Aett_Thorn

Also, while Mid's says that CE and EA have ToHit checks, it actually affects very little. Their main effects (-DMG and Slow, and the Endurance/Defense thing, respectively) are auto-hit in PvE and PvP. What is not Autohit are the Taunt effects. Basically, every time the powers hit an enemy, they apply a Taunt effect on the enemy. Against most enemies, this Taunt effect is autohit as well, but against the tougher enemies you'll fight (things like Arch villains and Giant Monsters), you will need to make a ToHit check for the Taunt effect to land.

Set Bonuses will help these, but on an Ice Tanker, I'd say they're very unnecessary to aim for, especially since you've got Taunt in your power list, which IS autohit against those enemies.

It's something like a 10% chance to fire off a 5% heal on you. Basically, if you managed to hit 10 enemies each time you fired it off, you'd (on average) heal 5% of your HP each time it went off.

However, in my experience with it, it's just not worth the slot. Unless you really have no other place to put a slot, I'd say skip it.

There was a time when it first came out when it was bugged (might have still been in the I9 Beta) where it would fire off on every mob, meaning that if you had 10 enemies around you, you were healing 50% of your health every 8-10 seconds. I could stand in the middle of a freakshow pile with nothing but Wet Ice on, and live, firing off just Frozen Aura with the heal proc in it. While fun, it was definitely broken, and it's much less worth it now.

Nemesis troops are actually a little bit resistant to Taunt, but a Tanker's aggro on them usually is so long that it doesn't matter. Remember the Threat formula in this game:

Threat = Damage * DebuffMod * RangeMod * AI Mod * AT Mod * (1,000 * TauntDurationRemaining)


Now, if you take a TauntDurationRemaining value of 45 seconds, that's 45,000 Threat by itself. Cutting that down 50% or so, to 22 seconds, still means a Threat of 22,000. That's going to be tough to overcome if you don't have a Taunt-like effect (and yes, I've seen the reports in this thread of Controllers and Defenders who can steal aggro with their debuffs, but I'm willing to bet all of the money in my pocket that those enemies that turn and fire at them haven't been affected by the 10-target capped aggro auras or the 5-target capped Taunt.


But what can we do to this formula to create "smarter" enemies without trivializing Tankers? Well, we could modify the AI Mod, for certain. We've been told by Castle before that while there could be AI mods that tell the enemy to go after Healers first, there's no enemy in the game that has that kind of code. But it could be done. Still, if you do that to too many enemies, as has been mentioned, you can make Tankers very redundant. Still, with some clever scripting, I'm sure that you could make some enemies go after the squishies.

The DebuffMod is probably not going to be changed. Most debuffs have a value of 2 (now, I'm not sure if that is 2 per debuff, or just a total of 2, meaning that something like Darkest Night and Siphon Power would have the same value, or Darkest Night would have twice the DebuffMod), and changing that seems unlikely. And the recent change to Tanker's inherent, Bruising, has basically given them all the ability to double their Threat rating, since the tier 1 powers all do a debuff now.

Damage, AT Mods, and RangeMods are all unlikely to change, for what I'd say are fairly obvious reasons.


So, that brings us back to TauntDurationRemaining. What could be done on some enemies is something akin to the Purple Triangles of Doom. However, instead of creating Mez Protection, it removes the TauntDurationRemaining part of the Threat formula for a few seconds. Allowing them to take shots at other players, unless the Tanker is also doing some damage or something else to keep the enemies' attention.

However, this would be somewhat problematic, because it would severely hinder some Tanks (like a WP/EM Tanker) while doing very little to others (say, a Fire/Fire Tanker). So this wouldn't be a perfect solution, but it could make some encounters a little trickier. It still does nothing to the enemy to make them target team buffers, but it could make things a little chaotic.

I also set the chest slider down to minimum, or slightly higher, on all my female characters, and I'm a male. I don't like my females looking like they'd topple over every time they took a step. However, I do agree that the inspiration from this game is the comics, where it seems like almost every female has 38 DD breasts or bigger, despite their size -14 waist. Unlike the poster above, I'd say that the most common superpower among women in comics would have to be searing, crippling back pain.

There are a number of options I would like to see, for sure. On most of my male characters, I'd actually like to have smaller chest icons. Some of them just look really stupid being that big. Maybe a chest icon slider would be a better idea than just the two options, because some of them look better at a medium size, I'm sure.

I'm just going to warn you, there are a LOT of changes that I think need to be made to your build, and I'm not even a blaster expert. I would be prepared to make a lot of changes.

Edit - as for endurance, you're most likely just seeing some perception bias, where you don't remember it running out as fast as it does, but it really did. AS for helping with that, make sure to slot each attack with at least one EndRed. Attacks by far are the largest user of endurance in the game.

I respec'd with an incarnate slotted and tore a hole in the universe. True story.

