Kane1

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I think either a damage increase or an End discount on Incinerate would be in order.

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Because fire needs the help?

[/ QUOTE ]In the early levels, yeah, I think so. Flares blows, man.

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I understand that sets need to be balanced within themselves, however, when a power is duplicated across an AT, if it has something 'special' about it it should keep that specialness. I'd rate this discrepancy as equal to the discrepancy in Total Focus being only a mag 3 Stun for Dominators.

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It looks like they simply normalized the first melee attacks, for whatever reason.

[/ QUOTE ]That's exactly what happened. Except for the animation, Skewer is almost nothing like Lunge. My guess would be that it's a sort of a balance buffer: so long as they've all got a strong hitter in the Tier 2 slot, they can't be too far off in terms of damage potential.

The problem here is that Incinerate is all DoT (and it's a long DoT timer, too) in exchange for about 10% more damage. That's not a whole lot, really. Compare Fire Breath to Frost Breath: both of them act as DoT's, but Fire Breath gets 25% more damage just because it's Fire.

I think either a damage increase or an End discount on Incinerate would be in order.

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I'm almost sure it has been adressed "somewhere" but after searching for the past 20 minutes, I need to just ask:

What happened to the Market Report????????

This was one bit of nice handy and actual useful information that i relied on a lot in learning to play the markets!!!

Did I miss something, seems i have - I know there was a "temp" fill in a few weeks ago , and then ..........?

[/ QUOTE ]I'm the guy who takes the data now (it's being posted regularly in the Market section of the forums), but I don't want to write an article for it every week. I've talked to the guys at the scoop a couple of times, and each time no conclusion has been reached.

I dunno if they don't want to run that article anymore, or if they just don't have someone to do it, or what.

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Well, you can try with me, but be forewarned, my idea of good fashion is a t-shirt, jeans and sandals. Underwear, while nice, is not mandatory.

[/ QUOTE ]That is entirely the wrong attitude. You see, as long as you have clean underwear, it doesn't matter all that much whether your jeans are clean.

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Dude... when was the last time you hammered down two sausage, egg and cheese McGriddles and a coke?

[/ QUOTE ]Never. The last time I went to McDonald's was at least 6 years ago, and it certainly wasn't for breakfast. I do, however, get breakfast from Hardees on a somewhat regular basis, and their food is nearly as greasy. (Then again, I also have an iron-cast stomach.)

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It's so good goin down... but 20 minutes later you feel like you had ingested a 5th of drano with some shots of paint thinner.

[/ QUOTE ]That sounds like you've got an ulcer.

All things in moderation, the man said.

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I'm calling you on constructing a deliberately missleading statement by touting a single element, which may well be accurate, but is of limited relevance to the overall context of the larger, and more important discussion, that being: would Arcana eat at McDonald's except under pressure of relatively dire need.

[/ QUOTE ]Well that conjecture includes necessary knowledge about Arcana that we don't have. (Among other things: Is Arcana a health nut? Does she like greasy food? Is she willing to spend more money on a better meal? Does she value her time enough to go get said better meal? Etc.)

Gecko's comment is the only rational response to the comment concerning the content of McDonald's food, because anything else hinges on the frequency one eats at McDonald's and not simply a single visit.

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Interestingly enough, McDonald's is one of the safer places to eat. Taste aside, you're generally much better off germ wise at a fast food place than at that nice local restaurant with the fabulous food.

[/ QUOTE ]Well, yeah, when you deep-fry everything you serve, it tends to kill anything on it that might kill you.

That doesn't stop it from destroying your liver and clogging every blood vessel in your body with all the grease and fat.

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How would people feel about an issue like this:

Activation times for the single target holds (Gravity Distortion, Char, Block of Ice, Dominate, Strangler) need to be more consistent, because this is a limiting factor when trying to hold tough enemies such as Players, Heroes and Arch Villains.

And for Strangler:

Strangler has 2 disadvantages when compared with the other single target holds, its targets need to be grounded, and its animation time is extremely long. This is inappropriate for a power that is so critical to the control sets.

[/ QUOTE ]Looking at the raw numbers, I'd say the first item seems acceptable, but I must add to that that subjectively I only ever have an issue with Strangler, and it only because there's an obvious pause in its animation.

As for Strangler not affecting flyers, I can accept that as a flavor issue, but it seems thematically inconsistent that Entangle works similarly but includes -Fly, which Strangler doesn't. If they'd simply add -Fly to Strangler, I think it would become much less of an issue.

