Frosticus

When they explode the debuff has a 15ft radius and there are two of them exploding. Large spawn coverage with them is not an issue.

Seekers also tend to clump the spawn up pretty well, which is pretty much ideal for a cone based set. It works wonders for my firebreath (30 degree arc) and work just as well for the cones of Assault Rifle I'm sure.
PT also comes with a mag 3 aoe hold that has a 25ft radius, with base duration of 6 seconds. It continues pulsing the hold at a 2% chance every 1 sec. And also applies 20% -rech.
Triage Beacon has a 40ft radius for the buff, that allows pretty much full mobility during a fight. The ~290% regen it provides (and can be stacked) is part of layering mitigation. You have high def, strong -dam, distraction/avoidance/mez, and regen all layered together to create a very stable set up.

If you start to subtract aspects of that mitigation your survivability will fall. I can certainly notice a difference between 9hp a sec and 27 hp a sec on my trapper. The difference is the latter is very stable feeling with all of my other layers of mitigation in effect.
Definitely. Traps is a strong set, very very different than devices though. It is strong enough to allow a larger margin for error than some others so it can be played more loosely.

You just moved the goalpost, first you were talking about how good a damage aura is toward damage output and now you are talking about complete single target chains or something, of which the strongest /shield is still ahead of the strongest /aura toon.

That said, they are not leveraging game mechanics even remotely in the same way. The ability to make an aura shine in that fashion is available to two specific power sets (three if you include rage, but so far the discussion is isolated to scrappers). The ability to make AAO+Shield Charge shine is available to every single shield regardless of primary.

*It's probably worth mentioning that I really doubt the devs care if set A can do 20% more st dps under extreme build conditions than set B. But I am certain they care about set A wiping entire spawns in the time it takes set b to drop a couple targets. The reward rate of Set A is significantly higher.
If it so happens that Set A can both produce more st dps AND earn rewards at a significantly faster rate then there is reason to be concerned.

Using RotP while alive would be amazing and is a suggestion that I've been on board with in the past.

It would need a moderate downward adjustment though as it currently does more base damage than a blaster nuke with a shorter recharge. It is currently kept in line by not being able to buff it via bu/fe and such.

In all honesty I'd say it should be around 200 base damage if you could use it while alive with the same 300 recharge. IMO blaster nukes should never feel outclassed by a scrapper power. What that says about SC being 200 base with a 90 rech is that I personally think it was a lot more reasonable of a power when it did brute damage and ideally that would have been the version scrappers kept and everyone else would have been adjusted down. That would also require some way of enabling brutes to use their higher damage buff caps on that specific pseudo pet though.

IMO of course and I am in no way the authority on this stuff, just a single perspective.

Damage auras are impressive when they are constantly affecting enemies. They are extremely effective when they affect 10 enemies constantly as show in an earlier post.

Outside of some very rare scenarios that isn't the case though. I'd set them all to have a larger radius akin to blaster lightning field (20ft), so that the times it is good are more of a common occurrence.

FWIW, the db/elec leveraging the aura you speak of has blinding feint (double stacked), achilies -res and the pvp -res boosting its performance. Which results in roughly double the expected performance for an aura.

I'm actually a bit serious. If the market is down for~72 hrs, or w/e it turns out to be and we don't send any letter bombs to Paragon Studios it gives us a stronger position to negotiate from in the future when Posi's Magical Market Manipulation fails. We can say "hey we didn't all abandon ship the last time the market was down for an extended period. So take the needed time to merge them offline and put them back up when ready".

There are a lot of directions that burn could go. What I'd love to see myself though I don't think it is possible in this game is for it to be turned into a fire walk (if you ever played Diablo 2 it should be familiar). Basically a 10ft wide wake that would lay down behind you for like 5-8 seconds. That would be my dream version of burn as it just fits so well into a fire based set.

I think it might be possible (though I'm purely guessing) with a zero cast time/zero root time pseudo pet drop. It would be spherical in nature (just like all patches are), but if it summoned fast enough it would leave a proper visual wake as you move through an area. However, if it is summoning little burn patches preventing it from being ridiculously overpowered in short order would be a challenge judging on how the Assault Bot burn patches overlap and do insane damage.

But assuming you could find a way to make its damage ok that would be my ideal fix to burn and it is still functionally very similar to how it is now, just better and more thematic (imo). So no demolishing of any cottages would occur.

I'd complain about SC if they shrank the radius to 8ft and set the target cap to 5 and cut the damage by a quarter and made the cast time significantly longer and made the damage a long duration dot that cause mobs to flee.

Then I'd complain about it recharging faster.

