ClawsandEffect

But Ball Lightning + Electrifying Fences deals more than Fireball alone, and lets you slot a set of Posi's Blast for more recovery, accuracy, and recharge.

Don't know if that's worth it to you, but I'd rather take 2 powers I will actually use than take a throwaway power to get ONE power I will use.

None of my current scrappers are going to go villain for Patron Pools, but if I roll another one I may go that route.

True.

But, if not using Parry/DA means you die more often, it makes more sense to use it and let your DPS suffer.

My BS/DA has enough DPS with a 2 Parry attack chain to solo an AV, and I haven't noticed any major decline in my normal mob killing speed by using it. Also, my build doesn't have much recharge, so if I tried to use just Hack, Disembowel, and Head Splitter in a single target chain, I would have huge gaps in my chain, which will hurt my DPS even more than putting Parry in there.

If your build lacks recharge to the point that you're waiting 2 seconds after your third attack to fire a 4th one, Parry will actually HELP your DPS. 90 damage from a power is better than 0 damage in a gap that the power would fill nicely.

That's only a bad thing if DPS is the only thing you care about.

Also....dead characters do 0 DPS. If I'm alive and dealing damage, my DPS is better than if I were faceplanted.

Hurl and Hurl Boulder.

You won't run into it that often, but if you fight any Warwolves it's gonna suck, because they REALLY like to throw rocks at your head.

Also, Gravity Control powers are flagged Smashing, and some of them have no positional flag at all. Lift is an example of one. (Levitate from Mind Control is the same way I believe)

Fortunately, you don't run into too many NPCs that pack those powers. Only Family Consiglieres and Kadabra Kill have Gravity that I know of, and I can't think of any NPC with Mind powers who get Levitate.

Warwolves and their rocks are much more common though. There are a couple missions that have nothing BUT warwolves in them, and they pop up very frequently when running Council and 5th Column missions above level 25 or so.

If future content is not more difficult than what we have now, what is the POINT of gaining Incarnate abilities?

We have the first two pieces of the Alpha slot now, that's it. Are you really suggesting that we should get even MORE power than that without a difficulty increase to go along with it?

I'm speaking of content that requires Incarnate abilities, I will never say that they should go back and make normal level 50 arcs more difficult because some people are making a mockery of them with Incarnate abilities.

I suspect that future Incarnate content will contain at least a TF, and probably at least a few story arcs that will require whatever the latest Incarnate slot to be released is. It just makes sense, you have to unlock the Alpha slot to run Apex and Tin Mage, and you have to have it slotted to avoid being debuffed in them. I don't see future Incarnate TFs being much different.

All I'm really saying is: If Incarnate content is not inherently more difficult than normal content, it makes gaining the power of an Incarnate completely pointless.

I'm already anticipating, in the future, 10 minute STFs being run by full Incarnates. They aren't going to go back and make current content harder just for Incarnates, because that wouldn't be fair to the level 46 that joins an STF to gain a level or two. So, the current "difficult" content will end up being pathetically easy for fully slotted Incarnate characters.

Yes, there should be soloable content, I never said there shouldn't be. But Task Forces tend to be where the bulk of the earth shaking storylines are found. All of the TFs in the game, with the possible exception of Katie Hannon and Moonfire, revolve around a major event occurring that you have to avert.

Eiko_chan, you made mention, I believe, that it gets blase when the Avengers or JLA band together to fight a global threat every week. True, but what you're failing to address there is the fact that, as far as the game is concerned, every time you run a TF it's the first time that event has ever happened. When you talk to Synapse, he tells you about the Clockwork acting up, he doesn't say "Oh, hey, the Clockwork King is at it again, get a team to stop him for the 12th time this week." The game has to treat each TF like the first time it's ever happened because it would not be at all fair if only one team ever got to run any given TF because the event already happened.

Incarnate content will continue getting more difficult, because you are gaining more power. You said that the JLA fighting a big bad every week gets boring after a while. Well, Superman spending all his time beating up muggers gets boring too. More power = more ability to take on bigger threats. Bigger threats = more difficult.

The game is not about what Eiko_chan wants it to be.

It's not about what Grouchybeast, Golden Girl, Arcanaville, Bill Z Bubba, Werner, or ClawsandEffect want it to be either.

