ClawsandEffect

Ideally, you want 3. The problem is, 1 will protect you from most of the KB in the game, but the things that will beat mag 4 protection will not be stopped by mag 8 either. Things like Nemesis Staffs are mag 10 KB, so you can see the problem, it's more than mag 8 will stop, and most other KB doesn't go over mag 3 or so.

Mag 12 will stop anything you are likely to ever encounter in PvE. In PvP it's a whole different ballgame, but I don't recommend DM/DA for PvP (not sure if you were interested n it or not, just throwing it out there)

Also, Cloak of Fear will accept the Siphon Insight set, which will give you the same defense bonus as Kinetic Combat, but MUCH cheaper.

No, neither one is a poor man's anything.

It's more like comparing a Ferrari to a Pro Street drag car. Yes, both of them are fast cars, but the drag car is more raw power, where the Ferrari is more finesse. And neither one of them is cheap.

Shouldn't be hard to figure out which set is the drag car and which is the Ferrari.

Me? I like neck snapping acceleration and 10 second 1/4 miles, so I like the drag car

This.

Parry makes it pretty easy to softcap to melee attacks, leaving you free to pursue some Ranged/AoE defense. You probably won't be able to softcap like Dark Armor can, due to a lack of a native defense power, but if you can get Ranged/AoE up to about 30% you should find a significant increase in survivability.

No worries, that's kind of what I figured might have happened, but I was disputing it on the chance that you could have been seriously suggesting positional defense on a WP character.

It's a viable option for sure, but I still think you'll get more mileage out of Mu Mastery as an Electric Melee, especially if you take Mu Lightning to supplement your ST damage, it has a pretty fast animation and it's pure energy damage. And it doesn't have the one problem I have with Gloom: Gloom being DoT means I frequently waste half or more of the damage because I queue the next attack before the damage is done being dealt.

This one is the players' fault, not the devs. The stated intent was to close the gap between highly IOed characters and non-IOed characters. The players took that and turned it on it's head by putting so many IOs in their builds that it actually widened the gap instead of closing it.

For all the vaunted skill there is in CoH PvP, most PvPers I've run across would prefer to stuff their character full of IOs to the point an SOed character stands literally no chance against them. When you can kill an opposing player in 10-15 seconds and they are essentially helpless to stop you, it removes a lot of the skill involved.

Instead of the intended result of closing a gap, the players decided that it would be better to widen the gap themselves and then blame the devs for it. You are NEVER going to see a PvPer admit that, but it's true.

Yeah, the devs MADE you slot all those IOs into your character, you didn't have anything to do with the decision making process, it's all their fault. You just logged in one day and found all those IOs sitting there that weren't there before.

The players chose to load their characters down with every IO under the sun, at least put the blame for that one where it belongs.

Evidence that the people saying Ramiel's arc is too hard are.....well.......being a little unreasonable.

If this player comes back after over a year of not playing, and solos it while re-learning how to play their character, I'd say the difficulty level isn't too bad.

Welcome back, Minibromian

At the end of the day, a video game company is just a business.

It makes more sense to spend time on something 80,000 players will use than it does to spend time that 1,000 will use, especially when the time you spent on the thing that 1,000 will use is time that could have been spent on the thing that 80,000 will use.

Additionally, Paragon Studios is at the mercy of it's parent company, NCSoft. The game will only continue to have funding as long as it continues to make a profit. Judging from the fact that PvP is nearly dead and the game continues to thrive, it's pretty clear that PvP is not a significant income earner for this game.

Yes, the devs want to make a fun game, but they are constrained by the fact that the game must also turn a profit. Spending a lot of time on something that the majority of the playerbase has proven they don't really care about just isn't a financially sensible move. It makes more sense to spend that time on the stuff that people actually like.

