Frosticus
-
Posts
2597 -
Joined
-
So I'm confused. If I select "no bosses" on my difficulty slider do the mobs I face only give 50% of the reward in normal pve or is this just an AE specific thing that pushes the "MA is a viable way to level to 50" statement?
What if I make a full faction in AE and then select "no bosses" on my difficulty slider - - 50%? -
Great work. The mids program is the best tool created for this game imo. Thank you for picking up the pieces and continuing the program!
-
Quote:Controllers get the best of everything. Not sure why it isn't a 540 rech like blaster Hoarfrost, but...well, controllers get the best of everythingOriginally Posted by StratoNexus
Does Earth's Embrace really recharge in 360 seconds?
For anyone wondering about fireball vs fissure.
Fireball:
64.24 (contained) + 0 to 9.18 dot damage
1.118 cast time
32 sec rech
=33.118 sec cycle time for a max of 2.21 dps
@ +200% rech
=11.78 cycle time for max of 6.23 dps
@ cap
=7.518 cycle time for max of 9.77 dps
Fissure
55.06 contained
2.244 cast time
20 sec rech
=22.244 sec cycle time for 2.48 dps
@200% rech
=8.91 cycle time for 6.17 dps
@ cap
=6.244 cycle time for 8.82 dps
*That is max dot for fireball too. I don't have the dot formula handy, but fissure is at worst equal to fireball over time with avg dot. Then recall that Fissure can slot the FF rech proc and an extra kb damage proc if desired.
The downside is that you need to be on the ground to use fissure and it has very short range (same sized aoe as fireball though). Both of which aren't really an issue for a /kin troller that is probably farming.
Finally my Seismic Smash can do 630 damage to an even con (at cap). For those times you start to get tired of killing everything with high dot damage it is nice to bust out a move that is right up there with the hardest hitting attacks in the game.
ie
bu+Energy Transfer = 566 damage
bu+headsplitter = 465 damage
rage+KO blow = 440 damage
aim+bu+total focus = 716 damage
And with all the recharge on a kin I can have it up as often as those guys (well no HS, but the others)
I'd say troller seismic smash is in fine company
-
Quote:Scrappers and brutes are very good for sure, but they are nowhere near the most powerful st or aoe toons in the game.Originally Posted by SpittingTrashcan
Yes, because single target debuffs (especially regeneration debuffs) and damage have exactly the same value against a single AV or GM over the course of 30 minutes as they do against 16 minions, lieutenants, and bosses over the course of ten seconds.
More seriously, yes, I'm well aware that certain builds of other ATs can meet or exceed Scrapper performance in general PvE. That doesn't change the fact that Scrappers (and Brutes) collectively are well-served by the build and challenge options available. The reason I consider this the golden age of the Scrapper is not so much because I necessarily expect things to get worse as because I don't see a realistic way for things to get better. Right now is a great time for characters with good AoE damage and moderate (enhanceable to excellent) survivability.
The only AT that is really worth being envious of is Controllers because they are the most powerful toons in the game.
Top farming builds
Top AV killing builds
GM solo'ing options
Effective st dps that can surpass any scrapper (though I'm curious to see what dm/shield/blaze and fm/shield/blaze scrappers top out at).
I very much agree with your last sentence. My plant/kin/stone is looking forward to i16 as I'm pretty sure creepers let me go beyond the agro cap. -
Quote:Ya cause scrappers are the best farmers...Originally Posted by SlimPickens
In the time it took any other AT to solo a GM the scrapper just defeated about 2000 mobs. And gathered all the rewards for so doing. How much was that GM worth?
Meanwhile, back at the auction house... -
Look at fissure, look at what you can slot it with. Compare cycle time and damage output to fireball.
That's reason 1.
Look at Seismic Smash.
That's reason 2.
Look at hp capped without having to bother getting any hp accolades.
That's reason 3.
Look at pretty easily hitting the s/l softcap.
That's reason 4.
A /stone app troller with EE up and softcapped s/l is 18x more survivable (vs attacks with a s/l component) than a /fire app troller with just fireshield and about ~1200 hp. That's before accounting for the mitigation offered by fissure. -
I don't think any scrappers have solo'd any GM's yet. Be sure to let Corrs, MM's, Trollers, and Def's know when they do
-
Quote:Just like in D2 people that are afraid of dying sit back and play really timid and generally contribute far less than someone going (pardon my french) balls to the wall. Having a self rez is exactly like having an extra man in other games - great analogy - it fits so well with blasters and is imo a real game changer for the AT as it allows a blaster to shed all/most fear and do what a blaster can do.Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Ah, good old Diablo 2... Was there ever a worse game that was still so damn popular?