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An interesting one:

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Some assault sets working better with Domination than others. (Lemur_Lad July 4th)

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Sounds like a reference to Energy Assault. Since I think Psychic Shockwave is the only other power from the secondary that is boosted by Domination.

This is probably connected to the fact that Total Focus is mag 3 instead of 4. Otherwise we could one shot disorient EBs under Domination.

My feeling is that it's generally fine. The difference is not that great, during Domination most things will be controlled anyway, and /Energy needs something.

[/ QUOTE ]I'd be hesitant to speculate what Lemur meant, there, but as far as Total Focus goes, I really want that extra point of Mag. I don't mind if the Devs only want us to have Mag 6 in Domination; if that's their concern they can just make it Mag 4 out of Dom, and Mag 6 when Dom's up.

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My problem with your new wording is the first sentence, specifically "They cannot be used in every fight".

If I were a Dev, I'd stop right there and think "Yeah, we know. We made it that way. Next issue."

Maybe a better approach would be accentuating the triple nerf (bad Acc, short duration, long recharge) as being the problem. Long recharge, but a reasonable duration would be better, or reasoable recharge and short duration, or, at worst, non-penalised accuracy.

[/ QUOTE ]I concur.

I just want two things: for Total Focus to be Mag4 like it is for everyone else, and for Power Boost to be changed to Power Build Up. Give me those two things, and I will love Energy in spite of its crap AoE damage and long animations. (I mean, after playing my Spiner who spams Impale all day long, firing Total Focus every once in a while doesn't seem so bad.)

-sigh- Not that I actually believe the devs would ever give us that. But a man can dream, can't he?

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We still have a long list of under discussion items to address. This one looks pretty easy:

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Animation time of Power Bolt is excessive. (Chefshift June 1st)

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Any thoughts?

Lili -- Turning Forumming into work since January 2006

[/ QUOTE ]Animation time on all three of Energy's blasts is excessive if you ask me. On the other hand, at least Bolt doesn't have the "lag" that Burst has.

The thing is that I can't think of a metric for "excessive" where Power Bolt is the worst offender. Flares takes longer to cast, and both it and Psi Dart are hurt far worse than Power Bolt is by their animations. (At least in terms of DPS.) I'd love to see its animation time reduced, but Flares really needs the attention first.

And I concur with Gearsmith: That's a general QoL issue, and not very specific to Dominators.

Flash Freeze is largely in the same place as Flashfires. It has a crap duration and a long recharge, and so far as I've ever been able to see, it's all because it does a piddling amount of damage.

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Many sets across all types of powers offer mez resistance bonuses, while very few offer mez duration bonuses, which makes things more difficult for Dominators in PvP.

[/ QUOTE ]The problem there isn't that relatively few sets contain it, it's that only Hold sets contain it, and only as a Tier 5 bonus. Dominators can't have more than two hold powers, period. The devs have forbade that. As such, it's largely useless to actually aim for the Hold bonus in any given set, since slotting the 5 Set IOs necessary to get the bonus doesn't bring you to the ED soft cap. If it was a Tier 2 bonus like it is for Immobs, Sleeps, and Fears it wouldn't be an issue; we could mix and match a couple pieces from each set, hit the ED soft cap, and have a few bonuses to bring us a little over it. Or if there was even one Ranged Damage set that had a Hold Duration bonus, even if that bonus remained Tier 5 it would still be useful (but not overpowering) to slot that set in our Ranged attacks for the bonus.

The issue of the prevalence of Mez Resistance in sets vs. the rarity of Mez Bonuses is much trickier because that can only possibly be of concern in PvP. Moreover, the Domination portion of our mezzes are unresisted, so to a certain degree it doesn't even matter much because it doesn't affect us. I do believe the disparity between Mez Resistance bonuses and Mez Duration bonuses is an issue which needs to be addressed, but ironically enough, I think that's an issue that ends up hurting Controllers more than Dominators.

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On test now:

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Psionic Dart for Dominators’ endurance cost was set too high. It has been reduced to its correct value.

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Score.

[/ QUOTE ]Massive WOOT!

Oh, crap. That means it may actually be worth slotting now. Decisions, decisions.

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Sorry if this has been covered already but I am just wondering if there was ever a reason given as to why Plant is the only Dom primary that has no secondary affect?

[/ QUOTE ]What's Mind's Secondary effect, then? Or Fire's? If you look at Strangler and Char, the only two mechanical differences between the two are that Strangler only works on mobs near the ground, Strangler is Lethal-damage typed while Char is Fire-damage typed, and Char's animation is a second faster. None of those have anything to do with "bonus" effects for a set. (The first is a penalty that exists for flavor's sake, which I think is wrong, but it's there and I don't think the devs are going to remove it anytime soon.)

