Frosticus

Every mob performance is nice, but I don't discount aim and buildup simply because they are up every second mob. HL is an "i win" button that is up every 3-6th mob depending on speed. It's sort of like when a blaster nukes a spawn and you quickly move on to the next, but instead of one person doing all the damage you make everyone contribute to that quick kill speed and then turbo charge them until it is up again with unlimited endurance. So really, nothing like a nuke lol, but it is a great "i win" button.

Sleet alone puts the set on the cusp of being "super offensive" it is just that good of a power. Bare in mind though it is in comparison to the other buff/debuff options available. Benumb is mentioned because it shows that cold has little issue moving from minion munching to taking down the big stuff, unlike kinetics which is unparalleled in minion munching, but quickly falls behind vs hard single targets.

Cold (and rad) are the only two that are consistently awesome regardless of what you face. And cold is better at it than rad, but has the requirement of needing decent recharge and maturing very late.
Traps will be a great addition and will be another set that moves well from minion munching to killing big stuff. Though it is almost a reverse of kinetics in some ways as it usually isn't an amazing minion muncher from a speed point of view (longish rech on acid mortar and it is sort of a small aoe), but is unbeatable at killing hard things.

I too am eagerly awaiting the arrival of traps as it seems like since defenders got it people are finally realizing just how potent the set can be. Controllers will be able to showcase it in a way that is unmatched and the sheer number of awesome x/traps trollers possible should do wonders for the set.

If nothing else the increase in availability/popularity will force the devs to correct the wrong animations on triage/PT/acid, which will be nice.

Agreed. High rech colds are sick. By far my favorite set other than pre-nerf high recharge storm, so now my favorite.

My comment with regard to cold lining up similar to rad vs hard targets was with regard to non-high recharge builds and only from on offensive standpoint. With enough recharge to have benumb up even 75% of the time it isn't even close anymore, cold is just great.

I know I got a laugh the first time I ran the numbers on the -recharge and saw that a single cold could make a serious dent in AV's despite their near immunity to the effect while HL was up. Literally, cold domination.

Guess you learn something new every day. Sleet (and Freezing rain) are pretty much the best -res powers in the game. When they aren't bugged, and we can only assume that Castle will fix it some day, they are easily stacked and settle in nicely as second most forcemultiplication behind kinetics.

In case you weren't aware, Heatloss also provides 30% -res.

Benumb, while up, provides 70.67/265.05 effective DPS against a lvl 50 AV/GM respectively.

In mob to mob action it is behind Kinetics and maybe storm (Basically whether LS+nado pull ahead of HL spikes). Against hard targets it is well ahead of everything* if you can perma benumb, but typically more in line with Rad.

So ya, being one of the top rankers across various types of game play is pretty dang offensive.

*No traps available to controllers.

Would you like to know how it compares defensively that warrants the title "extremely" as well?

I very much agree with regard to stormy vs cold. Cold is insanely powerful both offensively and defensively. Since the pet recharge nerf storm sort of feels like Fire Armor to me. Typecast into the role of "damage", but not really delivering enough damage to compensate for other weaknesses. That said storm is still great, while Fire armor isn't so hot, but just how I feel when playing the toons.

I wouldn't mind seeing a recharge reduction granted to benumb or it being turned into an aoe with the current recharge, but it really doesn't matter, just a QoL change for the most part. Regarding the strength of benumb, it is just a byproduct of controllers having a higher modifier for that type of power. The same thing happens when they use powerboost. So I'm not sure if it is bugged, or just the way things are.

Arc fog currently isn't granting any typed defense, which is confirmed as a bug afaik. And sleet (as well as freezing rain) are bugged and not lasting more than 15 seconds in many situations. So once those two bugs are fixed it should be smooth sailing.

I wouldn't mind a change to the power progression to smooth out the leveling of the set, but I wouldn't dream of changing any of the powers beyond what I just said because the set is so good.

You should try a DA/stone, about 5x as much control/mitigation (conservatively) and minus the corpse blasting.

My tanks take damage and deliver quite a bit too. Sorry yours doesn't, it sounds about as useful as a pure Emp.

it is, but debuffs lose power against +cons and a WP should be fighting +cons. So it usually isn't as powerful as the numbers say.

traps

Flash Arrow, but the values are so small that even powerboosting it doesn't really do that much.

None of the effects found in envenom stack except the 50% -regen. Which is probably a good thing cause 50% -regen is pretty useless.

I don't see a compelling reason not to switch it to 500% and remove the stacking of the -regen as well. It would be a pretty big improvement to the set without making it OP'd relative to any other debuffers.

In exchange for confuse protection Arc Fog grants 60% slow/-rech protection, meaning you and your team can pretty much shrug off most of those debuffs. So walking (even running) out of quicksand or caltrops patches isn't an exercise in frustration.

