Eldorado

ROFL, and yes it does!

I'll let someone else try to explain it. I'm too busy chuckling over "the transmission...it improves gas mileage" and "can you park on the street, maybe?"

I used to hate Fire Breath for conceptual reasons. One character was a tech oriented character with a powered armored suit, and I REALLY didn't like fire shooting out of his faceplate instead of his gauntlets.

When they came out with "alternate animations" in the costume creator -- for Fire Breath, an animation that shoots fire from the hand -- that was THE FIRST alternate animation I grabbed! (I'm also a big fan of some of the alternate animations for Super Strength and Martial Arts, too -- thanks, devs!)

I'll agree with the "extreme concept builds & players that (perhaps) take things a bit too far in leaving out key powers" should probably warn the rest of the team in advance, like the not-so-Unyielding Invuln tank in the first post. On the other hand, minor "customization" like the sacrificing Plant/Emp or a Speed Boost-less Ill/Kin still seem like viable characters even if they're not from the same cookie cutter as many others.

I prefer that too, but I suspect we might be in the minority on that one.

This isn't the thread for me to rant (again) about how I think that -- until recently -- this game's just gotten one big "Easy Button" after another. Still, it seems to me that we've got a bunch of players who are used to steamrolling old content with no strategy except for "zerg." Then, when they're faced with new, more difficult content like Incarnate Trials and the revamped Dark Astoria they just cry "it's too hard!" since they haven't had to USE (or perhaps even learn) any strategy to speak of.

If you know what's wrong with it, why ARE you posting here exactly?

You COULD give the information to the support team if you open a support ticket, but as it says at the top of this page, "This is NOT a forum where official technical/QA support is available." The customer support team doesn't read and reply to problems in this forum.

The people that regularly DO hang out in this forum (and have answered a LOT of player questions) have certain information that they routinely ask for. By not giving it to them, as mentioned above, they're just "taking blind shots in the dark."

Good luck doing it your way, though!

If you look at the information provided by CoH Helper and HiJack This in other posts (like in this thread, you'll see exactly what sorts of DIAGNOSTIC (not personal) information they provide.

Right now this thread sort of reads like "my car is making a funny noise."

"What sort of noise? And what kind of car do you have, and what year?"

"Oh, I'm not comfortable sharing THOSE on an internet forum. But it's a STRANGE noise!"

It's the same reason doctors make you come in to their office instead of diagnosing over the phone. "You 'don't feel good?' That's it?"

Cool and thanks! I must have skimmed right over that in the patch notes -- oops!

And I think it's a totally cool WAI -- such a huge difference between "more than 15 minutes" and things like "overnight," but I'm loving it for some of my toggle-heavy characters.

The "All Access: Suggestions and Ideas" forum, perhaps? http://boards.cityofheroes.com/forumdisplay.php?f=603

Since the e-mail wasn't originally designed TO send stuff back and forth to ourselves, that's probably why they didn't set it to default to "to ourselves."

There's so many builds up there, I'm not sure which one(s) we're each working with!

I was working from the last one I saw (posted 04-07-2012 05:09 PM), and with my suggested change it's at 47.5 melee, 47.5 ranged, 48.5 AoE.

http://www.cohplanner.com/mids/downl...DDCB3FB206E6A1

That works too, and yes, you've met the soft caps on all three!

Glad it made sense -- writing it at 1 AM, I wasn't sure that it would.

A few things jump out at me -- in a perfect world, you could swap a little AoE defense to get the ranged defense up to the softcap. If you had one stray slot somewhere, I'd think about putting a set of Mako's Bite into Charged Brawl for an easy solution, but I don't see any obvious slots to spare.

...at a second glance, if you took the Perf Shifter: Acc/Recharge out of Stamina, put it in Charged Brawl with a full set of Mako's, that WOULD get you to 47.5% melee, 47.5% ranged, and 48.5% AoE! Not sure that you'd want to give up the accuracy and recharge for a damage bonus, but it's an option. [Those last couple of points to get over the softcap may not seem like much, but my elec/SD has 45.6 melee, 45 ranged, 44.1 AoE without Combat Jumping, and I DEFINITELY notice the hits coming through fighting 54's when I forget and leave Super Jump on instead. "Why am I taking so much damage? Oh, duh. <click> MUCH better!"]

