Dysmal

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Ballista is a Toggle Dropping *******!

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Yeah, he is. He was designed to be as close to a Player Hero as we could make him. How do you guys like the Toggle Drop on him? Is it too nasty or does it add a nice challenge?

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He's absurdly over powered. Why should we expect a PvE foe to have powers that work in a PvP manner?

In PvE, your toggles are only supposed to drop if you''re stunned, held, or slept. Every other mob I've encounted in my history of CoH and CoV (both betas) behaves in this fashion. How the heck is it fair for me suddenly find out that a mob gets the benefit of his powers working in a PvP fashion? I mean, are you going to start giving Blaster's 30% unresistable damage in PvE now?

Either make the force bolt he uses a stun attack, or drop the toggle dropping ability from him. Having random toggle dropping appear magically in the PvE game is very annonying.

Anyone know which sound is the one used for blinkies? Thats one I might want to make louder.

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Never a good idea to bypass the updater...and as Scorp said, you don't have to do that to get what you're wanting.


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There is no reason not to bypass the updater unless there is a new patch. Many people get stuck at "Connecting" frequently, and have to do constant DNS flushes to get the updater to connect. Rather than deal with that headache everytime you want to play CoH/CoV, you can happily bypass the updater.

I have been doing this for over a year and it has never caused me a problem with the game. Nor have any of the members of my SG that I have given this information to reported any problems.

With this method if you dont have the latest patches of CoH/CoV,when you click on a server you will get an error message telling you you have the wrong version and to run the updater.

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The do tend to 1) scatter and 2 ) stay at range.

Makes it fun for melee only types.

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Now all they need to do is apply that logic to all primarily ranged mobs in the game. A man with a rocket launcher should not run in and punch you at first oppertunity. He should stand back and shoot rockets at you.

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Twilight grasp's animation time doesn't bug me. It's AoE is pretty big and it heals for a lot. It's also a very, VERY powerful debuff. To me, it's a debuff with a healing component.

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I agree. It's actually comparable in magnitude with Empathy's AoE heal, and it does debuff toHit and health recovery significantly. I don't find the animation very annoying. Maybe I just remember the way it used to be.

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To be specific, Twilight Grasp is a single target 20% To Hit Debuff, 12.5% Damage Debuff and -Regen Debuff, with a large side helping out AoE Heal(base heal is equal to 23% of your base HP).

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Just letting you know I have read this, and will be addressing the valid issues.

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Whoah, a redname post in the Defender forum? From Geko even. Did someone break the seventh seal?

Thanks for reviewing this Geko. Please let us know what issues you consider valid, and how you intend to proceed.

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Do you remember what it was like when they made the bad guys tougher? It was as if millions of voices cried out all at once.....


.....and kept crying until they rolled the changes back.

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He wasnt talking about something silly like the old boss changes where they upped their damage and HP (which screwed over lower damage ATs). Thats the lazy way to make the game "harder." Which it isnt really, just makes the math different. No more thought or tactics were required. My Dark Defender, for example, just had to burn one or two more Catch a Breaths to deal with the harder bosses. It wasnt any more challenging though, just a bigger time sink.

I believe he was talking about doing something to make the enemies smarter, to improve mob AI, to create different classes of mobs that present new and different challenges to the players that require more thinking. Those are all a little harder to do I'm sure, which is probably why we havent seen it. Though I'm not sure how hard it would really be to make Defender style mobs (like Crey medics) actually spend their time buffing/debuffing and healing their fellow mobs instead of running in to brawl the heroes.


And Statesman, just shut up about whats fun and whats boring until you post your complete vision of what is and what is not fun. You come off as a pompous twit every time you mention those two words in a post.

I'll believe you actually have data gathered from your customers on what they enjoy about this game when I hear of many people receiving surveys like the one NCSoft asked me to fill in about customer service from the GMs once. I've been subscribed since launch, and I have yet to see any evidence of any effort on Cryptic's part to do market research among their customer base. Sure, these forums are here, but from what I've heard you dont put very much weight into anything that gets written here.

How hard would it be to put together a websurvey and randomly email a few thousand subscribers every few months to find out what your customers actually like about your game? NCSoft already seems to have the technology set up to do it. Give them a call.

