BellaStrega

My issue with the boss changes was that the majority of builds that could handle bosses before could still handle them, and the builds that already had trouble with bosses just had a lot more trouble. It didn't really accomplish what the devs intended, except perhaps for sets like super reflexes - which suffers for not being able to floor boss accuracy and not having a way to reduce damage that actually connects.

I don't think the new bosses really added reasonable challenge to the game, except for a narrow band of builds that could feel the changes without being murdered constantly.

McBoo, I remember someone like that, but I can't remember names.

DarkTyger, I think we all have our moments on usenet. I don't hang out there now, but I did post intermittently in alt.games.diablo and fairly regularly in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg

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*Hides* Yeah. CoHDrayvis. Actually, think it was just "Drayvis" at first, changed to CoHDrayvis when the forum bug ate the first one, then changed for global chat to DarkTyger.

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Yeah, I remember seeing you post as DarkTyger on Usenet, and then seeing your name here change (but keeping the same avatar).

Taser, I totally forgot you used to be AutoRPD. I mean, I remember you were around, I just forgot you had a different name.

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Bah, bad choice of words on my part. Sub in "post to" instead of "been to" and that's what I meant. I've seen all sorts of hellhole boards. Would I make a peep there? Not in your life. These boards get very unpleasant at times and IMO it is not a good learning experience if this is the best internet interaction you've seen.

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I hear this said a lot...about every forum I've been on.

It's even true about some of them.

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Been around here for ages, though. Take a little over a month off my registration date, my original post ID got eaten by a forum bug shortly after launch.

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Is that what happened to the CoH_Drayvis ID? (or was it CoHDrayvis? I forget)

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This is probably one of the cleanest, gosh-durn nicest forums I've ever come across.


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That just seems kinda sad to me. These are by far the rudest, most flame-filled boards I've been to.

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Don't get out much, do you?

It wasn't on the forum - and in fact, I never came near the forums here prior to purchasing City of Heroes. It was two or three years ago, I posted that there were three upcoming MMORPGs that could make me break my self-imposed, "never play an MMORPG" rule - City of Heroes, World of Warcraft, and The Matrix Online.

One person posted a comment to the effect of, "City of Heroes is gone to the Americans. They won't have capes, and they're instituting a class system. I think it killed my puppy."

Okay, maybe I exaggerate. But, wow, before beta even, and the game was a failure for lack of capes and freeform character creation.

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I guarantee any villain group in I5 will have numerous foes with -Resistance and/or -Regeneration attacks. I'd put money on it. There's already signs of it in I3/I4, with the sonic-using council mobs; only the somewhat limited (arena-focused) scope of I4 kept there from being further changes, IMHO.

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Also, some of us are pushing for exactly this and a reduction to the overall presence of mezzing in the mid- to late-game.

And anyone who says that defenders are only wanted on teams for status protection for squishies needs to tell me why my DDD is needed.

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3) Status effects, as they are now, are horribly broken***The intent of the toggle-dropping is obvious, it's the dev's way to try and get through defensive powersets...

[/ QUOTE ] I think that's quite literally backwards. The intent of the status effects is not to get through the defensive AT's. Why would they have status protection if it was? The point of Status effects is to force Controllers and Blasters do take defenders and tankers and scrappers on their team. The status effects are specifically put there to affect the squishies. Their very existence also supports the defender employement. The only reason I have Inertial Density is because someone can status a blaster or controller. I don't have it for the scrapper.

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It also provides smashing resistance and knockback protection, so it's definitely useful to just about any scrapper or tanker without capped smashing resists, and to dark armor scrappers and fiery aura tankers for the knockback protection. Not quite so black and white as one might think...

I know I've missed chunks of this thread - what's the scalable build up idea?

Well, I can tell you from experience that herding blue clocks past a certain point is almost suicidal, or at least extremely dangerous. The DE are difficult to round up for the same reason - I've been tanking an 8-person DE spawn when a second arrives, everything drops emanators, and we're dishing out all the damage in the world and barely holding even until we can get them off the emanators - and even then, it's tricky.

I feel that adding buffs and debuffs would make more challenging fights, make defenses and status protection less of a trump card. Naturally, status effects should remain so that protection against them is worthwhile, but there really shouldn't be as many as there are now.