The single Blessing of the Zephyr in Super Jump suggests that it used to be part of a set, but since there's just the one, it's not giving you any sort of bonuses. You could put in a generic Jump IO and save a few million INF.

Any of those will work; you could perhaps also try to slot for a little less recharge and more end reduction in a couple of attacks, like Char/Fire Blast/Fire Ball? I think a lot of elec/SD scrappers are END use intensive, but I went with Musculature on mine for more "boom!" when I Build Up/Shield Charge/Lightning Rod.

Most attacks are composed of two types of damage. (There are some attacks that are actually more, but for this example we'll stick to the basic ones, and I'll probably oversimplify in the process.)

Let's say you're fighting good ol' Council thugs, and one wants to punch your scrapper in the face. It's a punch, so it's melee, and let's pretend it's just a regular, Brawl sort of punch, so it's smashing damage. The RNG will ask itself "what's the scrapper's melee defense? 43%? And what's the smashing defense? Not as much. We'll use the 43%."

Another Council thug shoots at your scrapper with his assault rifle. Even if he's standing next to your character, the bullets are still a ranged attack, and do lethal damage. The RNG says "what's the scrapper's ranged defense? Softcapped at 45%! And the lethal defense is...meh. We'll use the 45% from ranged."

Now a third Council thug throws a fragmentation grenade into your scrapper's general vicinity. It's an AoE attack, and does lethal damage. The RNG will look at your character's AoE defense, and his lethal defense, and pick the AoE since it's the higher of the two.

In all three cases above, it doesn't matter if the smashing/lethal defense is 28% or 4%, since the positional defenses is higher!

In general, you can either build for "positional" defense (melee, ranged and AoE) or "typed" defense (smashing/lethal, fire/cold, energy/negative, etc.) and pretty much ignore the other sort. Each secondary already starts off with one sort of defense better than the other, just using SO's. Willpower works best by adding to the inherent smallish typed defenses, while Super Reflexes and Shield work best by adding to the already huge positional defenses.

People sometimes attempt to go for "the wrong kind of defenses" -- like aiming for positional defenses with willpower -- but it almost always works better by adding to the sorts of defense that the character already has.

Sounds like a PS/2 connection [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS/2_connector ] -- if it's older than that, and rectangular instead of round [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DE-9_connector ] you've probably got bigger problems than just the mouse!

The "opening three Firefox windows at once" problem sounds a lot like when not one, but two of my Logitech M520 mice died on me after a couple of years of COHing -- the microswitch under the left mouse button went bad and started "double-clicking" when I "single clicked", no matter how slowly or deliberately I pressed the button. Luckily, it was a "known issue" and Logitech sent me a second M520 because the first was under warranty, and when that second one died they sent me a newer, improved version of their four-button wireless laser mouse.

If I were you, I'd go to your local computer store and buy their cheapest, most basic wired PS/2 mouse to make sure the old mouse is indeed the problem, and use that one to uninstall whatever mouse software you have installed from your current one, then consider a better mouse. (Assuming you're running Windows, I think I'd try to use the current one to uninstall whatever drivers/software you've got installed -- I'd always thought that most PS/2 mice used Microsoft's basic mouse software until new software from the mouse manufacturer was installed.)

As someone who does this quite a bit -- when making alts of my own characters -- it's probably less of a big deal these days. For one thing, a lot of people are now using the "click on name in chat" feature to invite people so the spelling doesn't matter, as long as you're not "hidden from all invites."

In the old days when a lot of invites were by "/invite namegoeshere", though, I got pretty proficient at adding "the name's actually A-i-p-h-a" to my tells to the team leaders, and my friends would even get into the act sometimes.

