Fulmens

Hey. No kicking, no gouging, no biting.

Rad/Sonic defender. Some more protection, a lot more damage.

... ok, my first thought was "Jim Beam". I'll admit it.

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I'd probably have a flat out 35% endurance discount at level 1, leave it untouched until 15, and then gradually disappear over the next 10 levels

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I still hold to my original position. 35% endurance discount is almost exactly the same as 50% more endurance recovery. As, for instance, you get from Stamina.

So my level 10, with one toggle and gaps in his attack chain, is going to handle endurance MORE efficiently than my level 28, who also has to run three toggles and a 100% full attack chain, and took three powers for the privilege.

Yeah, that's a great idea. Really makes people want to get to the "good levels".

I was hoping for some amazing stock market trick which got you an actual billion dollars.

Or the current alleged value of a billion inf, which would be (checks spambox) umm... about $600?

Dark Armor sacrifices your blue bar on the altar of survivability. But it gives you the survivability.

Admittedly, I played Spine/Dark... I'd love to play Kat/Dark but I already have like 30 unfinished characters. (including a dark/energy tank around 36.)

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Teleport: Travel as a click power. Monstrously annoying to use for most people. Faster than anything over long distances. Less direct combat use in it's prereq (though if you're going to show up first, might as well Recall Slower Friend.)

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Just sort of an aside:

Nuts to the mundanes. My Boost Range+Range-enhanced Teleporting Blaster has Recall Friend and AtT--I refuse to port your lazy butt across the Shadow Shard ever again if you have yet to move by the time I get there. LEARN THE PATHS. If my travel power-less Stone Tank can get across the Shard faster than you, you're not trying hard enough (granted, the meaning of "travel power-less" is up for grabs with all the bonuses that toon is sporting).
Also applies to non-Shard cases.

</rant>

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Very much a personal taste thing. I built that character to level fast. (It was, like, issue 4 or 5 and my first 50 took me 563 hours. That is not a typo, that's how long it used to take people to get to 50. Fast people could do it in, like, 300. ) Force Fields so I can get on higher-level teams and contribute (later discovery: I can fill teams with unkillable blasters and melt holes in the map), teleport for max-speed movement and Recall Friend so once the slow loaders get in zone I can drag 'em to the mission door and start already.

Out of 30+ characters, I have one or two with Recall Slower Friend. It's not something I do unless I feel like it.

I figure that the "5 for 4" (or 7 slots in 5) pretty much gives you 75% of the improvement that a billion inf build does and you can do it for,like, 20 million for the whole character. Less if you are willing to actually work on being cheap about it.

Details in my (slightly old and creaky) guide, in sig.

Every travel power sucks. Every travel power is king. It just depends on what you hate and what you don't mind.

Flight: Slow, relatively. (Faster than the old days, though.) Fire and forget. Or fire and chat with friends, recruit for the team, catch up on global channel chat.

Superspeed: Great except for Faultline, Shadow Shard, certain parts of boomtown, Eden, bits of Talos and Founders and ... well, you know the drill. The temp jump pack takes care of most of this problem. Comes with free stealth!

Teleport: Travel as a click power. Monstrously annoying to use for most people. Faster than anything over long distances. Less direct combat use in it's prereq (though if you're going to show up first, might as well Recall Slower Friend.)

SuperJump: There's a learning curve, where you learn to not accidentally jump into big groups of purple-con enemies. There are occasional "missed the jump" or "can't quite get that high" moments of irritation. Other than that it's quite good. I don't like leaving my finger on the spacebar for the WHOLE TIME but I may be a tiny minority there.

While we're picking on things that are nearly irrelevant, your "normal" build gives me an ice cream headache.

Combustion at 4, Fire Ball at 12, BU, Aim, Fire Breath "sometime after 20"?

Ow. My head.

Even the "alternate" build- Rain of Fire and Combustion before Fire Breath?

It's like a hangover and I haven't been drinking.

(Irrelevance #2: Travel powers can often be delayed, what with jump and flight packs.)

For your second build you don't need to get the XP. It "levels" like you're starting at level 1, but you can go to the trainer, switch to second build, and train up 17 times in a row.

Abbreviations:

TO= Training Origin enhancement- anyone can use.
DO = Dual Origin. You can use natural/magic or natural/tech (I think those are the combos).
SO = Single Origin. You can only use Natural SO's, which are very rare below level 25.

