Hyperstrike

It's a shame you choose to miss out on so much content simply because you refuse to exemp.

Sorry you can't make it Post. I'll see you next week though.

Don't worry, we'll brand your name on some unsuspecting thug's backside just so they don't forget who you are.

A teletank is also utilizing an unwieldy, End-chugging means of transportation. All just to get a few feet down the road.


If you skip all the armors, agreed.



I'm sorry "nothing" is a value judgement, not a quantifiable number. The fact is you're still doing significantly less damage over time than an otherwise identical tank running another armor type or another primary.

So you ARE paying for that survivability by prolonging fights.



Never mind that the majority of endurance is eaten by attacks, not defensive toggles.

If you want to start talking IO sets, then this is over. Basically any talk about optional sets is going to introduce the "you weren't originally intended to do that". Yeah, you weren't originally intended to defense cap so many different types of toons either.

As for the "ease". Do a cost analysis for both inf on the market and merits as to how much it takes to fully frankenslot out a stoner this way.

Fire's a very nice AoE-rich secondary to take.

You won't do "*WHAM!* HE'S DEAD JIM!" levels of damage. But you'll be something more akin to killing someone with a high speed belt sander.

A flaming belt sander.

Of doom!


Mud Pots (PBAoE)
Combustion (PBAoE, DoT)
Fire Breath (Cone, DoT)
Fire Sword Circle (PBAoE)

And if you take Pyre Mastery.

Fireball (Targeted AoE)

And, since you're pretty much unkillable once you get and slot Granite, you can just stand there and let Mud Pots just kill stuff off for you, interspersing it with your other AoiE attacks when you get bored or have the End to spare.

Noted and corrected.

Again, noted and corrected to follow what I meant (100% EndRedux), though, in the interests of balance that could probably be reduced.

Good point. It was only intended to be an EndRedux for the armors SPECIFICALLY. Not sure if that kind of situational reduction can be achieved.

Agreed.

Even if you're able to work around them, it doesn't mean the penalties are token (this is simply YOUR value judgement). Devoting a portion of your build to mitigation of weaknesses in the inherent is par for the course with all of the sets. Not just Granite.

That doesn't mean they're not still penalties. And the slots required to work around them aren't required by any other set out there. And, even slotted, you're still less well-off than an unslotted tank/brute with another defensive powerset.

Again, simply because you see them as "trivial" doesn't mean they are. especially in a tight build. And with a stacking armor schema like the one I proposed, it would get tighter still.

Right now, players can afford to skip almost all of the non-Granite armors and still carry through into the late game with few problems. Then if they did take them, respec out of them.

But on a build like a Granite tank, you're usually building FOR recharge, at the expense of higher accuracy or damage and/or lower endurance.

A 2rch/1acc/3dmg SO build was able to negate the recharge debuff, and although same build would be much more faster in a non-granite build, the relative difference between the base and the enhanced versions are huge.

One problem. You're also forgetting the 30% damage debuff that Granite imposes. So even at identical levels of recharge the Granite tank is doing significantly less damage overall. AOE or no AOE.

You're also forgetting that a non-stone player who devotes NO slots to recharge has room for End Redux. So they run less of a risk of burning their blue bar by spamming attacks as fast as they come up.

Or devote the slots to another attack that might go underslotted, adding to their arsenal and giving, again, more attacks.

A regular player that puts on those 2 SOs would jump from 10s to 6s, 160% the damage of the base build.

Actually, common IOs don't make it much better (you shave another second off). That's the problem with high levels of recharge. Diminishing returns on investment. Such an attack on non-Granite is 5.45~ seconds.

Even significant frankenslotting only reduces it another second from there.

On a non-Granite, such a 10 second attack is taking just under 5 seconds.

Honestly, the issue with granite IS that it gives that much power on it's own. That it completely and utterly deprecates pretty much the entire rest of the set.

And yes, requiring stacking would not change the fact that a tank running with everything would still be damn hard to kill. Even on SOs.

Again, I don't really propose this as a buff to Granite per-se. I'd simply like to see the set reworked so it isn't An 8 tier Stone Armor set...and GRANITE!

I'm aware that the set would likely need to be reworked in other ways that would nerf it. I can look on that with equanimity. I merely meant this as a jumping off point.

If that's correct, then yeah, I could probably see a -radius debuff.

Admirable.

