Umbral

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On FF it yields 38.5% def with 1 end red and 3 def buff IOs @ 50

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Your best bet is to just get Maneuvers, the 2 ST shields, and Dispersion Bubble.

Assuming 1.6x benefit from enhancement, Maneuvers grants 5.6% +def(all), Dispersion Bubble grants 16% +def(all), and the shields each grant 24% +def(all types but psi and all positions). That's 45.6 +def to pretty much everything.

My personal favorite beverage of choice is a Dewdriver. It's pretty much a Screwdriver (equal parts vodka and orange juice) with MtnDew instead of vodka (because I'm a horrible teetotaler), which is where the drink gets its name.

I will say that I too love me the blue Dew. I get as much as I can whenever I go for groceries, but I will have to agree that it will be painfully short lived, which is strange because everyone I've had try it, loved it. It's the first 2 liter to get killed at all of my weekend D&D games.

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if you find a money on the street do you use it? or try to return it to the owner... just because there is an exploit in place doesn't mean you should use it... says a lot about your character.

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How much money and is there identification?

On a more appropriate note, you have to remember that we live in a society wherein people feel encouraged if not obligated to abuse the system they live in to its fullest extent even if it's completely at odds with the intent of it.

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a shuriken and caltrops are WAY lower tech than something that explodes and is designed to lock someone in place...
If it was a smoke bomb, I'd agree, but the concept of web grenade really isn't ninja esq.

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Depends on what you think Ninjas are. Ninjas employ tricks, weapons, stealth. Web Grenade could be devised and used by a martial artist as could Caltrops and Shurikens. Targeting Drone doesn't fit the roleplay theme of the other powers in Weapon Mastery, it was just available to be plugged in. One day it should be addressed in some fashion.

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You do realize that Weapons Mastery wasn't designed for those that wanted to make a Ninja, right? It was designed as a thematic ancillary pool for the blade using power sets. It has nothing to do with ninjas or any specific character concept (which you seem to be operating under the incorrect assumption of). All of the ancillaries were designed to be vague thematic counterpoints to the existing sets. Scrappers had DM, the blades, and MA when the APPs were added. Dark for dark, Weapon for the blade sets, and Body for MA. Complaining about the Targeting Drone because you don't think it works for ninjas is like complaining about the Laser Beam Eyes and Energy Torrent in Body Mastery. None of them fit specifically with their root power set, but that doesn't mean you have to take it or that the animation/effect is bad.

If anything, a modern ninja would leap at the chance to use higher level technology than what they had available in the medieval era simply because they used whatever tools they had available. They would never handicap themselves by only using tools from a specific era.

I really think that you need to remove your head from your rectum and figure out that the APPs don't exist to make your concept complete. If you don't like how it looks, you don't have to take it.

(Also, they're not going to take up one of the 8 remaining costume option slots for a single power effect that you don't like. They've got better things to use them for. If you don't know what this means, you need to learn more about the problems with power customization before you start trying to make a fuss about it.)

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How do you know they didn't use him, eh?

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Because there are story arcs that specifically tell us that Nemesis is responsible for it from multiple positions and vantage points. Claiming that the Rikti are the masterminds behind the mastermind even though it completely ignores the in-game canon is like suggesting that the Skulls are actually responsible for Statesman getting all of his powers.

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can hit regen levels that wp can only dream of

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it can hit very decent levels of regen but only when surrounded by hostiles

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I'm not quite sure you know what you're talking about here. */Regen can only achieve better regen than */wp when it activates Instant Healing, which has a notoriously bad uptime ratio (90 sec duration / 650 sec recharge = 13.85% uptime). */WP can actually maintain better regen than */regen for a couple of reasons: RttC is fully enhanceable whereas Integration is only partially enhanceable. With pure SO slotting an only a single target feeding RttC, Integration and RttC grant the very same +regen. The only difference from that point on is more targets feeding RttC and the uptime ratio of Instant Healing (which is also only partially enhanceable). With SO slotting in IH, you're getting 990% +regen on a 27% uptime ratio for a total contribution of 267.56% +regen over time. It only takes 7 targets feeding RttC to get up to that. Plus, when you add in */wp's regen debuff resistance, */wp is actually better at regeneration than */regen is.

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How good is softcapped defense without any self-heals or resistances?

The simple and most complicated both together in 1 answer:

As good as the player behind that toon.