[Tell] @friend: ((Which character are you on? The one with an 'i' or an 'L'?))
[Tell] -->@friend: ((Heh - 'i'))
[Team]: ((Okay -- try 'S-t-e-e-i-whatever'))

Of course, I always roll my eyes when I run into someone who's "i'ed" one of my own character's names, and I've done everything from sending good-natured tells ("The REAL ________ is highly amused at the imitation = flattery" "Heh - do you know them?" "Know them? I AM them! Except I'm not actually plural....") to hovering next to them at Wentworth's until they notice. I'm usually 2% annoyed, 88% pleased that someone else liked the name enough to do that, and 10% thinking "they really should consider another name purge" BUT, as Xzero45 mentioned, with the dev's hopes of Freedom bringing back old players, they'll almost surely not do another purge for a looong time, if ever.

"Absolutely right" to all three of these, especially the first one.

Super Reflexes really NEEDS to be softcapped to positional defenses, since that IS their defense. Anything big enough that gets through means they hit the floor.

With Willpower, anything that gets through FIRST has to get through WP's resistances, THEN make a dent against the hopefully large hit point total, THEN has to be big enough that a few ticks of Rise to the Challenge aren't enough to heal it.

That combination of innate resistance and regeneration were enough to make most WP pretty survivable on the way to 50 on SO's -- defense at this point is just icing on the cake.

And here's another recent thread on DB/WP from last week: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=285308

*facepalms too* GREAT idea and one that I didn't even think about! One of those disadvantages to being an "old dog" in this game, apparently. "New tricks? Huh? What? Well, in MY day when we were slogging uphill to Terra Volta barefoot in the snow both ways, we didn't HAVE any newfangled 'alternate builds!'"

For those who are at work or too lazy to go to Mid's, the new build certainly looks impressive: 44.1% smashing/lethal defense (and conceivably 49.1% with six catalysts, in case of debuffs or incarnate trials), 44.3% energy/negative defense, 689% regen (or 52.77 HP/sec) with one enemy feeding RttC and 4.09 end/sec recovery are all great, in my book! (I am kind of curious about the single Rectified Reticle in Blinding Feint, though -- was it part of a pair at one point?)

This is what makes this game great, in my opinion -- an infinite number of ways to build good characters, and a lot of different approaches. A couple of your slotting ideas seemed kind of weird to me (at first), but I can't argue a bit about the results.

Sometimes this forum and the Build Workshop remind me of a cooking class or something. "Hey, I've got all these ingredients, so how do I make beef stew?"

"Well, you can't. For starters, that's chicken! And those orange things are hot peppers, not carrots."

What you've created doesn't look anything like MY recipe for beef stew; instead, you've created an amazing chicken-sausage gumbo -- which IS essentially stew, after all, only different! (And now I may have to "borrow" a couple of those formerly weird ideas, too....)

Nice job!

I've done it both ways and enjoyed both. The "gradual improvement" reminds me of restoring and souping up my buddy's '71 Nova -- "it's gonna be awesome when it's done!" Just dropping 2 or 3 billion on bids overnight and then plopping new IO's into a respec the next day is kind of like trading in an old car on a brand-new one -- with a turbocharger. "Wow! This is faaasst!"

Heh - I just said pretty much the same thing over in a Scrapper thread.

Now, IF I were paying X for this software and service, I'd expect a Mid's update as soon as new issues go "live."

Why, IF I were paying 2X for some sort of premium service, I'd want the updates during beta!

Since I'm not paying anything (though I probably should make a donation) I'm quite happy with what we've got, and glad to get updates whenever we get them. (An un-updated Mid's is still VASTLY superior to a notepad and pencil, if you ask me!)

Riius: I think you're definitely in the ballbark this time around! After you get this build completed, the good news/bad news is that you'll have nothing left to do but play, tinker, play more, tweak, and keep up with minor changes in the game like the new addition of ATOs.

I still think you've got Combat Jumping overslotted for the tiny amount of defense you're getting from it, and the LotG's ARE definitely still breaking the "Rule of Five" so you're not getting the set bonus regen from it -- which makes them a rather expensive waste of slots. I'd either pick different IO's to go in there or (preferably) move two of those slots elsewhere.