It is about appealing to the largest amount of people possible. There are things that will thrill some players that others will despise. There are things that will increase difficulty, just as there are things that will decrease it (if getting Stamina at level 2 isn't a difficulty decrease, I don't know what is).

You do not have sole possession of the game, and neither does anyone else. If you don't like part of the game, you have the option of ignoring it and doing the stuff you do like.

They will continue to release soloable content, because the devs are well aware that there is a significant number of players who enjoy soloing. In fact, I will be very surprised if there isn't some kind of normal mission content taking place in Praetoria for Primal Earth characters to do, probably in the 30-40 and 40-50 range. Releasing it with i20 would make sense. They very seldom release details about new mission arcs months in advance, so it doesn't surprise me that we haven't heard anything about any yet.

Saying that the game should remain casual, and not cater to people who want a challenge AT ALL is just plain ridiculous. There have been 18 issues of "casual", and now there is content that is more challenging, and is also completely optional.

Since I started playing this game over 5 years ago, I have NEVER seen anything in it that was absolutely required in order to advance. Everything in the game, from badges and task forces to IOs, PvP, and marketeering is optional.

Name ONE thing that you absolutely MUST do to advance in the game, that you absolutely can't do by yourself. I can't think of anything at all that fits that criteria, can you?

You're outraged that they are changing YOUR game into something you don't like. Since when are we playing City of Eiko_chan? Yeah, I just looked at the header at the top of my forums, it still says "City of Heroes". It's not YOUR game, it is the game of anyone who chooses to play it, and you do NOT get to dictate that "this is a casual game, go take you challenge seeking and play something else"

So, the solution is to react with outrage to something that hasn't even happened yet?

Makes perfect sense. It really hasn't gone to the point of "You MUST do this content within these rigid guidelines in order to progress!" at all. Nor do I see it going that way.

I've been solo the last several play sessions and I almost have enough for my uncommon Alpha enhancement on one character, and have the common slotted on 2 more. That is playing solo, no more than 2 hours at a stretch. I don't have much time to play these days, and I don't feel at all like I'm being forced to grind to get the shinies. I'm being rewarded for simply playing my level 50 characters, which I would be doing anyway.

As far as "End game content" goes, this is about as casual as they could possibly make it while still differentiating it from the same old stuff we've been doing for 6 years.

Unless you think we should be able to simply click a button to get 100% of the Incarnate stuff without doing anything at all, and then go grind out the same content we've had for a while now. That would be extremely casual, but it would also get the reaction of "THIS is what they've been hyping for the past year and a half? It's exactly the same as everything else!!"

Your definition of "casual player" seems to match up pretty well with my definition of "players who want everything handed to them". Or at least with "Players who think socializing in a video game is something to be avoided"

Also, just about every new addition to the game to be released recently has had a Task Force associated with it. ITF, Kahn/Barracuda, and going farther back, Moonfire was a new TF, STF and LRSF were new at one point. LGTF was new.

Your stance seems to be that they should add a bunch of solo content and screw the people that want something for a team to do. There IS new solo content being released on a regular basis for the game, it would be perfect for you if that's ALL they released, but surprisingly, there are players in the game who LIKE to socialize, it's kind of one of the main draws to an MMO for a lot of people.

Well spoken.

I hate to agree with Golden Girl, but she is right in this case.

You don't need to have a 10 billion Influence build and be purpled out the wazoo to play Incarnate content, it really IS as simple as she laid it out here.

Unless you routinely hang out with people who will kick you for not having any set bonuses, you can run everything Incarnate related on SOs alone.

It just happens that the characters people tend to do the content with first are their main/favorite characters, who have generally had more time and money invested in them than various alts do. I have 6 level 50 characters, 5 of which have been heavily IOed. 3 of them are my favorite characters to play by far, so it's not surprising that I started Incarnate stuff with them first. I'd imagine that most people in the game play anything new with their favorite character first, then the others later.

Personally, I'm trying to decide which of my 3 favorites I am going to take all the way through the Incarnate stuff. I only have time to do it with one of them, so it's a tough call.

What level is it?

