Umbral

Consider again the numbers I provided earlier. Those numbers factor in the Rage crash. Rage provides a massive untoward benefit when viewed as an individual power. When viewed as a set, it's roughly balanced. When you start bringing in outside powers, that entire concept of "balance" just drops though because you can take powers that are better than the utter pieces of crap that are supposed to balance it out.

You're getting something wrong right off the bat. The highest chance you can have to hit anything is 95%. The single accuracy enhancement is not going to make you more accurate than Rage will. It makes you roughly as accurate (assuming you're not enhancing Rage).

Let me get into this even further. Not only are you getting to save a slot on accuracy but you are also getting to "save" on damage slotting. Because Rage provides that massive amount of damage and it's pretty much perma with baseline slotting, you're getting 75% +dam (factoring in the downtime) in every power as well. That's 2.5 damage enhancements.

Rage doesn't just give you an accuracy enhancement to all of your powers (because it's +tohit, it actually lets you shave more off comparative when you're getting to higher level enemies), it gives you 2.5 damage enhancements in all of your powers as well. That's 3.5 slot equivalences in every power you've got. BU provides about half of a damage enhancement and virtually no +tohit, so it only provides what amounts of half of a slot equivalent. With just a single power, you're making up for whatever investment Rage requires.

Now, even more, because Rage allows you to deal more damage, you're also getting to deal more damage for each point of endurance you spend. 75% +dam over time means that you're getting what amounts to 38% more endurance efficiency. Going with a standard 3.0 end/sec consumption, you're going to deal damage equivalent of a 4.8 end/sec attack string. Losing 30.2 endurance every 120 seconds (5.2 upon activation, 25 end at the crash) equates to only .252 end/sec consumption. You're spending 3.252 end/sec to deal damage equivalent of a 4.8 end/sec attack string (remember, damage and endurance are directly related thanks to the dam/rech/end formula Castle uses to determine the numbers for powers). Rage may increase your end/sec consumption, but it more than makes up for it by making you deal more damage for the same endurance cost.

The additional tohit benefits of Rage might seem less than stellar when you consider IOs, but you're similarly having to consider that some aspects of Rage are further magnified with IO builds. +Dam is one of the hardest things to get ahold of. Rage provides that in spades. End redux is substantially more common as well and, because it's reducing endurance cost rather than increasing damage in order to increase DPE, you're multiplying the endurance efficiency effect of Rage even more, while you simultaneously gain even more endurance and endurance recovery tools to mitigate the crash.

Remember, any time you try to argue that Rage is balanced because it's in a bad set (which is the crux of your argument), you have to remember that you can still get attacks from outside the set. Taking Boxing allows you to get get an attack that's already better than Jab, and the APP attacks let you bypass Punch as well. It's not a requirement that you take every attack from the set. The way Super Strength is designed, there are fully a third of the powers that you can easily skip (if you could skip one of the tier 1/2 powers, you could add another to that list).

I am willing to bet virtually anything that Super Strength is not going to get proliferated in its current state. Castle knows the set is borked. He's not going to proliferate it without changes to address that (just like he didn't do with Elec Armor or SR, and those required substantially less work than Super Strength would).

That's a point that we can both agree on though I don't think it's really the fault of the set being typed defense based rather than a positional set. In fact, if you use the IO equivalences (melee = s/l, ranged = n/e, AoE = f/c) and switch the defenses out, you'll achieve only the slightest of increases to overall survivability (using Arcanaville's survivability spreadsheet, the changes would make the set only 4% more survivable).

The weakness of the set isn't simply a question of typed versus positional. The weakness of the set is more substantial than simply a difference in what defense you're getting. The weakness of the set is based in the fact that the set simply doesn't have enough going for it and it needs an outright buff (preferably in the manner I've suggested as it would allow for proliferation rather easily) rather than a simple exchange.

That's why I stated "substantial" for those effects. The effects you mention in Shield are nice, but they're nowhere near as strong as the outright defense. For SR, the scaling resists are, once again, nice, but they're not going to provide quite the same degree of additional survivability as the Invuln resists do. The DDR in SR is largely there due to the fact that the set is almost entirely reliant on defense (and you can generally gauge how reliant a set is on defense by looking at the degree of DDR the sets get; both of those sets have "high" DDR demonstrating higher reliance on defense and lower reliance on their other mechanics).