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A better answer:

Depending on the prevalence of defense debuffs and personal regeneration, excellent to middling. If you're running without regen, you're going to have much better staying power than someone without it, but without some way to get your hit points back (self heals or regeneration), you're going to go down. If there are defense debuffs about, you could quite easily go down. Defense debuff cascade is not your friend.

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Well, it was just a concept. I doubt it would help all that much, though with so many enemies having 50% lethal resistance in the upper levels, it might help. But we were talking about something unique, and I thought that would be unique not just as a mechanic, but as an approach to set balance, as well.

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The problem with using it as an approach to balance is that damage type has never been accurately used as a balancing metric. Psychic Blast's damage got nerfed into the ground even though psionic damage is actually resisted significantly more than Fire, Energy, or Negative Energy (which are all the damage type kings). Damage type is actually a rather minor difference except for when fighting specific enemies as enemies tend to resist most if not all damage types to a similar degree rather than having a single damage type weakness.

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Granted, not all enemies are going to have a weakness to ice or fire - Freakshow are weak to Energy, for instance, and have neither a strength or a weakness to Fire. We can't really clone a bullet for every damage type (and it would be pretty stupid to even try) but I wouldn't be as quick to dismiss choosing your damage type on the fly.

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This is one of the reasons (aside from the variable damage type issue) that I suggest having the toggles add damage rather than change it. Still, the problem is that, in order to make the choosing significant, you've got to have a number of options. Lethal, cold, and fire aren't really varied enough options to make the choice particularly significant across all enemies except against a very small number of groups (CoT, Freakshow, Nemesis robots, Redcaps, Snakes).

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As for conventions, there are always sets that break the mould. Look at Scrapper sets, for instance - small attack, bigger attack, even bigger attack or cone, utility, confront, build up, bigger attack, even bigger attack. Yet look at Dark Melee. It's a lot closer now, with the changes to Midnight Grasp and Syphon Life, but once upon a time it had small attack, big attack, combo bigger attack/cone, then utility, utility, sorta-Build Up, Confront, then combo utility/relatively big attack. There is precedent, however small, for oddball sets out there.

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I realize that Dark Melee breaks the conventions a bit (it gives up 2 AoE for 2 utility power, which hurt it a lot for a long time) but Castle has been very wary about doing so with the new sets. Dual Blades, Willpower, Shield Defense, and Mental Manipulation all follow the conventions for their respective set type pretty closely. I don't really predict Castle to rock the boat much more, especially if he's also going to be adding a new mechanic to the power set. Fire Blast (all damage, nothing much else), Ice Blast (heavy control), and Sonic Blast (significant secondary effect) are pretty much the boundary of their respective specialization. Anything getting close to those is probably going to be questionable, especially if you're trying to add in other new hard-to-balance mechanics like modifiable damage types.

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Granted, balancing a set that relies on switching damage types would be difficult and VERY dependent on what you fight and what weaknesses it has. But practically speaking, it's a lot like having Survaillance on EVERY enemy you fight. 'Course, it would suck to use if you didn't know who is weak to what, further complicating things, and we're probably going to want to add some secondary effects to toggles and so on and so forth.

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That's one of the other problems I can see with this. It will have very little benefit and possibly a lot of negative effects on players that don't know or pay attention to enemy resistances. Many players will probably just leave on the highest level or coolest damage toggle because they think it's doing the most damage, even if they're fighting an enemy which has huge resistances against that damage type. People don't really pay attention so they shouldn't really be penalized for it. Most people still think that psionic is the best damage type even though fire and energy are actually better.

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The point, though, is that what was asked a unique idea and, given the limitations of the system, that does fit. Someone had an Excel Spreadsheet of enemy resistances somewhere, so we'll probably have to look at that to determine even potential viability, but I'd be interested to try, anyway.

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I've already downloaded it (and have been checking it as I write this), but I can't remember where I downloaded it from. I know that there have been a few discussions over the last couple months concerning player damage type superiority in the Archetype and Powers General Discussion forum over the last few months though. You may have some success searching that forum.

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One thing I haven't seen mentioned in this thread is the fact that there's already one power in the game that does add a new damage type to attacks: Enchantment of Serafina. Instant psi damage, perfect for taking on the honoree in his "Unstoppable" phase.

