Frosticus

Well I don't think things are supposed to flee from it but some mobs will head for the hills

1. Mobs flee from acid mortar. It is annoying. Slotted caltrops can help. I like provoke it keeps things planted even with rain of fire and mortar on them.

2. 53% def is probably more than you need. Keep in mind seekers debuff acc quite a bit so they generally help you out if you get mildly debuffed.

3. Not sure, I use clouded in mine, or stupefy.

Generally this is how it is for def sets pre SO's at which point they take a gigantic stride forward.

That said, don't be afraid of using def inspires, they tend to go a lot further than greens.

88 damage sounds right vs +2's, but it should be two ticks of it. Fissure is with out a doubt the highest dps aoe attack because it cycles much faster than fireball.

Seeds is decent, be sure to look up how confuse actually works and if you are going for drops vs per mob inf it is a massive boost. And really you should be making a lot more money off of drops than kill inf.

The only time it tends to be an issue is if the mobs you are farming use a lot of aoes and they will pretty much wipe themselves out really quick. This can be a serious issue if you set up a handpicked vanilla mob farm in ae like I tried where they only have a grenade launcher power. Lol seeds and they all turn and aoe each other to death in about 3 seconds. That was a failed experiment.

There isn't much to the build, make sure you have roots, seeds, carrion creepers, heal, siphon speed, transference and fulcrum. From stone take fissure, seismic, dullpain, and the def shield. Build so you have at least 40% s/l def and then go kill things.

/kin/stone is nice because you don't need to bother grinding any accolades thx to perma dullpain.

To which Castle said:
His post was filled with misinformation and incorrect "beliefs" about the causation of the perceived issue. And appeared to be formed on a laughably insignificant sample. Which I (not you btw, just thought I'd point that out) and others quickly tried to correct. No point in him taxing his efforts in an area that has nothing to do with the issue.

If he truely believes that a persistent 81% damage buff isn't "that large" then I fundamentally disagree. Maybe you agree with him I dunno, I'm guessing yes cause you are picking this nit silly.

As mention the cause of the discrepancy isn't fire or DM because if you enabled shields for all primaries you'd see claws, db and kat right up there too. But now I'm just repeating myself and getting pulled into a position of similar contribution that you have made to the discussion - none.

FWIW an approximately 35% increase is all AAO is contributing on those high end builds (the rest is fire's innate higher damage and near perma souldrain for DM, procs and likely better attack chain optimization), but you'd know that if you knew what you were talking about rather than just trying to prove some pointless point that only you seem to be intent on making.

Thank goodness that isn't being said by anyone other than you. Or even implied. But you might want to reread his comments in this thread with regard to "300dps pylon solo'ers" and how he was thinking of pinning that on fire and DM (and may still be).

It is well documented how Shielders leverage AAO to produce higher st damage, it shouldn't require an asterisk each time you mention the set. Certainly not when you are talking with the person who is in charge of the whole shebang. That said I know I personally made mention quite a few times of the relative performance levels with and without AAO in effect. So I'm not sure how much clearer it needs to be laid out considering the "caveat" was already mentioned several times.

Definitely, but people tend to go where people are. Especially in a social environment. I'm absolutely sure more people moved to Virtue/Freedom than moved out into the more rural settings. I have a sneaking feeling that Virtue saw the largest influx of players.

But it doesn't really matter as long as there are "enough" people to partake in the activity of your choice when you choose to do it. For me at least that is my definition of a healthy population in a MMO. If that is true of other servers then great, it wasn't when I started the game 4yrs ago and I doubt it is now, but we each have our own preferences and personal thresholds.

I pretty sure that is intended. That way you get equitable performance for using the power "as intended" ie to charge and you don't feel pressure to soak up AAO fodder and cast the power at your feet. Yet if you decide to do the latter it will still perform on par with charging from a damage standpoint.

I agree 100% with this. Honestly the inaccuracy purported in this thread by Castle has me wondering how far off numerous other situations could be. I know I gave a big "you're kidding right?" when they increase the damage of SC by 50% not very long ago, but it seemed hunky doory with QA and the devs.

Now we are in a situation where the playerbase has grown accustomed to the performance and to reach balance it needs to be literally slashed in half. A downward shift from 133 as introduced to 106 would be a lot easier to swallow than dropping it from 200 now. Either that or even more time needs to be sunk into the power making it behave uniquely and abide by its own ruleset. I'm personally fine with "special cases" but how many cracks does it take to get it dialed in?

Lastly I have to agree about Castle looking at rikti pylons and making sweeping generalizations, and I think everyone should note how quickly we all jumped on him for that. The issue for me is Castle seemingly unaware that a persistent 81% damage buff would result in roughly ~35% faster kill times. That is disconcerting as the disconnection between the spreadsheets and actual performance might be cavernous. It is kneejerk reactions like that that sound disturbingly like "everyone laughs at you if you don't take EM".

