Muon_Neutrino

Hot feet, if you are in melee, not only causes damage over time to the foes without you having to spend any time animating it, it also provides mitigation. Hot feet carries an 'avoid' effect, which causes mobs to try and get out of the area. Unfortunately for them, they don't move that fast when under the effect of hotfeet's slow, so they mostly spend their time running verrrryyy slloooooowwly out of the area and being distracted from attacking you. Basically, the trick is that it's a damage and mitigation power rolled into one.

It's almost like a defense shield in that it cuts down on the total number of hits you take while using it - the catch is that it only works in melee. However, doms in general do their best damage in close, so imo that's not much of a drawback - the end cost is the bigger concern to me, and it definitely needs endredux slotting.

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I'd have more defenders if we had Fire Blast.

Oh, this has nothing to do with anything.

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Ditto.....

(empathy/fire, storm/fire, and dark/fire concepts line up in the back of Muon's head chanting "Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" )

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Some particulars are left out of certain sets (no yellow ice patch, no bloody ice...). People will whine but then that's better than the alternative

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I can see why no yellow ice, but what's wrong with red ice?

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We want ice to look like 'ice' and because of how the FX were created when you apply a very saturated, non-cool hue to them they no longer look like ice and instead look like a cartoonish jewel.

Even saturated greens turn ice FX into emeralds, so we've had to desaturate the hues as they move away from the cool cyans/blues.

There's still reds, oranges, yellows, etc...but they're desaturated tints.

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If I'm understanding the current scheme correctly, there are often two color palettes for a powerset - one 'bright' and one 'dark'. Why not do a variant for the various ice powers - one 'saturated' palette and one 'desaturated' one? That still would allow colorable ice that looks like 'ice', while also allowing the creation of 'emerald blast' or 'crystal blast' (or emerald/crystal armor, for that matter) for those who might want such a thing.

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It's one powerset proliferated from two others.

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Four others, including one NPC-only.

But why oh why did you give us those poo-looking poo hammers D:

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Because slamming enemies with them is so very satisfying ?

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And, yeah. This. The entire reason I play characters with stone melee is because it feels like I'm smacking enemies around with ENTIRE FREAKIN PLANETS. If I'm gonna hit enemies with a piece of rock, I want it to be a big irregular hunk of stone that looks like it would leave a nice painful abstract pattern of indentations on the flesh of my brute's victims. Most weathered rocks are not flat and smooth, but neither are they angular - I personally think the mallets look fine.

Yeah, I'm liking a lot of the new MA animations for my scrapper for the same reason - she's not a trained martial artist, she's a self-taught fighter. I'll keep some of the kicks, for sure, but maybe I can finally stand to take CAK. Not to hot on the eagle's claw alternate, but that move looks way too awesome to ever replace anyway. Serious Rule Of Cool there. And the cobra strike animation looks nice, but I don't think it really looks right for an attack that does effectively no damage. Now if cobra got the clobber treatment, maybe...

Well, even if you're trying to stay away from expensive IOs, I'd drop acro in favor of a -KB io. They aren't actually too expensive nowadays, and at worst, you can buy one with merits. Mostly, it's because you can really do without the extra end cost - my FF/NRG is frankenslotted on all attacks and doesn't have tactics, and he still can run low if I'm not careful. You have the recovery uniques in that build, true, but it'd be nice to not *need* to rely on their presence.

Personal force field is a must. Definitely grab it as soon as you can. As you've noticed, some of FF's AoE tricks can really annoy mobs, and having PFF lets you manipulate that fact in ways that would just get you killed otherwise. Not to mention that it lets you jump-start cowardly tanks by taking the alpha for them.

Detention field can work just fine with only one slot. Like force bolt, it's got a 40% accuracy bonus - so one accuracy SO/IO is plenty enough to ensure hits up to +2s with no problem. I personally have it slotted 1 acc, 1 rech, but the rech is really just me being greedy.

Aside from that, it looks relatively solid. The order of some of your power choices makes me wince a bit, but since you're already past those levels it's kinda a moot point. I personally am trying to build for ranged defense, not AoE, but you're right in that it tends to be more expensive. I just want it so that I can herdicane with force bubble.