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I just checked the information for Enchantment of Seraphina both on City of Data and in-game, and it doesn't add a damage type. It simply increases the damage of psychic attacks without increasing the damage of any other type of attack (+% strength to psionic damage for 1 m 0s on target). So, unless both City of Data and the in-game information are wrong (I've never used it so I don't know), you're reading too much into the description and not enough into the game effects (which actually matter).

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Where did you find this?

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He made it up, not that I don't support something like this. I never thought that AE should be an equivalent leveling path to running dev content.

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How can we have a power with no practical cost? If Tankers, Scrappers and Brutes can get Taunt/Confront for free and Stalkers can get Hide for free, then a Blaster set can get a couple of toggles for free. Their point wouldn't be EXTRA performance, so it shouldn't merit EXTRA cost.

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I don't think you can quite equate Taunt/Confront and Hide with some other toggles for a single power set for Blasters. One of the big reasons that they're free is because they provide assumed baseline functionality for the AT in question.

Tankers (and the very least) need Taunt simply because that's what their role is supposed to be (even if it is largely redundant considering gauntlet and taunt auras). Brutes, ignoring intended/functional role debate, get Taunt for ranged Fury maintenance (re: getting those guys out of range of me to shoot at me), and Scrappers get Confront because, when they were first designed, they were supposed to fulfill the interceptor role to protect glass cannons and support characters. For all three of those ATs, because the benefit is largely non-existent (you're getting aggro on yourself), the cost is entirely made up by the animation time (plus it's probably also a "benefit" to try get those ATs to actually use the power).

Stalkers wouldn't be Stalkers without Hide. The lack of cost on Hide is similar to the lack of endurance use on Confront and Taunt: it's baseline, non-damaging functionality of the AT. The lack of cost is there to encourage using it in all situations rather than just switching it off after combat is joined.

Taking out multiple powers just to put some others in that switch damage types doesn't really seem like something worthwhile. I could see doing it when it actually adds something, but a pure conversion just doesn't seem like something that would actually be worth it, especially considering what the toggles would most likely be replacing. If anything, I would expect just a single power to be replaced with something like this, most likely the snipe or the utility/control power. Replacing more than one starts deleteriously affecting the power set to such a point that you're giving up a hefty quantity of actual effectiveness for a small amount of situational utility.

This is one of the reasons why I would honestly support my crit toggle idea more than the elemental round ideas. If people want to maintain the 3 basic tier attacks, Aim, a tier 9, and a couple AoEs, that doesn't leave much choice: it's either the control power or the snipe. There's already precedent for replacing either of them (Fire = no control, Ice = no snipe), but there isn't precedent for replacing both, and a lack of control was specifically the design mentality behind Fire. Replacing both might be possible, making 1 a more control oriented toggle than the other, but doesn't really fulfill the control power role, which requires a reliable hard control of some kind rather than a chance or a reliable but largely ineffective debuff.

It's most definitely less than 1% of the the entire player base. Most people who play the game barely know how to play their characters (at least my definition of know how to play their characters). I'd venture a guess at the actual AV soloing population of the game to be somewhere in the range of 500-1000 total players. There are probably more that could, but don't bother to.

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Scott Calvin... was on the drawing board to be returned

[/ QUOTE ]Eh? The storyline of the Calvin Scott TF was that Mr. Scott believed Sister Psyche's presence in Aurora Borealis' mind (His wife) was harmful, so he recruited heroes to separate them. SP and AB were sparated in I4.

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Yes, that's why it would have to be in Ouroboros, because you're going back in time to experience something that has already happened.



[/ QUOTE ]I realize the suggestion is to put it in Ouroboros, and I've got no problem with that. But where'd he get the idea that Calvin was supposed to be coming back at any point? Did he think Sister Psycho was gonna mind-ride Aurora again for absolutely no reason?

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I think he was bringing up what Positron said some time ago about wanting to have the Scott Calvin TF be brought back in game via Ouroboros.

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Oh and 5 Thunderstrike sets, 5 Maco sets, 3 Blessing of the zypher and the Steadfast unique and CJ 3 slotted with Def IOs will get you to the soft cap for ranged damage.

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There's also Weave from the Fighting Pool for an extra 3.5% +def(all) enhanceable to 5.5%.

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im not a math genius but could someone find out what is the increase in average DPS is with Aim on a blaster. such as if i used Aim every time it was up (with 3 recharge SO's lets say) and fully unloaded on a group. howmuch extra DPS would i contribute compared to without Aim?

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I'm so awesome I traveled back in time and already did that on the previous page! Go me!