As far as waiting to respec, it probably depends on what you've got for a build now and what your funds are like. If you've got the five million INF to respec now and just slot everything with SO's, I'd go for it now and then collect and slot set IO's as you get them.

Completely true, BUT....
...the one "failing" to Mid's is that it's not automagically updated the instant a new issue gets released. We can't really complain, though, since last I heard there's ONE player who's doing all the work, in addition to real life stuff and actually playing the game -- and since it's shareware, we're not even paying for it!

So yes, on paper it LOOKS like those attacks are massively overslotted even though they're not! In my most recent build, I've got an entire set of ATOs slotted in Sweeping Strike which again, we can't represent in Mid's just yet, so I just left them blank, and I think that looks even worse.

I think you're definitely on the right track, though personally I think you might have gone a little overboard on defense -- and I did much the same thing when I started rebuilding my DB/WP scrapper the second time.

There are scrappers whose idea of defense is to put the villains down first, and build for as much offense as possible and sacrifice defense, and there are those who build for tank-like defenses and sacrifice offense. I like to try to aim for a balance between, even though I'm fond of saying that "my DPS is a lot higher when I'm upright than when I'm faceplanted."

As mentioned before, willpower is based on layers of mitigation, so that "softcap" that's all-important to Super Reflexes scrappers is just a nice idea to us willpower types. If they get hit, it's gonna HURT. If we get hit, about half the smashing/lethal incoming damage will effectively bounce off thanks to our resistances, and whatever does gets through can be quickly regenerated!

You'll notice a HUGE difference in survivability if you just get smashing/lethal up to 35% or so -- I don't have the hard numbers memorized, but others here will. The gist of is that with zero defenses, half the incoming attacks from even level minions are going to miss, but with 35% defense something like 85% of them will completely miss. Yes, you can chase the softcap so that 95% will miss, but IMHO, we're talking about diminishing returns.

Your four attacks that are "just" slotted with four Kinetic Combats aren't doing anywhere near the damage they could if they were five-slotted with four KC's and an extra "something." Typhoon's Edge, which you'll still probably be using for the Sweep combo is doing even less damage.

Speaking of Sweep, Dual Blades also has some damage mitigation from the three knockdown attacks if you're alternating between Attack Vitals and Sweep. I like to focus on bosses and let the minions and LT's defeat themselves in my scrapper's flurry of AoE attacks, but while I'm doing that the boss is usually spending more time standing up than he is punching me. That extra knockdown makes my DB/WP just feel tougher and more survivable than my other six or so WP scrappers that are only knocking down a couple of things at a time.

Anyhow -- slots that are perhaps better used elsewhere would include two in Combat Jumping -- it's such a small defense to begin with that extra slots are usually unneeded. The 10% regen bonus you're getting from the Luck of the Gambler set exceeds the "Rule of Five" which says you can only get five of the same exact bonus in a character. You've got five LotG "pairs" in your character, plus another 10% regen bonus from Efficacy Adapter, so you're really not getting much from the slots in Combat Jumping at all. If it were me, I'd put in a Defense IO (or an LotG recharge when you can afford it) and move the other slots to one of your offensive powers.

Physical Perfection is the crappiest of the three heal and stamina powers willpower has available. Fast Healing and Quick Recovery give the biggest base bonus and the biggest enhanceable bonus, followed by Health and Stamina. Physical Perfection's base is half of Health or Stamina, so most people usually just put a Perf Shifter proc or a regen proc like the Numina's or Miracle unique in there. If you move two slots (and the three Numina's IO's) to Health, you'll see a bigger return on your investment in the form of more regeneration!

Confront: I LIKE confront and have it on most of my scrappers! No, I'm not a tank but I find it handy to pull aggro off squishies when I simply can't run over and stab the offending villain in the face. However, I really can't justify three extra slots in there on my builds since I'm trying to maximize my damage output at the same time! I'd move those slots over to your other attacks that can use the bonus, if I were you.

