I am still of the opinion that the empathy set is bad for the game.
The Good
I was on a good team last night on my Ill/Emp lowbie. It was a good team in that it actually managed to go through most of the Julius arc without massive casualties. All the time though, I felt that Empathy is a pretty screwed up set.
Yes, Fort is good, AB is good. But the set is distinctively built in a wacky way with three heals and a rez set as the first four powers. You spent your early levels just healing and healing people. This is, of course, the norm for most MMOs, but CoX should do better.
We had a fire tank who wanted to tank, amazingly enough, so he did the jump into mobs thing while the rad, two empaths, and kinetics helped him stay upright and the blasters killed things. It was a very (MMO cliche) textbook of doing things, and it worked. Then his girlfriend came home and he left.
The next thing you know, the kinetics defender decided he was going to tank, told us to heal him, and went off charging into mobs firing off irradiate. Despite what people exaggerate on the boards, a fire tank is much sturdier than a squishy. There is some difference between having a load of hitpoints and innate resists, and having low hitpoints and no resists. You can't heal someone who dies while absorb pain is getting there... i.e. in the .2s human reaction + .5s network + .x animation time ~ 1sec.
After a few goes of that the rest of the team took matters in own hands and did the simultaneous debuff/rain powers/zerg (after a bit of deceive) business before the nutty kin defender could suicide in. When the aggro is spread amongst everyone, it's easier to keep people alive.
The Bad
It's amazing how empathy can just prop up bad players.
Earth/TA... the fun thing was, I discovered I can ignite oil slick with volcanic gasses! I ran around Eden burning down packs of green minions, but the xp was honestly not great. It was fun though, to see Devouring earth go up in flames. (Burn the salad down! Burn!)
Then I got recruited to a respec team. Warning bells went off when one of my teammates went "do we have enough healers?". The tank went "only one", and that guy decided to log onto their earth/emp.
Somehow, I ended up at the lowest on the team, and I told the team leader I could not control +5s. The earth/emp, who was +1 to me, thought everything was dandy though. There was a "pure empath" defender (level 50 who exempted), so I thought: well, at least we have tons of healing, which tends to make up for bad play.
Phew, turned out that the mobs were just +3. Through the next few missions, the earth/emp started gloating and boasting that she could hold level 38s all day...
While constantly spamming immobs on top of earthquake and oil slick -- even her own earthquake. I didn't know immobing mobs on top of quicksand constituted of "holding". Thank goodness the (invul) tank was actually seriously about tanking and spammed taunt.
Finally in the reactor, when she boasted yet again about her control powers, I made a snarky reply about being so great at holding mobs that she immobed on top of earthquake. To which she insisted that she had earthquake slotted with SOs for acc debuff.
That is like saying smoke in Fire Control will suddenly debuff mobs into kittens if you slot it with SOs! The set is "Earth Control", not "Dark Miasma" or "Radiation Emission", yah? I told her that a percentage of a minute number is still a minute number, but she insisted it worked fine for her and continued spamming immobs in an almost vindictive fashion.
Every time she immobed, I noticed one (or two) of the scrappers would take a HUGE hit in their hitpoints. But that was ok, the "pure empath" or the earth/emp would just spam some heals and heal them up. No wonder it worked fine for her!
Empathy, enabler of awful playstyle and ignorance. Though you have to admit, part of the fault lies in Cryptic's refusal to release numbers. I used wonder if I should slot debuffs into earthquake (or smoke, smoke grenade, flash arrow) too. Bah, by the time you factor in level-scaling the debuff would be non-existent against +3s.
Then the waves come. I don't know why I can debuff and control a group while the spines scrapper AoEs them to death, while mobs beat up the another scrapper and earth controller (with the supposedly superior team secondary of empathy) near the reactor. Surrrre it works fine. It works better if you negate your own earthquake.
What can I say, having the "pure empath" sure was useful at any rate. Although he had this weird habit of floating right next to the tanker when the tanker was pulling, which resulted in tons of freak grenades being dumped on his head as well. But hey, huge heals, auto-aura, not problemo.
The Ugly
Back to the Ill/Emp. Does the presence of an empath makes people decide to take leave of their senses, doing crazy suicidal things because the empath will just heal it up? A scrapper (ex-blaster) in my virtue SG seems to think an SR scrapper on DOs = an ice tank on SOs. He keeps jumping into full team spawns of CoT (with death mages, spectral lords, gag -- those things hurt) to spine burst. The subsequent fallout basically has me spamming absorb pain on him through sonics shields provided by a defender. If you're taking so much damage a few seconds after AP and HO raise you back to full, you go back to the low red (through shields and base SR defenses), you are definitely taking too much damage.
There's a limited recharge on my heals and I certainly wasn't going to AP myself to death, so people just end up dying.
Absorb Pain -- the power pisses me off. I should never have taken it. I was spending my time on the CoT mission with my hp plummeting at every spawn (and hoping nothing hits me because I can't heal myself) trying to keep someone else alive.
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