling.

Would only take a couple of seconds at a fateweaver to correct the problem, but people trying to prove a point can be remarkably stubborn about changing anything about their 'proof'.

Unfortunately Claws and Shield Defence are mutually exclusive.

Elec Melee is good. Thunderstrike comes a lot earlier than other AoEs with decent active mitigation and Lightning Rod is both good burst damage and one of the best looking powers in the game. Single target damage is a little lacking though.

Dark Melee makes the endurance issues involved with some armour sets easier to cope with and Siphon Life helps keep your health bar topped up while also supplying some good single target damage.

For secondaries I'll add: -

Elec Armour is better than it used to be, with Energise as one one the better powers to come out of a set revamp.

Fiery Aura just got buffed into an offensive powerhouse and has both a great heal and much improved endurance management. Would recommend a primary with a fair bit of active mitigation for this though.

Stone Armour is a decent typed defence set until you hit 38 and get arguably the best armour toggle ever. You will need teleport or vast amounts of runspeed slotting to overcome the movement penalties though. Granite comes with rather hefty recharge and damage debuffs; Fury does a good job of overcoming the latter.

Super Reflexes has better power order on a brute than scrappers, you can get decent AoE defence 15 levels earlier. Nice and easy to softcap without breaking the bank.

With all the changes the Devs have been doing to underperforming sets over the past year or so it's hard to find an armour set that isn't good. Energy Aura is still lagging slightly but being the worst set in this pack is much like coming in last at the Olympics, still pretty good.

You get them at 41, no unlock arc requirement.

Mids has them, but possibly not particularly accurately as yet; a lot of the damage numbers seem off compared to in game numbers - which is wrong I haven't had chance to check.

Half of Stealth's defence suppresses once you've been hit or attacked, so once in combat it is worse than Manoeuvres. The stealth effect can be gained from a single stealth IO in any travel power.

Fear isn't a debuff, it's a control, and dominators even get the double mag from domination on these powers. So Invoke Panic is suddenly a base 10.4 second 15' PBAoE fear power than works on bosses. The end cost is astronomical and doms usually have much better options available, but still, slotted up properly it's a lot better than people make out.

Frozen Armour gives defence to smashing and lethal, resistance to cold and fire.

World of Confusion is a toggle aura which at best confuses minions for 3 seconds out of 4. At the moment it seems to still have controller overpower rather than domination set-up, so this may change to affect lieutenants in domination at a later date.

Set slotting suggestions seem to be missing a lot of the recharge options: Decimations in ranged attacks, Crushing Impact in melee ones, Doctored Wounds in Spirit Tree and Basilisk's Gaze in holds. LoTG +recharges in defence powers are another possiblity, one getting increasingly more available with the new merit options.

Other than those minor points, nice guide.

Not a valid analogy since there is proof available to the contrary of those beliefs, what we've got here is one set of people with experience supporting their belief that there is a problem and one set of people with experience supporting their belief that there isn't. All we can prove from it is that different people have different experiences.

I will accept that my experience probably involves fewer people than your's since I'm an EU player so it is possible that there is just less tolerance of it over here.

Not a strawman really; part of the process for establishing causation is to remove one component while maintaining the others and see if the effect is removed. If people complain about AoE attacks when they do KB in order to show that the KB is causing the complaints you have to test whether people complain about AoEs that don't cause it.

In my experience the first point held up in most cases so the second needed testing for completeness. If in your experience the first point doesn't then testing the second wouldn't achieve anything. Didn't really achieve anything from my perspective either, but you don't skip the control group just because you don't expect anything to happen.

Third point; reapply the initial condition, see if the effect recurrs. Shockwave is actually one of my favourite KB powers since with good positioning you can chain it and Howl together and keep pretty much anything bouncing off the floor with a hefty -res debuff. Far superior to Siren's Song in that regard, yet most sonics I come across didn't even consider taking it.

When considering this though I've concluded that my experiences do have a certain selection bias, it only took 1 person out of 7 to actually complain after all.

So, with those two point, I'll withdraw my "majority" conclusion as applying to the entire playerbase. It does follow from my experience that the majority of random selections of 7 people available for PUGs during late afternoons on Union server contain at least 1 person that complains about KB when it is present. But honestly from that level of representation I wouldn't feel happy concluding that most people thought the sky was up.