Do you know what kind of socket the 3800+ is sitting in? Depending on which 3800+ you've gotten, you MAY be able to drop in a replacement CPU too. You need to know if the socket is AM2+ or not.

Yep. Cheap and easy. Just the way I like it...

Uh waitaminute! That just came out...wrong...

Seriously though, be warned. A graphics card with a huge on-card memory will also take a chunk out of the usable memory in your system. In your case, you'll see less than 3GB of RAM with something like a GTX 470.

You may want to give some serious thought to investing in a copy of a 64-bit OS to alleviate this. Note: AVOID the ones with "Anytime Upgrade" in the title. These are essentially feature packs that differentiate less expensive copies of Win7 from more expensive copies.

Well, they offer a lot of performance in a single-chip setup. And you're not dealing with the dodgy nature of CoX on SLI. I've done testing on both single and SLI 470s. Even the single card is OVERKILL for this game.

And right now it's cheaper than a 285.

Yes. It's a single-card SLI setup.

Wrong. It DOES work with it. You can use the unsupported -slifbos 2 flag when launching or you can force it in the drivers. Performance will go up. Just not as much as games that were designed for multi-GPU gaming.

Again, the 470's are pretty much exactly the same price (and in some cases CHEAPER) as the 285's right now.

Hope my response helps you come to an appropriate decision.

That's more or less the intention of the stacking.

Exactly.

Honestly, I don't know that it'd be all that intrusive. The sets would actually be better integrated and defense (other than psi) would be identical. You'd STILL be dealing with all the speed/recharge/damage output penalties intrinsic to granite. And if you want to make the Stoner "pay" for the psi buff, simply reduce the end discount on the modified Granite.

Yes, this could be offset by IOs, but how is that different from how it is now?

Adding subtle but harsh penalties, like the -radius and -range i mentioned, may be a better way to go as it does not intrude with the gameplay but does lower potential aoe damage.[/QUOTE]

I don't know that -radius or -range is going to work well, as a lot of that is baked into the AOE powers themselves. And most tank/brute AOE are point blank outside of epics. As such, -range is inapplicable, and radius is a function of the power with no means of buffing/debuffing.

Uhm. Actually. End of Days was a Schwartzenegger flick.

Thanks for the catch. Fixed it and a couple other major errors.

Dude! That's too AOLeet for words!

Betting that some of the other components in the system were not playing friendly with the overclocked CPU and you were getting more thread/pipeline failures. This'd cause the CPU to "waste" more cycles running the command again until it got a proper run-through on the process thread.

Additionally, depending on the memory, it may not have liked the higher bus settings. As such, to compensate, it was probably lowering your CAS/RAS refresh rates. This would result in lower memory throughput.

Could be other stuff, but I'm a bit toasted right now and trying to dig the data outta my brain is causing real pain right now.

BED!

BEEEEEEED!

Yeah, I ran it with her too. I'm actually in a couple of the vids with my doppleganger.

LOL! Yeah. I had the exact same problem on the very first mission. Jumped the boss mob by reflex and had D_R about ready to kill me.

Yeah.

Badguy: You wimpy little lowbie! I'll
*SPLAT*
Badguy: OW! How did you?
*SPLAT!+*
TanksBelow30: Six-slotted EVERYTHING homes!!!

Yeah. My first Fire/Rad is stopped at L33 for maximum earnings via recipe generation.

The Fire/Rad I'm working up is primarily for giving the group access to higher level task forces.

My main.

Let's be honest though. That kind of phenomenal cosmic power? It's really easy to let it go to your head...

Considering that the main summer convention season is really only about 10-11 weeks long, you're ALWAYS going to run up against the "I heard about this already" issue.

You're talking to a guy who does these as full 7-day events including transit times. I'm INTIMATELY familiar with how they sap you. One of the reasons I'm glad I can work my day job from home after I get back.

Only if they're sending the whole cadre of senior devs. And, if they are, they have enough people to set up a VERY easy booth rotation. If they get sucked into a bunch of gaming after the hall closes and the M&G is over, that's their business.

I'd have to say Origins is probably out. That's still pre-GR and only about a month out. As such, everyone with even peripheral ties to Paragon will be in the offices, glued, chained, strapped, and welded to a desk.

Considering that the only other major candidate in the time frame is another costal con... I don't think there IS such a thing as an "ideal" candidate.

On the bright side, if it DOES go off at DragonCon and I'm able to attend, my WiMax provider will service me down there. Live and streaming over the net right from the M&G.

Heheheh.