The big problem with using Aim's contribution over time is that it's not particularly accurate. Sam and I both brought up the fact that Aim isn't used at every recharge. It's better used by Blasters to achieve a larger alpha-strike in conjunction with Build Up, which, thanks to specific use that emphasizes heavily buffing specific long recharge powers rather than the overall attack string, skews the end DPS benefits of the short term buff powers by having that +dam act on a larger amount of damage.

If anything, I'd expect the Aim contribution over time to be a baseline and have the toggle value be significantly increased to make the toggle do more than simply add .68%, 1.32%, or 1.97% +dam. It would probably be closer to a 5-10% increase in base damage though have an endurance cost high enough to encourage slotting end redux.

If I were to make the power however, I know what I'd do to the power cost: make the toggle cost .01 end/sec (re: nothing) but have a debuff attached to it that increases endurance consumption by however much the damage is increased. If the damage is an extra 10% (whether by chance for damage or simply extra damage), the toggle would have increase endurance consumption by 10%. It penalizes use of non-primary powers a bit, but I think that might be a suitable exchange for being able to increase the base damage of your primary powers as you need/want. If it's deemed inappropriate, it could always be reduced a bit (7% in the example above).

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I have a related question. I noticed that I get higher regen values with the numina and the regen tissue unique slotted in intergration with 3 numina IOs then I get when they are slotted in fast healing with the exact same 3 numina IOs. I've been scratching my head at this. Its the same thing with rttc. Can anyone explain this?

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There was a post on this phenomenon not so long ago. Apparently, the higher regen the power the IOs are placed in has an affect on the actual values that are given off by the IOs, increasing them beyond what they should be...

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That's actually wrong. The real phenomenon is that the +heal slotting in the power similarly effects the procs within the power. So the +regen and +regen/+recov proc actually give more +regen when they've got healing enhancements slotted into the same power with them.

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Expose Vitals

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Do you mean Attack Vitals?

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Making the damage "small enough" is what I'm afraid of. Blasters have enough toggles to run as it is, at least some powersets, so saddling them with another one from their primary with a "small enough" damage boost could potentially do more harm than good.

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*/Dev and */Fire are the only sets that have more than one toggle. */Elec, */Ice, and */MM only have one apiece. None of the primaries have any. I don't see how adding a single toggle is going to have any particularly deleterious effect upon the state of the build. It's an issue of getting the extra base damage (and allows the blaster to break above the damage cap), which is even enhanced by the base slotting of the power. "Small enough" also means "large enough". The damage isn't going to be so small as to be ignorable with a disproportionately high cost. Toggles are actually more efficient for damage than other effects.

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Specifically, I'm worried that this will end up replacing Aim, because you can't have Aim and two toggles in an attack set, because that would only give you 6 other attacks. I just don't see that happening, which means we'd lose Aim - a 62.5% damage buff, and I don't believe a small constant damage buff would make up the difference. I've seen how many worlds apart Archery/Devices and AR/Devices are all thanks to Aim, so it makes a difference.

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I'm curious what you think "small" is going to be. If it's a 5% increase in base damage, that's a 5% increase in damage, even when enhanced and buffed. That's not to be ignored.

As to losing Aim, which I'm sure the set would lose if it actually did get toggles like this, unenhanced Aim can be used once every 91.188 seconds for a 10 second buff. Enhanced, you'll pull it down to once every 47.34 seconds. Enhanced and IO'd, you pull it down to once every 31.69 seconds. Considering the 62.5% +dam, that's .68% +dam, 1.32% +dam, and 1.97% +dam over time for each of those respectively. Aim isn't a largely noticeable +dam benefit over time, except when used as part of an alpha strike. Aim isn't as great a benefit as you make it seem. The uptime just isn't high enough.

Personally, I've always thought that the loss of Build Up was more significant than the loss of Aim. You don't need all that much +tohit for an alpha strike (which BU still supplies) but you need much more +dam. The only build without either would be Dual Pistols/Devices, but it would have a bonus damage toggle and a +tohit toggle, so it balances out in the long run.

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A critical hit is an interesting idea, but even at double the base damage, it's still a relatively minor contribution to the overall raw damage, and a more minor one still to actual damage delivered to enemies as its uncontrollable nature means it tends to activate on almost-dead minions and triple overkill them, yet doesn't happen against hard targets most of the time.