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I hope you at least checked the "read receipt" for Statesman, he takes alot of PMs, but he rarely responds, he does at least read them though.

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I forgot to that time, but...every time I have requested a read receipt, it's been read. I can only trust this one was as well.

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Sorry, I may have been a little over-enthusiastic last night, it's just that I was furious that a Scrapper was making me literally worthless in my team. Whenever I tried to attack something, it was dead before my attack hit it.

Except for Nightstar, who just one-shotted me :P

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I know your pain, although for me, it was as a scrapper, the blasters would get the kills, and I'd spend endurance on corpses.

I guess to whom it happens depends primarily on level - I got it a lot up to 30, not so much afterward.

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3) Status effects, as they are now, are horribly broken. Almost every status effect in the game is a binary proposition; either nothing happens, or you're unable to act and have your toggles dropped. The intent of the toggle-dropping is obvious, it's the dev's way to try and get through defensive powersets... but, and this is the big but... all the defensive sets are immune to status effects. This means that they hurt the 'squishy' ATs far more than they hurt hard-target ATs; every time they try to increase the number of status effects, blasters and defenders die en masse, and yet for some reason they seem utterly baffled as to why this happens. The only thing that can be done here is reducing the prevalence of the high-end status effects across the board, and adding lesser debuffs that circumvent status protection while not completely crippling those sets in the process. -Resistance debuffs are an obvious one, and there's already a fair amount of -Defense debuffs. How about -damage, though? Or more examples of slow that don't come with the caltrop ping damage? Maybe more examples of Immobilize, since at least you can use inspirations and attack while stuck? Regardless, something needs to be done; status effects are just salt on squishy wounds, instead of the defense-equalizers they're obviously intended to be.

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I've PM'd Statesman and CuppaJo about this specific issue, and presented the case to CuppaJo in a bit more depth - she said it made sense and she'd pass my elaboration along to the devs.

No response from Statesman, though.

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Obviously, the simple solution is to give blasters a 500% damage cap.

Do you want a solution, or do you want to complain about how unfair it is that scrappers killed your puppy with laser beam eyes?

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Duskking can't just give us the 500% damage cap himself, he's stating his argument, don't belittle him for not being able to do more then complain.

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Well, it's not so much the complaint (which is valid), but that it was everywhere last night.

Yes, blasters, could use some mechanical benefits to support them as ranged damage dealers - the higher cap, for instance, and perhaps a boost in overall damage (scales up in level, but I wouldn't expect it to be large). I still think putting blaster hate generation lower than it is now (say, attacks generate 75% of the aggro they do now) might be helpful, or giving blasters a kind of "anti-taunt" power.

Just some general ideas - I don't really have any new ones, though. It just seems to me (still) that blasters don't have the right tools to do what they're intended to do in all of the situations they're expected to do it in. They can do it, and they can solo - they're not gimped, at least. It is clear that quite a few players are frustrated with them, though.

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There's also the frustrating effect of getting them to a sliver and missing with the final followup... That's mainly bad luck, though.

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Accuracy has not been nerfed! ... It's just been coded by Murphy.

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I believe you're right.

It seems to me, often, that if my characters are going to miss, that miss is most likely to happen when exactly one more attack will finish the villain...and then it'll be a miss streak. Or...every attack but one would finish the villain, they all miss, and the one that wouldn't defeat him anyway, takes him to a smaller sliver.

It's bad enough for my scrapper, and she can take ~6 times the damage a blaster could.

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Actually, once you reach the 40's, they do even less than that. A Blaster is arguably less effective against even-con enemies at 50 than they are at 30, since mob HPs and resistances scale up faster than player damage does; a 'two hit kill' becomes 'two hits and a sliver of HP' left. This is true for every AT, but they have control or defense to fall back onto. And it's doubly painful for single-target-focused sets like Energy and Elec, since having to take an extra attack to defeat a foe means that's another second or two they and their friends are shooting you.

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There's also the frustrating effect of getting them to a sliver and missing with the final followup... That's mainly bad luck, though.

