Fulmens

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Leave the TFs to people who actually want something close to a challenge.

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When I started reading this thread I had this sort of attitude. "leave the hard stuff hard" has always been my attitude.

... then I started thinking... "Well, it's not like redside has that many other choices." I believe that redside should be a little tougher than blueside (it is, consistently, and I believe that to be a design decision. ) But when you have only, like, five Strike Forces compared to 13 Task Forces, or whatever the numbers are, making one of them "incredibly difficult" is a problem.

The correct thing to do is add four or five more Strike Forces and leave the RSF where it is.

In the Architect Entertainment system, they have sewer missions for villains now.

New fangled fricking frackin offa my lawn...

My theory is "if you like Blasters you'll like Brutes" but I will admit that the pre-22 levels can be tough.

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She is a true wiz at math. The answer is yes.

...In my mind, anyway. In truth I imagine her as that Italian astronomer who I saw on the History channel, undoubtedly someone knows who I'm talking about and will post her picture.

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Huh?

Well, true, I hate people and I'm probably going to end up leaving my vast fortune to Muffy. Isn't that right, Muffikins?

And Controller FF does let about twice as much damage through as Defender FF. (30% vs 40% Defense, or 35/45 counting the big 3 plus Maneuvers.) But I've also been on teams that had another Force Fielder who couldn't be bothered to keep the shields up on ME. My only reason to be on that team (vs. someone who would have done 50% to 100% more damage) was that the guy who was already there was a useless boatanchor. So me and my darling, darling Muffy want to hurt those people! Isn't that right?

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Nothing drains endu like a Kinetic/electric defender/sapper.

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... elec/energy blaster?

OP said:

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What I mean is that Cold brings similar defense values to the table

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It does? I have a vague memory of it bringing "not nearly as much" but I don't recall the numbers offhand.

To be fair, "maneuvers" is not technically part of Force Fields, but considering FF + Maneuvers is at the Defense softcap, and only 5% off softcap is half the mitigation... doesn't take very far off in numbers to be very far off in results.

I'm probably going to leave out important info. . . I'll do my best.

I've got a fairly new computer with a Nvidia 9800GFX+ . When I'm playing CoH sometimes - not very often- the graphics will just sort of freeze. A few seconds later (order of 30 seconds?) it will start running again. The CPU during this time seems to show no activity.

Sometimes if I alt-tab to another window, or ctl-alt-del to bring up the task manager, it seems to help. That could be "I alt-tab and it doesn't take until the computer works itself out."

I believe I'm running the 6.14.11.8208 drivers.

Things that seem to not be the problem:
* I thought it might be because I (possibly stupidly) had the firewall on while playing, but I turned it off and it just happened again.

* My new computer shows temperatures on the case for the CPU, HDD and "sys" (I don't know where it's measuring system temps) and they're around 27 to 30 C- warm for a room, cool for a human. So THAT doesn't seem to be the problem.

* I'm running stuff at very high graphical settings, but it seems fine except for once every hour or so when it just goes on strike.

* Shortly after getting the computer (it's like six weeks old), the power supply crapped out. I had the problem before the supply failed, and I have it again with the new supply.

Anyone recognize this problem? What other info would you like?

If you roll a Force Fields controller and don't keep the bubbles up on people, I'm writing you out of the will. Just saying.

Welcome! I should warn you that The_player and I are two [possibly the only two] Force Fields supporters. Having said that I don't think FF is good for "most people". It tends strongly towards a boring playstyle. . . you sit, you bubble people every 3 minutes so they don't die, you don't have a lot of last-minute glorious rescues, the team just wins. Unless you forget to rebubble and the team dies and doesn't understand why.

Kinetics is about the opposite. It's the closest thing to a purely offensive Defender set there is. You mitigate [comparitively] almost no damage, but you boost the speed and power of the team tremendously. You're one part speed dealer, one part rabid dog, you're the president and also a customer. You're not there to save people's lives. If it happens, hey bonus, but you're THERE to cause a lot of pain in a hurry.

Every defender is totally different from every other defender. Try 'em all! Have fun!

It's not the using, it's the having!

... I dunno either.

I don't like the word "purist" in this context and think it should be replaced with [...grabs scrabble set, pulls letters]
... "grublin"? "burgnil"? Blingur? Rubling. We shall call it a rubling build.

If you have fun with your rubling build, it's an OK build, isn't it? I wouldn't run one, although I did have a FF/Elec with all 9 from his secondary. So half-rubling.

(... hmm. Willpower maybe, but what for the primary? Axe?)

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SStingray:

Let's look at the "natural" regen of that Tank- not even Regeneration Aura. I am working these numbers out in public, so I may not prove what I expect.

I can get to almost 250% Regen with nothing but 5 slots in Health and, umm, a couple hundred million inf. (Numina's Heal and unique, Regenerative Flesh unique, and two generic Heals.)...

