DrMike2000

I think the best way to fix End Drain is to have it NOT based around Short Circuit.

End drain affects bosses as much as minions.

End drain currently hinges around an AoE power

Therefore making End Drain effective against a single minion also makes it just as effective against a group of bosses. This is too much for a blast set.

Ading End Mod boost to Aim is a nice idea, but means a blaster can totally disable a room full of bosses every 45 seconds or so.

My solution: Add significant end drain into the single target blasts. You can then partially drain a group but fully drain a single target while you attack.

The original Sandman, Wesley Dodds, used sleeping gas to disable opponents.

Much nicer than using a katana or breathing fire on someone.

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I'd actually been tinkering with an idea for an "Astral Form" power. It would work something like this.

A toggle, when you turn it on, it creates a duplicate of your character that will just sit there (or kneel, or whatever). This double would have the same health as you, and would remain in place. This is the body you leave behind as your "actual" character becomes the Astral Form.

In Astral Form, you would be Phased (a la Phase Shift) and hovering. Additionally, you would have 1/2 of your normal health. This is because you CAN attack in your astral form. Your Phase effect would suppress if you attack or interact with the environment (eg. glowies). While Phase is suppressed, you would have massive Resistance and Defense bonuses, and your damage output would be reduced by half. Holds and other similar powers would work normally. Buffs and such would also be halved.

If your body (the double) takes damage, your astral form would too. If your astral form is defeated, or if you turn the power off, it would detoggle the power (obviously), and you would be transported back to the spot where your body had been left. Your health and endurance will be reduced as with Unstoppable (ie. no endurance, nearly no health).


So, as an example, Dr. Solomon, a Controller activates the power as he enters a mission. His body remains behind as he goes unseen through the map. He finds a glowie and attacks the guards, doing half his usual damage. He defeats them, and uses the glowie.

This spawns an ambush at the front door. They encounter his body and attack it. All damage it takes is also applied to Solomon in his astral form. They reduce it to half health, which defeats the astral form. The power detoggles, and Solomon is transported back to his body, with no endurance and little health, and under attack.

Had there been no ambush, he could have turned off the power and been transported back to the body instantly, with no endurance and reduced health.


This is just my first thought on this. I'm still tinkering with the idea.

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I scripted an ability along these lines in Freedom Force and it worked rather well. It was of course, a very different game - single player where you control a group of up to 4 heroes from an overhead camera. As such, having an inert body left behind made more sense because you could go and check on it whenever you wnated or leave a character behind to guard the body even.

In CoH things are kind of different, kind of similar. You could have a teammate guard your body, but thats asking a bit much of another human player.

My biggest concern about an ability like this would be that most missions dont spawn an ambush by the door as you describe. For over 90% of PvE this reduces down to the optimum startegy being to check your body in by the door and travel through the mission in astral form. Either that or the penalties you build in like half damage are too high and you never use the ability. Maybe the problem is that most CoH content is just not variable enough.

I really like this idea though. Nice thinking, Ultimo.

I really like the idea of Clarity adding Psi resistance to an ally. Very cool.

Force Fields in comparison also doesn't defend against Psi with its ally shields, but the hardest hitting Psi attacks tend to have a Ranged components, so in effect it does. (And Dispersion Bubble has Psi defence)

It would also be nice to be able to add this to Invulnerable allies, and actually give them resistance where they need it. Having your powersets holes overlap with theirs is not fun.

Sonic Siphon is tricky. My preference would be to make it self stacking, possibly increasing its recharge to 20 or even 30s to do so. This would actually make it worth slotting, and make Sonic the undisputed king of -Res. Currently we can achieve 60% on a single target, half of which is on a group, whereas Trick Arrow (for example) gets -40% on a group. Storm gets -35% on a group with part of one power. For Sonic as a set thats very focussed on one buff and one debuff, that isn't a great difference.
Trick Arrow and Storm provide a wide variety of debuffs, Sonic specialises in one.

Also, I really like the suggestion in your Corrupter thread Fury, to give Disruption Field a longer lingering debuff like the -To Hit on Hurricane.

These three relatively small changes would improve Sonic a lot.

What he said. "Pure support" is very much overrated. Its your $15 and all, but I do feel obliged to let you know that it isnt the norm for Defenders.
Also, Dark Blast attacks can do lots of To Hit, and provide support that way. Slotted, Tenbrous Tentacles and Nightfall do almost 32% To Hit.

As for your Empathy powers, a couple of suggestions:

1) Get Fortitude six-slotted. The most basic slotting is 3 recharge, 3 def so you can keep it up on 4 people that way.