Pretending burn had no fear it still has to work way harder than SC, which comes down to opportunity cost. If I spend 15% of my time casting burn that is 15% less time I can do other things. Comparatively the Shield can get similar damage with no opportunity cost because they only use up 3% of their time.

Shields is from a mitigation standpoint a mediocre set (pre IO's), while it is also the strongest st and aoe damage set. With IO's it moves near the top for mitigation and furthers the gap for st and aoe damage.

If Shields is working as intended then Fire needs a very sizable buff. The reality (imo) is that Shields needs to be trimmed a bit and fire needs to be boosted a fair amount.

No foolin' with just the 3 rech SO's 15% of the FA's time would be spent just casting Burn. Compared to only 3.5% for SC.

With hasten and 70% global ontop of the slotting a whopping 23% of the FA's time spent on burn. And only 6% for the Shielder.

What that means is literally 15% of your time required to stand in one spot if you want the enemies to stay in it (assuming the fear was removed ). Whereas the shield has almost no restrictions because SC is so large and it goes to the enemy rather than requiring the enemy to come to it.

Buff FA plz

Sure but it will be making some fairly sizable assumptions about the scenario so I'll try to do up a couple different cases to paint a more complete picture. With the market being down right now I should throw up some numbers pretty soon.

With regard to the magic pony: the cost/benefit analysis doesn't come into play. Hitting someone in pvp is the most important factor for a number of reasons. There is no benefit currently implemented or likely to be implemented that makes hitting someone less desirable relative to something else. Which is why what you said is a pipe dream and will never happen.

With regard to acc: When I say 200% accuracy I mean +200% accuracy not +100%. If I mean +100% then by proxy me also stating 0% accuracy would mean a power that can under no conditions ever hit.

To be more specific the range you are dealing with in pvp realistically goes from:
+60% acc (casual zoner) all the way up to ~+220% powers like KO blow on an IO'd toon)

The affect of acc is automatically cut in half by the 50% tohit chance vs PC's so you have an effective range of 160/2 = 80% accuracy variance that you will encounter in a pvp environment.

The variance is too large for elusivity to be balanced to not feel retardedly overpowered vs a casual and majorly underpowered vs an heavily built toon. Which once again is pretty much exactly what we saw when it was first implemented.

It needs a DR curve that cuts the variance in half which would mean putting a ceiling of about +140% acc (so 2.4 acc) before a single value of elusivity stops the extremes.

Once the extremes are eliminated you could pick a singular value for elusivity that would perform more reasonably.
ie 25% elusivity
So for the casual they'd hit a character with elusivity
1.6*.75*.5 = 60% of the time before def and tohit is factored in
The top end build
2.4*.75*.5 = 90% of the time before def and tohit is factored in

Vs Now with no acc DR
1.6*.9*.5 = 72%
3.2*.9*.5 = 144% (capped)
Vs i13 with no acc DR
1.6*.7*.5 = 56%
3.2*.7*.5 = 112% (capped)

*I shut my brain off earlier with regard to 150% elusivity, the number in my head was 50%, not sure why I threw a 1 in front of it. Sorry 'bout that.

Ah so the poster listed "enhanced" average damage.

I don't have dual pistols as I haven't purchased GR, so I can't check it myself.

I just know that avg damage on the traditional nukes is 305. So the unenhanced avg damage of Hail is about 192 now?

Click based mez used to have advantages when you were overwhelmed as it would still work whereas things like integration would shut off and make the possibility of being perma mezzed by the mobs much more of a reality. Of course it is very rare for 10pts of mez protection to be broken in the pve game.

The clicks don't seem to have much value anymore imo.

As for the psi def hole it is much less of an issue than no psy resistance is when comparing def vs res sets. Things like willdom, tkblast, and subdue are all typed ranged as well. The ones that lack positional def are the control powers like mass hypnosis, mesmerize and dominate. Of course you can certainly get dominate+mesmerized to death in some situations, but not nearly as easily as getting hit by every psy attack and having no res to it can lead to.

If an entire issue was "Issue X removal of redraw" I'd be happy.

Is the avg damage accurate? It is higher than traditional blaster nukes isn't it?

Well it is the "unique powers" that really make the set imo. I mean earth and fire control are actually pretty functionally similar, but they each have a few unique aspects that really differentiate the experience with them.

It just so happens those are my two favorite control sets by a sizable margin so if elec has similar foundation powers to them and differentiates through the unique powers it could be a very good fit for me. I'd love to see another sets as aberrant as illusion though, playing it is unlike anything else in the game. But that could be satisfied by an unaltered port of illusions to doms (or nearly unaltered, one of the invisibility powers could be altered).