On SOs, DA scrappers tend to be on the squishy side before you get Oppressive Gloom and Cloak of Fear available. The set is somewhat balanced around running one or both of them to mitigate melee attacks from minions. If you have no IO sets, and aren't running either of those toggles (I like Oppressive Gloom better, it's useful from the second you get it, while Cloak of Fear requires significant slotting to be effective)

Your primary has a bit to do with it as well. Werner and myself (and many others) like the sword sets paired with DA because Parry/Divine Avalanche is huge for your survivability in lower levels. Dark Melee has to-hit debuffs and a small self heal that is part of your attack chain. Sets like Fire and Dual Blades don't have much in the way of active mitigation (FIre has none at all), so they tend to be squishier until you start investing in IOs.

Also, your timing may be off on hitting Dark Regeneration. It has a longish animation for a self heal. Many times I have gone to hit DR while low on health and took enough damage to kill me before it finished animating.

If you put only one IO on your character, make it the Theft of Essence: Chance for +End in Dark Regeneration. If you slot that and hit enough targets with it, you will sometimes GAIN endurance from it.

Without knowing how you character is built and how you play it, there's not much more advice I can give. Some more specifics would let me pinpoint what your problem is, and if I can't figure it out, I'm sure someone else here can.

Eh, if the set didn't have anything else to fall back on, I'd be inclined to agree.

But, it has solid resists, a monster heal, and status effect/debuff toggle auras.

If it were given defense debuff resistance I would say that would probably make it overpowered.

Softcapped character with ~30-50% resistance (including a butt ton of Psi resistance), the best self heal in the game, and the ability to completely neuter any and all minions? If you take away the ability to strip away that defense, that character would be nearly god mode. I'm okay with the lack of DDR simply because of everything else the set offers.

Not exactly.

Defeat a mob and it will drop something of the same level the mob is if possible. Common IO recipes only exist at levels that are multiples of 5 (10, 15, 20, etc.), so that might be why you have the misconception that they can drop up to +3. Level 27s will drop a level 30 Common IO, but they will drop a level 27 set IO. This is also why level 47s will drop purples, because they are flagged to drop from anything that could drop a level 50 common IO.

If you random roll, the recipe will be at your level if it's available there, or the highest level it exists at.

If you purchase it directly (using merits to buy the exact recipe you want), you can choose the level of the recipe.

It is more than likely a patch.

It downloads a small amount of information, and then verifies all of it to mke sure everything is playing nice together. It tends to happen every couple weeks when they need to fix something or turn on/off game events.

In this case, it may be the patch to turn the Winter Event off, but I'm not certain.

If this is your first MMO, you may not realize it, but things are constantly changing. It's not like a console game where what you buy at the store is the entire game and that's what you get. In MMOs you pay your subscription fee and you get access to a game that keeps getting bigger as you play.

As a side effect, you will occasionally have to download a patch so everyone is playing the same version of the game. You can't play version 19.23472393 while everyone else is playing version 19.23472394, because the servers won't recognize the version you are trying to run.

Yes, we want to keep the devs from taking too close of a look at what some people are doing with Dark Armor, especially now that we have the Alpha slot taking care of the last of the endurance issues. My BS/DA scrapper runs 10 toggles and I can attack nonstop for quite a while with no noticeable drain.

Dark Armor is one of the better sets in the entire game, I'd rather it not get nerfed. Though I think it's unlikely, because it doesn't get that great until you add lots of IOs to it.

Fire can be decent too with a LOT of recharge to get that heal coming back faster. Don't bother with Blazing Aura if you want to PvP, nothing is likely to stay in melee with you long enough to really get any mileage out of it.

Regen IS better, but you can make Fire work.

There are some, you won't see them very often though.

Notable exceptions would be Midnight Grasp and Siphon Life, so whatever you do, don't try to solo Nosferatu

And on the rare occasion you run across a melee attack that has no S/L component....you're a frigging Regen!!! Heal it back!

Used to be I would agree with this, nowadays I'm leaning more toward S/L defense.

Good reason for it: Machine guns.

Machine guns are the single most common defense debuff in the game. They are flagged Ranged/Lethal, so you could have 1,000% melee defense and it won't stop that gun from hitting you.