2) Put some END Mod slotting into Adrenalin Boost. It has a base of +800% Recovery, if you can get this above +1000% (ie +25% End mod slotting) you can give it to a Blaster of fellow defender after theyve nuked and overcome the recovery penality from nuking.

Do all this and you wont need all those slots in Absorb Pain. Treat that as an emergency heal rather than one you need to be up every 8 seconds.

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[edit: The thing about special cases is it opens Pandora's Box; once it's open, there's no going back. Anyone who'd support the detoggle removal should think about that hard.]

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Hasn't Invincibility already set that precedent though? It only affects others in the sense of taunting them, hence its OK to treat it as a non-offensive toggle?

Its not like making this change for RttC would open the floodgates so that the devs are forced to flag other powers as non-defensive?

I picked it up for the first time this week. When I started out I didn't realise that the 1000 Ios crafted badge was a requirement, so I hit a bit of a false horizon there - memorised all the recipes and still had 500 to go just for that badge.

I can't say I minded really - its been fun to log in twice a day with two "assistants" on my other account to help out with bidding and selling and Ive made around 15-20 million on each of those three characters selling common IOs.

The funny thing is, getting the table ahsnt been that great.
I'd already figured out that if I parked in Wentworths, then used my 24 month vet power to TP to the supergroup base to use the table, I could then leave the SG base exit and reappear right back in Wentworths where I'd left!
And thats without using the teleport to Wentworths temp power I've picked up, thats there as backup.

So the tables kind of saved me zoning twice per market session, and thats about it.

So I'd say leave the journey on this one long. It was more fun than arriving.

If you're going for Shivans in Bloody Bay, for example, I can see this would be a real problem.
That involves fighting AI mobs outside, so its hardly a crazy idea.

I agree with Quixotik that something's wrong here - a power that's 90% defensive and 10% offensive, AND one of the main survival tools for a set should maybe be excepted from this rule and shouldn't detoggle.
Especially when you consider that the "offensive" part of the power is a To Hit debuff, which is really defensive itself, ie its keeping you marginally safer rather than upping your damage in any way.

It may not be technically bugged or nerfed, but I wouldn't be surprised if its been overlooked.

This made me laugh, and I havent even played it yet.

Thank you

Your Fire Tank can pick up some pretty good Defence though, just like anyone else, andf end up with a highly survivable Defence/Resistance/Healing multi-layered approach.
I'm looking into the same for my Dark Tanker and building up some Energy Defence to cover that hole in her defences. Its working quite well so far.

Aegis or Reactive Armour both offer good bonuses, Aegis providing 4.65% Cold Defence for 5 slots - very handy for Fire Tanks. Reactive Armour spreads it around a bit more with 1.25% vs almost everything for 5 slots.

In light of what Fulmens says above, about not wanting people to max out Defence and resistance, this decision by the devs now makes sense to me.

Yeah, I'd agree that there are no utter turkeys in the powersets available. This is the sign of the well-polished mature game we've got now.
We're usually talking about sets being 80% as good as average rather than 50% as good.

I'd also agree there are sets that shine solo, Gravity Control for Controllers being one of them.
All the negatives - slow animation on Propel, teammates getting confused by Dimension Shift, teammates mis-timing AoE damage and buffs with your Wormhole, all of them evaporate when you're on your own.
You're just left with good burst damage, damage per endurance and a lot of visual cool.

Is it a general rule that the better solo sets are often "X that plays like a Y" whereas the true specialists are better on teams?

Gravity - Controller that plays like Blaster
Energy Melee - Tanker that plays like a Scrapper
Devices - Blaster that plays like a Stalker/Controller? they give up some damage for survivability anyway.

All good soloers compared to more specialised Fire Blasters, Stone Tanks and Force Field Defenders.

If you're looking at Defenders, Sonic Blast pretty much trumps eveything due to the stacking -Res. The AoEs arent spectacular, but with the -res in Howl dont do as little damage as they first appear to.

May I suggest Dark/Sonic?
Its a great combination of safety from your primary and surprisingly good offence once you've built up some -Res on a hard target.
You'll have superb crowd control between your debuffs (which have a much larger radius than Rad's), your Dark Servants debuffs, Fearsome Stare and Sirens' Song, so fighting off 20 enemies and surviving isnt a problem either.

You have one pet, but he does hardly any damage, hes very much a support system rather than a glory-hog like Illusion pets.

