ClawsandEffect

There's at least 3 spots (4 if you're desperate) that you can use Kinetic Combat: Barb Swipe, Lunge, Boxing, and maybe Brawl.

You could put Enfeebled Operation in Impale (I wouldn't, slot it for damage instead)

Maybe take Confront and slot 4 Mocking Beratement in it.

Reactive Armor in all your resistance toggles.

Take the Fighting pool, and at least Maneuvers from the Leadership pool (I've heard Spines/Electric can go Staminaless, but I hesitate to suggest it because I have no personal experience with the combo)

Take Tactics for a place to slot Gaussian's, since you won't need Physical Perfection, you can take a different Epic pool than Body. Spines/Electric seems to mesh well with Blaze Mastery for the extra AoE it provides.

Slot a couple Rectified Reticles in Build Up.

That's about all I can think of at the moment, hope it helps.

Good point, I'd forgotten about that.

If you were to add 5 optional animations to a power that takes 1.67 seconds to activate, you would have to make 6 versions of each animation, AND ensure that all of them also took 1.67 seconds to activate.

The problem is, in asking to be unique in appearance you are asking the animation team to do literally years of work.

Every animation that is made for the game has to be made 6 times: male standing, female standing, huge standing, male flying, female flying, huge flying. If you want 5 options for your power animation that increases it to 30 animations. For ONE power. Now add the other 8 powers and you have 270 animations for one powerset alone. But of course they can't do just one powerset...they have to do them ALL, or people will complain that "this powerset got new animations, why didn't mine?!"

What you're asking for would basically prevent the animation department from working on any NEW powersets for several years at least. You could have exactly what you want....if you don't mind waiting until 2013 and getting nothing new until then.

It's not that the devs don't want to give us more options, it's that doing so is a crap-ton of work for them to do.

If you have the capability to perma Dull Pain, by all means do so.

However, you may not want to always use it the second it comes up. Having it perma serves 2 purposes: A) You can keep your HP at the cap at all times if you should choose, and B) It will recharge faster on the occasions you want to use it as a really big heal (like AV fights or PvP)

No, it never will.

The problem is there is no REASON to expand it. The entire game is designed around level 50 being the highest level there is.

It would set a precedent that would be bad for the game. It would take no more than a week for players to hit the new level cap and do all the higher level content, and people would be clamoring for another level cap raise.

It would be a crap ton of work for the devs to do for no real reason at all. In order to churn out enough content to fill 20 levels of new stuff it would take well over a year to produce, during which we would get nothing else. It would also invalidate a ton of work the devs have done on what is currently high level content. Purple recipes would be obsolete, Hami-Os would expire. Higher level IOs would be pointless, because the current ones already slam you into the ED caps. A higher level cap would be nothing more than a bigger number to reach, and it would serve no useful purpose.

"It's what WoW did" is a horrible excuse to do anything, and it doesn't fly here. Aping every move WoW makes is not going to magically make millions of people sign up to play. WoW is an abberation and should not be considered a mark you have to reach to be considered "successful". Before WoW, 100,000 subscribers was considered thriving, and that actually hasn't changed. The fact that WoW has millions doesn't change the fact that 100,000 subscribers is a healthy playerbase.

In short, the level cap won't be raised because it's a bad idea.

Just in glancing at the build....I can answer for Umbral here.

Didn't really hurt it any.

Since the only change was to Blessing of the Zephyr, and not IOs in general, the net loss was 1.56% to ranged and AoE. Doesn't really hurt a regen scrapper much at all.

I very seldom post exactly what I'm playing on live. Most of the time I'll post something that is similar to what I'm playing with some key differences, largely because I don't like doing all the work for someone else.

I've had people tell me "That build sucks!"

....Of course it does, that's not the exact build, because you should do at least SOME of the work yourself. Figure out what it's missing and fix it

But that's with MY builds that I actually play. I have no problem at all posting a build just to show someone what I might do with a particular powerset, or if they ask for help with theirs.

Yeah, there isn't much you can do about defense debuffs, good thing defense is only the first layer, with resistance and a monster heal backing it up.

The problems my particular build has are lack of recharge and accuracy. For what I do with it, it's fine, but it's not going to be soloing +4/x8 (at least not without difficulty. Unfortunately, there's not much I can do about that either, since one of my goals was to build it on the cheap.