But stalkers *do* have this reputation. There is nothing wrong with the AT or the powers, but the reputation still exists. At no point have I said that KB in itself *is* a bad thing, I have said that it has a reputation for being a bad thing and that this reputation is fairly wide spread.

While further reflection has lead me to believe that the reputation may not be held by as many people as I had thought, it certainly does seem to crop up a lot for a minority belief.

Does that make "We should have the option to turn KB into KD if we don't like it" threads the equivalent of demanding the option to be taught creationism if you don't like the idea of evolution?

There are numerous threads on how power X would be better with KD than KB and just as many replies telling people how they can behave 'intelligently' to mitigate KB. There are none at all (that I am aware of) telling people to slot footstomp for knockback to improve mitigation or saying that you should slot 'stupefy: chance for KB' in stun auras to make them provide some use against lts and bosses.

Anecdotal evidence that is supported by a number of sources and only ever refuted with "prove it, hah!" starts being more acceptable as evidence.


Team on an energy blaster, play sensibly. At some point you will get asked not to use aoes by someone, probably a tank or blaster, sometimes a defender complaining about their anchor debuffs not affecting the whole mob now.

Swap to another set, sonic maybe; play the same way. See if you get asked not to use your AoEs because they're debuffing the enemies' resistance too much; it just doesn't happen.

Start using shockwave on a sonic/ and people ask why you even have the power.

Levels of proof; it's not enough to validate a scientific theory, but the level is sufficient to warrant a proper investigation, one that as players we can't pursue at a level sufficient for other players not to also dismiss as anecdotal.

On a team that is struggling KB *can* help tremendously, but the addition of other mitigation could have worked equally well without the downside of causing problems when the team doesn't need it.

Increasing someone's work load unnecessarily is bad. Throwing boulders onto a highway is no less bad an idea just because people can swerve around them or use other means of transport.

Usually blasters only complain if you don't leave that gap for them to fire in, if the gap isn't there then it is your fault. Of course if you leave that gap and they throw a fireball, grab aggro and die it is also your fault for not knocking everything over like you had on the previous spawn. There's no pleasing some people.

My experience is mostly redside. Brutes are the resident aggro magnets but it isn't their only job so you can't expect them to go out of their way to save your *** after you put it in trouble. Corruptors both do decent damage and have debuffs to place so like stuff to stay still long enough for them to drop tarpatch/sleet or hit an anchor and still shoot the mob with their AoEs. Dominators don't care, if they'd wanted it in one place they'd have used an immob - notable exceptions being icepatch and earthquake, where you're as likely to get abuse for using an aoe immob as KB. Good MMs can cope with pets chasing KBed mobs, bad ones are often too oblivious to even notice it. Stalkers and VEATs... see scrappers.

Ditto, as always.

"Majority" isn't hyperbole, it just means "more than half".

Loling and referring to that as hyperbole is fairly ridiculous in itself. If it wasn't true the downsides wouldn't be brought up so often by so many different people and get 'refuted' by the same few people each time. The forums aren't a microcosm of the general playbase though so look in game.

Since I've been playing I've heard more people in game complain about knockback than any other effect and seen no-one mention any good points about it outside of hurricane. People setting up teams will ask for more control, heals, -res, +def, +recov, melee damage, ranged damage, even stealth and recall; I have never heard anyone say "this team needs more knockback" but have heard someone say "have you got anything except a PB?".

"Everyone" would be wrong. "Vast majority" would be hyperbole. "Majority" is simple observation.

A kheldian is also not simply a kheldian, trying to play a warshade like a peacebringer and vice-versa will result in just as many attacks of 'wrong' as trying to play them like any other AT.


Doubtful.

It's very much like the dominator revamp a while back, many that knew how to use them and would put the effort in didn't see why they should be fundamentally changed to be easier for the average player to use. The discussion on that got so heated that the devs left the thread and presented the community with a fait accompli.

The majority of players don't like KB and don't want to have to learn to use their main damage powers as knockback control powers that do damage; this makes the few people that either actually like the effect - or just like the feeling of superiority they gain from being intelligent enough to 'do it right' - to be very vocal and defensive about the possibility of changing it to something more user friendly.

The relationship between targetless powers and targets seems to have some quirks, on my SS/Shield/Soul brute I notice queued attacks getting cancelled when my target dies regardless of whether the target is actually required for the power to activate. Not really relevant to the topic, but throwing it in here to see if anyone else has noticed and investigated a bit further.

