BurningChick

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  1. BurningChick

    Caltrops?

    Forgot to add -- for me, I love the combination of procs and traps because I end up getting a lot of damage out of otherwise low damage powers I'd be using anyways.
  2. BurningChick

    Caltrops?

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by El_Spark View Post
    Totally. Also, Ragnarok proc + Positron Nrg proc = enemies flopping up and down and a damage counter that reads "-2 -2 -2 -173 -2," etc.

    Presto. Explosive Caltrops.
    My traps defender can easily stack three patches.

    You know the escapees in BAF? Their particular behaviour involves standing around for a few seconds before taking off -- that's usually enough time for one round of ProcTrops to go off. Further, oppressive gloom tends to mez the minions, making them ripe for more procs. Gas Trap? That one's also procced up -- and even lieuts sometimes have to stop for a quick puke. Acid Mortar (at least 2 out at all times)has a purple damage proc. And a -resistance proc. If any lieuts get away from my trapper, a stiff breeze will drop them.

    High hilarity!

    The other use for Caltrops?

    Ambushes
  3. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
    Its been a long time since someone has explicitly asked me to help them commit suicide by stupid. I almost miss it sometimes.
    So ...

    You don't spend much time PuGging on Freedom?

    I've seen some whoppers over the years, like people throwing wobblies over a TA not healing them, a scrapper shrieking at my bubbler (post-i7, with Maneuvers) for being useless 'cause I didn't take my rez (while bubbled, he was dropping like trousers on prom night).

    Ahhhh, good times.

    Edit: I actually look forward to the idjits with their OMG awful builds and helpful tips. Every once in a while, I even find people who threaten to petition me
  4. Airhammer,



    I've done things like that, also. I think it's relatively common among defenders with a certain sense of humour.
  5. I got a theory.

    People like heals because they're visible -- you take damage, your green bar shrinks; you get healed, it grows. Further, there's more feedback with the green numbers popping up. And those green numbers? Unless something's changed recently (haven't been playing much), they still show perfectly healthy people getting healed phantom damage.

    There's minimal equivalent feedback with (de)buffs. And with all the effects firing that you get in larger teams, it's even hard to tell which mobs are mezzed.

    Heals are obvious. Other buffs and debuffs? Not so much.

    Further ... some leaders set up the situation so that it's the responsibility of the healer(s) to keep the team upright, absolving themselves from taking responsibility for bad play and build choices.
  6. Yeah, I know you said you're thinking of rolling a Traps corruptor ...

    But I'll throw out that my Traps / Dark can zzzzzz her way through AVs, ambush farms, pylons, etc..

    Just to throw something out ... if you're willing to proc-out Traps, you can milk a HUGE pile of damage from the traps themselves.
  7. D'oh!

    I was just about to start a "11.6 is causing my 5850 to go kersplat especially when alt-tabbing out of the game" thread ... and then I saw this.
  8. BurningChick

    Traps Time Bomb

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by DarkOasis View Post
    I'm pretty sure this has been brought up but I'm too lazy to troll all the posts to see if it has.

    My concern is with the basically worthless power Time Bomb. A tier 9 power in the traps set that I don't see anyone taking. I wish I knew how many trappers don't take this power? Why not replace it with Gun Drone or Cloaking Device? Or maybe an AOE immobilize like Web Envelope?
    There are LOTS of "situational" or "worthless" powers in the game ... but the devs tend to only do anything with them in cases where they exist in underperforming sets.

    And, even then, it's extremely rare for the devs to outright replace the power.

    FWIW, I don't think Traps is particularly weak. And it has 6 or 7 gotta' have powers (for me, at any rate); having a couple clunkers frees up some space for more blasts.
  9. Hmmmm ...

    Does anyone have solid evidence of FF defenders underperforming?

    Or is this a case where people would like to see underused powers changed to be useful?

    IME, those are two different cases.

    If the former, we could expect to see buffs.

    If the latter, it'd be reasonable to expect, if the devs did anything at all, to swap crap for crap ... which seems like a waste of time.

    Granted, I no longer have any kind of feel for what is or is not balanced with the game (seriously, the devs went live with a power that turned Caltrops into a nuke) so you never know.
  10. BurningChick

    Defenders Damage

    I haven't been subbed for a while, but I took my Traps / Dark out yesterday.

    I was able to drop 2 Pylons with the Lore pets out; on my way to the third, they despawned. And then I dropped a third Pylon for good measure.

    That is, IME, a solid amount of damage with or without Lore pets.
  11. What's funny is that no one answered, "We just use LFG."
  12. Trying to crash Freem with an influx of players actually sounds kinda' fun.

    Tying a badge to an event that lasts only a few hours on one server seems oddly tone deaf.

