Muon_Neutrino

Khelds each have 14 powers in their primary and 12 in their secondary, and get 2 free powers. Veats have, after branching, anywhere from 14 to 18 powers in their two primaries and 12 or 13 powers between their two secondaries. Veats also have full access to all power pools, unlike khelds. And veats get epics.

I don't think the total number of powers available to khelds can really justify not giving them epics, not when veats have the same number or more and *do* get epics. If they don't get them for some other reason, like theme, that's ok, of course, but if so, I wish it'd be explained.

edit: also, mace beam and mace blast are not exactly the same. Mace blast does 1.32 damage instead of 1.0, has a longer recharge and endurance cost, has a slightly longer range, and has lower magnitude of knockback. They certainly are very *similar* powers (and I presume they share an animation), but they're not identical.

I understand the reasoning you were using here, and if not for one issue, I would agree with it. The problem is, however, that not all set IOs enhance all pet powers (unless something has changed recently that I am unaware of). If a pet power doesn't accept a certain sort of enhancement set, enhancers from such a set slotted into the base pet power won't affect that power.

Fluffy's only power that takes healing sets is twilight grasp. So, the accuracy from the TotN acc/heal is only applied to twilight grasp, not to his other powers, and the TotN %dmg can only proc off of twilight grasp. Similarly, the DWD %slow can only proc off of his tenebrous tentacles, darkest night, twilight grasp, and chill of the night, and not from petrifying gaze (which is, admittedly, most of his powers).

Also, while the power may show a 100% accuracy bonus, this is common to all pet summoning powers (I don't know why they bothered). This accuracy is meaningless - it applies to the power that *summons* the pet, not to the powers the pet uses. Those powers themselves have the usual base accuracy. For that reason, I personally think it best to enhance fluffy with at least 50% accuracy from non-set IO sources. My own slotting would probably be 2 generic acc and 4 DWD, trying to max out the tohit debuff.

Huh? It only needs two changes. Hide -> generic stealth (which is hardly a compromise, it's the closest possible thing a non-stalker can get to hide), and caltrops -> something else. I hardly think having one power replaced is enough to make it not be 'ninjitsu' anymore.

I am presuming Hide would be replaced with a generic stealth power (at level 10ish or so). After all, the stalker versions of dark armor and energy aura lose their basic stealth powers for hide, so I don't see why the reverse wouldn't happen here.

This I do agree on, but I don't think it necessarily represents an immovable obstacle to proliferating the set. Look at what they did with electric armor and conserve power, after all. I'm sure they could find something useful to replace it with.

As the devs have said numerous times, powersets are not balanced around IOs. It makes no difference what the reconstruction clone can be slotted with.

Why does this need to go? Even on stalkers, it doesn't interact with their inherent at all. No crits, no pseudo-hide as the actual placate power has - it's just a PBAoE mob placate. I see no reason that the placate status effect must be exclusive to stalkers - in fact, there's even an IO proc with that effect. Vanishing in a puff of smoke is a classic ninja move, and I don't see why only evil ninjas would be able to do that.

While this set was certainly originally designed for stalkers, I don't see why that means it can never be adapted for use by another AT. That's the whole point of proliferation. Psy and rad blast, plant and earth control, cold dom and thermal radiation, battle axe, war mace, and broadsword... the previous proliferations are littered with sets that used to be exclusive to one AT. Some of them needed to be tweaked in the transfer, but that didn't stop them from being proliferated.

And I certainly wouldn't mind energy aura, especially as they would have to do something with conserve power to avoid the overlap. Nowadays, it's not a *bad* secondary, even if it's not as good as some. But it's not what I want.

One small quibble with this, is that in some cases it doesn't make sense to strictly compare on a tier-to-tier basis. Soothing aura/suppress pain does not most closely compare to fortitude, even though they are at the same tier - it most closely compares to regen aura. World of pain, similarly, is much more closely related to fortitude than it is to recovery aura. Recovery aura and anguishing cry are the two powers without a counterpart. I don't think it makes sense to compare them as you did.

