Frosticus

ya i've seen some f/k/f with fly too, haven't seen a f/k/earth with it yet though considering fissure wouldn't even work for them in the air.

I've seen in on the /fire app kins because they can't survive and they try to hover about 10-15 feet above the group out of range of their melee attacks, but still in range for tran's, FS, hotfeet... they still end up spamming the hell out of transfusion to stay alive though.

Fissure (with two dam procs and FF rech proc, 2 stun purples and 1 acc/rech stupefy) does ~250 damage and cycles every ~7.5 seconds (includes animation), while also stacking nicely with flashfire and having the FF proc boost the recharge on everything else.

Fireball (with 5 pieces of posi, 1 acc/rech ragnorok) is not only considerably more expensive than slotting out fissure it does ~277 damage and cycles every 10.6 seconds.

So not only does Fissure do considerably more for the build it also does more damage over time due to a much faster cycle time thanks to have a 20 sec base rech vs 32.

So unless you are fighting mobs that die from 1 (maybe 2) cycles of fireball, earth app tends to pull ahead, while also being about 18 times safer (no joke) and that isn't even with factoring the stacking stun of fissure lol.

Of course if you are farming easy stuff as mentioned earlier than you probably don't need the extra survivability and you can probably get by with 1 or 2 applications of fireball and move faster through the map.

At the heart of it the statement that doms are now "dual primary" suggest that you could take on the role of damage dealer and look at your controls as a secondary function to killing things.

But that only works when solo, or in teams that have enough mitigation that you have no purpose being there anyway.

You are exactly right when you say that doms that don't focus on control in teams are generally playing inefficiently. But that isn't to say that they still don't get the opportunity to do some decent damage provided domination is up to ensure that their controls do the job very quickly thus allowing them a larger window to attack (which runs counter to the idea that perma-dom is less necessary, but all well)

I haven't seen an i15 dom with the ease of use comparable to standing in one spot and raining down aoe like corruptors do. That isn't to say doms can't do ok aoe damage, but it generally takes a lot of jockeying around and is almost always in melee range which precludes that the mob must be controlled first.

IMO doms solo better now, but whoop-de-doo they already solo'd very easily if a bit slow in some cases. The changes have done absolutely nothing to improve their teaming abilities except now I see the odd dom trying to play like a wannabe blapper in the 20's, which while their choice just makes me laugh...and with the idea going around that perma-dom is somehow less important I haven't seen it yet (as I still don't see that many late game doms), but would ultimately lead to considerably less contribution from team doms.

If you farm easy stuff then fire app provides the most damage and speed. If you are farming harder stuff like all boss maps of +1 (or even +2's) then you will need to be def capped so earth or ice. Howerver, ice pairs better with plant than fire's pbaoe style so earth.

You mention BM and deamons I'd go fire then and just carry a few bf's on the BM map.

Earth isn't overrated at all, it is the easiest set to soft cap with and has a vicuous st melee attack that one shot holds bosses and caps your hp. Fissure isn't spectacular, but it cycles really fast so does well with procs and does enough damage. Especially the FF +rech proc, which on my plant/kin seems to be giving me over 25%+rech over time.

This was my understanding as well.
If an app/ppp currently has less than 5 power choices it is getting an additional one.
Vill side
- brute/veat mu
Hero side
- scrap/tank body
- scrap dark
- blaster fire
- blaster force
- troller fire
- troller psy
- def dark
- def power

AND

scrappers are getting the pyre app added (renamed to Blaze, but lacking the power blaze heh)

It would be great if some, or all AT's were getting an additional app/ppp pool to choose from, but I don't see why scrappers would be the only one's mentioned if that was the case.

Here's hoping that the troller APP's get the best melee attack from fire and psy added to their app's like earth did! and hopefully they get scaled way up to be as good as seismic smash haha.

Yes,
1. open database editor - epic - add - make new set - select correct AT to reference - save/exit
2. copy each pyre power one by one into scrapper app
3. save/exit
4 open new scrapper app and make build.