Each of the three scrapper EPPs has two ranged attacks...one could argue that Dark Mastery has three, but two of them have control aspects (immobilize, knockback) as opposed to damage - so Dark Blast is the only power in that set that presents any damage comparable to a first or second tier blaster attack. Body Mastery has two good ranged attacks with Laser Beam Eyes (single-target) and Energy Torrent (cone, knockdown). These are not an attack cycle - a scrapper with ranged attacks still needs to get into melee range to deal a lot of damage. If my scrapper sat at range and only alternated LBE + Energy Torrent, she'd never approach blaster damage. Even if I six-slotted both of them. I'd have to get up close and use Smite, Shadow Maul, and Midnight Grasp.

I don't have direct experience with the Weapon Mastery EPP (although I will test it out soon). It has two ranged attacks - Shuriken and Exploding Shuriken. I would guess that these are comparable to ET and LBE.

So I think that's why scrappers get the full 500% cap and the critical chances with the EPP ranged attacks - it doesn't make a huge difference in the long run.

Getting upset about scrappers having that cap and those criticals on the ranged attacks strikes me as a red herring. If scrappers somehow had access to entire blast sets and the ability to slot them out, that'd be something to worry about.

There's plenty of other very good reasons to be unhappy or angry that blasters don't have a 500% damage cap along with or instead of scrappers, though. Like, the whole risk vs. reward argument does not play out just as people have described. Blasters are at greater risk than scrappers because the game environment simply does not favor blaster advantages and exploits blaster weaknesses, and because the blaster primary/secondary design does not necessary synergize well to facilitate range as a viable defense.

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If the Scrapper cap is higher than the Blaster's cap because they have to be in melee to use their powers, how come Blaster's melee powers still have the same 400% cap?

Also, if this is true for Blasters, I assume that the same is true for Scrappers. With APP's, Scrappers can use ranged attacks that do the same damage as Blaster's ranged attacks, but do more damage since they have a 500% cap.

That.

Is.

Stupid.

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Obviously, the simple solution is to give blasters a 500% damage cap.

Do you want a solution, or do you want to complain about how unfair it is that scrappers killed your puppy with laser beam eyes?

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The fact is I've studied the damage outputs on my teams for the last few weeks. I'm HIGHLY disappointed by what I see.

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This is largely perception, I think. I've felt on teams with blasters that my scrapper's damage output is moderate in comparison to their extreme (especially when they're using nova/inferno/etc every second or third fight).

As for your first shot with build up and all those enrages, which attack was it? I mean, it could just as easily be Power Bolt (BI = 11.1112 at the cap) vs. Katana's Golden Dragonfly (with five damage enhancements, BI = 16.846578). While your anecdote would be literally true, it would be misleading as you're comparing a tier 1 attack to a tier 9 attack.

On the other hand, if you used Power Blast, you'd be dealing a BI of 18.2224, which is clearly superior to Golden Dragonfly's damage. That's energy blast's tier 2 power. Now, if the Golden Dragonfly is buffed further, or crits, it'll still outdamage your tier 2 attack, but...your example doesn't have enough information to really judge whether it's meaningful.

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Don't forget....they get critical hits on their ranged attacks too. Cuz they're at risk.

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No, scrappers get critical hits on all of their attacks because that's a scrapper perk.

It seems clear to me that blasters could use some perks as well - and that was the thrust of a few of my suggestions in earlier threads. Blasters already have a few (75% endurance costs on everything, for example), but it's not really enough.

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Woot, woot.

Don't forget that it's a knock-DOWN, too, not a knock-back-and-scatter-to-the-four-winds.

Yeah, would someone care to explain to me why it's ok for Scrappers to get better ranged AoE's than me? Especially when it's an AoE from my primary that they're getting through an APP.

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Sure, but first...why is blaster TI through an EPP better than scrapper TI through a secondary?

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Actually, the reason people arn't in arms over my first comment in the thread is because they realized I wasn't making fun of Europeans. What I *was* making fun of were the people who, back when the 5th Column was changed into the Council, constantly blamed the Europeans for the change and Cryptic for pandering to the Europeans.

This is also why I never used any kind of hate word in my post (LIke the N word), and used three things that had nothing to do with Europeans.

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Your post was funny because it was absolutely true.

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A hero is a hero, is a hero. Korean, English, Mutant, American or Kheldian. All heroes would do well to remember that, not just in times of need.

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BUT all of the billboards say "Earth is for Humans!"

If they're refering to ritki, then it goes more than double for kheldians...

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But Kheldians aren't aliens. They're human-alien symbiotic pairings. Willing pairings. Why is that double?