    Log in, get a handful of free server transfers? That'd probably get a few people interested.
  13. I, personally, find it odd that 45% def is twice as effective as 40%. I find it even weirder that 45% def means that a mob will hit only 5% of the time.

    Also ... the defence caps for the individual ATs are so high as to be completely meaningless. With I7, the devs should've taken a page from resistance and instituted meaningful def caps along the lines of: 50% tankers / 50% brutes; 42.5% scrappers / stalkers; 37.5% everyone else.
  14. My Traps / Dark defender is, hands down, my favourite (de)buffer. Mez protection; def; -damage; -ToHit; -Resistance; a couple powers that (currently) beat the snot of Reactive.

    I've taken kin, FF, Dark Miasma and Traps to 50, and Traps hits my sweet spot.

    I like Dark Blast since it has some decent utility (AoE immob, great for making mobs stand in place while Caltrops kills them, sometimes useful stun, self heal), and has -ToHit which complements Traps +def nicely. The two main AoEs, which can be an attack chain with a decent +recharge build, are, however cones -- something not everyone's taste.
  15. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Mr_Grumpums View Post
    Okay, you just sold me. I'll get Reactive for my DM/Nin Stalker.
    What sets Caltrops apart, IME, is that you can have 2 or 3 out all the time so you can, at least theoretically, get 20+ mobs lit on fire.

    The hillarity increases if I can keep 2 Acid Mortars out (they're destructible) since they fire an AoE that can also set off Reactive (in addition to debuffing resistance).

    So ... not sure how long it's going to last. Caveat emptor with Reactive and your stalker because, IME, it's the tiniest bit insane right now.

    Edit: oh my god, I'm my own worst proof reader.
  16. On a traps / dark defender, 0 / 8 AE ambush mish with bosses:

    619 tickets / minute
    189,000 damage of which 120,000 was reactive

    Gotta love those stacked Caltrops patches
  17. My daughter just finished reading the series (I'll be forever grateful to Ms Rowling for turning her into a bookworm). I asked what her favourite part of The Deathly Hallows is -- without hesitation she said, "Mrs. Weasley kicking butt."

    Or maybe it was the naughty word

    Edit: fortunately she goes to an urban public school, so she most likely knew that it was used appropriately.
  18. Hi folks,

    The Repeat Offenders just ran a full BAF, 24 people, with ~ 22 (de)buffers (VEATs, MMs, defenders, trollers, corruptors).

    First thing, nasty server lag.

    Second thing, the timers, including the duration timer and the timer for dropping the two AVs, are real time, NOT server time.

    Powers that should activate in ~ 2 seconds were taking ~ 4 or 5 seconds, effectively cutting in half the amount of time we had to perform timed actions.

    I've seen situations where powers recharge longer than expected ... but activiations taking twice as long? That's some serious mojo.

    Just to put things in perspective, when we tried to blow up the AVs together, my netgraph, while green, was showing 10,000+ incoming data.

    Things were much improved when we separated the AVs.

    Just throwing something out there: if ya'll are going for even more epic encounters for future trials, consider 1.) cutting down on the amount of incoming data and 2.) work towards getting server time and real time to be in sync when large numbers of players are in close quarters.
  19. Quote:
    Originally Posted by EvilGeko View Post
    I just want to note that the EvilGeko was right about Interface being by far the most powerful of the new slots.
    And I've been telling people for years that Caltrops + damage procs is a nasty, nasty thing to do to mobs -- my thugs / traps still has 4 damage procs in 'trops from when you could slot targetted AoE, slow, and PBAoE sets in it.

    But, OMG, my traps / dark can ticket cap in 6 or 7 minutes.
  20. I'm probably adding additional to the servers by doing this, but I can only reliably access the site by going here: http://cohdigest.appspot.com/ and repeatedly clicking a link until I get a "good" connection (it's easy to see -- the site will come up fast).

    Once I'm into the forums, rinse and repeat. Makes posting a bit of a bear, mind you.
  21. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Beltzhak View Post
    Are you saying that you can stack more reactive DoT's from 2+ caltrops patches?
    More like you can tag a holy sweet jebus number of mobs from the patches.

    The proc also works in Acid Mortar, another stackable pet (although it's destructible). Traps made out like a bandit with this patch.
  22. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Flux_Vector View Post
    Double-edit: Let the players police themselves for leechers.
    I think that we the players can police the leeches ... but only if we form up teams on our own. If we use LFG, the situation changes since the league leader is, AFAIK, randomly chosen and may be either tolerant of leeches or be a leech himself. Further, you have no way of knowing who will be in your league ahead of time.