That's part of why I said that you mileage and preference may vary. Personally, I couldn't stand those either of the powers you recommend on my FF/Sonic Fender, even when soloing, but I can't stand the use of those powers in general. Force Bubble used to be a great power though it became largely useless when all enemies were given ranged attacks way back when. Even with the lower average damage of NPC ranged attacks (roughly 80% of melee attacks), Force Bubble isn't an especially endurance efficient manner of excluding melee and has the side effect of pissing off additional groups as well (cuz Force Bubble is both big and indiscriminate). You could just as easily go with the Flight pool and accomplish the same thing (just fly out of melee reach) for less endurance and lower risk.

Except that those same sets that have typed base defenses have other mechanisms besides defense to count on. Shield, and SR rely on defense almost exclusively for their survivability (yes, they have what amounts to token amounts of resistance, but a vast preponderance of their survivability is derived from positional defense). Energy Aura, Invuln, Ice Armor, Stone Armor and all of the typed defense sets have other substantial mechanisms that provide survivability beyond their typed defense. The only positional defense set that doesn't follow the "almost entirely defense" model is Ninjitsu, and, for it, the defense only provides a baseline of performance that all of the other tricks it has builds off of.

You can't simply state that a set is typed defense and then proceed to ignore everything else that the set has going for it. Positional defense sets focus almost entirely on defense. Typed defense sets use defense only as a portion of their survivability. I dare you to find a hole that healing or +hp don't cover. All of the set that are "typed defense" based that you are using as your basis of "typed defense is inferior" have those mechanism in substantial amounts. Neither SR nor Shield have substantial amounts of either of those.

Which isn't the fault of "typed defense" but rather "typed defense sets". Psionic was designed to be a largely "screw you" damage type (the devs have outright stated that was the original intent and the reason why the was and is so little defense or resistance to psi until recently).

We're not restricting it to non-AE PvE play. But we're not limiting it to any specific subset of play either. Over the entire course of the game, typed and positional defense are largely identical in their effectiveness. Bringing up player powers that bypass typed defense without bringing up the more prolific psionic attacks that bypass positional defense altogether is simply being disingenuous.

As I have stated, we're not discussing the relative effectiveness of positional defense sets versus typed defense sets. The argument was that typed defense is worse than positional defense. Whether existing defense structures are better or worse than their others isn't really appropriate (especially when you consider the weight and rarity of these effects and how little weight they actually have upon the overall balance of a set).

Typed defense and positional defense are perfectly equivalent in their functionality. The effects that bypass typed defense and positional defense are functionally equivalent. The question of whether the sets in question are better or worse thanks to design decisions by the developers (which are universally offset by gaining additional capabilities in other survivability areas such as resistance, +hp, +regen, and/or healing) doesn't have bearing upon the question of whether typed defense is better than positional defense and a specific attribute.

The damage on Full Auto is actually probably the intended performance point for the mini-nukes. Rain of Arrows probably does a bit more damage than is intended, especially when you consider that the real numbers for it assume only 2 ticks of damage will hit (which would put it roughly on par with Full Auto rather than outclassing it by more than 25%).

The only real problem that I see with Full Auto is that it is target limited to 10 targets when it should be limited to 16 like every other nuke in the game. It's already limited in effectiveness and use by being a cone power (targeted AoEs and PbAoEs are universally easier to use than cones, even if they have a smaller total area of effect). Giving it a lower target cap than the other nukes is just weakening it pointlessly.

To offset the long animation time, you could probably use the Hail of Bullets solution (which is funny when you consider that Full Auto was the precedent I used to increase HoB's damage), though, rather than providing an unenhanceable defense buff, I would probably provide it with an unenhanceable unresistable tohit debuff with the exact same numbers (9.75%/11.25%/15%) to equate to the distraction and reduction in accuracy of your enemies provided by filling the air with bullets (cover fire for your allies and yourself)

Not really.

First, the "does not stack with same caster flag" causes effects to replace each other rather than preventing use while the first effect is active. This would allow you to completely circumvent any crash while getting all of the benefits of the power (because the crash is actually a delayed effect of the power and you would be replacing the instance of the power with the new version before the delayed effect of the initial instance occurred).