*Mine still tells me I can't choose the powers because the app doesn't belong to scrappers, but it lets me pick them anyway. The numbers all look right and short of that red text it all works on saves/reloads.

Nor am I in the beta, but my crystal ball says it is approx half the value of health + half the value of stamina.

Elec usually makes heavy use of short circuit. If you are a stormy that enjoys hurricane that is a tough pairing.

I don't have a fire/storm (but I do have two lvl 50 storms), but I made a fire/cold before storm was available to corrs and I can tell you that freezing rain (sleet for cold) + rain of fire is one of the best aoe combos in the game with very high damage and high mitigation. And can even be cast from around a corner.

It is usually up at the beginning of every fight too. With the amount rain of fire ends up scourgng it isn't all that much behind Rain of Arrows for an every spawn aoe nuke.

I eagerly await the day DR is permanently implemented into pve.

I liked old mog, but the lack of buff canceling made it generally last too long. I don't see that as a problem with MoG necessarily and more a weakness of the entire game. You were generally very safe with it running, but the low hp gave you an edge of the seat feeling that only /fire armor is able reproduce (albeit in a different way). Granted very few players want that kind of "excitement" in this game.

Temp protection is still skipped by pretty much everyone even though if you stack it with the winter's gift it does a nice job of helping fire with its main weakness. Alone, it is very meh.

Melee range was a QoL adjustment because at 5ft is was often very finicky to outright unplayable in the event of lag (which is admittedly rare in CoX... haha).

I argued that changing siphon life to a true attack, but with a free heal is unfair... and they made it cycle faster. MG, a nice QoL change, but why only MG, why not incinerate, or combustion, or irradiate, gloom, NF, TT, or all the st immobs? It would seem to me that if upfront damage is that important it would remain consistently important to players and set balancing. I am against making everything the same, always have been, but as soon as you start going down that path you may as well just do everything.

I think it is pretty clear that the current power's team balances purely by spreadsheets. I don't agree with that at all as ultimately excel can only get you so far, but I can accept that it is occurring. However, it then makes inconsistencies look like sloppy work rather than uniqueness - especially when every single change being made removes inconsistencies. Or variation if you will.

I mean people are currently criticizing CO for making each tier of attacks so similar and these are people that play this game lol. It is exactly that way here too except you can't pick and choose. Take scrappers for instance, the only really unique set is spines and Castle has said in the past that something like that set would never happen again and he'd change a lot of it eventually. Any guesses how he'd change it?

I don't agree with Castle's (or Posi, whoever is making the decisions) vision of balance or fun. And while I've still been enjoying this game it seems that as each issue goes by he sinks his claws into something else I enjoy and sucks the fun right out of it. So far i16 sounds good, I don't really care about power tinting, but dynamic team size adjusting sounds really good. But I'm worried about the round of powers adjustments (nerfs, buffs, changes) that comes out shortly after each issue because ultimately combat is 99% of this game. I'm not worried because I want a static game, or can't handle change, I'm worried because I'll likely completely disagree about how and why the changes occur.

Very few power changes that have occurred in the last 2? years have been the way I'd do them. They have always just been the absolute shortest way to make them perform within the accepted range while consistently reducing the scope of said range. But I don't make the decisions lol and I have no guarantee that my ideas would be more fun that what has been done. Although I don't see how they could be less fun

Anyway, keep on dominating everyone. I hope to join the ranks again with earth assault. Pl it up to 29 where it looks playable and have some fun.

I used to pvp almost exlusively in this game then Castle got his hands on the system and like many many people no longer partake in that area of the game.

I've posted my suggestions on how to fix PO's and am now content to join the surge of people and just make fun of pvp. At times I wonder if the devs are actually trying to kill pvp off...

