The Cutting Edge Gadgets Guide

The mines have the same potential damage radius as EMP. However, the mines will only detonate if one of the following conditions is met:

• An enemy comes within distance of the mine. This "auto-detonation" range is only a bit larger than Cryo-Field's damage radius.
• If a player uses Self-Destruct Signal
• 15 seconds pass

If you're dealing with a highly mobile boss or the tank moves the boss to another corner of the room, you're probably going to end up missing some mine casts.

Just remember that under Revamp rules, there is always a trade off if you want something buffed. An auto-detonation range buff would probably result in the mines doing less damage.

Thank you for the clarifications.

Thats for any change request for any powerset? I ask for Sorcery, which has had all its flavor taken out in this revamp, both DPS and Heal.

All abilities are balanced that way. If you buff one property you'll get a nerf to another. Range vs damage vs cc vs cooldown etc

As pointed out by Crimson Mayhem, all abilities were initially balanced against a broad set of "Revamp Guidelines" that included:

• Base Power Cost. More expensive abilities do more damage or have better shields as an example. Abilities were typically broken down into 100, 200, and 300 base power costs.
• Crowd Control. Abilities with good crowd control abilities do less damage.
• Cooldowns. Abilities with longer cooldowns do more damage than abilities with low cooldowns.
• Range. Melee abilities do more damage than ranged abilities.
• Power Interactions. Anything that uses a power interaction had its base damage number reduced a little bit.
• Perks. Any ability that has a side effect either has reduced effectiveness somewhere else or increased power costs.

There are more balancing guidelines, but that should give you some idea as to what the devs were going by.

The idea behind the Revamp is that all abilities should be viable and there should be a trade-off for using one power over another. There shouldn't be a single "best" power.

These balancing guidelines lead to some very interesting versions of Gadgets being tested. One version removed almost all Damage role crowd control effects in exchange for higher damage. That didn't work out too well. Sticky Bomb was all over the place during the Revamp testing period. Sticky Bomb went from using Dazed, to applying Burning, to using Burning as a high-cost power, and then eventually to using all of the power interactions as a medium cost power. Nevermind all of the damage and crowd control adjustments to Sticky Bomb. Paralyzing Dart was a cheap single-target ability for a while. Taser Pull was an AoE attack in June. EMP used certain power interactions to setup DoT damage.

Thats interesting for Gadgets. I understand the trade-off aspect.

But my main gripe revolves around Sorcery being fundamentally changed from what it was.

Its still a dot power but changed from having 5 dots to 3 dots.
Its still a hot power but changed from having 4 hots to 3 hots.
Its Red Soul and Golden Soul Aura fx is gone. Couldn't even get to just keep the visual animation without the pi interaction and heal crit buff.
It was always a great Boss fight killer, and exceptional in add-heavy areas for healing. Then half of its DPS offense got transferred to Fury during the AM era. And now post-Revamp, the half of its non-pet DPS offense got an additional projectile attack added to its arsenal, when there were already two.
Arbiter crit buffs are all gone, with just no reasoning in my opinion.

Going back even further in its history, its unique Vengeance Soul Aura mechanic got removed. The fun aspect of Transmute got destroyed because of the Transmute Clownbox combo, which only occurred cos Clownbox went from Gadgets to the Iconic Tree, iirc. We had a power that provided a jump cancel at no power cost changed.

Fire, Gadgets, Ice, Mental, Nature. They are all still Fiery, Gadgety, Icy, Mentally, Nature-like. Sorcery? Its got no more heart, no more soul.

You can see some of the thought processes here:
https://forums.daybreakgames.com/dcuo/index.php?threads/stats-revamp-sorcery.283268/

According to that logic, Sorcery's power interactions were simplified to help promote build variations.

Sorcery may suffer some from being one of the earliest revamped powers. Gadgets was included in the second revamp round too. Gadgets went through at least five "back to the drawing board" revisions before the final version was released in late June. The version of Gadgets that went Live did a better job of preserving the existing "flavor." Previous versions of Gadgets Revamp went off in some very weird directions at points. The first version of Gadgets Revamp was a dumpster fire.

The version of Gadgets that was released to Live could have used a couple more weeks of testing. There was almost no time to do comprehensive testing with it and compare it with other powersets. It was a major struggle tracking down all of the bugs of which there were a very large number.

which there still is lol. Whenever I get knocked out of still, emp stays on red till I get stealth again.

Not enough of the experienced Sorcery players went to bat for it during the entire Revamp period.

Gadgets would have been in a bad place if you or TheDark didn't get the work in. Thanks .

What bugs are there still for Gadgets?

Hi Pen, Crimson and everyone else
I've noticed something about, particularly MY cryo foam animation length. This dates back AM era, having used foam in the loadout and having ran content with other gadgets players, pug and leaguemates. I didn't really make a big deal out of it/I was just too lazy to record it and I keep forgetting it anyways, but now I had the time to record it.