Secondly, while many people capitalize on the +dam aspects of Rage, the biggest problem (pre-IOs) is actually the 20% +tohit that power provides. The 20% +tohit combined with basic slotting (3 tohit and 3 rech) allows you to have a 95% chance to hit against +0-1s without any accuracy slotting and have a 95% chance to hit against anything less than 5 levels above you with a single acc. Rage essentially gives you carte blanche to either ignore or underslot your attacks. This means less when you're using IOs (because it's trivial to get high levels of acc while getting dam, rech, and end redux thanks to the sets), but it's a major advantage outside of SOs because it can allow you to get more recharge or end redux in attacks that otherwise wouldn't be able to benefit thanks to the 6 slot limitation.

I wasn't aware that Energy Aura was the whole of typed defense. Whether Energy Aura has pisionic defense or not has no bearing on whether typed defense is better or worse than positional defense.

And the only time you're really going to be facing those is when you're facing custom mobs in AE or other players in PvP. The number of attacks in PvE that you'll encounter with only positional tags are pretty much equivalent to the number of attacks you'll find with only typed tags. Any argument attempting to determine whether typed or positional defense is "better" needs to remember that both sets have their weakness and, honestly, both of the exceptions are relatively rare.

Yes. Most of the highly problematic sets are problematic specifically because they were designed by the Cryptic devs. The new devs have made some small changes since then, but, mostly, they're in their current states because of how the original devs designed them, comically ignorant of some of what we now know to be fundamental balance concepts (like survivability equivalence and DPA).

Mids doesn't calculate rolling DoTs correctly and never has, afaik. The guys working on it really should change that. I know I've told them at least once. The DoTs do not, in fact, each have an 80% chance to land. Each tick requires that the previous tick have landed so that the first has an 80% (.8 ^ 1) chance to deal damage, the second has a 64% (.8 ^ 2) chance to land, and so on.

Because of this, Fire Blast does not deal ~92 damage. It really deals 86.6 damage. This gives it a DPA of 59.6. CAK has a DPA of 61.1.

Perma-saturated Soul Drain and double stacked Rage aren't even remotely similar. Rage can be used and operates at full capacity whether you're in combat or out. Soul Drain requires that you have and hit all 10 targets surrounding you. You cannot guarantee that you will have 10 targets around you at all time. You can guarantee that you will be able to use Rage no matter how many targets are near you or whatever effects you're under. Even more so, you've got to deal with the fact that you're having to devote roughly 8.5% of your animation time to keeping Soul Drain up compared to the ~2% use of Rage (which actually means that perma-Soul Drain has substantially higher recharge requirements than double stacked Rage).

Even with that comparison, double stacked Rage is still stronger because you're getting 200% +dam (Scrapper numbers) and 40% +tohit with 16.7% time lost compared to perma Soul Drain providing 30% +tohit and 150% +dam (assuming you hit all targets). With double stacked Rage, you're getting functionally 330% total base damage dealt irregardless of what the fight conditions are compared to perma-Soul Drain providing 345% total base damage dealt under optimal circumstances. Under more reasonably circumstances (5 targets averaged), you're going to get only 295% total base damage.

Then you obviously have no idea how to identify balance. The only thing keeping SS from being completely borked is the fact that Jab and Punch are miserably bad attacks. Of course, with the same recharge that gets Rage double stacked, you can pretty easily get your other attacks (and additional out of set attacks) down to low enough recharge times that it doesn't really matter.

Quick Recovery provides 30% +recov. With enhancements, that translates into roughly 1.0 end/sec. It's not as extreme as the roughly 3 end/sec (100 end every ~33 secs) that can be gained via Power Sink, Energy Drain, and Energy Absorption, but, honestly, that much end drain is largely redundant anyway (and it assumes that you've got between 4 and 7 targets around you at all times). There's also the advantage that Quick Recovery is passive and the others are active (thusly making it more popular for a vast majority of players because you're not having to devote 7.5% of your animation time to your endurance sustainability).

In that case you would be correct. They do pay for their utility by having lower survivability, but the big factor that causes the reduction in survivability is, honestly, the damage. It's been pretty well demonstrated by the other sets that endurance sustainability isn't something that is so heavily balanced against survivability to such an extent that Energy Aura would be considered balanced by the additional presence of it.

Where end consumption is concerned, you only really need 3.0 end/sec passive recovery to run a character, and there really isn't much you can do with redundant endurance (you can't force yourself to spend more endurance to get more out of it). Once you become infinitely sustainable (or even sustainable over a long period of time), there's really no purpose to getting more (which is what Energy Aura does).