Yeah, I remember the Hardcore option in Diablo 2. I heard you had a better chance for unique drops with a Hardcore character or some such. Me, I never had a use for it. I died all the time. Of course, that's because my characters were gimped, but then the game really did invite gimp builds with its unsupportive system.
Personally, I don't enjoy playing games and fearing dying in them. I fear death and injury in real life, which makes me both a wimp and a coward. I enjoy being able to avoid being that in a game. In City of Heroes, I play the game like I have fun - just go for it and don't worry about anything. I enjoy being able to chance the odds, to go out and do stupid stuff, to skirt the edges of what's reasonable and, yes, even to flip out and kill stuff from time to time.
I could play Blasters strategically and carefully. I could pull, I could divide, I could hit and run. I could play them like squishies. I don't want to. I play my Blasters like I play my Scrappers - aggressively, offensively and with an eye for the kill. If I have a choice between pulling a spawn one by one and exploding the whole spawn at once (which is usually possible), I'll pick the latter every time, despite the fact that I WILL eat an alpha whenever I do that. If I die doing so, provided I died because I made a mistake, then that's how things go. If I can resurrect on top of that, all the better.
Mistakes will happen. They're half the fun.
When I have rotp recharged I play like I do when I have a FF or decent emp on the team, which needless to say is about twice as aggressively as otherwise. -
Quote:Possibly on that regard, but in order to leverage the tiny aoe of mudpots and the tiny aoe of fissure (much smaller than troller version) you pretty much need something that draws the enemies into a clump.Originally Posted by ShoeTattoo
Plant/earth might not synergize as well as other sets with earth assault, though, because plant's pet immobilizes frequently, giving -knockback, and knockup/back/down is a frequently appearing damage mitigation feature of earth assault. Thematically it seems like a good pairing, though, and the superior mitigation in earth assault might help to keep plant's relatively fragile pet upright a little better.
So while plant can potentially negate the popcorn effect of earth assault it is probably the best set for actually getting anything out of the AoE's. -
Quote:With how often the lockdown proc goes off in poison trap that would actually be a neat looking combo considering it uses the telsa cage vfx.Originally Posted by Sagamemnon
Seekers are just awesome. People scoff at them but those little toys of joy are wonderful. Plus when combined with any primary that has a stun (archer/sonic off the top of my head) can stun bosses. Since the mag in seekers is only 2, its enough to stack with the mag 3 for bosses.
Side note. I actually saw and Electric/Traps corr the other day!!! Now that is really a rare bird among the aviary!!! -
Quote:Perfect, it already exists. I'd forgotten the temp powers from the winter events.Originally Posted by Rigel_Kent
-
The only issue on a fire/kin corr is that how do you keep them out of melee? A single enemy sure, but what about multiple?
That's why I personally just embrace it and say to myself: alright I'm likely going to be in melee a lot to use my kin powers, how can I make that as painless as possible?
For the new build you posted you should be fine with the lack of aoe def. Most aoes have a s/l component, or energy. Firebreath, psysceam/nado and a few others will still get through, but that's why kin has 400 hp transfusion...
You'd be hard pressed to notice 0.7% def away from soft cap without extensive use of herostats
Quote:You're losing me. If your primary goal is to be supportive then you should have gone with ice or dark or sonic paired with kin. A fire/kin corr should be leading the team in damage. If 60% of the kills on the team aren't mine on my fire/cold, or my fire/traps, or even my fire/rad corrs then I'm not playing hard enough. Fire/kin's damage is like taking those toons and putting it on steroids.While I won't look away from a build that will let me do both, my main objective will be to boost my teammates AoE damage so that they can wipe out the spawns.
Anyway, your new build looks a lot better to me. Very survivable without skimping too much on power acc/rech. If/when you achieve it I'm sure you'll be very satisfied. -
Quote:Castle has plans.Originally Posted by EmpYou
Even amongst the hardcore, stacking vengence wasn't done. Its the reason vengence was/is banned for most arena matches.
It is an exploit and its not that difficult to do if youre good and practiced. Why people would do it in zone PvP is beyond me. PvP now is like shooting fish in a barrel, Im not sure how you can make it any easier. -
Quote:Being able to 6 slot stamina was about as good as stamina+miracle+numina+perf proc and cost about 400 million lessOriginally Posted by Miladys_Knight
Yeah there's several powers that are like that. Fallout, Vengance, all the self rez, all the ally rez, etc.
You have to wonder sometimes about what was going on in the minds of the original Dev team.
I can see, in my mind, a conversation between Geko and State's going something like this.