Boxing: I'm not personally a fan of using powers to be "set mules" if I think I can use the slots in an attack I'm actually going to use, but I can't argue with the results in a lot of cases, so I left it alone. I'd probably move one or two to Typhoon's Edge, one to Fast Healing and one to Rise to the Challenge to try and boost damage and/or regen, but again, that's me and there's an infinite number of ways to build good characters in this game!

Assuming you're probably slotted with SO's right now, it's probably a toss-up between "respec now and slot IO's as you find them" or "collect IO's and respec when you have half of them." I've done it both ways in the past -- these days thanks to Mid's I've usually decided by level 47 if I like a character and if so, have a build and respec ready to go at that point.

Here's my version of your build, but it's 4 AM and I have a gnawing sensation that there's something else I missed. S/L is down to 41.4, which is still great, if you ask me, damage is higher, recovery is a little higher, and I'm not sure why Mid's is showing the same regen when I'm SURE it should be higher now, but that takes us back to "4 AM and something I suspect I missed."

Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.953
http://www.cohplanner.com/

Click this DataLink to open the build!

I've caught grief for saying it before, but it's been a while:

Not everybody needs or should lust after "purples." Yes, they're great for recharge bonuses, yes, they're handy for some other ones, but for the defense bonuses scrappers often want the most, purples really aren't very good at all. If you just want to spend money and prove to others that you're "133t" get yourself a Glad Armor +3% (especially now that the prices will be dropping) and save the purples for AT's that REALLY need them.

Imagine a full screen, interactive version of your in-game Enhancement screen that you can just swap powers in and out of, move slots around with the click of a mouse, and swap enhancements with a couple of mouse-clicks, all without having to go through a respec. It also does all the number-crunching for you, shows you everything that "Combat Attributes" will with a click or two, and lets you pretend to level all the way up to level 50 without earning a single xp. It's great for planning, tweaking, and rebuilding builds, making alternate builds you can toggle between for comparison's sake, and as you see here, posting and trading text files like they were baseball cards.

It's free at http://www.cohplanner.com/ -- developed for players by players, and it's generally updated to include new things like powersets soon after new "issues" come out, subject to the designer's real life schedule.

Basically, it's awesome!

You're claws/WP. Your attacks recharge pretty fast already, if you're not using Resurgence you don't have any click powers in your secondary, either. Unless you really need it to build a higher DPS attack chain, I'd skip it, but that might just be me.

Hope that helps, and good luck!

[Edit: "yours ISN'T a bad first build" -- sorry -- was thinking of my train wreck and left out that "isn't" part -- sorry!!]

So you're saying that it's okay to overcharge people with Buy it Nao prices in the market, because that's what's it's there for, but it's not okay to overcharge people in the Market Forum, even though that's what it's here for? "Come here to make suggestions, bid or sell items, and discuss all features of the game economy. THIS IS FOR IN GAME ITEMS ONLY!"

As mentioned in countless other posts, anybody who spends more than 2 billion on an IO without doing their homework is an idiot. The "for sale" posts are here, but so are the ones talking about how the prices are going to plummet.

I don't think bad of people who are rich -- I've got over 40 billion INF in liquid assets floating around, and at a wild guess have several hundred billion in Hami-O's and IO's spread across 20 plus characters.

I just think you love to stir stuff up on the forums, which is why I have to remember to sign in before reading so I can utilize the "ignore" feature and not read your nonsensical drivel!

The OP being wrong is pretty normal around here. The OP is apparently also a two-faced troublemaker who needs to stop stirring crap up on the forums and just go back to living under his bridge:

Please tell us, o holier-than-thou one, exactly how DO you amass a net worth of hundreds of billions of INF without occasionally fleecing some of the ignorant masses you're now pretending to be claiming to try to protect?

The sheer stupidity of a "one-percenter" ranting and wailing about the other "one-percenters" is sort of hysterical. What's the real issue here? "I got mine, but damned if you should get yours?"