I don't know what the actual number of active PvPers is, but I can guarantee that at some point the devs and probably some accountants crunched the numbers to see how disastrous it would be if they all quit at once. Now, they knew how unpopular the PvP changes were before they put them on the live servers, and they did it anyway. That says to me that losing 100% of the PvP population of the game would not hurt the bottom line enough for them to worry about. You can't tell me a business would do something like that without looking at the potential consequences of it, because that would be incredibly stupid. If the vitality of a PvP community in this game would make a significant impact on the game's profits, it is unlikely they would have pushed changes through that they knew were unpopular and would likely have people quitting over.

So, as much as the devs want to give us a good game to play, spending time on PvP just doesn't make a whole lot of sense for the continued growth of the game. If they DO make changes to it, it's going to happen when they don't have any major projects going on, so I'm not going to hold my breath on it, because the Incarnate stuff is a pretty major project that's going to be going on for a while.

The question that has to be asked is: Would the potential return from completely revamping how PvP in this game works be worth the time, money, and manpower that would need to be invested in it?

At this point, probably not. Revamping the PvP system would take a huge amount of resources, and it would really only benefit the few people that still PvP here. I kind of doubt the people that left when they changed it kept up on what's going on here nowadays. So, they would end up doing a huge amount of work for a very small subset of the population. Old PvP was just as broken as new PvP, only in different ways.

CoH might have had good PvP if the game had been designed with it in mind from the beginning. But it wasn't. It is nearly impossible to balance PvP in a game where the available character types are so vastly different from each other. What happens with it is a few character types, and sometimes even powersets of those character types end up being way better than others. And anyone NOT playing one of those characters is at a HUGE disadvantage in a fight.

Since CoH PvP was added as an afterthought, no consideration was given when character powers were designed as to how those powers would work when opposing each other.

When you pitted a Mind/Fire Dominator against a Claws/Regen scrapper the way it was before the i13 changes, the scrapper lived only as long as his breakfrees lasted. If he ran out or got caught without any, Telekinesis was basically an "I Win" button, since that Dominator could keep you permanently held as long as his endurance held out for. And that's just one example of the kinds of things you get when you shoehorn PvP into a combat system that wasn't designed with it in mind. There are plenty more powers that made a fight very one sided that I'm not thinking of right now.

Changing PvP again at this point would be very similar to painting a condemned house. Sure, the house might look better, but no one lives there anymore.

Arachnos Operatives are normal people they recruited.

Anyone with superpowers is hired as a freelancer. In a lot of cases, if you were a metahuman, joining Arachnos like that would result in the loss of your powers, and you would be just another goober in a black bodysuit. Most supervillains would not want anything to do with that scenario, because THEY want to rule the world, not be a faceless drone in someone else's army while they rule it.

You are the source of 100% of the information I have read regarding PvP in that game. When I responded to your first post, that information did not include the existence of PvE servers.

I wasn't making any claims about the game, I was responding directly to what you said about it. I freely admit that I know next to nothing about it, so what you said was all I had to go on.

I got 3 pieces of information from your post, one of which is opinion, and 2 that could be construed as fact, they are:

1) PvP in the game is good. (opinion)
2) There is open world PvP (assuming this is fact)
3) PvP is a big part of the game. (could be either, but it is presented as fact and I have no grounds to assume it is not)

Given the combination of open world PvP and PvP being a big part of the game, and lacking any further information, it is perfectly logical to conclude that the game consists of a lot of PvP that takes place out in the open.

My post was in response to that conclusion. If that post was ill-informed, I have only the source of my information to blame.

I do not like open world PvP, and it is highly unlikely I will ever change my opinion of that. I dislike it primarily because of the behavior that it brings out of people. I'm guessing it won't be long after that game is released until some of the obnoxious PvPers figure out the best method of killing other players and start hanging out around highly traveled locations to kill unsuspecting newbies.

I am well aware that not all PvPers are just out to pwn nubs, but enough of them are that open world PvP will never be something I'm interested in.

Since you are the only one here who has first hand information, maybe you should INFORM PEOPLE BETTER BEFORE GOING OFF ON THEM. If I was ill-informed, the fault is YOURS for not sharing the information that would have made me better informed. Unless you think I should automatically know or assume things about a game I have never played. If I was ill informed, it was because I got the bad information from YOU.