The last thing I want to touch on with regard to Shields is that people seem to forget that it is the only armor set in the game that actually buffs teammates (and pretty well at that). That unique property may not carry much value to a solo shielder's mitigation value, but it has to carry value somewhere in the grand scheme. It can buff with more def value than a FF controller's dispersion bubble. That is not insignificant.

Well at least this post makes it sound like you are no longer off in la-la land. For those wondering this will change the scrapper version down to 106.36 base damage (for the main aoe). So basically half of what it does now.

That is a pretty major reduction when it eventually hits. I feel a bit vindicated for mentioning that the original value (133) was a lot more balanced, but that was only as perceptive as spotting a gigantic purple elephant strolling down the street, so I'm not out celebrating or anything.

Unfortunately if/when this goes through it will make FA a lot more offensive by proxy, which may translate to some QoL upgrades to the damage delivery, but probably no significant bump in said delivery.

We'll have to wait and see how it all comes out in the wash and whether Castle decides for a full scale reduction to the correct values or allows some wiggle room in the power.

The only powers this would actually be justifiable for is probably the crash based blaster nukes. Having them capable of exceeding 16 targets would be a nice upside to so much downside relative to the pseudo-nukes.

SC sure as heck doesn't warrant such a change.

Exactly, which coincidentally enough is how it happens in the co-op zones now.
Dark/dark/dark def lf team...
Oh sorry we are only accepting dark/dark/soul corruptors.


Even at the damage cap a corr w/ scourge factored in deals ~1.5 x as much damage as a defender, but that difference is still just a drop in the bucket that is the entire teams capped damage output. If you are on a team that can notice the loss of ~3% of the total team damage then wow. Especially because if that defender has a res debuff it is more than likely made up...and then some.

This just caught my eye and could have some serious ramifications. If you are talking about a fully built Shield vs future content it means one of two things (or both).
a/Mobs in GR are going to be much harder (excellent) and will probably have significant tohit buffing ability.
b/Fire is so badly in need of a buff if you are ok with the peak survivability attainable on shields.

Based on this I'd like to retract everything I've said negative about Shields. I no longer want you to look into the issue at all.

If Shield Charge is all good can you share some of that love to other AT's like blasters (excluding arch), corrs, defs, doms, and trollers? They want to be "not that bad" too.

Lastly the discrepancy is not fire or dark, go ahead and enable shields on your internal server for claws, kat, and db, then pimp the builds. They will be right up there in performance too. Maybe with five brightly lit arrows pointing in the right direction the path will be visible.

edit: good news about FA, hopefully it will be "not that bad" with powers like AAO and SC after you finish with it.

I tend to agree. But not everyone plays the same and not everyone takes optional powerpools and not every attack set offers even remotely similar mitigation. Unless you are prepared to account for every possible composition and nearly every possible playstyle it is probably more silly to start arbitrarily including random additional elements outside of personal information gathering.

If you can't compare things at their most basic form then the possibility of comparing them at more complex intervals literally flies right out the window into obscurity.

I am serious, if we are unable to compare something in this state:

Then heaven help us when it gets to this point

While kins (cause unless you have a buttload of rads/emps/therms you aren't riding at cap) are popular I wouldn't say it is common to be above 400% damage, but ymmv and depends if you pug vs regular team I imagine.

8 rad corrs don't deal more damage though
base+buff+debuff
0.75*(1.95+1.6)*2.8 = 7.455
vs
0.65*(1.95+2)*3.4 = 8.73

They only match defenders vs bosses or higher for the 17% scourge rate.

-res has a 300% cap, that is not a low ceiling in any way shape or form. It's roughly equivalent to +600% damage in most situations. Which is only applicable for one AT in the game. Buffing has a much lower ceiling than debuffing in terms of raw speed and debuffing is where you tend to feel the difference in the two AT's (like I pointed out in my last post) Like you said though, one kin def can cap the team, where it usually takes two kin corrs, those other 7 spots can be spent on debuffers.

How many tohit debuffing corrs to floor +4's? How many defs to do the same? Corrs don't really have defense buffers sooo they are going to be relying on tohit debuffs.

But like I said, you'll be very hard pressed to notice the difference in a team because they are so interchangeable unless you are pressing above the defender damage cap, which depending on who you play with is either every team for you, or sometimes for the rest of us. And even then the superior -res of the defender all but negates the extra personal damage the corr does on a team, which I already highlighted.

Considering fire does over double the raw dps of sonic for corrs despite fire dot not counting toward scourge I guess we'll just have to wait and see. Sonic also isn't a direct port, the corr version does comparatively more damage than it should with the first two attacks vs the defender version. Those two attacks are the workhorses as well.

Actually, I just ported fire to defs for fun. Sonic will need to maintain 4 stacks of -20% res to keep up. I have a lot of sonic experience and that just isn't that common. Not impossible by any means, just not that common.