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# Gravity Distortion measuring poorly against other STHs. (Natsuki September 9th)

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could this be explained to me? not sure i see what's the issue.

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From memory, this refers to the activation time being longer, and the damage being either less or more resisted. Take a look at the stats in City of Data, and check out if you think it's losing out.

[/ QUOTE ]Damage of GD is the same as Char. It has the third-longest animation of Dom holds (just barely shorter than Block of Ice). It is tied with Strangler for the most resisted/defended Hold, but it also has those slows which are awesome in PvP. IMO, if any of the single target holds come up short, it's Strangler, not GD.

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A ringing endorsement if I ever heard one! I'll put on my rose-coloured glasses and read that as "sounds good to me".

[/ QUOTE ]Well, since my prescription sunglasses are, in fact, rose-colored, that's what I saw when I typed it.

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Could people get behind this wording:

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Ice Control is lagging in AoE control effectiveness when compared to the other primaries. The primary cause for this is that its three fast recharging AoE controls (Arctic Air, Shiver, and Ice Slick) are not boosted in an appreciable way by Domination. Secondarily, Ice Control's recharge debuffs lost significant effectiveness when they were ported over from Controller sets, thus upsetting the balance of effectiveness between the shared primaries. Finally, the recharge debuffs of these powers are unenhanceable, making it even more difficult for Ice Control to catch up.

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[/ QUOTE ]I don't specifically object to that wording, but I think you should know that all -recharge debuffs are unenhanceable. (This is because of the way the enhancement system works; they don't function off of Slow enhancements, they function off of +Recharge enhancements. So, in other words, if the -recharge debuff in Shiver were enhanceable, you'd enhance it by adding Recharge Reduction SO's to it. )

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Yes. I know.

But in these two cases, is there a difference between

a) when you press a hotkey to start Hack and when Slash can first begin?

b) when you press a hotkey to start Hack and when Hack's damage occurs?

A redname recently said the answer to a) is "no". If the answers to both a) and b) are actually "no", then redraw has no effect on damage output whatsoever, either burst or sustained.

If the answer to a) is "yes", then BAB is either wrong or lying, and neither I nor anyone else can meaningfully contribute to this issue without extensive personal testing of the entire Thorny Assault power set starting entirely from scratch.

[/ QUOTE ]Ok. I never said or implied that the answer to a) was "no." But the fact is that the animation time for every power in every set which includes a redraw is intrinsically tied to the fact that they have to account for the redraw, and like it or not, animation time has a very real, tangible effect on DPS, even if you're only talking about the time it takes for a power to cycle back up.

In other words, 99% of all arguments that complain about the redraw hurting the DPS of relevant sets are actually complaints about long animation times. Personally, I don't give much consideration to such complaints, but it is important to understand them for what they are.

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To be thorough, b) is a different but no less important question, and neither BAB's post nor any thread I've seen on the issue actually addresses it.

[/ QUOTE ]Yeah, I've kind of wondered that myself, particularly with my Spines/ Scrapper, but if there is a difference, it's such a small fraction of a second that I don't see how it could be reasonably tested, given the window of human reaction time.

Technically that's not true. The animation time of the power (whether or not the "redraw" plays before the power is used or not) is dictated by the time it takes to perform the redraw animation, since each power involving a redraw has to account for the possibility of a redraw each time the power is used.

Simple demonstration: roll a Broadsword Scrapper and take Hack at level 1. At level 2, take Slash. Walk up to a mob somewhere in Atlas with the sword not drawn, click Hack and queue Slash while the animation's still playing. Let both powers recharge and then click Hack and queue Slash. There's a noticeable delay in the second cycle between when Hack seems to be finished and when Slash's animation starts playing.

So, indirectly, redraw sets pay for the redraw with the casting time of each of their powers. Thorns ends up not suffering badly from that, since all of its animations are pretty quick anyway, but it's really noticeable on my Broadsword/Invuln Scrapper that keeps a constant Parry chain going.

I think the re-draw issue is largely aesthetics, since Dominators end up throwing more powers which cause a redraw than most other characters with sets that include a redraw. E.g: A ForceField/Archer doesn't have to deal with the redraw in mid-combat anywhere near as often as a Mind/Thorns would. (And while it's only a slight annoyance, it is kind of distracting when your character is in a constant cycle of draw, sheath, redraw.)