Geko - "Well, Fire/Fire for blasters is almost done. I'm not sure what to do about them. They will do lots of damage but not enough to keep themselves from dying every other spawn with the aggro that they will draw."
States - "Well how about we put in "Epic" Powers and give the blasters a self rez power? We could call it "Rise of the Phoenix" that would be all comic themey and all."
Geko - "Oooooh, I like that. That's way more fun than giving them a power that actually would, I dunno, let them survive overwhelming odds every once in a while. Great idea."
States - "Hey, this idea it just hit me. In keeping with that over whelming odds thought, what say we give blasters a way to do even more damage. Let call it inherent powers and give them one called defiance so that when they take all this extra damage they do even more damage and can defeat foes quickly."
Geko - "Brilliant! Though what happens when a healer repairs the damage?"
States - "Well they lose the damage buff so we'll just tell blasters to have healers not heal them."
Geko - "Brilliant once again!" It's an even better idea than Knockback as mitigation for melee!"
I kinda think the same thing happened with Endurance useage.
Geko - "Well Fire/Fire for tanks is all most done. I can tell from looking at the numbers though that it will be using way too much endurance."
States - "Well how about we get rid of one of the hard hitting powers that uses a lot of endurance?"
Geko - "Great idea again boss! Well, wait though, what do we replace that attack power with?"
States - "Well how do the endurance numbers look with out that attack power?"
Geko - "The set still burns too much endurance even with out it."
States - "Ok, easy then. We replace that attack with a power that gives back some endurance. Let's call it consume. You can give it a little damage I suppose but you can fix the endurance problems with that."
Geko - "Brilliant once again boss."
States - "Oh, but make sure that it doesn't recharge too fast. We still want them to slot rest for recharge to stay all comic bookey."
I think the current dev team is aware that many power sets use too much endurance. That's why things like:
*No end cost for brawl.
*Miracle + recovery unique.
*Numina + regen and recovery unique.
*Recovery set bonuses.
*Ultra high recovery set bonuses that aren't lost to exemping in purple sets.
*Physical Perfection Power.
Keep entering the game.
If /fire manip had the kind of survivability/mitigation that say /ice manip has you don't think that would raise any eyebrows? None at all?
Old defiance isn't as powerful as new defiance, but it was about 16x more fun. If I wanted to play a brute with fury I'd play a brute with fury, hence why I deleted both my high level blasters with new defiance in play and am now just getting back into the AT.
The old team may not have always had the same idea of fun as me, but it was pretty clear they strive for "fun". The new team strives after making sure the excel boxes all line up in neat little rows. If "fun" occurs then great, but it is probably about the 5th most important thing to them.
Finally, IMO self rezzes are awesome on blasters and I wish each epic pool had one.
Munitions - resurgence
elec - electrical version of RotP
cold - something similar to energy absorbtion, but instead it rezzes you
force - Revive -
Quote:I hit aim>boostrange and use a fully range slotted tp foe and drone them from across the zoneOriginally Posted by CrazyJerseyan
I think its stupid as well, but for a different reason. To use 4 accounts to help you PvP or help you "enjoy" PvP is pretty sad in my opinion. But, one toon with triple Vengeance and Kinetic, Cold and Heat buffs is enough to rile up most everyone in zone (cept for the people that are on the side of the exploiter it seems)...DR regardless. This tactic happens pretty regularly and I usually just ignore the offender if I can.
If you see someone "ruining" fun it is never really that difficult to "ruin" theirs.
also people doing such things aren't "exploiting" well other than stacking veng which has been cited as not WAI by the devs. -
If it is fun and effective for you does anything else really matter?
-
I greatly enjoy my fire/traps (lvl 48 last night). It has always been a lot better than people give it credit for and the completely lack of carrying bf's is a huge boon - more reds on board!
However, I would say my fire/rad and rad/dark were both easier to solo in the early-to-mid game, so I imagine pairing either of those secondaries with ice or sonic would be even better solo.
My fire/traps in late game is amazing though. Softcapped s/l at lvl 42, bout 30% ranged (for now), hold proc in poison trap, seeker drones and it is beyond safe. In fact I can count on one hand how many insp (other than reds!) I've used since 42 and I use aidself about once every 4 missions. I generally play on setting 4-5. I also solo'd Chimera AV (no insp/temp/click accolade) the other day very easily and considering I'm an aoe spec I was happy. -
Gone the way of CoP I'm afraid and probably some other things promised on the CoV release box heh.
-
Sure a rikti rifle will go through s/l def as it is pure energy damage, but a rikti sword will go through ranged def.
The reason s/l def works so well with kin is because most kins play in melee range or very close to it as that is where the set is by far the strongest. If you want to play from range and are willing to constantly reposition then there is no reason a ranged def build can't do well too.