Is it somehow possible that the stun effect is 'missing' some mobs even though the teleport/KB part isn't? I know that's not supposed to be able to happen, but the game engine has definitely done weirder things before.

Maybe you can go get one of those power analyzer temp powers and try and use it on any targets which don't get stunned? See if the stun effect landed, and if they've somehow got some anti mezz effect on them to make sure it's a real bug?

I personally fall on the 'increase the duration' side of the line, simply because of the difference in cost. To 'go faster' usually means spending quite a lot on IO sets to increase recharge, while 'increasing duration' with a secondary w/ powerboost simply costs 1 extra power choice (which I usually have room for anyway). I know that I *could* probably earn the money to IO out a dom if I tried, but I'd rather spend the time and energy feeding my altitis.

Now I just need to decide what to pair earth assault with... so many doms, so little time!

I don't start teams because I'm a shy, reclusive type with no people skills whatsoever, who finds the stresses of leadership actively corrosive (and who is awful at it to boot). The challenges involved in the dynamics of doing missions as a team appeal to my analytical bent, but don't ask me to be the one in charge of herding all those cats in the same direction. Whenever I get the star the game just stops being fun for me - I just don't have the temperament to lead and deal with the inevitable human idiocy that will be involved.

You have a chance to get a PvP IO drop every time you get a kill that awards you rep. That means, basically, one chance per 5 minutes per target (since the recent changes to the rep system). This is for both arena and zone.

Er, I don't think so. For one thing, if they were, you'd have gun attacks doing smashing damage, which the devs have said in the past they don't like to do (in regards to why there are no 'fire sword' options for the sword sets - they don't like to have attacks which do the 'wrong' damage type). Also, I'm pretty sure BaBs mentioned that the alternate animations were punches.

Pistols just don't make sense as a full melee powerset for scrappers. It'd be like making katana a primary for blasters, and having 1 or 2 melee attacks and the rest of them based around throwing the sword. It just doesn't make sense.

Now, as an *epic*, it would work fine. Going off the precedents set by the existing scrapper ancillaries, it might go something like this?

Pistol Mastery
Level 41: Cryo round: 1.1 accuracy, scale 8 hold, minor slow, 32s recharge, 9.75 end. (identical stats to petrifying gaze)
Level 41: Acid round: 1.1 accuracy, scale 0.2 damage spread over 20s DoT, 13% res debuff, 14% def debuff (20s), 30s recharge, 12.19 end.
Level 44: Dual Wield. 1.1 accuracy, scale 1 damage, 25% chance for low mag KB, 6s recharge, 6.5 end.
Level 47: Empty Clips. 1.1 accuracy, scale 0.79 damage, 25% chance for low mag KB, 16s recharge, 18.98 end, 40 foot 30 deg cone.

Water Spout *does* do a lot of damage - but it delivers that damage in a DoT over its entire lifetime. And since it hurls things around and tends to switch targets a lot, it usually doesn't deliver that entire load of damage to any one target. In normal situations, it's not going to be an AoE damage dealer. However, you do have ways to leverage it - your AoE immob stops knockback for about 10 seconds after you use it, and also prevents the mobs from running away. If you use seeds of confusion to make the mobs clump up, immob them all in place, and *then* cast water spout it'll actually get a chance to hit more than one target, and do so for a while. Just make sure to keep casting roots to keep the -KB in effect. It'll still take a while to do the whole damage, but it *will* do it.

The other big use for water spout, imo, is on tough bosses or EBs. EBs are generally immune to knockback and fear (and bosses can be held/immob'd to render them stationary), so as long as you've cleared out the riff-raff water spout will grind on the boss/EB for the whole duration, doing a good amount of damage and debuffing their defense to boot. That's what I use it for most often on my ice/ice, since I already have a couple of decent AoEs from my secondary.