As to the debuff thing... I'm all for buffing Dominators, piecemeal or wholesale, but I only see two ways of implementing that particular buff, and neither of them seems all that plausible. The first is to simply up our Debuff modifiers, to globally pump our debuff prowess. But that becomes a problem because then we have full debuff capabilities without full buff capabilities, which puts us in something of an odd position where -Def is intrinsically more powerful in our hands than +ToHit. That may follow a certain balance logic, and it may well fit into certain design schemas, but I'm not convinced it's what's best for us, and the devs may very well say, "No, that's not what we had in mind."

The other solution would be to simply go into every power in our primaries that has debuffs which are underperforming and increase them on a case-by-case basis until they're dead-even with what the Controller versions do. And I'm not happy with that for two reasons. First, because it's a kludge. And second, because that's basically saying, "We're underperforming because Controllers do something better than we do." I'll grant you that Ice/ probably needs some work as a Dominator set, since three of its signature powers get nothing from Domination, but to say that the -slow, -recharge in Ice/ isn't good enough because Controllers get better numbers for it ties our balance to what Controllers are capable of, which I really don't think is a good idea.

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This bears out your theory that Icy Assault is focused on single target damage. It's the AoEs that kill the endurance on Icy Assault. Are people comfortable with the fact that the Icy Assault AoEs kill endurance? Is this a problem for other Ice sets?

[/ QUOTE ]No more than it does for /Thorns.

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Icy: 7.14
Icy: 6.09

Thorny: 8.87
Thorny: 7.55

[/ QUOTE ]/Thorns has better efficiency to begin with, but it's clear that its AoEs actually hurt its single-target DPE more than /Ice's do. Me? I don't see a problem with Icy having mediocre DPE on both single-target and AoE. It's one of the two control secondaries. The fact that its AoEs aren't as efficient as Fire's or Psi's doesn't bother me in the least, given that Ice has Power Boost, and as far as single-target DPE, it's dead center of the rankings according to that latest sounding.

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I thought this had been gone over before, and the DPE were right in line with the standard settings (5.2 end per BI?); it's only the fast animations in the set that let you burn the blue quickly.

[I could be wrong, but that's my recollection.]

[/ QUOTE ]That's generally true, yes. Except that remember that two of the Assault sets have a bonus DoT, which inevitably raises their efficiency a bit (at least in the single target department), and Psi Shockwave obviously tilts the tables when it comes to AoE. So the only real competition is between Icy and Energy, in which case we have one that's efficient against single targets (because Power Burst is slightly more efficient than it should be and Bitter Ice Blast is slightly less efficient than it should be), and one is a good deal better at AoE (because Whirling Hands sucks).

What I don't get is how Lili's getting these "average" DPE numbers. Are you including the snipes? Cause I can't make Psi hit 6.70 in single-target without it. And how do you figure the "3 target" number, are you just running the average of all the powers and multiplying any AoE's by 3? And how does Ripper figure into that? Cause Ripper rarely hits more than two, as far as I can tell. (And it's costed as if it's not even expected to hit two on average.)

Edit: It occurs to me that Lili might have simply left out Psi Dart in Psi's averages, which doesn't quite bring it up to 6.7 in my model, but it gets it to 6.5, so I guess that's close enough. Out of curiosity, are you figuring these by taking numbers from an attack chain? Because if so, I think that's a little unfair, considering that different players will play the sets differently.

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Psychic Shockwave is way too efficient -- it's 6.95, suspiciously like an ST attack, which leads me to believe someone switched its attack type during development and forgot to adjust the numbers. Its Endurance cost is basically half what it should be. Whirling Hands is inexplicably inefficient given its short range, which usually correlates to a lower cost or some other balancing benefit.

[/ QUOTE ]Shockwave is the crowning power of Psi Assault, and given that the set lacks a strong single-target chain at all, I think the devs gave us Shockwave as-is knowing that it was better than it "should" be. Whirling Hands came to us ported directly from Energy Melee, which is a strong single-target set with deliberately poor AoE potential. Since Energy Assault is the only Assault set with only one AoE power, it's logical to assume that they intended to continue that trend. (Personally, I think the disparity between Energy and the other sets is large enough that Whirling Hands probably deserves a buff anyway, since it's the only AoE Energy Doms have, but that's neither here nor there.)


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I will concede that Thorny's two "ranged" AOEs don't follow the same costing pattern as all other Dominator attacks. I'm not convinced it's a problem, but I'm not going to say everything looks fine.

[/ QUOTE ]Good enough for me.