For how much I used to love pvp in this game it pains me to say I'd actually rather it was removed entirely (hey they already pulled base raids, the next step is arenas and zones haha). They have failed at every turn, so it isn't surprising the PO's are also a failure. I'd personally respect them more if they just admitted they can't do it and focus on more missions on the lab map.

I'm starting to wonder if you have ever played dominators, or are just chiming in?

Old nrg could make do on 3-4 attacks which leaves numerous slots and power choices that could just be used to slot cheap recharge bonuses. New Nrg needs 5-6 attacks, which means you have to slot the attacks as attacks, so you can kiss cheap recharge bonuses away. Aside from having worse set bonuses, how does decimation compare to forcefeedback in price and availability?

I KNOW you aren't reading what you are responding to because I already stated it was a combination of ease of building chains out of very few attacks and strong IO options that made Nrg the easiest and cheapest dom set to tweak.

People say they want every power in a set to be valuable and worthwhile, but then they complain about how tight sets like /sr are. Like I said earlier though, people generally don't know what they actually want and certainly don't know what they are talking about. At times this applies to me as well, this isn't one of them though.

If you need purples on an old Nrg to hit perma dom then you aren't very good at building toons. You don't even need lotgs.

Again you are just showing you aren't reading what you are responding to. I already said Nrg was the easiest set to hit perma dom with, but once other sets were perma dom'd as well they would surpass it. The difference was that nrg was about 5x easier to perma.

I'm getting upset that I've been suckered into having a "discussion" with you again, it usually feels like I'm talking to a wall. Take a few extra seconds and actually read what you are responding to.


Ridiculous hyperbole ftw! Play a brute, MM, or scrapper then. Some of us liked that Doms actually required a modicum of time investment to reap the benefits. If people can dismiss server mergers by saying they like playing in ghost-towns then I should be able to dismiss dom changes by saying I liked that they were a slightly more advanced AT.

Unfortunately they are now as easy as brutes, scrappers and mm's and I don't have any above lvl 40 and probably never will. Even with how fast you can hit 50 now. So unless /earth assault is awesome I doubt I'll ever take another dom to 50.

You've had enough conversations with me to know that I think changing an AT around the goal of increasing popularity is retarded. For starters it isn't a real goal because you can't directly control the outcome.

It's probably why chasing popularity for stalkers, pvp, and doms has resulted in next to nothing overall.

Finally, where are you getting lvl 20 by? I just searched the thread and where you pulled that number from is a mystery. I'm getting the feeling it is from the same area as everything you are saying.

emphasis mine. It would have to be the bolded state for this to occur

It was the best secondary if you wanted a cheap perma dom, or wanted to get perma dom at the earliest level possible. Just like how the sword sets are ultimately surpassed by other scrapper sets they offer tremendous earlier benefit that is very desirable to some people. I mean there was no shortage of /nrg doms running around despite the set being "unplayable" on these forums.

Inferior damage? maybe, that is tough to make a judgment call on. If my /nrg is perma dom 15 levels before other sets what does that do to damage output over the lifetime? I mean it was so easy to build into a perma dom relative to other sets that it might be fair to compare perma dom /nrg to non-perma dom other stuff.
w/ dom+enhances
Pbolt - 99
Pblast - 130
BS - 187
TF - 407
Pburst - 210

In that regard, even next to the mighty "old" elec non-perma it was very good.
Cbolt - 72
Lbolt - 118
Cbrawl - 162
Havoc - 216
TS - 247

Obviously once other sets achieved perma dom they could blow past nrg, but I seem to recall a thread where someone demonstrated they could build a perma /nrg dom for like $50mill at the time when most doms were usually spending over a quarter billion for perma. For a "casual" player dipping into IO's that sounds pretty tempting to me.

For people totally unwilling to invest even a tiny bit of inf into their /nrg dom then ya they were totally the suck. For those people Castle changed the entire AT. If Castle wants to post the population stats for each AT over the last while then I guess that would be the best way to determine if the dom changes were for the better.