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Brutes: New epics that are actually thematic to primaries/secondaries
Corruptor: New epics that are actually thematic to primaries/secondaries
Dominator: New epics that are actually thematic to primaries/secondaries
Mastermind: New epics that are actually thematic to primaries/secondaries
Stalker: New epics that are actually thematic to primaries/secondaries

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Oh, and THIS. To keep it fair, I guess heroes can get patron pools too. They can learn to cough up furballs as a ranged attack, courtesy of Mynx.

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And that is less silly than throwing freaking *ghost sharks* at enemies how?

Heh, my first purple was, annoyingly enough, on the test server while poking around in RV looking at the issue 13 PvP changes. Don't remember exactly what it was, a mez set piece I think, but it's still probably sitting on the test server version of my dom. Second (and so far, last, thanks to my altaholism) purple was from one of the damage sets, got that on one of GW's patron arc missions a few months back (the one where you go kidnap a scientist from portal corp). Don't remember exactly what this one was either, but I sold it for well over 100m and it's funded my dom ever since. Wonder how much that particular purple goes for now?

Controller: Secondary, dark miasma
Blaster: Secondary, 'body manipulation' - MA attacks (with the new alternate animation tech), 'natural' style self buffs.
Defender: Secondary, fire blast
Scrapper: Secondary, ninjitsu

Stalker: Primary, Ice melee
Dominator: Primary, Illusion

Most everything else I want falls more under the heading of 'new powerset'. 'Body manipulation' is kinda a stretch, but in both this current round of proliferation and the last one, they've shown that they're willing to make pseudo-new sets out of bits of old ones (mental manipulation and now stone assault). And I think it would fill a niche in blasters that's a bit untapped right now - the less 'gadget-y', more action-oriented natural character.

edit: heh, now that I've read the rest of the thread, I see someone else already suggested basically the same blaster secondary that I did. So, can we officially consider this a write-in campaign, now? VOTE BODY MANIPULATION IN 2009!

Uh-huh. Yaknow, sometimes I think the established PvP crowd *likes* having empty zones. Only explanation I can think of for some of their behavior.

Well, it depends. Can you do a 'free for all' in the arena? From what I understand, nowadays (or at least once the most recent test patch goes live) the rep timer is 5 minutes and is not reset by being defeated by the target, or defeating the target again before the timer is up. Thus, you want each character to have the widest possible variety of targets. If you can do free for alls in the arena, then jamming all 6 characters into the same match would be best - each character has 5 potential targets, for a total of 30 drop chances every 5 minutes. If you can't do arena free for alls, I think it'd probably work out best to stock everyone up on wakies and find a deserted corner of warburg. And since teammates get rep when you kill something, probably don't want anyone to be teamed up.

Of course, given my limited experience with the arena and PvP in general, I might be wrong...

Yeah, that's because fireball's secondary effect as a fire attack is bonus damage. Fissure's secondary effect is a chance to knockdown and/or stun. Fissure does have a quicker recharge than fireball, though, which partially makes up for the lower damage.

If you ever plan on soloing, take siren's song. It's that good. You can put the whole spawn to sleep, zip in for a quick, utterly safe drain psyche, and then rip them up one by one. It lasts seemingly forever, and as for breaking it, you don't *have* to use the AoE attacks if you've got things slept. On my sonic/mental, I find that the AoEs come in handy more on teams - solo, the only one I really use very much is shockwave.

Regarding shockwave, it's an underappreciated power, especially for soloing. Ranged knockback is a great survival tool, especially for a combo which has no way to stack mezzes on a boss. Another great use for it is to open from stealth/super speed: knock everything into a corner, put them to sleep before they get up, and then become a regen blaster with IH by running in for a target capped drain psyche. After that, you could get away with using the cones - not like they could kill you anyway.

Regarding skippable powers, the ones I wouldn't take are world of confusion and scare. World of confusion, as cool as it sounds and looks, is really nigh useless - the confuse effect lasts 1.5 seconds base, ticks every 4 seconds, is only mag 2, and has a --25% accuracy penalty (plus the damage is utterly negligible) - in other words, you will only confuse a few minions, for an extremely short time, and only at point-blank range. Especially for a set as cone focused as this one, I'd just leave it behind. Scare, meanwhile, is just mediocre. It's got a very long cast time (in a combo which already has more than its share of slow activating powers) and a pretty short duration. If it was more reliable, I'd take it anyway because I like mezzes, but it's just not worth it when you have screech.