To put some baseline numbers/factors. First and foremost it isn't a hardware issue, neither it is a lag/latency issue. Rocking an Nvidia 1070 and our connection is fiber. In-game setting, v-sync off.
The only difference I have with my leaguemate that I recorded with is, her toon is flight, our base mods are the same the only difference is I'm using tumbling master on my feet.
She wasn't clipping at all, I just told her to spam foam. So in the video you can see the difference of animation length, like a quarter of a second.

I wanna know what's causing this, if people are experiencing this too or am I the only one experiencing this.

I've seen this behavior with Cryo-Foam several times. I've never done any in-depth troubleshooting to figure out what is causing it though.

Sometimes you see other weird Gadgets VFX bugs. I remember seeing this one while using Vortex Cannon during Revamp Testing:


Gadgets has some other VFX bugs related to Distract.


On the subject of the guide, I've been spending my limited free time testing Water over the last few days. Water doesn't share any common power interactions with Gadgets. However, I have been testing shield mechanics to see if I can make sense of stacking mechanics.

I think that Sticky Bomb isn't working correctly. When I use it on 3 targets on one of the targets does 3k damage while the others does 1k damage.

"Sticky Bomb does not follow normal damage division rules. In group situations, Sticky Bomb does 100% damage to the primary target and all surrounding enemies divide a separate 100% damage pool. This makes it a good choice for dealing damage to priority targets in group situations. Sticky Bomb's unique splitting rules do not allow it to deal more damage than other abilities on three or more targets. They only lead to a different distribution of damage."

In your example, you'd expect to see:
Targeted Enemy: 2k damage
Nearby Target #1: 1k damage
Nearby Target #2: 1k damage

Rule of thumb: if you think an ability does something different from what you expect, check the ability description in the guide before reporting it as broken.

spord provided some details today in the Water testing thread about shield stacking works. It can be briefly summarized as follows:

• For each damage tick a player receives, only one shielding ability will be used to mitigate damage for that damage tick.
• Since only a single shield can be used for a damage tick, which one gets selected? The one that deals the least amount of damage to the player.

Let's say a NPC does a single 12000 damage attack to the player. The player has both Neural Neutralizer and Distract active and both offer maximum damage absorption. Which shield will the game use? Neural Neutralizer is the correct answer. Neural Neutralizer has a higher shield modifier and less damage will be dealt to the player as a result.

What are the implications for these rules?

• Activating several weak shields will not protect you against a powerful attack. Only a single shield can be used to mitigate a specific damage tick. You need to use a shield with a high shield modifier to mitigate large spike attacks. Be sure to block!
• Water has a group shielding ability called Tempest Guard that does not mitigate all incoming damage. Rather, the player will still receive a small percentage of damage from each attack. The side-effect of this is that a player cannot rely on Tempest Guard to secure cogs or rally teammates while under fire. If Tempest Guard is active, you need to use a shielding power of your own.

I don't know if it's only me but Supressor Turret nothing does on alerts. I've ran SJ/WC/UT with the Supressor Turret activated but nothing.

Hasn't that always been the case? Iirc, pre-revamp, certain shields seem to stack, and some don't. But for PvE now, there isn't really a need to stack shields.

In Pvp, its different. In a different pvp era, it might be beneficial to stack shields for a member which is being focused on and just need that little bit of time to mitigate the burst damage in for the Hots to come in, or the burst heal from the healer to come off cooldown, or his/her own soda off cooldown.

Other than that, general rule is rotate shields, and not stack them.

It was nice to get dev confirmation about the current mechanics for using multiple shielding powers in PvE. It answered a few lingering questions I had and confirmed some observations. When I do shield testing in the future, it'll be easier to spot bugs.

For advanced players, accurate knowledge of shielding mechanics is useful. When a person thinks about "shield stacking," they might assume multiple shields can be used to mitigate a single attack. Too bad it doesn't work that way. It would be nice if there was an in-game UI element for displaying shield strength for all active shields. I think the current mechanics behind shields are a bit too opaque.

Hello,

It's my first time posting on this gadget guide. I did, however, post on the one made by deadpool and shady in the early years. It's been a while since I've played and now I'm back on the forums. I have been mostly Pftt with some success. This would be my rotation:

• Implosion
• Thermite
• Sleep dart
• EMP all with the turret active.
• Distract would be my get out of trouble move

My 10s parses would be about 11k on the 3 sparring targets (198 CR and 170ish skill points)

Are these numbers about average? What powers are some of you running?

Kind Regards,
CQ

Im playing hybrid and parsing 14-16k averages on 3 and 9-11k averages on single with 201CR and 312SP. While raiding I will be around close second on third before first bosses. I usually break away after the first boss. Top Tier Averages seem to be around 15-16K for 3 targets from what I have seen but those load outs will net about 6-8k on single target. I've tried a PftT load out as a hybrid spec with precision base mods and was averaging 12-13K with:

• Field
• Thermite
• Implosion
• Foam
• EMP
• Asphyxiation

I think with higher might and straight might build this would compete or do a little better than my hybrid build for AoE. I still prefer to go hybrid because it's way more power efficient, and my parses are way 1-3K higher in raids with a troll because I'm alway receiving the precision buff from the troll power dump. End of raids I am always the second lowest power in. I'll be glad to share my play style via private message if you're interested in hybrid.