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end drain works just fine on its own its somthing your toon has to skot for a lil less dmg for the fact the enimes cant atk as much i did the itf last nite we had me an elec blaster and elec brute and a third elec i forget what but the mobs never had end so the spent thier time running aroud waiting got that 1 atk even the EB's had this problem. but thats with 3 ele types you need to be able to do this all the time with just 1 toon the end drain dont help u much when they die 2 sec l8er it huts pc's cuz it slows down the next battle but is to short lived an effect for battles that last 5sec....

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Oh yeah, a group of Elec's can do wonderful things. The Repeat Offenders network has a group "Dont Whiz on the Electric Fence" who form superteams of end drainers.
I think I heard that they drained Lusca once?

Come to think of it, me and a PUG member drained the Winter Lord once, I think, me on my Kin/Elec Defender, and he was an Electric/something Blaster.

But you're right - with one drainer the damage always outpaces the end drain.

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so when do these end drain groups meet id luv to put my toon in that group

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They've got a website here, Captain, with details of their global channel and so on.
http://www.repeat-offenders.net/

I've never actually run with them, what with being both an Australian resident and somewhat solitary, but I've seen the occasional member and heard of their exploits.

Get Stamina from the Fitness pool, and Hasten from the Speed pool. Chances are thats what you heard before.

Mass Confusion and Total Domination (your best AoE controls) are on a 240 second timer.
Liquefy (a very nice Sonic Debuff) is on a 300 sec timer. You want these back up as often as possible, which is where Hasten comes in. Stamina will be needed to run Sonic's Disruption Field and Sonic Dispersion as well as attacking and controlling.

I wont make a build, because Im not really experienced with pure support, but I can give you a few pointers.

Your blasts can all provide support through the -Def.

Let off Irradiate in the middle of a team of Rikti Drones and your team will love you for it - -37.5% Defence is worth the power pick there. It'll turn a frustrating whiff-fest into a quick clean steamroller.

You can also slot the Achilles Heel Chance for -Resistance in there to further assist your team, and provide some of the offensive punch Force Fields sorely lacks.

If you really want to go down the pure support route (and its your fifteen bucks), then be sure to get Aid Other. Its not only a heal for what little damage that does trickle through, but it breaks sleeps, which your Dispersion Bubble does not protect against.

Get Recall Friend - if a squishy has run out of range of your Dispersion Bubble and got stunned/held you can pull them back in without dragging it away from anyone else who may be sheltering in there.

To be honest, I doubt you'll need most of the shinies from Wentworths.
You have no buffs on a long recharge, so Luck of the Gambler +Rech is pointless. If you're not attacking you wont be running out of endurance, so forget about the Miracle and Numina's uniques and Performance Shifter chance for +End. Stamina alone will cover Dispersion Bubble and the three Leadership toggles.

My guide shows you how to build for capped Defence on your own, but this seems a waste if youre not attacking. If you do get Irradiate it could be handy, since you will draw aggro with this, but popping PFF woudl cause Dispersion Bubble to fall.

If you do want to use your default attack, Neutrino Bolt, at least slot the Devastation Chance to hold in it. That power and IO were made for each other.

"I do when its recharged"

Honestly, some people are just so greedy for speed boost!

Three sets stand out for me, I'll resist the urge to dig around to find another two.

Gravity Control (Dominators)
Trading off area control for extra damage works for Controllers, it doesnt work for Dominators who have a damage oriented secondary.

Electric Blast (Blasters and Defenders)
Trades damage for control via End Drain. In practice, end drain is difficult to use, and requires combination with specific other powersets or superteams to have any significant effect.

Psychic Blast (Blasters)
Have a single AoE instead of the usual two, in exchange for a mediocre extra single target blast. Originally this was cautiously set up due to PvP repercussions, Psi damage no longer has an advantage in PvP and is more often heavily resisted in PvE than most types.

I find that its very satisfying from a visual standpoint in Fire Breath.
I love breathing fire so hard I knock the enemy over.

Two Empaths is really that good. Both run and slot Manouvers for an additional 11% Defence (- about 35% with Fortitude?)

Assault also works well here at +37.5% damage combined.

I've PvP'd casually with my SG once, using two Empaths (post Adrenalin Boost).
Despite the fact I was kind of hampered by dual-boxing for the first time in PvP, I put in a pretty good showing, and absolutley slaughtered the opposition in a 3 vs 3 Arena match.

So I can offer anecdotal evidence that some of the awesomeness translates to PvP. This was all befroe the recent workover of PvP by the way.

And yes, dual Sonic attacks means over 100% Res debuff on your joint taregt of choice very quickly.

Yep, it does exactly that.

