Muon_Neutrino

Procs in volcanic gasses do indeed work weirdly. It all comes down to how the power functions, with all those pseudopets. Take a look at the city of data entry:

Volcanic gasses on CoD

So. It summons one pseudopet (weirdly labeled 'voltaic sentinel') which lasts 60s and has an autopower which pulses the trivial fire DoT that the power has. This power works like any other autopower when it comes to procs - one chance per 10 seconds on each enemy in the area. This power does damage, but doesn't hold, so the only procs that will function in it are the posi and PvP damage and the purple KD procs. These procs are probably not worth using.

The other pseudopets are where it gets interesting. The power summons six of these spaced over a 60s period, each lasting 15s (except for the last, which lasts 10s). These powers use a actual hold *click* (not an auto!) with a 7.5s mag 3 hold, over a 10 foot sphere with a 5 target cap, no animation time, and a 6s recharge time. Since these are clicks, not autos, procs in these will have a chance to go off each time it fires. So, each pseudopet will get 3 chances to fire (one at 0s, 6s, and 12s of its duration, except the last which gets only 2 chances). This adds up to 17 proc chances over the whole duration, or an average of one every ~3.5 seconds, much more often than the once per 10s of a regular auto.

Since this part of the power holds but doesn't damage, the only procs that will work in it are the hold procs. However, there are quite a few of these - 3 regular damage procs, a purple damage proc, and the +2 mag proc to boot. You probably don't want to slot all of those since you won't actually get reasonable enhancement percentages, but if you've got some global recharge you can probably get away with just the purple hold/rech and acc/hold/rech and give it 4 damage procs (or 3 and the lockdown).

I do not have experience with this myself. However, I have heard from people that have tried it that it is indeed very nice, and knowing how the mechanics work it certainly seems to me like it should be very good.

Addendum to the above: said character is also a massive investment of RL $ for not much return in terms of +5ing all those IOs, and probably improves a team's performance by at most the same as a purely SO'd rad/, dark/, kin/, cold/, or (probably) time/ defender who can actually supply both offensive and defensive buffs and debuffs. Especially if you take a nice secondary like /sonic or /ice (for example) and actually use it as intended instead of ignoring it or slotting it for mostly irrelevant debuffs like -defense.

Healing in this game is probably the single *least* important form of mitigation available. It can be useful, but empathy's (for example) best powers are the buffs. If I was doing a +4/x8 TF, a 'pure healer' empath would be about the *last* character I would want along. No amount of healing is going to save a squishy who just pissed off a +4 rikti chief soldier, I want buffs and debuffs in that situation.

At level 8 on a plant dominator, all your survivability problems should vanish. Seeds of confusion is probably the best single control power in the game - as long as it's up for a spawn, that spawn should be toast. Mitigates their damage, causes them to weaken each other, bunches them up nice and tight for fire breath, and even at very low levels lasts something like 20 seconds completely unslotted. If you're not using seeds, I would very strongly suggest doing so.

If you are trying to use seeds and are still running into problems, could you tell us exactly what you're doing and how fights are usually going, so that we can see what the problem might be?

The defense and resistance bonuses are never used because PA is invincible and phantasm doesn't really make very good use of them. You want as much recharge and damage as possible in PA, along with some accuracy and endredux. I'm fond of the recharge intensive pet sets, you can get pretty good enhancement values *and* set bonuses with some judicious combinations of those.

The nice thing about these guides is that they're fun to read. Totally apart from the actual information imparted, too many guides read exactly the same. When you read a Silas guide, not only do you know you're going to get a solid guide to the powerset, you also know you're not going to be bored while doing so.

Ice assault isn't really discussed much, but not because there's anything *wrong* with it. It just isn't one of the standout flashy sets that does something special.

In many ways, ice is the middle of the road assault set. It's got decent ranged and melee, decent ST and AoE, some quick animations and some slower ones, a useful but not especially flashy secondary effect, a mostly ignorable utility power, and power boost. It doesn't excel at any one specific task, but performs reasonably well at most anything you'd ask an assault set to do. It isn't likely to blow you away in any particular area, but it offers solid performance overall.

