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Originally Posted by Fulmens

My wife and I built a midlevel arc (Big Ideas, by @Amazing Amazon, if you care) to try and do something about the "No #$%ing content V-side!" problem. Unfortunately, the AE is clogged to the point that people don't even look there.

Originally Posted by DrMike2000

Don't you find that each alt you make is a challenge in their own right for unlocking powers as you go along?

You get your first 50, and can then play a Kheldian, but there's still a lot of untapped power content in the game.

You want Fulcrum Shift? Go play a Kinetics Defender for 32 levels, or a Controller for 38.

Want to know hat its like to pilot a Tanker once they've got all their defences together? Go play one for the next 100+ hours then. Want to go and own all those Malta and Carnies who gave you Blaster so much trouble? Keep playing that Dark Armour Tank into the 40s!

And so on. Most powersets have some pretty good stuff in the higher tiers. Some even combine in interesting ways. I've played Storm Summoning, but never on a Controller with a mass immobilise with -KB, which makes Tornado into quite a different power.

That's what kept me playing, even if there wasn't an explicit unlockable at the end each time. 3 1/2 years later I'm still not done.

If the developers do introduce new powersets, I'd rather they leave it to us the players to decide when to try them out than force us to play through something else first.


Account wide badges for getting to 50 on certain archetypes could be interesting though. eg "Seasoned Tank" for 1 level 50 tanker, "Master Tank" for 5 level 50 tanks. Could even have these unlock a few cosmetic options, like costume parts perhaps.

Originally Posted by MutantX_7

What are you trying to buy? I'm seriously wondering what went months without selling.

Originally Posted by brophog02

Blasters get their resistance/defense attributes from any combination of Tough/Weave/Epics/IOs.

The secret to getting ANY Energy Blaster to work with its secondary is to move and think freely between melee and ranged. The sets don't work against each other, they work against the thinking that once you go into melee you must stay in melee. A lot of people cannot think in any terms but melee characters and ranged characters.

Some decide to make Energy Blasters totally ranged so they don't have to worry about how to use their secondary, and in the process they tend to not take most of their secondary.

Even Energy/Energy, the most popular Energy Blaster choice by far, has several great reasons to enter melee. The biggest difference between the two in that regard is /Energy is doing it mostly for single target and /Fire is doing it mostly for AOE potential. Both sets, to get their full potential, have to be able to move and think between various ranges.

What order you enter melee is going to depend on situation. The nice thing about Energy/ with /Fire is that it provides you the option of mitigation that really matches well with the DOT of /Fire.

To be honest, I have a 50 Energy/Elec and a 50 Energy/Fire. I like the Energy/Elec a lot more than Energy/Fire, but that's because I don't particularly like /Fire. I don't dislike it on Energy any more than any other primary, I just don't particularly care for the secondary whereas I really like /Elec as a secondary.

Originally Posted by Tonality

I'm assuming SC = Shield Charge.

Shield Charge and Lightning Rod summon pseudopets. The target of the power is you as it brings you to the target and then spawns the attack. As far as I know, those procs will never proc on an enemy, but actually, will proc on you, meaning you could actually die from those two powers. I guess it is possible that the slotting also affects the spawned attack of the pseudopet, but as far as I know, this is not the case.

I haven't seen any AT match the AoE potential of an Elec/SD/Blaze scrapper yet, although typically that AoE potential is wasted as you aren't always hitting the target cap for your mini-nukes, making something like Fire/SD/Blaze a good option because it offers both AoE and ST dmg.

Originally Posted by Organica

BTW didn't mean to ignore you, I'm mostly marketing with my Justice toon at the moment. I've been working on a scrapper on Freedom, splitting time between that and my Midlevel Crisis toons and occasionally playing my level 50s on Virtue. ^_^

You know, the usual altitis.

Originally Posted by Dunkelzahn_NA

My point was more that dark armor offers a bag of tricks like no other set and each trick is in itself balanced. Giving it an end recovery power would mean you could use all the tricks all the time which I think is overpowered and my guess is that the devs at least initially had the same thought.

Originally Posted by Sharker_Quint

well, if you don't want to re-roll to take DM for dark consumption you could always re-roll to take elec melee/da. or da/elec melee. depending whether you want a scrapper or tank...

Originally Posted by Dunkelzahn_NA

I apologize for not reading all the posts here but from the ones I did read I thought this might be a different way to look at things. Let's look at all the powers in DA:

1. Dark Embrace (Toggle) - Similar in effect to other resistance toggles (i.e. Charged Armor) at similar cost
2. Death Shroud (Toggle) - Similar in effect to other damage auras (i.e. Lightning Field) at similar cost
3. Murky Cloud (Toggle) - Similar in effect to other resistance toggles (i.e. Conductive Shield) at similar cost
4. Obsidian Shield (Toggle) - Similar in effect to other status protection toggles (i.e. Static Shield) at similar cost
5. Dark Regeneration (Click) - Very unique power at healing 30% per target hit at 33 endurance. I would compare it to Siphon Life which is heals 10% at a cost of 10 endurance but has a way higher damage component. Triple the heal for triple the cost plust the AoE component which can significantly multiply the heal and the damage seems OK to me. Because of its uniqueness balancing this power is probably mostly a matter of personal opinion but I wouldn't say it is off.
6. Cloak of Darkness (Toggle) - Similar in effect to other stealth/defense toggles (i.e. Energy Cloak) at similar cost
7. Cloak of Fear (Toggle) - Another unique power. Looking again at Dark Melee it is kind of an AoE-Toggle version of Touch of Fear. Spammin Touch of Fear unslotted should cost about 1 eps (if my math is right) so I think 0.52 eps for an AoE toggle version is pretty cheap.
8. Oppressive Gloom (Toggle) - And another unique. I would call it an AoE-Toggle version of Stun (Energy Melee). Spamming Stun I believe results in about 0.5 eps. Again 0.08 eps plus the minor health damage seem dirt cheap in comparison.
9. Soul Transfer (Click) - Similar in effect to other Self-Rez powers (i.e. Resurgence) at similar cost (none ).

So, if all individual powers are reasonable endurance wise why is the set viewed as too expensive? I think it all comes down to playsytle. People were complaining that Regen has to many clicks which can get you killed if your not on the ball constantly and which also causes constant redraw. They are complaing that Auto Powers are generally to weak to spend a power on. People complain that you have to take every single power in SR to get a solid build and they complain that Dark has too many toggles so they run out of endurance when they keep them on all the time. Dark Armor will offer a unique play experience and is actually really powerful when played well even without IOs. The set also can benefit a lot from IOs and actually accepts quite a range of different sets.

And for the record I am frequently frustrated with my DA brute but when I get in the groove I think the set is just awesome. (The brute is 34 right now and I just yesterday managed to get my theft of essence proc which so far hasn't really changed my play experience.)