    If LFG were the primary way for the players to engage in the trials, I'd say that some form of participation code is absolutely required. If the players are in a situation where they can't police themselves, it /has/ to be the server punishing the jerks.

    I think we can see a couple things at play.

    First, the devs thought we'd be using LFG, en masse, to form up for the trials. It certainly is more convenient than spending 5 or 10 minutes in Pocket D or RWZ shooting out tells and broadcasts. But LFG is, at best, a problematic tool and, at worst, manages to both suck and blow.

    Second, our first taste of the participation code comes from the zone events in Praetoria, an open world event where it is entirely conceivable that 1 team will do the heavy lifting and 20 people will go AFK for 10 minutes and come back to a new shiney.

    And the devs anticipated the same sort of dynamic with the trials. With the players lining up primarilly through LFG, the devs most likely thought they'd be doing the players a favour by rewarding active behaviour.

    Only ... the metrics for rewarding active behaviour are problematic, and the players, by and large, dislike LFG in large part because it gives them too little control over their gaming experience.
  23. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Snow Globe View Post
    Every time I take the time to talk or lead seriously, I drop to a common from uncommon. Sorry, proof enough for me.
    I get no correlation, but I tend to bark out commands during down time (pulling, waiting for prisoners to escape, forming up in PD).

    Quote:
    The master runs I've been on drop me down to common or uncommon, without fail. Sorry, proof enough for me.
    Not much correlation on my fire dom, solid correlation on my disadvantaged trapper -- I've had 2 VR drops on BAF, ever, and both related to MO runs.

    Quote:
    When several people DC and I all of a sudden get a V. Rare table, or my team clears phase 2 of Lambda faster than the other and I get a V. Rare table makes it appear to be a zero-sum.
    Or ... having fewer people around gave you more opportunity to participate. What we don't really know is how the distribution of drops happens within leagues -- we generally only know what a handful of people get. And, IME, the self-reporting we do get tends to be clumped around the high and low rewards.

    What I will say is this: my fire dom gets consistently better rewards than my trapper. My trapper's best rewards come on BAF runs with "high success rates" (lots of badge-worthy events).

    Maybe ... the system has some interesting quirks -- the system disproportionately rewards face-punchy ATs for punching mobs in the face, and rewards (de)buffy toons for overall success.
  24. Quote:
    Originally Posted by McNum View Post
    The Personal Accomplishments is a lot more difficult to do. Easy part is hitting things and doing damage. The mobs need to fall and it's certainly worth it help to do that, so "doing damage" is a good baseline to compare to here. Buffs and debuffs are more tricky as they aren't equal. I'd probably add a point value to each so they'd match up with doing damage for increasing accomplishments. You know, make powers weighted. Some buffs and debuffs are very potent, but are short lived, others last a long time. Ideally, the points would be gained for keeping the buffs and debuffs active, not from the casting itself. A balancing nightmare, but a fair nightmare, at least. I'd likely add a honey trap for being on follow, not moving and/or only using a power set to auto. That should tank your Personal Accomplishment.
    Hmmm ...

    The problem as I see it is that, if a kin caps a fire blaster's damage, the fire blaster's primary contribution, damage, just got doubled (or more). If my trapper has 3 Acid Mortars out, she will have, almost, doubled everyone's damage output against an AV. Using a pet that fires every five seconds (in my case, with a purple damage proc). Everyone's damage gets "buffed" with Acid Mortar, not just those within range of FS.

    How do you track whether it's better to (de)buff ... or to benefit from the (de)buffs?

    Is it a net benefit to toss Bonfire into the middle of a spawn and fug up everyone else's AoEs? Or are some powers classed as being negative ... unless the engine can figure out if that Bonfire just saved the team from wiping?

    The best system, IME, simply tracks the success of the trial as a whole, assigns a value to the level of success, and then gives everyone on the trial a roll based on that value. All objectives met in under 15 minutes? 5 stars! 10% chance at a VR, 55% rare, 35% uncommon.

    Or something like that, anyway.

    Let the players themselves deal with leechers.

    The only complicating factor, IME, is if the whole system is geared towards using LFG to assemble teams, and the randomly chosen leader happens to be the leech.

    Edit: it occurs to me that the original participation metric was developed for an open mission where anyone can join on the fly. In this case, having a system that weeds out leeches is essential otherwise you could, conceivably, end up with 1 team doing the heavy lifting and 15 people AFK. It might be that the devs were anticipating LFG to be used to set up the trials, more or less exclusively, in which case punishing leeches server-side is damn near essential since there's always the chance that a leech will be the leader. And you have no way of knowing who's going to be in your league.

    So, I guess, aside from the new performance metric, the devs should implement a VASTLY improved LFG tool (lots of info for this already kicking around).