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Are you really trying to say that minions with almost no hit points left will get crit left and right and bosses will almost never get crit? That's what it seems like you're trying to say. Minions will actually get crit less than harder targets specifically because they're softer. You're only aiming 2-3 attacks against each minion, 4-6 against lieutenancts, and 8-10 against bosses. Sure, there will be times when you use your hard hitting attack against a minion and get a largely wasted crit, but there will be an equal number of times when you hit a minion with a weak attack and take it out in the first hit thanks to the crit. Bosses and other hard targets, on the other hand, almost never actually waste a crit because they've got the hit points to soak.

The only mechanic in game with a tendency to crit and waste on minions is Scourge. Every other one, Critical, Assassination, and the one I was off handedly suggesting here, has the same chance of critting a target at any health. There is no tendency whatsoever to preferentially hit low health targets than higher health targets. Hard targets are actually favored because more attacks are directed against them. Something else to remember, each check is discrete. Whether you crit or not with any attack has no bearing on whether your next attack crits or not. Your statement here is simply, blatantly wrong.

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A 5% chance for double damage on a Blaster damage mod with a big Build Up attack would be GREAT! Except Blasters don't have heavy-hitters like Scrappers do, which is where the damage matters the most. Some Blasters have ~2.2 scale damage short-ranged blasts (Power Burst, Blaze, Bitter Ice Blast, Blazing Arrow), but even those fall shy of Scrapper big hitters which are in the neighbourhood of ~2.6 scale damage, only shy below Snipe damage. And we've already said this will replace Dual Handguns' Snipe to begin with, leaving the set with fewer still heavy hitters.

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Actually, critical hit is equally beneficial to small attacks as it is to large attacks. The only reason the hard hitters are nice is because they've generally got higher crit chances, but, in line with your previous line of argument, those attacks also largely waste most of their crits except against hard targets that won't die to a single attack in the first place.

You're also ignoring DPA. Many of the Scrapper big hitters have nice big damage numbers but take significantly longer to animate. Blazing Arrow (1.3 scalar DPA), Power Blast (.94), Blaze (2.54), BIB (1.73), and TK Blast (1.64) compared to Head Splitter (1.19), 1k Cuts (.72), Midnight Grasp (1.29), Greater Fire Sword (1.27), Golden Dragonfly (1.32), and Eagles Claw (.96). The Blaster heavy hitters are better than the Scrapper heavy hitters by the only damage metric that actually matters. Power Blast is the only one that's actually bad.

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All that is to say, I'm not sure running a toggle that costs endurance is worth that.

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The problem here is that you've got an automatically bad opinion of what the endurance cost is going to be. There's no assurance that it's going to cost an arm and a leg for an extra 5% damage. There's no assurance for the cost or for the benefit. The most we can make is an educated guess, and an educated guess would predict a reasonably fair exchange for the benefit so that the endurance costs are no more prohibitive than Targeting Drone.

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On the subject of Super Strength - it's not Rage that causes other powers to be pathetic. As a matter of fact, they're not. They're standard 0.64 minor, 1.0 moderate and 1.64 heavy, the same as Blaster starting blasts, in fact.

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Once again, you're ignoring DPA, the actual important metric of comparison. It doesn't matter if an attack does 1000 damage in one hit if it takes 20 seconds to activate. Super Strength has Jab (.515 scalar DPA), Punch (.68), Haymaker (.956), and KO Blow (1.5 scalar DPA). War Mace has Bash (.63), Pulverize (.956), Jawbreaker (.99), and Clobber (2.01). All of Super Strength's scalar's are lower than War Maces, and, if you look at the heavy hitters' recharge, Clobber can be used significantly more often than KO Blow, meaning it will actually contribute its DPA to the attack chain more often leading to greater damage. Super Strengths attacks are all lower in damage than their counterparts in other power sets. The big reason for this is the fact that Super Strength gets Rage, which is a significant, constant, and high uptime damage buff. It's perma-Build Up. All of the attacks have lower damage to make up for that.

All of your other comparisons follow the same logic: damage is the balancing factor, not DPA. DPA is the actual determinant in how much damage you'll be dealing over time. You'd do well to actually learn this, especially if you think Blasters are doing so little damage, even thought they've got some absurd DPA.