And, as you mentioned, the swords are cool.

That's because SS is, quite frankly, busted, and has been for a long time. It's just busted in so many different contradictory ways that it's not really feasible to fix at this point. If comparing to super strength is your metric, then you're doomed to disappointment no matter what. Saying something is inferior to SS is like saying the sky is blue - sure, and your point is? If there's one set that should definitely *not* be held up as a balance metric, it's SS.

Yay, I have my enter game sound back again! Thank you so much, this is one of those little things that was just bugging the heck out of me. The old sound feels like "OK, time to go kick some rear!", while the new one just felt like.... "ok, I pressed a button". Just wasn't the same feeling.

(Now if only I could fix the menu music...)

Erm, Bill, before you keep going off on BurningChick about the particular subject of always-on FB, you might want to take a step back and look at her history post again.

Unless I'm severely misreading things, as far as I can tell she's not intending to advocate actually *playing* that way, or indeed that it was *ever* a good idea to play that way. She's simply talking about history and how the original designers apparently *thought* the power should be used (I think intended as an aside to the discussion).

My shield/mace tank performs fairly well on trials. I've got her with tough/weave, all the shield powers, rebirth radial t3, reactive radial t3, phantoms radial t3 (untouchable variety), ion t1, and spiritual radial t3 (33% rech/heal).

She sits just above 50% to all positions and survives reasonably well. The turrets in BAF can rip me up if I take too long pulling the AV, of course, but that's to be expected. I can solo crates/tubes in lambda as long as I can keep any one of a small purple, the support pet, OWtS, or rebirth running, and I can hold off reinforcement spawns in BAF solo for quite a long time (don't necessarily *kill* them too fast, but whatever). Note that both of these were significantly harder before I became +3, though (although not completely impossible). Only been on one keyes with her, but between the support pet, rebirth, and greens I was able to keep upright well enough. I wasn't tanking AM, though, so I don't know how well a non-trial-softcapped defense based character would fare against his defense debuffing shenanigans (my guess: not well without support).

It seems to me that there are two key things to focus on. One is to manage inspirations to keep small purples available for 'regular' trial foes. You don't always need them, and of course they're not especially useful for AV fights, but they're very handy for taking on larger spawns of regular trial enemies by yourself. You won't need them if you're with the team, usually, but they're useful if you want to try to solo.

The other thing is to make sure you've got stuff to back up your defense. Rebirth radial is *definitely* the way to go - even if you have aid self, in my opinion. Tough and decently slotted one with the shield are also very good to have. Your defense will get pierced, having the extra resists and HP to back it up is a very good idea. I don't think cardiac is mandatory if you're willing to take body mastery, but if not it's definitely useful. Spiritual is nice to have, but definitely not the only way to go.

Hmm. I am always really reluctant to delete high level characters, because it feels like 'wasting' the work I put into them up to that point. But I have rerolled some characters several times at lower levels, generally when I just wasn't 'feeling' the combo.

I have a particular robot character who's been rerolled a number of times. I like the concept of a robot intended as a non-sentient war machine who develops intelligence and escapes his creators - it gives me a chance to play a character who comes at things from a completely different perspective, and who's learning about the world, morality, and what it means to be alive as he goes. As far as his powers go, he was always intended to use ice or cold type sets in some way, but I keep rerolling him to try and find the 'right' sets. So far he's been an ice/ice blaster, a cold/ice defender, an ice/ice tanker, and an ice/storm controller, none of which have topped level 20.

I also have played around with the 'multiple suits of power armor' theme. It didn't involve deleting and remaking the character as I was quite happy with the shield/mace tank original, but she's also now got fire/energy blaster and rad/fire defender versions. She'd also have a energy/energy scrapper version if they had energy melee, or a kin/energy scrapper version if I didn't hate concentrated strike's animation so much, but whatever. And then there's her praetorian counterpart electric/sonic controller, and her (planned) nemesis illusion/energy dom (whenever they remember that doms exist). Power armor is such a nice story prop that way.