That was their way of appeasing the large number of people who wanted a "street fighting" set. Not every martial artist is flashy and dramatic with their attacks. In fact, real martial artists tend to laugh at people who are. You will very seldom see a Storm Kick or Crippling Axe Kick type attack in a real fight. You will probably never see an Eagle's Claw in a real fight. You will, however, see all of their alternate animations quite frequently in a real fight. Thunder Kick has been used rather often in MMA fights, and Crane Kick is actually one of the more practical types of kick you can use, they were not given alternates because it is perfectly plausible for a street fighter to use either one. Cobra Strike was given an uppercut animation for the same reason, you don't see very many self-taught fighters using open palm strikes, but everyone knows how to throw an uppercut.


The alternate animations are more for characters who learned how to fight by actually fighting, rather than in a monastary in Tibet or a dojo in Southern California. And since a Street Fighting set would be as similar to Martial Arts as Broadsword is to Katana, it made more sense to just give the existing set some dfferent animations rather than code an entirely new set from scratch.

You also would have no right to keep Task Force Commander, as at level 1 you aren't even high enough to run the FIRST TF you need for it, let alone all 6. A level 1 character should NOT be allowed to keep bonuses from Accolades they aren't high enough level to obtain legitimately.

There's also the "exploitable" factor. What would stop you from leveling as something that solos awesome and levels fast (like a katana/willpower scrapper) and speccing into something that gets stupid powerful at high levels? (like a Fire/Kin troller, or Elec/Shield scrapper)

It would create a LOT of people with level 50s they have no clue how to play. Just because I can play a Claws/Regen scrapper doesn't mean I know how to play a Storm/Sonic Defender just as well.

Heh, I actually like the Hollows. I generally skip the initial contact, street hunt to level 5 or 6 and start the Hollows arcs. By the end of it I'm usually level 14 or 15 and have 30-some merits already. Then I run Posi and Synapse and start working on the contacts that will get me to the Freaklympics and Freakshow War arcs (a couple of my favorite arcs in the game, either side)

After them I'll run Croatoa. Occasionally I'll run Striga if I find myself in the early 20s with nothing to do.

Redside I generaly just follow whichever contact I feel like running at the moment, no particular rhyme or reason to it.

So, you killed one enemy out of 16. That's better than some tanks and a lot of defenders will do. It's also about the same thing a single target focused scrapper would do. Watch and see how many enemies a Martial Arts scrapper defeats in a fight before level 26, or how many an /Energy tank ever kills in a fight.

I really don't get the hate for the single-target focus of stalkers. It's like everyone seems to think if you don't have stupid amounts of AoE you're worthless.

When I play my stalker on teams, I basically hit the thing that's in front of me unless there's a reason to aim for a specific target. I enjoy it, and I've never had anyone complain because I wasn't contributing enough.

You're not asking for an improvement to stalkers, you're asking to change the very nature of the AT. If the sets that lost their AoE were to get it back, you would lose Assassin's Strike and Placate. I'd be willing to bet money on it. If you lost AS and Placate, you would be nothing more than a really squishy scrapper....and even less useful. Sure, you have AoE, but with Going Rogue around the corner there would be even less point to roll a stalker, when a scrapper could serve the same purpose.

Really, what it comes down to is: If you think stalkers, as they are, are weak and useless, don't play them.

You are not required to like every AT in the game, that's part of why there are so many choices of what you can play. Me, I can't stand playing masterminds, and there are tons of people that love them. But you don't see me asking for the thing that makes a mastermind a mastermind to be changed so I might like it more.

Stalkers have a role on TFs that very few others can perform....they are the perfect ghoster, and they can do it from level 1. The only other things as good at it are VEATS and Illusion controllers, and they have to wait until level 20 and level 8 respectively.

And I STILL say that the problem is with the people who insist that anything less than total annihilation of a spawn in 3 seconds is unacceptable, rather than with the AT. The game has gone from "Cool, I'm a superhero!" to "Speed speed speed now now now, I need to get all the shinies as fast as I can!" Which saddens me a little bit. A video game has become an excercise in being as efficient as humanly possible.

Yeah. It's a fun power, but the recharge is too long for it to be practical.

Siren's Song + Time Bomb works pretty good, but like I said, the long recharge makes it not quite worth taking.

It's pretty useless for anything but Sonic though, unless you go with Munitions and take Sleep Grenade.

Did anyone else note the incongruity here?

Especially when this:

is clearly visible?

I mean, did the guy just sit on a forum account for 5 years and never use it or what?