Blood Red Arachnid

That's what new guys are for. I haven't been tainted by institutional dogma yet, so my out of the box ideas can flow freely while completely unaware that a dev just pulled into my driveway with a shotgun.

I had another "solution" to this problem. Just make purple inspirations weaker. I didn't suggest this for fear of CoX flash mobs, and that weakening purple inspirations wouldn't resolve any sort of problem.

So I figure, I can either pack a med or large purple and greatly reduce the damage I'll get, or I can pack a med or large orange and reduce the incoming damage by less.

I do enjoy a little friendly competition now and then, but I am always hesitant to enter into the PVP areas of any CoX zone. I find that most MMO's have themselves a set of rare, expensive, elite items that completely dominate others and are a necessity in any PVP context. CoX isn't as extreme in this manner, but regardless talk about expensive PVP set bonuses and FotM AT arguments let fly in my rather casual gaming.

So my question is this: How much dedication do PVPers put toward making their toons kill other toons? Is any well-built PVE toon able to fend off or occasionally win against someone in zone, or do PVPers spend billions on purple sets and PVP IO's to make it so they are unstoppable by anything but someone of equal dedication?

Also, when I walk into one of these zones, am I going to be ritualistically stalked and murdered by every/the only PVPer in that zone?

I'm sort of new here, so sorry if this is an issue that is taboo or there's some formal response somewhere that I haven't found.


Something I've noticed is how disproportionately powerful purple inspirations are to orange. Defense soft caps at 45 (unless I misunderstand), which is easily achieved by 4 small purples, 2 medium purples, or 1 large and 1 small purple. Resistance has no soft cap, and the hard cap requires anywhere from 3 large oranges and a med, to 4 large oranges and a small.

Looking over defender primaries and troller/mm secondaries, I see a reoccurring trend that it is easier to boost defense than it is to boost resistances:

*Cold domination: Boosts all positional defenses and smashing, lethal, energy, and N.E., mostly boosts cold resistance, then fire resistance, and some energy/toxic resistance
*Dark Miasma: Boosts all defenses, gives resistance to energy, N.E., and psionics
*Empahty: Boosts all defenses, no resists. Only fortitude does this, though
*Force Field: Boosts positional defenses and gives delivery defenses to seemingly all but psionic and toxic, only gives resistances to toxic
*Kinetics: Boosts smashing and energy defense
*Pain Domination: Boosts all resistance
*Poison: Boosts toxic resistance and some cold
*Radiation Emission: Boosts neither
*Sonic: Boosts all resistances but psionic
*Storm summoning: Boosts all defenses, boosts fire, cold, and energy resistance
*Thermal Radiation: Boosts all resistance other than psionic and toxic
*Traps: Boosts all defenses
*Trick Arrow: Boosts neither

Now, I know that the defensive powers that scrapprs/tankers/stalkers/brutes get focus more on resistance than defense, but when combined with the easy access to things like the leadership pool, combat jumping, stealth, weave, and VEATs on both sides, defense dominates over resistance as the primary source for personal damage mitigation, and even mezz mitigation. The only advantage that resist boosting sets get is that, since defense is so easy to boost, you can have boosted resistances alongside of soft-capped defenses to aid in protection.


With all of that, I say that the resistance inspirations need a boost. Currently they provided 10%, 15%, and 20% resistance to everything but special damage. I would suggest nearly doubling those boosts to 15%, 25%, and 35% respectively. While 4 small purples can soft-cap defenses from nothing and remove 95% of incoming damage, 5 small oranges can cap resists from nothing on everything but Tankers and Kheldians and remove 75% of incoming damage.

I am not aware of any unbalancing this will cause. My only concern is that PVP fights will be too long; all AT's could cap their resists with just a large orange, making fights sometimes take twice as long as they would normally. If this is a problem, then orange inspirations can have a reduced effect in PVP zones and the arena.

In conclusion, I apologize again if this is taboo somehow.

There are certain instances where you will need a good mix or specific ATs. I mostly encounter this whenever I'm running a +4 Task Force or Strike Force, which about as high as difficulty can get. I first saw this when, on a +4 ITF, whenever my Sonic Defender was d/ced due to chronic assertion failure, my entire team would die within a minute. Secret to our success in the end was me being able to stay in the game long enough to kill the archvillain.

With the large amount of powerful AoE, cone, and PBAoE attacks in this game, most groups can be flattened in seconds. Though my experience is support powers are overall more powerful than raw damage, especially since buffs become more useful the more you have.

So, ideally, a good group would consist of the following:
4 support ATs
1 heavily defensive character
3 damage dealers

But not too strict, since the roles can overlap and aren't too well defined (14 ATs will do that to you). You can run with nearly any group until you get into the +3 or higher difficulty.


The two TFs and SFs you'll want specific AT's for all the time are the Lady Gray Task Force and the Barracuda Strike force. The Lady gray just needs a good mix of holds, ranged damage, and melee damage. The barracuda needs either plenty of support ATs, or just one Defender/Mastermind to de-intangible the final boss.

My first encounter in with this myth came from my LGTF from HELL run (a +4 PUG run) when several of my team members insisted that we keep up exactly 4 pylons. I had no idea why, but I just rolled with it anyway.

Next LGTF I had, several of my team members asked me about the myth, and no one knew what was going on. Only that they saw someone get kicked from the team for it. Third run, wasn't even mentioned by my team members, and we just killed the pylons. I never noticed any difference.


This reminds me a bit of where a lot of superstitions come from, particularly regarding medicine. Since cause and effect have a close temporal relationship to each other, we assume that events that occur closely chronologically have a relationship. This is a flaw in reasoning known as the ad hoc ergo propter hoc, roughly translates to "before the fact, therefore causes the fact". Back when we were exploring the universe by licking toads and placing magnets on our bodies, we would associate two unrelated things together because they happened closely in time. One fine example is that, to cure a cough, you should place a beetle on the sick person's neck.

We in modern day... are not beyond this problem. I caught one of my coworkers reading a book detailing crystal therapy: a guide to healing oneself with diamonds and other assorted gems. Worst part was I think he may have believed some of it at the time. I remember telling him about the above, and gave the counter-example of how it is I cured the last flu I got: by doing precisely squat. No meds, no change in diet, nothing.


However I digress. There is nothing that is incomprehensible, out of our control, or preventing us from objectively testing the myth. Therefore, this issue is scientific, and wanton speculation shouldn't suffice. Here are a few criteria that someone should test to bust this myth:

*Power Analyzer / Bane Spider Surveillance on Nuclues, Antibody, Mender, and Electrolyte with and without pylons. Check for any differences.
Nucleus and antibody damage with and without pylons.
Nucleus range with and without the pylons.

That should cover most things that would need to be checked. It is doubtful I will be able to pull this off myself, since now I only play at night and can rarely ever find a team, let alone anyone willing to let me power analyze then record all the stats of Hamidon.