I was able to partially mimic time by combining trick arrow with pool powers. None of the powers do remotely the same thing, of course, but they take most of the same IO sets. The ST slow can be mimicked by entangling arrow, the hold/slow patch by ice arrow, the ST hold by emp, the -res/-def debuff by acid arrow, the -tohit aura by flash arrow, the heal + ST buff + chrono shift can be mimicked by powers from the medicine pool (almost, none of them take endmod sets like chrono shift does), and the +tohit/+def click can be mimicked by either maneuvers or tactics.

Remember that you can take powers at wrong levels by click+dragging them after you place them, so you can put EMP arrow at 12 to mimic the ST hold, or aid other at 2 to mimic the heal. This does slightly screw you up if you were already planning to take leadership powers, but it's at least close.

As far as we know, it will happen someday, but we don't know when.

You are correct that it shouldn't be too hard to port. Reversing the example of dark armor (which had its regular stealth turn into hide for stalkers), turn hide into a regular stealth (probably a clone of dark armor's, but without the perception/etc). Smoke flash doesn't need changing since it's only placate, the mez effect, not placate, the mez effect + temporary hide/criticals stalker power, and other ATs are allowed to have placate, the mez effect (it's in an IO proc and a few temp powers). All that really needs changing is caltrops; I would favor something non-overwhelming but possibly useful, my personal idea is a sleep dart with attached debuff of some kind.

Tanks and brutes would probably have a harder time adapting the set; it'd need to get an aggro aura somehow, and smoke flash would conflict with holding aggro, so it might need to be changed for them. Even then, though, simply swapping smoke flash for an aggro aura would work, even if it might feel a bit conceptually odd.

And yeah, I've been wanting this forever as well.

Well. I don't know if they changed anything for scrappers, though I doubt it. But for the ATs which already have them, the differences between mace and axe are:

Both have 4 single target attacks. Axe's all do KD/KU, with 40%/50%/50%/70% chances. Three of mace's do stun, but two of those are ignorable (10% and 20% for mag 2). Clobber, however, is 100% mag 3. The last mace attack is 75% knockup. The damage on the first three attacks is the same across sets, but mace's clobber blows axe's swoop out of the water with significantly higher damage and a shorter animation time (longer recharge, but it's worth it). The animations on axe's 2nd and 3rd attacks are slightly faster than on the corresponding mace attacks, however.

Both sets have a PBAoE, narrow cone, and wide cone. Axe's PBAoE does slightly less damage than mace's for some reason (~90% as much, same end/rech), but does have a much more reliable secondary effect (50% KD vs 30% mag2 stun). Axe's cones both do about 20% more damage than their mace counterparts, however mace's recharge faster and have better areas/caps - axe's narrow cone is a 20deg 'headsplitter' cone while mace's is a 45deg 'shadow maul' cone, and mace's wide cone is 1 foot deeper than axe's and has a 10 target cap rather than 5. Both of mace's cones have guaranteed KD, as well, as opposed to axe's 80% and 50% chances for KD.

So, bottom line. Axe has more consistent secondary effects (all KD/KD instead of a mix of KD/KU/stun), and doesn't have any powers with really bad secondary effects (like the mace powers with 20-30% chance for mag 2 stun). However, the secondary effects on a few key mace powers are much more *reliable* than the corresponding axe powers, and mace probably has somewhat better AoE overall thanks to being able to reliably hit more targets. Mace probably has a bit better ST damage thanks to the awesomeness that is clobber, but axe has some really nice chain KD on single targets. Mace is also smashing, where axe is lethal - they're both often resisted, but it feels to me that smashing is resisted a bit less so than lethal. I am of the opinion that mace is a slightly better set, but I don't think the difference is huge.