From that, people renamed the new things as they came out.
HO= "hamidon origin" (level 47+ only)
IO= "Invention Origin" - the new, expensive, complicated stuff.

Build advice: I'm not much of a "hasten" person myself. I'm in the minority, though, and I don't play Controllers. Stamina, yes, you want. You may not need it by level 20, but you should probably plan for it by level 24 or earlier. Recall Friend- I have this on only one character, who is ... impatient. By level 18 people should be able to get their own damn selves to the mission.

Welcome back to Paragon City.

I would recommend one full travel pool. It is possible that you were in the game before respecifications (or "respecs"). You can rechoose your powers with a respec, which can be gotten in a wide variety of ways:

1) You may have a "freespec" - they give them out every few issues when they've made a significant change to the way powers work. I don't know if you have to be subscribed to get them or not.
2) If you do a "respec trial" (level 24 minimum) you can get up to 3 (one at 24+, one at 34+, one at 44+).
3) If you've been a subscribed member for a certain length of time you get one or more respecs on every character as a veteran reward. I think it's nine months or a year for the first one.
4) There is a "respec recipe" that drops off critters, and that people sell on Wentworth's, which you can use to get a respec. They cost millions and millions, last I looked, but a million ain't what it used to be.
5) You can buy respecs with real actual money from the online store. I believe nobody should need this; if you get this far, give me your global name and what server you play on, and I will buy you a respec recipe with inf.

Also, as mentioned, you have a second build that you can rebuild with and avoid the whole problem.

There've been a lot of big changes to the game, indeed. When you get into your 20's, learn about enhancement diversification.

edited to finish that last senten

I personally think that the "number to get in" should be higher than the "number to be removed"- say 4.5 and 4.2- so that one vote won't make the difference.

[marvin] but nobody listens to me anyway.[/marvin]

Basically, yeah, Stalkers have "First and last guy free" in every fight. Makes soloing pretty crisp.

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The best I can gather since launch the reviewers and public don't like:

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True. Some of 'em don't.

Not having done the story in question: I'm going to say that it is, in fact, important to work the story to fit the format. A movie is not a novel and what works on the page will not necessarily work on the screen, and vice versa. A game is neither of the above.

What you're working with here is a fairly fast-paced game - four second fights are not unheard of- and in the case, specifically, of Brutes, stopping to read the text is actively discouraged.

By which I mean "you will lose around a third of your total damage. " The act of reading the text in the order, with the timing, you want is actually a nerf to the gameplay.

Having said all that: There are things I "don't like" that I'm willing to put up with if they're very well done. People with an axe to grind, for instance (Whether it be political, philosophical, or whatever) are incredibly irritating when they build a canned mission to show how right they are. And yet, when I ran through one last week (something like "Save the great philosophers!") I four-starred it because it was good, and funny, and had entertaining gameplay.

Sort of like "If you're mean but funny... you better be REALLY funny."

JeetKunDo said
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I love the "I don't have a problem with endurance pre-Stamina" posts. To those posters, I would ask: "Why do you take Stamina then?"


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... because I have more AOE's, more toggles, and a full attack chain? Just a thought.

I like Power-that-shall-not-be-named, but I often end up waiting till 22 or 24 to get it. Blues, I can carry; it's a lot harder to carry some sort of substitute for your level 16 or 18 power. Like, oh, Whirling Sword, Integration, Blaze, Invincibility, Siren's Song, Build Up, Force Field Generator, Shadow Fall, Focus, Practiced Brawler... perish the thought that you should want TWO of those more than Stamina.

(Admittedly, since I can let the travel power slip now, I don't do as much "wait till 24 for Stamina" building.)

Taking the biggest END destroyer I've ever played- a Spine/Dark scrapper- as an example:

At level 10 I had Dark Embrace and Death Shroud going. That's a lot of END, true, and I threw in Spine Burst when I could.

But at level 22 I had Dark Embrace, Death Shroud, Quills, and Obsidian Shield, with Spine Burst and Dark Regeneration as my "you have too much END" buttons.

The reasoning behind having Stamina, at least in my head, is that you have a lot more ways to burn END in the upper game, and you need something to help you get it back.

More AOE, more toggles, more end consumption.

I would like to give points to Pippy for repeatedly specifying "while soloing" or " as a soloist" or any of the other repeated disclaimers.