Funny how you only give out part of the information, and then accuse people of being ill informed because they don't know the part you didn't tell them.

I already said I enjoy PvP. But I enjoy it on my terms. When I don't feel like PvPing, I don't feel I should have to have it forced upon me because someone else wants to PvP. That isn't hating PvP, that is simply disliking having PvP forced on me whether I want it or not, which most people would consider a reasonable dislike.

How exactly is that obvious? You didn't say anything about it in your post, and I haven't really done any research on it, because I'm not in a financial position to be buying more video games at the moment. I see no point in researching games I can't afford to buy, so I haven't done so.

From what you said in your post, it is perfectly reasonable to come to the conclusion that the entire game will have open world PvP whether you like it or not. PvE servers that were never mentioned are not in any way obvious, nor is it something I should consider obvious simply by thinking about it. Your post, which is the first I've heard regarding PvP in that game, simply stated that there is open world PvP, and nothing else about it.

Thanks for convincing me to never buy that game. I have ZERO interest in a game where some jackhole can gank me any time he feels like it, just to be a jerk.

If I want to PvP, I go where there is PvP. I do NOT want it forced upon me against my will.

I still occasionally PvP here and enjoy it, precisely because when I decide I've had enough PvP, I can leave the zone and know that I'm done with PvP, instead of deciding I've had enough PvP and having to log out of the game because I have no choice in whether I PvP or not.

Open world PvP is, more often than not, a breeding ground for the worst kind of gamer there is: the people who delight in going out of their way to ruin someone else's good time. As I said, I enjoy PvP, but I enjoy it when I WANT to enjoy it, I don't want to have to fight off a bunch of trash talking jacktards just to go from point A to point B.

When that mez protection makes it impossible to avoid something that will probably kill you outright, yes.

From what I understand, the patches that Battle Maiden drops are both autohit and unresistable, so if you are running Rooted and Granite, you are going to die the first time she goes to drop one on you, because you can't avoid them. And with it being unresistable, Granite will do you no good at all. Finally, something in the game where the first thing anyone says is NOT "We need a Stone tank"

Welcome to Incarnates, where your "I Win" buttons have all been taken away. Now you have to actually THINK about what you're doing, instead of just standing there being unkillable.

With the slotting suggestions I laid out for you, you shouldn't need to buff accuracy and damage much. I suggested Scirocco's Dervish to pair with Eradication specifically because it offers an Acc/Rech and a Dam/Rech, which will ED cap your damage on the power and leave you with about 73% accuracy bonus (which I believe is 95% to-hit against at least +2 mobs) For a tank or brute chasing typed defense, Eradication is the perfect set for PBAoEs, because it gives nothing but useful bonuses for those ATs. Well, the debt reduction bonus is kinda lame, but I rarely use more than 4 of the set anyway.

You can slot whatever else you want in your single target attacks along with Kinetic Combat. I'm partial to Pounding Slugfest, because it's the only melee damage set that gives a useful bonus for only 2 slots, but you can use anything you want.

As a nice side effect, using those sets will let you retain a large chunk of your defense while exemped as low as level 27. That's the other reason I like them so much.

Spiritual, going the Heal path. The only real purpose the recharge would serve would be to speed up your big hitters. The real gem of that path is the heal component. Since Alpha slots function exactly like an SO of the appropriate type added to every power, the heal component will affect any powers that add passive regen as well. That means RttC, Fast Healing, and Health will all benefit from the heal component of the Spiritual Alpha. A lot of people think it only affects healing powers, but it will affect any power you can slot a heal enhancement into, because that's exactly what it is: a Heal/Recharge HO slotted into every power you have.

You really don't need the regen/recovery from PP at all, and Focused Accuracy is a crap power. (I only ever take Focused Accuracy if I need a place to mule Gaussian's, it only ever got used on my Claws/Regen scrapper, who has endurance to spare) Since you mentioned taking Maneuvers, go with Tactics instead, you can slot any set in Tactics that you can slot in FA, and it doesn't cost nearly as much end, plus it benefits the whole team, while FA benefits only you.