Also note, she doesn't have to have malware on her computer for the account info to be hacked. If somebody gets a hold of what her account name is, they might be able to guess a password if it's not that hard. Or, if somebody had cracked the NCSoft computers, they could have gotten the info there.

Not saying that is what happened, just saying that her computer might be perfectly fine, and somebody could still have hacked the account.

First off, the boards can't help you out too much with this, as it is an NCSoft issue. However, we can direct you to contact on of the community reps (I forget who it is now, though), who should be able to elevate this kind of issue, and can give you some help. Give me a minute or two, and I'll get you the correct person.

Edit -> Send a PM to Avatea. They should be able to help you out. I hope that you can get it resolved.


Edit2-> By the way, it seems as if, from the data you've given us, that you wife's account was hacked at some point. Either from a weak password, or a true hacker, or even if you ever gave any account information to a Real Money Transfer (RMT: those guys advertising to sell you influence for real money), although I doubt that is the case. If this happened, you are going to have to jump through some hoops to get the account unlocked, as there was probably some malicious activity that occurred on that account, and they might be hesitant to unlock it.

I agree that Hoarfrost would be better served with 5 Doctored Wounds pieces than the Numina/Harmonized combo. The extra recharge will help.

Frozen Touch, as great as it is as a hold, should be slotted as an attack. Slotting it as a hold does it an injustice, and is also not helping your single-target damage any. FT is one of your biggest hitters, and just so happens to also be a good hold.

I'm a firm believe in slotting Energy Absorption with a combo of Def and EndMod sets, even if you're already at the softcap. Frankenslotting it can get you to the ED caps for EndMod, Recharge, and DefBuff, and you don't lose too much in terms of set bonuses by doing that.


If you slot Hoarfrost with Doctored Wounds, then you can take some of those slots out of Combat Jumping that you've got going for the recharge bonus, and use them in other places where they could be of more use, such as Frozen Touch, some EndRed in Frozen Aura, and maybe putting a damage proc in Chilling Embrace.

Heck, even my Ice/ tank gets Mezzed by Carnies on big teams on occasion. It's not just inherent to Elec Tanks. Being in a big group of high-level enemies with a lot of Mezzes being thrown around can be trouble for any Tanker.

The Devs, as far as I know, believe that Mid's is fine enough as it is, and don't want to 'compete' with a player-made application.

For a long time, the Devs (cough...Jack...cough) didn't want us to know what the numbers for specific powers were at all. As such, making a program like Mid's would have gone against that goal. They thought that such knowledge would lead to powergaming, because that was obviously not in the game even without the actual numbers. /sarcasm

More recently, we've seen the Devs as willing to give us the real numbers behind the powers. However, Mid's was in existence by then, and doing quite well. I think that the Devs are fine with letting us have our own little player-made program without them spending development time in creating one of their own, which would be very similar. It would basically create more work for them for a similar product to one that takes them very little work (just a few conversations here and there with the Mids guys, I'd imagine).

If Mids were to ever just stop being updated, then maybe the Devs will create one, but I doubt the players will ever let that happen.

To add to what Eldorado said, if they are applying a patch, that'll usually go out on Tuesdays, usually during the same time period.

Seriously Devs?! You give us a third build, but it starts out completely empty in terms of enhancements? Why couldn't we just get a copy of Build one, which we could then respec out certain powers and such? I don't want to have to take the time to IO out a completely new build just for this, especially across 100+ Level 50 alts. That's just ridiculous!

Why couldn't the Devs have made it easier on us, and just given us a complete build so that way we wouldn't need to spend billions making it full and playable again?!



Oh, and yes, this is a joke.

The Devs, when they first gave us the ability to respec (which wasn't until a couple of issues in), didn't want us to be able to take any enhancements away from it at all. But since you could go into a respec with a tray full of enhancements on top of what was slotted already, they didn't want you to have to sell those at the same time. There were also technical issues with getting it to work right without you being able to take those 10 away, so they left it in.

This isn't to say that they were arbitrary with letting you swap out all of your powers and slots, but not your enhancements, it's that at the time, they couldn't get the system to work right without letting you keep the 10, even though they didn't want you to be able to take any away.

Enhancements are meant to be mostly permanent on your character. The ability to take 10 away when you do a respec is the Devs being nice, because they didn't want you to take ANY away.

When the Devs make changes to sets (and even in some issues when they don't), they give you a free respec to make those changes, and take out any enhancements that you might have had in those powers. Now, if you haven't respec'd a character in a while, and a lot of changes have gone on in that timeframe, then it's going to take you more than one respec to get those enhancements out. But if you had done it over time, and used the freespecs as they had been given to you, it would have been simpler for you to do. Not doing that isn't the devs fault. They gave you the tools to make the changes over time. Not using those, then complaining that the system is a bad one doesn't make you right.