Most people have more than one AoE. Held or stunned mobs that are spread out take longer to kill than the same ones standing in a group. Why would everyone on the team get all their debuffs and/or attacks off in the first 2 seconds of you reaching a new mob unless you are waiting for them to arrive before moving in? Regrouping between mobs might be more common among mainly hero players, I'll admit that I play with mostly villain players and tend to go at brute pace even when no-one has a fury bar.

I intended it to imply that scenery is not always conveniently close or usable. There are a fairly large number of maps with spawns in open areas, anything from cargo ships to city blocks will have spawns that you would have to move some distance to get them to a sizable wall. Being able to fly or at the least jump while using KB so those mobs are propelled downward is just sensible.

Then there are the cave maps where KBing mobs into walls often ends up with them outside the map. Resetting an ITF because one of the Sybils is being held hostage by a guard running around the wrong side of a solid rock isn't fun.

Or average players into good players in this case. It takes a bad player to turn an average attack into a liability. Turning knockback powers into a liability merely takes an average player without experience.

While the hit check at the start determines which targets are hit the direction in which the target is knocked back is determined by their location when the effect is applied.

Combustion damages the target at the start of the animation, the majority is then spent standing there while the power effects trail from the hit targets to you. Solar Flare damages the target and applies the KB approximately 1.5 seconds into the animation period during which the mobs are free to move and you are rooted (or in midair after jumping).

If you want to test this I suggest finding a mob of hellion in atlas and trigger SF on one side while jumping over them to the other, see which way they fly.

While this timing is nice in that it means you can fire SF off in the middle of a mob while hopping out to get whole mob to knockback in the same direction, it does mean you have to get the timing right every time or you get the less desirable 'doing it wrong' scatter effect.

I'll conceed that while human PBs can absorb alphas and take damage as well as or better than some tank sets, they don't actively hold aggro. So they're about as much tanks as masterminds are.

That you can use SF without scattering a mob to the four winds is not in question; that in order to not do so you have to use the PBAoE as a wide cone is, imo, a downside; in much the same way that frozen aura having a 10' radius is a downside compared to footstomp having one of 15'; or crowd control would be even better as a PBAoE than a 180' cone.

Actually I'm saying that if Solar Flare was knockdown then the mobs would fall down, then get hit by luminous detonation and AoEs from other members of the team, those that survive get up, possibly do nothing due to an AoE control from a squishy that the mob couldn't retaliate against, if not they're still in range to knock down again as soon as the power recharges. By the time they finish getting up a second time they ought to be dead.

With knockback, even ignoring the scatter effect, roughly three quarters of the mob gets sent flying away from the remainder. Subsequent AoE damage, debuff or control powers will only hit one of those groups unless you wait for the KBed mobs to return or have a convenient wall close to the mob.

All the positive points Dechs listed were generic KB ones. Solar Flare as a melee PBAoE knockback has disadvantages that ranged AoE KB does not, or does and can easily mitigate.

Solar flare is (as far as I am aware) the only KB power in the game you must be standing on the floor to activate, and as such the only one you actually need scenery to contain, the others being easily handled in open areas by flying, a power given to PBs at level 1.

Since you need convenient scenery to constrain the knockback, the power has definite downsides in comparison to both similar powers with KD, and KB powers of other types.

A downside does not suddenly stop existing because you can mitigate it by using the power intelligently. You do not reduce the number of people using a power badly by not mentioning what the problems are.

Solar Flare is a full circle PBAoE damage power that you cannot use from a central location without scattering the targets. No matter how practiced you might be at using it from one side of a mob you are not able to use the full area of the attack so this is still a downside compared to the same attack with KD.

So just like Follow Up or Blinding Feint then?

And people policing how other people reply to questions are also annoying.

No-one 'has a right' to experience the world without evidence that other people think differently to them, quite the opposite.

It did this to me earlier today, stack of 10 regen flesh listed for the price of a crafted IO each.

This would require at very least a database change and altering the UI in at least 3 different places. No idea how much work that would entail, but a lot more than a copy/paste.

Giving people more to spend on less stuff does not make prices go down.

See above. Prices going up is a detriment.

Are you serious? Are you so certain you know best that it's better to quit until the devs see the light of your stupendous brilliance than accept "no"?