You can also slot the Devastation Chance to Hold to get another shot at holding a boss if you like.

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Change Vigilance to Determination.

Determination = The less endurance the defender has, the less his powers cost to use (similar to how Defiance used to work, ie. as Blaster health decreased, attacks did more damage).

Simple. It allows the Defender to have Endurance when the team needs him, and it increases damage output by allowing the Defender to attack longer, while maintaining damage output relative to other ATs.

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Numerically that works out the same as just reducing the endurance cost of all powers across the board.

What I've suggested in the past is that each Defender added to the team increases the effect of inspirations used by anyone. The first Defender would add a 10% buff, the second 8%, the third %6, and so on, up to a maximum 30% buff (or whatever number). When fighting solo the Defender would always have the base 10% buff.

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Now thats a way cool idea. I really like that!

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Well, I posted elsewhere about this, but here's my suggestion.

Make Vigilance work such that the endurance cost of using your powers decreases as your reserve of endurance decreases.

That is, the less endurance you have, the less endurance your powers use.

The reason I say this is as follows.

I'm playing my FF/Nrg Defender (I'll post the build in a moment). The goal of this character was to emulate, to some degree, Iron Man. The truth is, he actually does it pretty well. However, I recently Veteraned up sufficiently that I gained access to the Nemesis Staff. I was astounded.

My BEST SHOT using my own powers does around 30 damage to a white conn Freakshow Slammer. Air Superiority does around 24 damage. The Staff does close to 150 damage. Yes, that's right, 5 TIMES the best damage I can do.

I tried an experiment.

I came upon a spawn of three Freakshow, two Slammers and a Gunner. I used only my own powers. I was OUT of endurance after the two Slammers, and was forced to struggle against the Gunner (I was never in danger of defeat, but it was VERY slow and frustrating).

I later came upon an identical spawn, but this time used the Staff as it became ready. I defeated all three foes and was a little above half endurance. Again, I wasn't in any real danger, but instead of having to stop and rest (or stop and wait for rest to recycle since it's necessary after every spawn), I was able to carry on playing.

What's more fun, Resting, or fighting foes?

Defenders need a bonus to their damage, or they need to have endurance equalized somehow. Because Defenders do a fraction of the damage anyone else does while using the same endurance, they end up using much more endurance to defeat the same challenges.


Here's the build:

Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.401
http://www.cohplanner.com/

[u]Click this DataLink to open the build![u]

Warpath: Level 50 Technology Defender
Primary Power Set: Force Field
Secondary Power Set: Energy Blast
Power Pool: Flight
Power Pool: Fitness
Power Pool: Fighting
Power Pool: Leadership
Ancillary Pool: Power Mastery

Hero Profile:
Level 1: Personal Force Field -- DefBuff-I(A), DefBuff-I(3), DefBuff-I(3)
Level 1: Power Bolt -- Acc-I(A), Acc-I(5), Dmg-I(5), Dmg-I(7), Dmg-I(7)
Level 2: Force Bolt -- Acc-I(A), Acc-I(9)
Level 4: Energy Torrent -- Acc-I(A), Acc-I(9), Dmg-I(11), Dmg-I(11), Dmg-I(13)
Level 6: Hover -- Flight-I(A), Flight-I(13), Flight-I(15)
Level 8: Air Superiority -- Acc-I(A), Acc-I(15), Dmg-I(17), Dmg-I(17), Dmg-I(19)
Level 10: Hurdle -- Jump-I(A), Jump-I(46)
Level 12: Dispersion Bubble -- EndRdx-I(A), DefBuff-I(19), DefBuff-I(21), DefBuff-I(21)
Level 14: Fly -- Flight-I(A), Flight-I(23), Flight-I(23)
Level 16: Boxing -- Acc-I(A), Acc-I(25), Dmg-I(25), Dmg-I(27), Dmg-I(27)
Level 18: Health -- Heal-I(A), Heal-I(29), Heal-I(29)
Level 20: Stamina -- EndMod-I(A), EndMod-I(31), EndMod-I(31)
Level 22: Tough -- EndRdx-I(A), ResDam-I(31), ResDam-I(33), ResDam-I(33)
Level 24: Weave -- EndRdx-I(A), DefBuff-I(33), DefBuff-I(34), DefBuff-I(34)
Level 26: Power Burst -- RechRdx-I(A), Acc-I(34), Acc-I(36), Dmg-I(36), Dmg-I(36), Dmg-I(50)
Level 28: Repulsion Field -- EndRdx-I(A)
Level 30: Repulsion Bomb -- Acc-I(A), Acc-I(37), Dsrnt-I(37), Dsrnt-I(37), Dsrnt-I(39)
Level 32: Maneuvers -- EndRdx-I(A), DefBuff-I(39), DefBuff-I(39), DefBuff-I(40)
Level 35: Explosive Blast -- Acc-I(A), Acc-I(40), Dmg-I(40), Dmg-I(42), Dmg-I(42)
Level 38: Nova -- RechRdx-I(A), Acc-I(42), Acc-I(43), Dmg-I(43), Dmg-I(43), Dmg-I(50)
Level 41: Conserve Power -- RechRdx-I(A), RechRdx-I(45), RechRdx-I(45)
Level 44: Temp Invulnerability -- EndRdx-I(A), ResDam-I(45), ResDam-I(46), ResDam-I(46)
Level 47: Total Focus -- Acc-I(A), Acc-I(48), Dmg-I(48), Dmg-I(48), Dmg-I(50)
Level 49: Assault -- EndRdx-I(A)
------------
Level 1: Brawl -- Acc-I(A)
Level 1: Sprint -- Jump-I(A)
Level 2: Rest -- RechRdx-I(A)
Level 1: Vigilance