That said the build you posted is making some huge sacrifices just for better def. Like poorly slotted attacks, siphon speed, stamina, fulcrum, and transfusion. IMO and IME the main idea of a kin is to boost your aoe damage to ludicrous levels and wipe out huge spawns of enemies. To enable that you build in enough mitigation. However, you have skimped on practically every power that will lead to the main purpose of a aoe/kin all for the purpose of more survivability.
It just seem like for 1.5 billion or w/e that build is going to cost you could build a lot more powerful fire/kin.
If money is no object and you are that concerned with def then I'd personally aim for something more like this:
Click this DataLink to open the build!
Sofcap def s/l/e (to protect you against rikti gunman )
41% def ranged
Much better slotting, probably a much more powerful toon, but ymmv.
Conversly, if you adhere to a slightly different mentality of "enough" mitigation for most situations and 1 insp from softcap which allows you to build for a lot better things like more recharge (no insp grants recharge ) then you could go for something like this:
Click this DataLink to open the build!
Anyway, like I said earlier, it is your toon and as long as you enjoy it then go for w/e you feel like. I'm just throwing ideas out for you to do with them as you see fit.
Take care. -
First person I've ever heard use barb swipe and short animation in the same sentence without some negative descriptors thrown in.
-
It is untrue that powers like fireball check anything other than aoe def. Regardless of whether you are the primary target or otherwise it checks aoe def. This is the case for all aoes such as energy torrent, footstomp, fireball, icestorm, etc.
*many of these attacks may also roll against other def types as well, such as footstomp vs smashing and icestorm vs cold and lethal. Whatever your highest def value is the one that will be used.
(though it might be kind of neat if they made multi typed attacks roll multiple times in the presence of layered defenses. ie you have a build with high aoe and high smash def and Footstomp hits through your aoe def, but then rolls a miss vs your smash and ends up missing. Would kind of add some value to a few corner case builds that have positional and typed def and make the idea of softcap or fail less important as something with 30% to positional and typed would be very good too... maybe too well).
At any rate, aoe def can usually be skimped on. It's nice, but generally not that necessary as a main focus of a build.
IME I've found kin's work very well aiming for s/l def and in the case of corrs and trollers it is usually really easy to do.
It isn't my toon, but imo you'd probably like it better (or at least find it more effective) if you dropped firebreath and picked up rain of fire and when with mace mastery instead. Lets just say that if you want to accelerate defeat times pretty much nothing compares to fulcrum + rain of fire (web envelope to keep em in it). RoF also doesn't require repositioning, which as far as I can tell firebreath is the only thing making it so you have to jostle around.
With a s/l build you could still sit at range when desired and be protected from pretty much everything too and still be safe in the event that something wonders up to you and tries to use melee. (the number of attacks with a s/l component is > pure ranged attacks).
Lastly, the build you posted is pretty affordable except you opted to include 1 of the single most expensive IO's in the game (pvp +def), which is worth upwards of 10x the cost of the rest of your build... -
Quote:Ok just tested with powerboost on my corr. It inherits nothing not even for the duration of pb like lightning storm does.Originally Posted by Trickshooter
Because it's a pet, if it inherits +Special buffs, it will only last the duration of Power Boost.
Too bad I was hoping (but not expecting) a hidden synergy for traps that would help improve its status a bit. -
Quote:Insprations... Inspirations! Well I never; that's just outrageous. hmph.Originally Posted by Sentry4
Yes. The people who interupt duels use heavies, summon shivans and pop inspirations. Duelers dont.
-
Quote:hmmOriginally Posted by JDub
Arcana said she worked on it for about a year, so I'm pretty confident it's accurate.
-
Quote:Oy! I didn't even notice that it said mag 3 for the base of SS.Originally Posted by macskull
Hm, mag of Seismic Smash got dropped from 4 to 3 (Dom version only) on test with today's patch, wonder if Domination's working properly on it now.
So it is mag 3 and then domination adds mag 1.
Base Mag 3 = 11.92 sec (lvl 50)
Dom Mag 1 = 17.88 sec (lvl 50)
*just checked on test
Somebody better send a basket to get this rectified cause that is pretty crappy.
Also Stone melee users better get ready for their SS to get dropped to mag 3. I mean if the dominator change to total focus that ushered in what was to come for everyone else is any indication.
And just so everyone is clear controller Seismic is Mag 4 (can't recall it every doing "overpower" for an additional mag 1, but maybe). But at any rate if there is no issue for blueside to have a mag 4 attack on a control based AT, then what is the problem if Doms do too?