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Good catch. The 240 seconds to go from full from 1 HP is 4 minutes, not 2. But otherwise it checks out.

Dull Pain would heal 1492 HP, once every 360 seconds, so it can be worth about 4.1 HP/s in healing, technically. Health pool would add a +125% regeneration from its own effect and IO enhancements, with the two procs adding 20% and 25% regeneration on top of that for a flat 250%. (Mids' reports 294%, but I don't know how it's computing that number.) Dull pain will increase the total by 746 when slotted for healing, which would get the total up to about 2600 or so.

Natural healing boosted by health and procs would be about 27 HP/s, with Dull Pain counting for an additional 4.1 HP/s on its own. So in this case, our Invulnerability tanker self heals close to what a real healer would do. Score another point for the healer-haters. Now if we can only do something about those crappy energy and element resistances when Unstoppable isn't running we would be in business.

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I can't help but to wonder what those tankers are doing to survive before level 50 and the purple IO set.

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FIRST: redoing my math. I think I'm right but lemme go through it again.

250% of 3000 per 4 minutes is 250% of 750 per minute, or around 1800 per minute. I may have been unclear because the DURATION of Dull Pain is 2 minutes (and with three Recharge SO's it recharges in something like 3 minutes 10 seconds). So I was looking at the cycle something like this:

Minute 1: regen 1800 HP (Dull Pain up)
Minute 2: regen 1800 HP (Dull Pain up)
Minute 3: regen 1200 HP (Dull Pain Down), hit Dull Pain at the end, heal for a MAX of 1600, call it 1800 HP of heal + regen for convenience's sake.

Second, a couple of weenie points- I didn't get this post count by being reasonable.

* You frequently overlook the effects of slotting. If you're an Empath and you're not slotting Fortitude for Defense, I'm cutting you out of my will. If you're a Tanker who's not slotting Dull Pain for both recharge and healing, you should be thinking about your OWN will.

* I think you're also overestimating how tough it is to get the listed Regen. If you slot Health with three SO's, you're at 180%. Which is not too shabby. A 1800 HP scrapper with 180% Regen is, lemme try math in public again, 810 HP per minute or 13 HP per second. (the 295% number is, I'm fairly sure, Mid's getting confused. Should be 100% for being alive, plus (40% x 195% ) or about 80% for Health, and add to THAT the 45% from the two uniques and 12% for the Numina set bonus. Again, math in public, I could be wrong.)

* third, it sounds like you're deep in the "tank + heal" mindset. It might just be "that's the way the conversation went" but if you look up any of TopDoc's superteams... it's far from the only way to go. Any two layers of mitigation will do. If the alpha is "giving" and not "receiving" (see: Inferno, any Controller) that helps too.

Done!

So a bunch of us, in the market forums, were being armchair economists, as is our wont. Specifically, we were trying to figure out if there was really inflation in the game, which led to thinking about inf sinks, and someone brought up the inf-to-Prestige conversion.

I know it's 500 to 1, which was considered outrageous and ridiculous back in the days of old, when 20 million was wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.

I guess I have a 2-part question:

1) Does anyone use the inf-to-prestige conversion these days?
2) Are any base builders also marketeers?

I'm not an official ambassador or anything, and I know very little about base building, but... is 200K prestige a lot these days? You can make 100 million inf pretty easily on the market, these days, and that converts to 200K prestige. For all I know 200K is nothing, or this is very old news, or nearly everyone has more Prestige than they can use, or whatever... but I thought I'd open a dialogue.

Ask! Explain! Discuss!

I'm not a base person much, but I do have people on my global friends list, and people in SG's that I have been members of,who left three years ago and never came back.

How long are people expected to wait? Seven years, like a missing person?

The prestige:inf ratio seemed a lot worse to me when I couldn't make 50 million inf over a weekend in my spare time.

Maybe we should ask the base builders if they use it?

SStingray:

Let's look at the "natural" regen of that Tank- not even Regeneration Aura. I am working these numbers out in public, so I may not prove what I expect.

I can get to almost 250% Regen with nothing but 5 slots in Health and, umm, a couple hundred million inf. (Numina's Heal and unique, Regenerative Flesh unique, and two generic Heals.) I think it's 232%. Assuming I pick up the other 18% somewhere else, that's a nice round 250%. When Dull Pain is up (about 2 minutes up, 1 minute down) that tank is at around 160% of normal HP. Normal HP is a bit over 1800. We can get 10% easily from accolades, so let's round off to 2000 (or 3000 with Dull Pain.) Dull Pain is, itself, about a 1500 point heal under these circumstances. Just incidentally.

So we're healing 3750 HP in those 2 minutes, or a little under 2000 HP/minute- if we throw in the Dull Pain at the end of that minute, we're looking at over 1800 HP per minute. There are spikes in the healing, but that's a nice round number.