You dont seem to have put in the effort to figure out what your customers think is fun. Dont presume to speak to us about what is fun or boring until you do.

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What about defensive powers such as Steamy Mist and Shadowfall? It's not enough that they have almost nil defense since the last patch, but they also are wastes of endurance once a good tanker joins the group?

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The main point of Steamy Mist and Shadowfall is their Damage Resistance, not the defence. I dont find a tanker being on the team suddenly makes everyone having quite nice resits to Eng/Neg/Psi or Cold/Fire/Eng pointless. I would think in the I5 world the added Damage Resistance that those two powers provide would even be valueable to tankers.

My prediction?

Issue 6: Parry's defense bonus reduced for /Regen Scrappers.
Parry enabled some BS/Regen and Katana/Regen players to compensate somewhat for previous adjustments to Regen powers. This was not intended. For /Regen Scrappers, Parry now operates at 1/4 of previous effectiveness

I just thought I'd pop in here and say, this is the Dark Defender guide that made me realize I didnt need to write one. BN does a great job here of providing more than a cookie-cutter approach to a power set combo, instead providing information on multiple strategies. I'll post my current build in here once I get CoHPlanner running again.

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You mean whenever States puts down his hand-held and stops fighting 64-bit bosses? Whenever States says ANYTHING I just roll my eyes. He is clueless, and a liar to boot. His team just nods and goes with whatever he says, whether they just don't disagree with him or are allowed to. It shows in the absolute lack of quality in the game.

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Generally speaking, the following has been true:

* If Statesman says something in the pipeline, we do get it - or we get a reason why we didn't. The weight of examples is the former, and not the latter.

* If a change makes the game painful to play, it gets rolled back or altered so as to remove the pain. Boss boosts in I3, for example, and the purple patch.

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This is true. It still doesnt mean that States isnt clueless. Look at his laughable explanation of how great defense is vs. resistance.

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Given the massive drawbacks of EF, it should be stronger than TP or FR in effect.

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I never thought I'd see the day when a defender begins to believe that their defender powers should somehow be better than the next defender powers.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Elvis has left the building.

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Oh please, that is NOT what I said. I said it should be stronger "in effect". That means the drawbacks in end usage and application of the power are such that the actual effects (ie the -res debuff) should be more potent. Being weaker is some ways, it should be stronger in other ways. You know, that little thing called balance?

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Well, it has a -damage component, which Freezing Rain and Tar Patch lack. I think that makes it more powerful.

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That depends really. Tar Patch is a slow, and does -Jump -Fly, effectively keeping targets in the area of the debuff. EF lacks that. Freezing Rain does Slow and Knockdown, as well as defense debuff, which contribute to keeping people in the area of the debuff, and making those targets easier to hit. The kicker though, is the ability to stack both powers. With that, I think I consider Tar Patch and FR better powers at this point, especially Tar Patch.

It all depends on what aspects of a power are importan to the individual player though.

I wonder if its time for whoever is in charge of patch notes to be fired?

Its been over a year, and we still cant get accurate or complete patch notes from the Developers. This leads me to believe they either dont keep an accurate change log themselves, or simply dont care about keeping the player base informed, which runs contrary to their stated goal of making sure players dont make uninformed decisions.

Surely, after over a year of not doing a compentant job of communicating information to the players accurately or promptly, its time for some kind of action on Cryptic's part.

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I just wanted to post this in case anyone though I might have said anything to garner the 45s limitation. As you can see, some of what I said was taken to heart, and some of what I said its questionable if anything got acted upon.

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It seems like there's a disconnect between how Ice works and how Statesman thinks it should work. It's like there's some kind of weird idea that it's actually effective lodged in the devs' heads.

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<resits urge to make a crack about whats lodged in the dev's heads>

Oh wait, I guess I didnt resist strong enough

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if you only take 3 pools can you get 2 APPs. Does power build up effect fulcrum shift or siphon speed?

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No, you can only choose one epic pool. Power Build Up boosts the same things as Power Boost. Below is the list, which I snagged from one of Pulsewave's guides. As you can see, it doesnt look like it has any effect on Fulcrum Shift or Siphon Speed.