Try actually calculating the survivability of the set and comparing it to the other sets (as I and many others have). Many players that argue that EA isn't all that weak are either operating under the assumption of IOs (which is a heavily flawed point to be making a balance argument from) or are using anecdotal evidence rather than attempting to gauge capability empirically.

The only way I could imagine doing a set as such, instead of having it operate by allowing you to choose the damage type and secondary effect (as is done with Dual Pistols, and it's not likely for the devs to give another blast set the same "shtick"), would be by having the damage type and secondary effect be applied in either a patterned or random manner. The patterned manner would essentially operate by having each power grant a "mode" that the next power you detects in order to determine its damage type. Essentially, you would be borrowing the Dual Blades mechanic (mode cycling) and repurposing it to do something completely different. The random effect would require a bit of new tech (though it's not like the devs have shied away from developing new tech for new sets), but it would add some interesting play to the set (random damage types and secondary effects).

If you really want more AoE damage, I would take it. It's not much work to quickly bounce out of melee to let loose with the cone based mayhem and then jump back in, especially when you consider that it's your highest damage AoE by a remarkable margin. The knockback can be a bit annoying, but, even with that, it's just a manner of finding a wall or corner to direct enemies at. I would agree that it's probably skippable, but you would also be skipping a remarkably powerful AoE simply because it can knock a few targets back.

Actually, what you're thinking of are the psionic attacks that bypass position. The attacks you're thinking of have the psionic type by no position, hence the moniker of "non-positional psi attacks".

What are you basing this on? Can you honestly bring up any specific attacks that completely lack a type and, even then, bring up any kind of evidence to demonstrate that there are more exceptions to typed defense than positional defense?

The only case in which I have ever seen positional viewed as better than typed defense is in the case of IOing out a character and, even then, it's only when you're attempting to softcap all types rather than simply a single category. In general, softcapping a single category of typed defense (s/l) is equivalent to softcapping a single category of positional defense (melee or ranged) to such an extent that it's largely a question of which IOs are easier to slot rather than a question of effectiveness.

If this is being directed at me, I can assure you I've done the numbers. It's a hallmark of how I approach sets.

The problem with the assumption that infinite endurance (i.e. endurance tools) is the counterbalance for lower survivability is that Energy Aura isn't the only set in the game with substantial endurance tools that allow for endless endurance. Regeneration, Willpower, Ice Armor, Fire Armor, and Electric Armor all have mechanisms that allow them to either equal or surpass the endurance capabilities of Energy Aura, and those sets don't have to pay with lower survivability.

Energy Aura is not unique in its ability to have plenty of endurance. It is unique in that it pays for the redundant endurance tools it has with lower survivability, enough that it's actually noticeable that it is less survivable than similar sets even with the buffs it has received over time.

Once again, Stealth isn't really an attribute that makes up for any degree of lower survivability. If anything, it's a functionality neutral attachment to a +def power. Dark Armor doesn't lose any particular effectiveness for having a native stealth power.

The only "villains" cooperating with the heroes are those from the Rogue Isles. Malta, Nemesis, and all of the others are independent and, rather than working with Vanguard, are either directly working against them (Nemesis, as explicitly happens in one of the arcs) or simply attempting to avoid them. It makes almost no sense to get NPC villains weapons from Vanguard. The only possible logical reason would be that you would be getting these weapons from defeated NPCs, though it's not like Vanguard is fighting them in large degrees, so it doesn't make much sense for them to have substantial stockpiles to give to those helping them.

And I'd be too busy facepalming to either post or play it.

Whether it can be "powerful" when build "right" isn't really a question of whether it's an effective set. If it can be roughly as effective as other sets under the exact same conditions as other sets, then it's effective. The problem is that Energy Aura simply doesn't fulfill that condition. With the same expenditure of resources, any other set would either deal more damage with the same survivability or simply be outright more survivable.

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As mentioned before, positional defense is superior.

The fact that people continually bandy this about really bothers me. There is no way you could find any evidence to support typed defense being worse somehow than positional defense without delving into the balance black hole that is IOs. Discounting IOs, typed defense of the same value will be just as effective as positional defense. Bringing up toxic attacks doesn't really mean much because a vast majority of toxic attacks have both a typed and positional tag. Just because there isn't a toxic defense type doesn't automatically mean that toxic attacks don't have the flag. Straight up toxic attacks (like those used by the Hydra Men) use the fire defense flag. Others that are mixed (like those used by the Vahz) use the other damage type (lethal, in the case of the Vahz).