That said, comparing the thematic pairs, I still think empathy comes up better in both cases, unless the pain dom is trying to solo.

Soothing aura/suppress pain actually usually restores more HP over a whole cycle than regen aura would (in the absence of massive +recharge, anyway), but only the caster themselves is going to get all of that, since teammates will spend most of their time outside the bubble. For teaming, it's generally a worse power (although it does looks hella cool, I think).

Fort can be applied to 4 people, world of pain to the entire team (including caster, but only 75% uptime). Fort is a *much* stronger buff, offensively and defensively both, and I don't think the 'whole team' aspect can make up for fort's strengths - especially since not all teammates have the same damage output to boost or need the same amount of protection. Even if fort and world of pain averaged to the same strength (that is, fort only twice as strong), applying fort to half the team would likely have a larger overall effect than applying world of pain to the whole team. Where world of pain wins is in ease of use - you don't have to keep track of your fort cycles. Also, of course, world of pain can apply to the caster. World of pain also probably benefits more from +recharge (even if you got fort down to, say, 15 seconds, you likely wouldn't be able to keep up that fast of a cycle). That said, I'd still take fort in a team.

Anguishing cry isn't actually *that* bad. It's got about the same -res as acid mortar, melt armor, and enervating field - tar patch and sleet/FR have more, but that's because they're using the (presumably defender) pseudo-pet values. Its recharge isn't *that* long, and it's got a pretty decent area. Compared to recovery aura, this is one place where I think pain actually has an edge - end issues are not usually *that* crippling, as most players build to ameliorate them as much as possible. I personally think anguishing cry would do more for a team's overall speed than recovery aura would - at least, at the higher levels. Recovery aura is much stronger before the 30s, when most builds finally start having 'enough' slots (and oh god yes RA at 18). Still, I'd rather have anguishing cry, I think.

I think there needs to be separate 'profit motive' and 'effort' axes. I'm not sure whether the 'ebilness' axis is supposed to represent one or the other, or both combined, but I think they need to be separate. For example, 'performance artists' and 'ebil marketeers' would fall on the same place in 'knowledge' and 'effort', but differ in 'profit motive'. On the other hand, you could have two identical users who craft/sell for profit, but one only checks the market once per week, while the other once per day. Here the difference would be along 'effort'.

Of course, that would make it a 3-d box instead of a nice easy 2-d square, but whatever.

I dunno, I think it's fun to send things flying on occasion. Useful? Not especially, perhaps to toss a bunch of melee types away from a squishy or something, or to get a moment to breathe if you've attracted a horde. But fun? Heck yeah. I'd miss it.

1: It does take a fair chunk of end. It's not crippling, but considering that none of the other travel powers' cost even outpace your native recovery, it's considerable. I do find that it is possible to run out when crossing large zones, although the one character of mine with teleport is only in his low 20s and thus doesn't have it well slotted for range or endredux yet.

2: If your computer is old, you probably should consider hover. I play on a 3 year old laptop with only 1 gig of ram, and so falling out of the sky due to graphics lag isn't uncommon for me. If I had room for it, I'd be taking hover (lucky 60+ month vets and their no-prereq travel powers.... grumble grumble). But if you have a modern rig, there's no need for it - when teleporting through non graphically demanding zones, I have no problems whatsoever.

3: It doesn't *need* to be 3 or 4 slotted, but it certainly can help. It's already the fastest travel power out of the box, but only if you can sustain the end costs. Slotting for range gets you there in fewer jumps, thus saving end, and slotting end also obviously saves you end. I believe I was planning on slotting mine end/range, end, range, but if you just want to toss an end in the base slot that's certainly fine.

4: I personally don't find teleport a pain to use at all (when my computer is behaving, anyway). The bind mentioned above allowing you to hold down control (or shift, or whatever) and click to teleport is a must-have, though. Without that bind, it can be more of a hassle, although certainly not unusable.