I'd wager 100 million inf that the population has actually decreased despite a short surge right after i15, but that might just be biased because my personal desire to play doms has decreased.

Primal can work very well with plant/emp and energy torrent is a nice cone that is easy to use while standing back to use seeds.

Powerboosted fort on your agro soakers means you might never need to heal.

However, if you can make /ice app work then that is the best fit for plant imo.

It is my understanding the teaming actually decreases your chances as it isn't a linear progression of roll chance which would then be divided among teammates.

ie. If solo you have a 1/200 chance of getting a drop on a team of 8 it doesn't jump up to 8/200 (1 in 25), but then get spread among the team (thus resulting in the same 1/200 chance).

I have a feeling (but don't know for sure) that even in a team you still only have a 1/200 chance, but then it is still divided by the number of teammates within range.

Similar to how in solo pve you fill up your loot tables a LOT faster than in a team, but in pve this is offset by faster xp and more inf and chances at "better" loot through TF's.

I also haven't looked closely at the rep timer lately, but I believe that if a team of player A, B, C kills you they all show up on your timer list. If that is accurate it means that in some cases you could see the effective drop rate of PO's drop to nil. Though lowering the timer to 5 min helps as does no longer having it reset with each kill before it expired the first time.

*1/200 is just an example drop rate, my understanding is that pre changes is was closer to 1/100, but I don't know for sure.

Neither freedom or virtue ever went past 2 dots last 2x xp event. Either they updated their servers or population just isn't high enough to max things out anymore.

WAI? nah, not even close, unless the developer intentions are completely disconnected from the player base. It is pvp we're talking about though so maybe...maybe.

I've seen several pvp IO proposals that solve all the issues of "player farming" and allow them to actually reward people for their pvp efforts. But you'd need to pvp to get them, which is probably auto fail at PS.

I (like most people) just play like they don't exist. It is my understanding that one of the key design points of rare rewards is that you want people to strive for them even if they never actually attain them. Some rare rewards have been done well, but PvP IO's are a complete failure right now in these categories:
1/ pvp activity motivation (ie the carrot)
2/ rewarding pvp participation in a predictable manner
3/ filling the need for character progression via pvp
4/ adding more depth to pvp

If you can figure out how to address even some of those failings pvp IO's might have a chance, but it sounds like you believe they are WAI so c'est la vie.

rad/thermal, as mentioned is a very solid pairing.

I personally dislike AR and rad/cold isn't bad, but cold already has an abundance of -def.

I'd probably wait and do an arch/thermal myself, that sounds like a fun combo to me.

Static discharge coming to a a brute (and VEAT) Mu patron near you.

I wouldn't bother using it for pvp anymore and I'd make sure you have your aoe attacks for pve otherwise ice is a bit lacking there too (imo).

hmm I had a feeling you weren't understanding what avg meant, or that you weren't actually reading what you have been responding to.

I addressed energy in my last post. Might have a little something to do with it gaining an additional st attack (PP) along with having a total of 6 usable st attacks which is 1-2 more than every other assault set. And by "little something" I mean entirely.

This isn't entirely true. Nrg was ridiculously easy to make attack chains with before and with only a few attacks. That along with good IO options was why nrg was the easiest secondary to perma dom. Nrg is definitely better now for most people, but you need to slot a lot of attacks and be prepared to use them. The days of just spamming BS, TF, and burst as a complete chain are gone. (slight exaggeration ).

Making Powerpush an amazing attack is what has transformed Nrg under the new design. If it was still skipped Nrg would be pretty rough in the low levels if you aren't mind or grav.

Be careful in your statements because the change to powerpush (and tk thrust) are not mutually exclusive from old doms, but they are a huge part of what constitutes the "improved" state of those sets.

As for my current issue with fire, ya it is mostely flares, though I don't like an 8 second fireblast either and would have probably liked it better at 6 seconds. Fire is set up a lot like ice blast (actual ice blast, not icey) and just like ice it is very hard to make fluid chains now.