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In my opinion, Energy Drain needs to get an Energize treatment. I think Conserve Power needs to be replaced with a "Defense Buildup" (like the one in Soul Mastery for Stalkers) or something cooler (Reflective Shield, anyone? redirects a percentage of attacks to enemies who cast them? Come on, it's fit the concept and be cool!).

A survivability build up is probably more likely than the retributive damage mechanism. Either of them would probably do the job to rebalance the set (defensive BU by increasing survivability to that of other sets; retributive effect by providing additional offensive capabilities to offset the lower survivability), but the retributive damage would require new tech, which means a lot of programming, which is pretty unlikely unless the devs decide to use it in a number of other places (which, considering the desire behind such an effect, is pretty likely if they did it).

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Other than that, it's not THAT BAD of a set, really.

Like I said before, not matter how many times you say it, it's still a bad set. Even with the I13 changes that gave Energy Drain a heal (which, btw, the heal numbers were chosen to make it equivalent to Reconstruction with 4 targets in range while factoring in native mitigation), the set is still significantly sub par compared to similar sets with similar capabilities.

Just because someone can make a set work doesn't mean that a set is balanced. The fact that it takes more to make it work than is required for other sets just to get to the same level of performance is pretty much an indication of such.

As an addendum to my previous suggestion, Overload for Stalkers probably needs to be tweaked as well. The +hp is overkill which makes even less sense when you consider that the base value that is already larger than is necessary can, as an option, be enhanced. I would probably reduce the +hp for the Stalker variant of the power from 40% +hp to 20% +hp and give the power 15% +res(all) to make up for the lower hp increase (+hp and +res operate in virtually the same manner).

SS is "balanced" as a set around one major concept: there are crappy powers and there are stellar powers. Essentially, within the set, there are powers that are stupidly weak (Punch, Jab, Handclap) and powers that are stupidly strong (Rage, Footstomp, KO Blow). Assuming that you take all of the powers in the set and that you aren't using many powers from outside of the set, it's roughly balanced because you have to use the crappy powers while your overpowered powers are recharging. The problem with the set comes when you start bringing in powers that aren't within the set (like pool and ancillary powers), the entire "balance" of the set falls through because you can replace the crappy powers in the set with powers that aren't as crappy (and oftentimes simply "good") from other sources.

Honestly, when SS and/or EM get proliferated (it's a question of "whether" with SS and a question of "when" with EM) I expect them both to get some rather substantial reevaluation. With EM, I expect Whirling Hands to get some love to offset the fact that ST damage is less important than AoE damage and the set itself doesn't have particularly stellar utility (stuns are nice, but not when they're not particularly reliable) like DM. With SS, I expect a lot of changes: changes to dam/rech/end and/or animation time to powers to bring them more in line with the effectiveness of other attack powers, a severe reworking of Rage to bring it back in line (at the very least, a reduction/removal of the massive +tohit), and likely a reduction in effectiveness of Footstomp. Just as I doubt Stone Armor or Energy Aura will be proliferated to Scrappers without some changes, I doubt either of the power sets in question will be proliferated to anyone without tweaks to fix problems with the sets.

The Cottage Rule only applies to changing powers after they have hit live. It has nothing to do with changing a power before, which is where the difference between Dampening Field and Repulse occurred.

Actually, that last one isn't unique to you. I've gotten that one a couple times. Generally, they're when I'm posting suggestions or commentary on poorly designed or imbalanced sets that people don't want the devs touching.

I've gotten that a number of times, though, as far as I know, it's due to individuals with low rep weight giving you positive rep. It's impossible to leave neg rep without a message. So any message that doesn't have any message and provides no rep is simply a positive rep from an individual with little to no rep weight.

I routinely get neg rep'd for various things, though I'm always amused when I get neg rep'd for being helpful by contradicting bad advice. Luckily, it's almost always countered by people giving me positive rep for being helpful and/or entertaining. I've gotten numerous neg reps from rep farmers that I simply pissed off (generally by calling out their idiocy or demonstrating that their analysis or math is bad).

As has been said earlier, I'm one of the few people that actually believes in rep somewhat. Of course, I actually believe that players should earn their levels rather than simply farming or using exploits to jump past whatever levels. I place more value on the actual earning of rewards than the simple possession of them, so it fits the theme. Many people would rather simply have stuff than earn them, so it puts me at odds with them.