But everyone else is ignoring the "form a team" option. Seriously, in my experience, once I get three or four people together and pointed in the right direction, endurance is pretty much not a problem for me. Once in a LONG while , usually when we're fighting things way too tough for us (at level 8, invincible IS too tough, I don't care who you are) we have to rest every once in a while. But usually at that point we're having more trouble with HP than END anyway.

So there's an encouragement to team early on. So there are ways around it OTHER than teaming early on. So I will tend to hold my current position... the 1-22 game is FINE.

While we are bringing up the good old days when we had 10-minute Rest timers... ED came with something like 17% off the BASE cost of all powers- because you couldn't 6-slot stamina any more, they set it up so that "new" 6-slotting worked like "old" 6-slotting, which meant that the sub-20 game because 17% less end-hungry.

When I was a kid, uphill both ways, in the snow, etc.

I ran into something ugly. I'm not quite sure how to talk about it without identifying information, but the point of the arc was that your old enemies tried to kill you. It had quite the spectacular EB at the end. It was /Devices with... some sort of mental control set, not sure which. At one point I had four named powers on me, plus was standing on caltrops (so Slowed with -Fly.) I think I was Blinded, Immobilized, Confused and Held.

It _looked_ like five named powers on me, because I was in Personal Force Field so I also had Cannot Affect Others (or whatever it's called) showing.

That was... umm, fun. Yeah. We should do it again sometime, but my SG is calling, gotta go.

As far as the supercomputer... hmm.

500,000 prestige
which can be bought with
250,000,000 inf

which is about twelve big craft-and-sell items at Wentworth's. The market's going to be whacky for the next little while, but last week I could make good inf on things like Impervium Armor at the top level.

For me, farming wents is a lot easier and faster than farming critters. My needs are comparatively small and simple,though.

(qr)
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The first fix I think the rating system should have is that no one can rate an arc unless they have completed it (but can leave a comment).

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As Dorothy Parker once said, "You don't have to eat a whole apple to know it's rotten." I'm not saying that anyone in this thread has a bad arc, but I've seen a couple that were honest 2-stars.

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It depends on what you consider painful.

/Devices is excellent both for safety and utility while solo. The trade off is it takes a little longer.

So if your idea of winning is an ADHD + Scrapperlock play style with arriving at level 50 in 2 weeks with all the debt badges then yeah /Devices is painful.

If your idea of winning is precision + skill and arriving at 50 with no debt badges, while enjoying the content on the way, then /Devices is golden.

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If I wanted to get to 50 slowly, with no debt badges, I'd solo a tanker.

I have a strong opinion on the topic. I have deleted one character over level 20, I think, ever. It was a L29 fire/dev blaster.

My other fire/* blasters are fire/ice at 35 and 19, fire/elec at 50, fire/en at 50 . So it's not the primary.

A blaster generally does about 50% more damage (when free to go postal at any time for no reason) than a scrapper using their primary and secondary combined. This is based on almost 150 levels of Force Field defender.

A blaster using their primary ONLY can do, maybe, 10% more damage than a Scrapper. The rest comes from melee attacks, Build Up, etc. - none of which Devices has.

Devices mostly has Trip Mines and Time Bombs, for damage. These take a high-damage-per-second class and add a lot of seconds sitting around doing no damage.

It is possible that two /Dev blasters can get good results by setting one Time Bomb each, in the same way that two Elec/ Blasters can get good results by both using Short Circuit at the same time.

But I didn't stick around to try it.

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Kinda miss the games when you had to actually think and figure something out to move yourself along.


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Yeah, I quit my first attempt at one of those games. It went something like this:

Your plane lands and taxis up to the airport. The door opens and the staircase wheels up to it.
>LEAVE PLANE
I don't understand what you mean.
>LEAVE PLANE
I don't understand what you mean.
>EXIT PLANE
I don't understand what you mean.
>GO OUT OF PLANE
I don't understand what you mean.
>LEAVE AIRPLANE
I don't understand what you mean.

... I'm kind of amazed that I lasted 15 minutes with the thing. I never STARTED the adventure.

[qr]
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someone had written their own RNG algorithm instead of using rand() - why, we'll never know.

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I would totally do that. . . the difference is, mine would work. (Arcanaville reported once that rand() gives "extra-streaky" results. I don't remember any details beyond that.)