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If I may offer a little advice, Ultimo...

Get some endurance redux slotted in those attacks!
You could do this with mixed IOs with your current number of slots. Even better you could get some sets in there like Thunderstrike, and six slot the attacks.

Never mind the (awesome) set bonuses you'd get 50% end reduction, recharge and accuracy plus capped damage for six slots.
You maybe dont like IO's, to that I counter, what would Tony Stark do?

But I digress...

Your idea for Determination is pretty good. As others have pointed out it does more or less equate to having reduced end costs across the board or a bigger tank of end, but that doesnt make it a bad idea at all. Its basically Vigilance that works off your own END tank instead of team health, and that sounds good to me.

The problem with coming up with an inherent for Defenders is that the primaries are so different. Any Recharge bonus favours Empaths over Force Fielders. End Discounts really benefit Sonics and Stormies, but a Trick Archer might have their end under control from the moment they start.

Trying to modify buffs and debuffs is risky - some buffs like +Recovery really cease to matter over a point, if your team is swimming in END and extra 10% wont matter. But for +Res and +Def, an extra 10% can halve incoming damage if you're close to the cap.

I'd suggest that the three constants that benefit every Defender are end discount, +damage and +recharge.
(Unless you're a pure force fielder who never attacks)

Make the bonus a mixture of these, nothing huge but maybe capping at +10% end redux, +10% damage and +10% recharge.

Make the trigger applicable to both solo and teams, possibly some aggregate of everyones end and health bars? If the team's average end/health, including your own starts to dip, the bonus kicks in. This covers a team who are struggling due to too much incoming damage or well protected but running out of steam.

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end drain works just fine on its own its somthing your toon has to skot for a lil less dmg for the fact the enimes cant atk as much i did the itf last nite we had me an elec blaster and elec brute and a third elec i forget what but the mobs never had end so the spent thier time running aroud waiting got that 1 atk even the EB's had this problem. but thats with 3 ele types you need to be able to do this all the time with just 1 toon the end drain dont help u much when they die 2 sec l8er it huts pc's cuz it slows down the next battle but is to short lived an effect for battles that last 5sec....

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Oh yeah, a group of Elec's can do wonderful things. The Repeat Offenders network has a group "Dont Whiz on the Electric Fence" who form superteams of end drainers.
I think I heard that they drained Lusca once?

Come to think of it, me and a PUG member drained the Winter Lord once, I think, me on my Kin/Elec Defender, and he was an Electric/something Blaster.

But you're right - with one drainer the damage always outpaces the end drain.

I love the early levels.
Your powers are a bit touch and go, but you level up very quickly.

I'm currently switching between two sets of alts, one lot in the 40s, the others all lowbie. Both have their charms for sure.

Thats a really cool write up, Prof. I love it.

Not a bad idea at all.

I can see it having a bit of an odd effect on min-maxers going for say, Perma-Phantom Army on an Illusion Controller, or perma-Dom on a Dominator, if theres a bit of Recharge boost in the final power.

But your core idea for natural characters is great! Cheap affordable movement boosts and a punch attack that could be used as a valid replacement for Thunder Kick for a non-kicky/mixed martial artist like Batman, Daredevil or Captain America.

I'm in the process of setting up a no-travel powers Scrapper and thinking of slotting Sprint (while knowing that Superspeed would be cheaper in terms of power investment), so definitely signed.