Oedipus_Tex

I understand your point. For most people, though, I think having both is probably overkill, because there are so many other important powers to grab in Cold and Earth. It's not so much a factor of the powers being bad as what you have to leave out to take both.

The reason to take the AoE immob is to get easy Containment for your epic AoE blast. When I was playing Earth a lot I didn't actually use it a lot for that, since I was teaming and preferred Earthquake for safety reasons. But it's a good ability to have if you want to solo in the 40s.

I think it's also greatly underestimated how irritating Energy Blast truly is to a lot of people. My god I hate this set. Except hate is not even the word. It's more like it depresses me, because it looks so awesome and performs so frustratingly.

Having knockback in a few attacks is great. Having knockback in every single attack is sadistic. Where other Blasters get to blast indiscriminately, Energy Blast has to hold back to avoid ticking off the entire team. It may be the middle of the road in AoE on paper, but in practice, on a team, it's behind everything else. You know you're frustrated with a set when you spend half your time trying to minimize or eliminate it's secondary effect.

I know this marks me as the "l2play" guy with some people, but seriously I have never felt as disappointed or irritated by a character as I did with my two attempts at playing Energy Blast.

I don't want to discourage you from trying it, but it is definitely not a set for everyone.

Right. I mean let's look at the problem with Controllers right off the bat.

A Controller does double damage if the enemy is held, slept, stunned or immobilized. Therefore, the Controller should ideally do one of these things to start out the fight. Immediate issues arise in calculating DPA and DPS of an attack chain:
- Minions and Lts will tend to get mezzed in one shot, but bosses take 2, UNLESS you score an Overpower OR open with a mag 4 single target immob
- Sleep will only let you get one double-damage shot in
- The opening attack has (at a minimum) a 5% chance to miss. If it does miss, the enemy is not mezzed, so continuing with the attack chain could be a waste. You could still salvage the attack chain IF you have some other mezz available and IF that enemy is a minion or lt or you get lucky with a boss and IF the power you need to do the mezz isn't a later part of the attack chain itself.
- If the Controller happens to be Fire, he has access to Hot Feet. The DPA on Hot Feet is infinity, so it puts out as much damage in theory as allowable during the DPS period measured. However, it also does double damage when the enemy is mezzed...
- Fire Control applies DoT damage similar to Fire Blast, with all the attendant problems of measuring a DoT that does a range of damage instead of predictable
- Against an AV you may be able to get Containment 50% of the time when triangles are down, it's doubtful the rest of the time. So, at a minimum, a Controller needs to know both the mezzed and not-mezzed damage of its powers.

I think you're brave for taking on this project. I don't mean to be a naysayer, just want to show why DPA and DPS are much trickier than is often supposed by the charts people post.

When this has become the standard on whether a toon is performing, I sometimes wonder about the state of this game.

Oh oops, I always do. Mostly because I never use the power for that, guess it would be different if my Dark was Dark Blast.

Howling Twilight is pretty ridiculously awesome, but IMO the stun is the least of anyone's worries. There would be some Fire and Earth Controllers living up the stacking with that power, but they can already do that with Thunderclap, on a 45 second recharge vs 180. Not a huge deal to me.

Actually what it makes me wonder though is if we hadn't received Storm Summoning or Trick Arrow in the original push of powersets, if we wouldn't have imagined they'd be overpowered.

I disagree. At least partly. An AT should not be defined by what powersets it gets that others don't. How is a Force Field or Storm Defender helped because Dark isn't available to Controllers? The answer is they aren't. If Defenders need help (and IMO, actually, they do, even with the new changes) keeping powersets unique to them does nothing for them.

IMO Defenders should get bigger radii on their buffs and debuff AoEs. It will probably never happen but it would be one thing that would kick me into playing Defenders over Controllers.

As usual I agree with you. I want to continue my (somewhat off topic) diatribe about Defense, though.

The point of grabbing the +5% Defense in the purple confuse set is that it the opportunity cost is low. At the cost of a slot, you buy more Ranged defense than many actual powers will give you. A lot of people will tell you it's not worth getting any Defense unless you can softcap it. IMO this is due to differing views on what Defense means for a character who has the ability to avoid enemy fire. I'll explain my reasoning below.

When talking about the Defense of a Tanker or Scrapper it's appropriate to consider attack rolls as an average. On average, 45% defense is twice as good as 40%, because twice as many attacks miss. But this is an abstraction. Attack rolls are not really an "average," they are discrete events. An attack either hits or it misses; you are never struck by "95% of an attack." The reason its safe to examine attacks as averages for melee ATs is that these characters will be under a constant barrage, which results (in theory) in the pattern normalizing.

But gaps in the pattern sometimes appear. Imagine a power capable of doing 1 million points of damage that only happens once, say at the beginning of a big boss fight. A character with 45% defense gets hit less often on average but this has little bearing on whether s/he is hit in fact after the attack roll has resolved. The character with 45% defense who is hit anyway is in the exact same position as the character with 40% defense who was also hit. The character with 45% defense certainly did not take "half as much damage" as most models of Defense will predict.

Now it's unusual for a Tanker to run into situations where a single attack roll decides whether he lives or dies. But on a team an AT that is frequently in that situation is the Controller. That's because the AT has a combination of low HP (i.e. vulnerable to the nuke attack above), the ability to shut down attack rolls before they happen, and a bevy of meat shields to keep enemies distracted. On the few occasions when the Controller has to roll the die, s/he is not doing it like a Tanker or Scrapper but as a one-off or two-off character who will hopefully soon shut down future attacks before they happen. The character doesn't live or die "on average."

Investing in +Defense is subject to an opportunity cost. My rule is you shouldn't do it unless you can grab a decent amount at a low price. IMO, one power slot for +5 Defense is fantastic. Then you factor in that some other teammates will likely have auras or -ToHit and it really starts to add up for a team heavy, aggro-avoiding character.

You're right. It's not that I want to portray the sets at worse than AVs than they are. It's that my original focus was on AOEs, and I didn't want to spend the six hours it took to type up another table. I just grabbed the source data on the AoEs I already had and applied the AV formula. I need to retract my off the cuff comment about Cold Dom though. Sleet + Infrigidate + Snow Storm + Heat Loss is pretty significant, even if Heat Loss's huge debuff is only up for 30 seconds at a time.

Never thought of doing that. It could work well. And actually, if you wanted to make up for some of Gravity's lackings, you could slot both procs. Someone better at math would hae to calculate it but I think that would give you around 40% mitigation per application.

Thanks. I added a new table showing how the AoEs affect AVs and the link you provided. of course against an AV you wouldn't really use some of these AoEs, but it does pretty much show that only powersets that can really hammer -Recharge should even bother with it against an AV. Ice and Psi sets should step to the front of the line. Cold Domination and Storm might be able to pull it off with -Recharge in the secondary or primary powerset. Everyone else pretty much shouldnt even bother against AVs.

Thanks for the info.

Gack, you're right. Well that makes for a huge table. I'm not going to update the whole thing for every AT, but thanks for pointing this out. I must have gotten confused since the Defender and Controller ATs both have the same mod for -Recharge, and that's mostly what I play.