Mu Mastery will let you slot 2 sets of Posi's Blast, giving you a source of recharge bonuses that you won't be taking away from something else to get. Or, if you REALLY want to slot some purples, you could put Ragnarok into one of them, since Ragnarok gives the exact same bonuses as Posi's, just higher amounts of them. I pretend purples don't exist when I'm building a character, since I use any that drop to fund the rest of the build. But if you like using them, Ragnarok is basically a direct upgrade of Posi's Blast.

On the additional plus side, you will be able to chain Lightning Rod, Electrifying Fences, Ball Lightning, and Thunder Strike. If that doesn't annihilate the entire spawn, you're fighting something REALLY tough. You can also take Mu Lightning and slot it with 3 Thunderstrike (for the recovery bonus and E/N defense) and 3 Devastation (for the 12% regen and 2.25% max HP bonus)

I'm planning on going Mu with my Elec/WP brute, who is currently level 36. The way I see it, adding more AoE to an already AoE heavy build can't possibly be a bad thing.

I'm giving you advice based on what I've already done on my brute, or have plans to do in the future. You might find some different slotting works better for you. If so, cool.

(this is a rare case when I actually have and play the powersets I'm giving advice on, I usually give advice from a general game knowledge perspective)

The glowing heads at least should be pretty obvious. If you didn't know they did that before, now you know what to look for.

This....is bad advice.

Willpower should be slotting for TYPED defense, not positional. The reason? Heightened Senses gives you a good amount of typed defense to E/N/F/C, a little bit of S/L defense, and no positional defense at all. Slotting for positional defense when you have that power available is just silly.

OP:

Replace the Obliterations in your PBAoE attacks with 4xEradication and 2xScirocco's Dervish. That will give you: 10% regen, 1.8% more max end, 3.13 E/N defense, and 2.25% more max HP.

Single Target attacks should get 4x Kinetic Combat, and 2 of any other sets you want to up the accuracy and recharge of the powers.

You should also slot your resistance powers with 4xReactive Armor for more S/L/E/N defense. It will still ED cap your resistance for those powers, and will give you more benefit than the Impervium Armors you currently have in there.

2xRectified Reticle in Build Up, and 1 Recharge IO. gives 1.88% S/L defense.

Don't bother with the End Mod sets in anything. One of 2 things will happen with any enemy you fight A) It will be dead long before you drain it, or B) it will be an EB or AV and you aren't going to drain it anyway.

The To-Hit debuff enhancement in RttC is pretty useless. RttC doesn't have enough of a to-hit debuff to make it worth slotting for. Pull those pieces out and leave the rest of it how you have it.

Strength of Will is WAY overslotted. It is completely unaffected by recharge, and it gives you enough of a boost to your resistances that it would be fine with just the 2 Steadfast Protections in it. Put those 4 extra slots elsewhere.

Willpower wants Defense, Max HP, and Regen, pretty much in that order.

Defense is so your ridiculous amounts of regen become that much more valuable (attacks that don't land don't have to be healed back). A high defense Willpower anything is a BEAST, and will outlive a lot of so called "tougher" sets.

Max HP will boost your regen more than regen bonuses will. (sounds weird, but it's true, regen is based off your max HP, the more you have, the more you heal per tick)

Regen is pretty self explanatory, you don't have a self-heal power, so your regen is what will keep you a live in a tough fight. You don't really need to try too hard to find regen bonuses, they usually go hand in hand with Max HP bonuses (which you should be looking for)

What Willpower DOESN'T need is recharge. If you can sneak some in there, great, but Willpower doesn't benefit from it at all, and you have enough attacks to have a good attack chain without much recharge at all. I wouldn't spend the money on purples, save them for a character that will get more from them.

I'd go Mu mastery with this character. It stays in theme, and it gives you 2 more AoEs, one of which is an immobilize (great for keeping them bunched around you to fuel RttC). You can also take Mu Lightning for an extra ST attack, which Electric Melee is lacking in.

You're wrong. Because my post count is higher