So the healing is 1800/60 = 30 hit points per second. Assuming our "Tank" was Defense only, no resistance, that 375 HP of alpha strike would take about 13 seconds to heal back. Given a 50% Resist, that would be... six seconds to heal back.

Then there are Firetanks, Dark Armor tanks (who bring their own self-heal), Stone tanks (who bring quite a lot of +Regen), and you can see that tank + Force Fielder is quite a good combo for mitigating damage.

I personally feel that nearly any two of (Tank, Defender, Controller) should be able to keep a team of 8 alive and healthy through almost any fight thorugh the various types of mitigation. I used to say "Force Fielder plus anything else is very safe", but I generalized.

I guess it comes down to that. You need a little more than "10x mitigation" to be safe. You can get that through multiplying various mitigators. ToHit debuffs, damage debuffs, defense buffs, resistance buffs, slows, holds, or... yes, heals. But the "heal" part generally provides less than 2x mitigation in any given fight, so calling for healing is a bit ... backwards.

You don't NEED a tank in this game. You don't NEED healing. You don't NEED blasters and you don't NEED crowd control. You NEED some combination of mitigation that keeps everyone alive, and you NEED enough damage to win the fight. There's a hundred different ways to get there.

I have now talked my way into hopeless generalities and I will now yield the floor.

Force Fields. But if you get to level 20 and decide you're sick of bubbling people, stop playing the character. If you play a force fielder and don't bubble people, I'm cutting you out of the will.

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Fire as I understand is geared toward more drastic aoe damage while being less efficient on endurance and more likely to pull agro. Is that a fair assessment?

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I just wanted to go back to this Grunthorr quote for a second.

Fire has some good singletarget attacks as WELL as good AOE's. As the side effect of Fire is "bonus damage" it has, technically, better damage-per-endurance than other Blaster sets.

Aggro is very multivariate. Damage over Time increases aggro. Mez effects (like knockback or stun) seem to give disproportionate aggro. Sheer damage increases aggro.

My solution on my fire blasters is "I don't care how angry they are. They can send me hatemail from the zig."

Largo seems to have come up with roughly the same diagnosis I did. It's hard to tell without seeing you play, but my guess is insufficient Build Up and Aim to me.

Let's look at a typical fight vs. say one lieut and three minions, both +1 to you, and let's do it on the Energy blaster.

Second 0: Build Up.
Second 2: Start Sniper Blast. One minion disappears.
Second 6: Energy torrent. One minion falls over [conservatively], all are somewhat injured.
Second 7: Power bolt.
Second 8: Power blast. Second minion down.
Second 10: Power burst. Third minion is down or close to it.
Second 12: No more Build Up. Another Power bolt and it's now you against the lieutenant.

Alternative approach: Jump in and fire off a bonesmasher/energy punch combo. That does almost as much damage as the sniper burst/power burst combo and it does it in about two and a half seconds. Under damage boost conditions, that will ruin some people's days in a hurry.

Two IO's that make a serious difference in playing Blasters:

1. Anti-knockback IO. Pick your poison- I tend to go with a Karma in either combat jump or hover. It's expensive, but the reason it's expensive is that it increases your firepower by about 50%. Getting knocked down is the #1 cause of Blaster frustration.

2. Stealth IO in a movement power, preferable Sprint. This is LESS important, but with a Blaster you have to get the first shot and you have to make it count. Stealth good.

EDITED: My wife [the better blaster] points out that I didn't give the "how to play on a team" advice. Which is "let someone with mitigation lead the charge. Kill what you shoot." That's really about it.

EDITED AGAIN: I said two minions at the start and then I shot three. Continuity error!

It's linear per-SO. The number of slots you need to fill is also [roughly] linear.

So technically the cost of a full set of SO's is quadratic with level.

Sure. Aren't you limited by what you can hold, to two or three recipes worth of tickets, though?

Someone upthread said
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I'm personally still stumped as to why they were called "meow".


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I pretty much figured it was because if you called them "farm" you might draw attention.

It's two steps up from a guy in junior high school talking about "reeb".

Kingsbury: If you're not having fun, you shouldn't be playing. It's a game, not a job.

Note that sometimes you put it up for 10 and it sells for 10. Someone had a screenshot of a very painful list of "last 5 sales".
Something like this, don't remember the details:
<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
20,000,000
18,000,001
20,000,000
10,000
20,000,000
</pre><hr />
I put something up for like 30 million once and it sold for 45 million. Not an instasale (where someone bids 45 million because they want the VERY NEXT ONE SOLD), but someone started their bidding at 45M. The relevant points here are two:
1) Some people pay way more than they have to for things, and
2) I woulda been happy if I got 30 million for it.