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I can't say I'm a fan of combos for Blasters. Combos, by their very nature, rely on a "stand and fight" type of approach, with effects staggered until the end of the combo, giving enemies the precious few seconds they need to hold, sap or outright kill you. For a Scrapper, that works out anyway, because Scrappers are built to stand and fight. Blasters, however, are not, and shouldering them with such a playstyle would do the character a great disservice. The strongest, most effective Blasters are those who can deliver a lot of effect up-front before enemies have much of a chance to retaliate, taking out or incapacitating the biggest dangers. That's one of the reasons why Fire/Fire, despite having little control, can be so effective when done right and why an AR/Dev can use Trip Mine + Full Auto to essentially auto-kill a full spawn.

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Then how do you explain the success of power set combinations that don't operate exclusively off of the alpha strike mentality? You're automatically assuming that the only effective blasters are those that can destroy a spawn in a single burst. It's a base fallacy. Discounting nukes, every non-Fire, non-Devices Blaster is going to actually have to stand and fight when solo. In fact, any AR/* that isn't */devices is going to have to do so because they don't have the huge amounts of area burst damage that is required to do so. Blasters still have to actually act for the entire fight. They're not just alpha strike machines that are useless otherwise.

I will agree that some mechanism needs to be in place to prevent the mez from completely negating combo capability, however, and that's the only problem with Blasters having a combo system. It could easily be solved by having the tier 1 and tier 2 blasts be the more integral of the attacks in combos. It also depends heavily on how the power set itself is set up and whether some attacks are determined to be excluded from combo capability.

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To my eyes, Blasters play a lot like Stalkers - put all your eggs in one basket, buff up as much as you can, then take out the biggest threat before the battle even starts. This requires strong self-buffs for damage and big attacks that can deliver them. Dual Blades, for all the respect I have for its innovation, plays exactly the OPPOSITE way. You start out with your weakest attacks and without your buffs, then build up from there, finally culminating into something relatively big when the enemies have already taken multiple shots at you. What's more, Blasters lacking the big hitters that Scrappers do (even Sweeping Strike is 2.0 and does an additional 1.0 in DoT from Attack Vitals), that would be seriously problematic.

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In my eyes, Blasters play like Dominators. They're ranged damage. They let loose with loads of AoE and have a bit of control to help them get through. They've got to kill fast to actually stay alive. They don't have anything else to hide behind (Dominators less than Blasters because of greater mez capability, though they've got lower damage to make up for it). Stalkers, on the other hand, are almost exclusively single target. Sure, they'll take out that single target very quickly, but they've got their secondary defenses and placate to make killing their targets much easier. If anything, they've got a number of other tools and strategies to make themselves more survivable that make the connection to Blasters highly inaccurate. They don't have to hide behind their damage alone to keep them alive.

You're also assuming that, if there were a combo system, there wouldn't be any alpha strike capability, which I've never said. I'd actually suggest that the combo effects be largely control and debuff type effects.

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Considering we have procs in the game why not make it a toggle that has a change to proc. The proc chance would naturally be 100% thus it will always proc.

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Sam and I already addressed this, concerning how you're operating under improper assumptions about procs but how it would still be possible if implemented in a different way.

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2) the teams doing police band / newspaper missions don't want to do the actual Safeguards / Mayhems because they are seen as being too slow in terms of XP and too easy to fail.

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Your best bet for getting the badges isn't this. It's better to just find a single person in the appropriate level range, offer to speed them through their radio missions with just the 2 of you (whether by just being higher level or just exemping down) until you get the bank mission. Don't try to find a team for it. Just try to find a person. It works especially well with controllers and defenders, who don't really solo well.

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Hi,

I'd like to know if AV and GM have resistance to endurance drain.

I know they have a high resistance to to-hit debuff but is it the same for all negative effects?

Thanks

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It's in here. To quote it for you:

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this resistance applies to -RunSpeed, -Recharge, -Endurance, -ToHit, -Defense, -Perception, -Regeneration, and -Recovery.

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Toggles can also set character modes, as most heavily evidenced by Kheldian transformations. These modes can then enable or disable powers and even activate specific, mode-dependent secondary effects. I looked at the power set-up of Dual Blades in Red Toamx's City of Data a while back, and if I remember correctly, each combo attack landed shifts the character into a different state, with each next attack in the combo having one mode-dependent stat and each returning to normal mode.

Theoretically speaking, these toggles could be set to put the player in specific modes that powerset powers would then be able to have specific additional secondary effects activated by them.