2-3 guys with machine guns hit you and all that melee defense goes away in a hurry with nothing you can do about it, because /Regen doesn't have any defense debuff resistance at all.

With S/L defense, at least you can make it more difficult for those machine gunners to take away all that defense you built up with IOs. It will still happen, just not as fast.

I switched my Claws/Regen from Melee to S/L and am noticing a world of difference when fighting Council, Malta, Crey, and any of the other enemy groups that have a lot of machine gun users.

Damage auras are buffed by Fury. Scrappers get critical hits which pull them ahead with normal attacks. But damage auras do not crit, except for Quills, which I presume is because it is in a primary.

We have no way of knowing this one way or the other, because Spines brutes do not exist.

Also, read what I said about Quills. Unlike any other damage aura available to a scrapper, Quills will indeed land critical hits. By that logic, it seems reasonable to assume that it would generate Fury as well.

I think the way it works for scrappers and stalkers is: Any damaging power that is in a primary or power pool has a chance to crit. If brutes work similarly, it would be: Any damaging power in a primary or power pool will build Fury.

It would make sense with damage auras benefiting from Fury, but not building it, because they are in brute secondaries.

I think if it were a straight port, Quills would not only benefit from Fury, but it would probably build it as well, because Quills is an odd power all around. I can see how that would be just a little overpowered. Quills dealing upwards of 60 damage per hit? Yeah, that would be a little sick.

Right, blame the devs for everything.

When a player ventures into a PvP zone equipped with just SOs and gets annihilated by players with oodles of set bonuses from purples and PvP IOs, it is somehow either that player's fault or the devs?

They can't even hold their own because other players decided to load their character with IOs, but those players can't be held accountable for their choice to do that. Right.

The point of the PvP changes in the first place was to even the field between the IOed characters and the non-IOed characters, so you wouldn't feel like you needed to spend a bunch of money on your character to do well. But currently, building a PvP character is more expensive than it has ever been, because you have to invest a lot of time and money into that character in order to be at all competitive.

I'm sorry, but you can't tell me that 2 players of equal skill will be completely even when one is IOed out the wazoo and the other is running SOs. It just doesn't happen, given comparable skill levels the IOed character is going to win every time.

The players took the changes and completely upended them, making the performance gap between IOed and non-IOed even wider than it was before the changes.

I really don't see how the disparity between a 12 billion inf build and an SO build isn't the fault of the players themselves.

Those IOs aren't necessary because the game makes them necessary.

They are necessary because everyone else has them. The players chose to spend billions on their characters, forcing other players to spend billions on theirs to keep up.

If no one used IOs in PvP, it would be just as balanced as when everyone is. Since everyone IS using IOs in PvP, the fact that you have to spend billions on IOs to even hope to hold your own is the fault of the other players that are using them, not an inherent flaw in the game.

Don't get me wrong, the devs are responsible for a lot of the problems with PvP. But the fact that you have to spend 10 billion on a build to be competitive is not one of the problems they are responsible for.

I KNEW someone would come in and say that players using IOs in PvP is the devs fault. Because it is so much easier to blame them than to take any responsibility for it.

The players chose to use them, therefore, if the use of them is a problem, the people that chose to use them are the cause.

But that is not griefing to the only people who can do anything about it: the GMs.

If the person doing the attacking was working on badges, like, oh, the Fusion Generator badge for his SG, he would lose nothing for repeatedly attacking the same person. For that badge, it only matters that you get kills in PvP, the circumstances don't really matter.

If he and the OP were the only people in the zone, he didn't have too much choice about who he attacks.

Unless you think that the non-PvPers badges are more important than the PvPers badges, which just isn't true. Both parties are equally entitled to have an opportunity to earn those badges, one person not wanting to fight in no way invalidates the other's right to pursue their badge.

If you want the badges in those zones that are obtainable without engaging in PvP, you can come back later when there is no one around, and it has zero effect on your ability to get them. If someone wants the badges obtainable ONLY through PvP, they don't have that option, PvP defeat badges cannot be earned when there is no one to defeat. Saying that someone else shouldn't be allowed to get their badge because it is inconvenient for you is just selfish.

Only if he told someone else what he figured out before he left. If he didn't, it falls to someone else to figure out the same thing, or another workable idea.