It also grants more suppressed defense than SI, so if you being attacked arc fog will protect you more (positionally at least as it currently doesn't offer typed protection). Also the needs of the team > individual, but it is an easy choice as it is better anyway.

It's not as good for invisibility as SI, but that really doesn't matter as you can get full invis very easily through superspeed, or stealth IO. You can't get -rech protection aside from 20% in winters gift (which if you stack with Arc Fog, makes you almost immune to -rech/speed debuffs).

For cold, just like storm, I too prefer to stack the aoe stealth with superspeed rather than pick up SI and/or GI.

edit: now if the sleet bug could be fixed so the power actually debuffed for the proper duration instead of 15 seconds that would be great.

/fiery (and late game psy) were damage monsters before the dominator buffs. /Fiery came out improved for the most part, though requires a lot more recharge than it used to, but now has a bit higher ceiling too. In all fairness it was actually more damaging pre changes for most moderately expensive builds (like mild permadom) than it is now, but it is still very good and if you throw a lot of recharge at it then look out. You'll have a lot of gaps in your attacks with just SO's on new /fiery, but that's ok as you have primary powers to stick in there. /Psi on the other hand is just a very mediocre set after the changes, but DP is a really cool power (but not really on SO's as it begs for high recharge).

Actually it doesn't. Unless dealing 3.2% less damage w/ 3 SO's dam, 2 SO's rech, is "the suck"

edit: ET isn't even the highest DPA attack attack brutes/tanks get anymore. In fact it isn't a particularly remarkable attack at all anymore. But that's all I want to say at this point in time because if I've learned one thing recently it is that the people we think know these things don't. And I rarely like he who must not be named's changes, so this is one issue I'm not going to draw attention to.

Hopefully my anonymous friend can clarify exactly what they were referring too being incorrect?

It is even more important on large teams because your active mitigation and def shields are more likely to be overcome than if you are facing less mobs.

FW does some things that a resistance buff would not do though like make any regen value you have more powerful. It also protects against all types of damage, even untyped.

And in case anyone hasn't noticed /cold provides no defense against non-positional Psi and many toons are weak to any psi damage that gets through. FW is pretty much a godsend in that situation. Combined with high resistance to -rech and endurance immunity thx to heatloss, cold puts teams in a pretty good situation to face some difficult mobs without issue.

Basically to simplify things w/o FW you make everyone about as survivable as a /sr stalker. With FW you make everyone about as survivable as a /sr brute. Then you start adding your active mitigation on top of that. Our understanding of layered mitigation states that the gap between the two only gets larger with more mitigative aspects.

Whether that increase in baseline survivability is valuable to your team is the question. But considering /cold will let your team easily hit and deliver high damage to even the most extreme mobs it only seems to make sense to me that you try to boost survivability high enough to leverage that scenario. But I like to set my support toons up so that they don't have to sweat it if I'm the only one doing my job. Just like when I was the only support on an RSF with my traps corr and told everyone not to worry about it, I don't really fret if I'm the only thing keeping us standing while on my cold toons either. But ime if the team wants to fight the same way they would if they had a healthy regiment of support I need to use FW on the people that draw attention. In the case of my fire/cold corr I wish I could use it on myself lol.

Basically if the emp that has the tank on follow and his aura on auto gets stuck on a rock I don't want the team to get jittery at the "lack of healzorz" heh.

The only /cold power I skip on my builds is snowstorm. Not because it isn't a decent power, but because it is slow to cast and I feel you have more than enough active mitigation to warrant not using it.

My ill/cold is skipping sup invis (already have arc fog which is way better) and group invis. That makes it a very tight build, but you don't really need a lot of powerpools to do well with it imo.

"The leg bone's connected to the hip bone, the hip bone's connected to the...red thing. The red thing's connected to my...wristwatch...uh oh."
No nearly about it:
3.564
2904
=6.47

The are so slow they are almost rounded up to 7 seconds.
It is stupid because you can make the same claim about any set.
Dark is good because it heals and debuffs
Ice is good because it keeps you very safe
Fire is good because it kills quickly
etc

It just depends what aspect of solo'ing someone wants to talk up and you can make any of the melee sets look good.

The fact that EM only performs decently on a single setting x1 out of 8 possible mob configurations (ignoring level settings) while solo says that it in fact, does not solo well because it provides no flexibility.

It solo's well under the old archaic rules of the game, but the game has changed. One may as well just state it's i4 performance for all the relativity citing a single difficulty setting has.

AoE is king at 3+ enemies. Almost all AoE's are balanced around 3 targets. You generally face 3 targets on x1 setting, but sometimes only 2. So AoE starts to dominate at x2 settings.

Everything you have said about EM is accurate, but you are being conservative with your assessment as it is even worse than you suggest.