Aside from that, if you're looking for more powers to skip, you may be able to skip either or both of mind probe and TK thrust. This particular blaster combo favors range more than most, and you may just find it not worth it to run into melee. TK thrust is useful as a 'get out of my face' power, but it's not mandatory (as long as you have shockwave, anyway - if you don't have shockwave, I *would* say this one is mandatory). The rest of the /mental set is pretty good - especially the AoEs for a primary normally somewhat lacking in that department. On the other hand, I would definitely take the whole sonic primary. The three blasts are obvious, screech has a nice long-lasting -res effect in addition to its stun, all three cones are quite useful, aim is aim, and a nuke is a nuke. It's all useful.

I personally favor super speed for this combo, because the stealth lets you get close to spawns to open with shockwave or siren's. If you can get a stealth IO, of course, you don't need that, but I'm cheap. Depending on how comfortable you are using drain psyche, you may be able to skip stamina on this build. Even one target hit with an unslotted drain psyche gives plenty of recovery - it's just that drain psyche isn't up all the time. I personally went without stamina and am doing fine, although I might take it in the 40s if I've run out of other useful powers to grab.

Looking at City of Data, I would think that it would work. None of the powers accept defense debuff enhancements (except earthquake), but the -defense effects themselves are *not* flagged 'ignores enhancements and buffs', and the powers are not flagged to ignore buffs, so it *should* work. That said, I've never tried it, so best try it out on the test server first.

People in PvE want it to soft cap their defense. Hit points and endurance can be gotten elsewhere, but not the extra +3% defense - not for a single slot, anyway.

My main beef with the set is how much effort and build sacrifice it takes to feel like it's performing at an acceptable level. Out of the box, the set feels inadequate to me, even after you take every single power. So then you have to start taking *extra* powers and buying IOs to get the defense up, at which point it becomes good - but getting there takes 40-ish levels and way too many of your power choices. I like actually being able to take the primary and pool powers I *want*, rather than the ones my secondary makes me take, and I like actually feeling like I have a secondary before the late 20s/mid 30s. As soon as ninjitsu comes to scrappers, I'm dropping SR like a hot rock and never looking back. I just wish we had gotten ninjitsu this round instead of lolelectricarmor.

Darnit, srmalloy, I get all the way to the end thinking 'nobody's chimed in on the proper color of plasma yet, I get to answer it' and then you go and take my spot.

Anyway, the first few customizations that came to mind for me were:

electric/energy blaster gets her powersets matched to each other - not sure if the pom-poms will match the electricity, vice-versa, or both changed to some different color, but they'll match.

Ice/stone tanker and cold/ice defender will get their various ice shields tinted to make them as translucent as possible - probably a dark grey, judging by how the colors on auras usually work.

FF/energy defender will get blue-tinted bubbles instead of green tinted ones so that his powers match each other, since they both supposedly come from the same source (or I might change them both to some other color, but not likely).

Every single character with hasten will get it tinted to match their theme/costume/powers better, once that becomes possible. I *hate* that dumb yellow glow, which is the biggest reason I have hasten on so few characters.

Fire/regen scrapper will get orangey-yellow regen glow instead of green.

I might experiment around with white fire powers as sort of a 'holy fire' schtick. I just wish we had a true elemental 'fire shield' option for /shield, in addition to the 'magma shield' type option we have now. (ooh..... now I really wish fire blast was getting proliferated to defenders... empathy/fire defender, tint everything white or goldish, and become an angel! )

Anything plant will just love this - more mobs for seeds to confuse! My plant/storm is already drooling over the possiblities.

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Do you have some kind of chemistry issue that makes it physically impossible for you to be happy? I haven't seen one positive post from you anywhere.

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Or to admit that he is wrong.

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I think you're right. He really ought to get that checked out or something, it can't be healthy.