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I guess it would be possible for all of the attacks in question to simply check for the Dual Pistols Fire/Cold Mode 1/2. They'd just need an extra portion of damage on them that only activates whenever that toggle is up. The problem with this is that it makes the toggle itself simply activate the capability but the power itself actually modifies the damage. Slotting the toggle itself wouldn't really do anything to increase the potency of the round (which I think is part of what's being asked), especially if there are any debuff type rounds (Freezing rounds).

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There's also the distinction to be made of buff vs. base damage increase. Dual Blades' combos are an excellent example - where just adding a bit of damage buff goes into the same pool as enhancements, inspirations and other people's buffs, adding base damage actually adds this damage, times whatever the buff is. Because Dual Blades' damage-dealing combos - Sweep and Attack Vitals - are actually power effects and not buffs, they benefit from damage slotting and damage buffs, making the additional punch of the combo that much more powerful. A Blaster with the potential for close to doubling his base damage numbers, then, is going to suffer BAD from being overbalanced. Either regular damage will SUCK to allow the additional damage to be meaningful yet not overpowered, or the additional damage will suck, allowing the Blaster to perform but not break the game. Given that this will be a toggle, the balancing point is likely to be very low, adding to the problem.

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I guess one way to work around this is to make the actual +dam portion small enough to be nice but not incredibly powerful. There's no reason why the additional damage has to specifically be on par with another attack. It could simply be 5-10% extra damage. Another option might be to create a pseudo crit capability that only activates whenever the toggle is on. (5% chance for another however much damage If Dual Pistols Mode 1/2 is on). That's just an issue of pulling the numbers down a bit in order to keep it balanced. It's nowhere near the problem of Super Strength with Rage, which, thanks to +dam, requires that every power except Knockout Blow be pathetic to account for the huge +dam Rage provides.

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Personally, I'd rather the set were designed for quick, hard, deadly strikes, rather than for prolonged tactical battle. Both in reality and in fiction, handguns are not tactical weapons suitable for heated firefights. Ignoring the realism of them largely being reserved as side arms, when the rule of cool badasses brandish their guns akimbo, they get done fast, one way or the other. For that reason, I'd rather this were a badass set about hitting hard and hitting fast, rather than relying on whatever benefit a continuous toggle could provide.

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My preference for Dual Pistols has always been to make it the ranged Dual Blades: combo attacks for all the special effects. The effects could be all over the place, they could even be similar (1 control, 1 debuff, 1 buff, 1 damage), or they could be a bit more specialized (4 additional extra types of damage). I just think it works well for concept and playability.

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It can be done though. We can already add new things to powers with IO's. Adding them in a toggle shouldn't be too difficult. It'd just be based on one of the many accuracy toggles we have around. Or hell the fire melle/armor (not sure which) power that increases fire damage is probably based on the same principal.

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You're amusingly wrong. Adding something via an IO and adding something via a power aren't the same. Increasing accuracy via a toggle (re: Focused Accuracy) globally adds 20% accuracy. It increases your base accuracy modifier of the to 1.2. Slotting accuracy into a power (re: enhancements) multiplies the base accuracy of the power itself by 1.2.

Toggles can only affect character wide attributes, not power specific attributes. In fact, afaik, they can't do anything to interact with power specific attributes. Procs are all power specific attributes.

The powers you mention (The APP version of Focused Accuracy and Targeting Drone and Fiery Embrace) don't operate the way you think they do either. FA/TD manipulate character wide attributes. They don't add accuracy to every single power directly. Fiery Embrace is simply a modification of numbers. +Dam has to be flagged specifically for each type of damage that it increases. Build Up increases smashing, lethal, energy, negative, fire, cold, psychic, and toxic damage independently. Fiery Embrace simply has a higher value for +dam(fire) than it does for the others.

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yes, and why is that?

i find redside to be more efficiently laid out especially at the lower levels before a travel power. if the redside at's are superior, why arent people playing them?

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Most people prefer the blueside community, prefer the larger population, prefer the blueside content, prefer to play a hero...

It also doesn't help that most people don't pay attention to numbers whatsoever or are incapable of actually comparing the two ATs easily. Brutes and Scrappers compete against each other very little in the game (re: ITF and RWZ). That's not enough for most people to actually notice any discrepancy.

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I get that you guys know about the sets and everthing but dismissing people because they aren't into max/min they way you guys are doesn't help.

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We're not talking min/maxing. We're talking "taking the powers that will actually contribute noticeably" and "knowing what your power sets offer". There's a big difference.