Effect: +100% to the following effects:

Disorient Duration
Sleep Duration
Confuse Duration
Fear Duration
Immobilize Duration
Hold Duration
Knockback (KnockUp) distance
Repel stregth
Run speed
Fly speed
Defense Buffs
Heal
Accuracy Buffs
Endurance Drain

Why the heck isnt this stickied anymore?

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Oh - one other change coming soon to the Training Room...

This was an idea taken right from this forum. Since Ice Armor has no Resistance, it's a zero sum sort of power set. In other words, you're hit or your not. Well, someone (I've forgotten who) suggested adding a Damage Debuff to one of the powers - and we did! Chilling Embrace gains the ability to debuff mob damage (though it's Recharge debuff is slightly slower now).

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Interesting, Damage Debuffs rock, as my Dark Miasma playing brethren well know. This should help Ice significantly with the one shot by AVs problem, when combined with the lowered AV damage you have proposed.

Care to tell us the percentage of the damage debuff that you will be assigning to Chilling Embrace?

Also, please clarify as to whether this will be specific to Ice Armor, or if it will apply to Blaster-Ice Manipulation-Chilling Embrace, or to the Chilling Embrace that Ice Control-Jack Frost runs.

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Here's the real numbers (that's what I get for doing stuff from memory).

Wet Ice
0.5% base
1.265% Defence from Wet Ice with ++ SO's.

17.71% Max Defence from Energy Absorbtion (not what I had earlier).

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Thats just absurd States. A power that gives you that low a benefit when six slotted with SOs might as well not have that attribute enhancebale.

I'm not entirely sure why the Ice Armor set is the target of so much reduction in effectivenes.

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So we're going back and changing the damage done by AV's so that it's no longer possible for a Tanker to be one shotted.


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Absolutely fantastic news! Best thing I have seen since I5 hit test! I am very pleased to see this! Mostly for ice of course (I still have an Ice tank after my character purge of all non-I4 modified toons), but also for the invulns getting one-shotted by non-S/L AVs!

This in turn will help non-tanks too, since some lowering of that insane damage cannot be bad for them.

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I'll have to do some further thinking on this, but reducing AV damage is something that I hope they think through carefully, given the ability of some non-tanker power sets to severely reduce the damage output of an AV through debuffs.

I just hope that when making changes to mobs to solve problems with one AT or powerset, that they consider the balance implications for other ATs and powersets.

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Because he could have just said "asking" but instead stretched for the sake of DRAMUH~!

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*sigh*

People, my people...

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Crying was a poor choice of words. It would have been much smarter to use a word that couldnt easily be interpreted as an insult. I don't think thats too much to ask of a man with two Master's degrees.

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what i would like to see added/modified with badges...

1. progression bar for all badges
2. lower amount for monkey badge
3. count added to progression bar (like for health,endurance, and xp)

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Seconded. Points one and two are SERIOUS quality of life issues. The third is only a MAJOR quality of life issue.

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They did number two. Testing verifies that the Monkey badge has been lowered substantially. I had less than a quarter of the monkies needed on live on my blaster, yet when I logged in on test, I got the badge. Other people are reporting lowered amounts for the Illusionist badge as well.

Great, someone forgot what comes after Klattu and Verada again.

People really need to stay out of the forum graveyard.

These all seem like reasonable changes. While you're fixing Ice Arrow, please review the changes made to Petrfying Gaze. It is now the worst single target hold in the game, worse than many holds in secondary or Ancillary pools.

Glue Arrow is comparable to Lingering Radiation, a Defender power. Ice Arrow is comparable to Petrfying Gaze, a Defender power. Flash Arrow, while very similar to Smoke, can be compared to Fearsome Stare in terms of being an AoE accuracy debuff, though without the control element.

Entangling Arrow is actually a clone of Web Grenade, a Blaster secondary power.

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Just a quick note since this is a hot topic. Regarding the issue of Earth Thorn Casters stacking multiple Quicksands (and such).
Without getting into details, ALL CoT Thorn Casters have been reworked. The amount of control powers these minions have will be severely reduced or outright removed. Expect other related changes with all Thorn Casters.

This change will come in Expansion 5.

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Whoo. I think it would be cool if you mixed it up, so you dont get just big groups of Earth thorns, or big group of Fire, or big groups of Air . Having a few of each kind would be far more interesting than getting smoked by stacking powers from one type of mob.