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Katie V

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  1. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Roderick View Post
    I really wish people would stop spreading this. It isn't true.

    Mender Ramiel's mission text does tell you that you have to visit a cave in Cimerora, but an Ouroboros Mender is NOT going to send you to use someone else's stolen Crystal of Ice and Flame to travel through time. The mission door is the crystal right beside him; it sends you into the cave he tells you about, and you never actually set foot in the actual Cimerora Zone.
    The reason people keep spreading this is because it may be true. No, you do not go to the Cimerora zone as part of the story arc, but people are reporting that if they haven't talked to Imperious as part of Montague Wossname's "introduction to Cimerora" mission, Mender Ramiel won't give them the Alpha Slot arc.
  2. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Techbot Alpha View Post
    Yeah, of all powers in the game, Curse of Weariness has to be up there for 'Most Cheaty'. I mean, if you don't have VG merits to get a cursebreaker? Ya screwed.
    I've had four characters encounter the Curse of Weariness. Each of them was able to handle it, each in a different way.

    My Kin/Ice defender uses Transference to regain endurance from whatever I'm fighting. My Bots/Traps mastermind simply reduces the number of optional traps (trip mines and the like) used, while the bots fight on unaffected. My Claws/SR scrapper simply doesn't get hit, and has Conserve Power as a backup. My Plant/Storm controller uses Recovery Serum, massive endurance reduction on all powers, and inspirations that drop so fast that there's rarely a shortage of blues.

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Santorican View Post
    Form a team, even Lady Grey says "Bring some teammates because this is going to be difficult."
    "Bring teammates because this is going to be difficult" is so over-used as to be meaningless. I've seen it on missions that have a pair of archvillains, but I've also seen it on an entire story arc where I faced nothing tougher than a boss.
  3. Katie V

    Too much Alpha?

    POST-ACTION

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Bittovan_Odduck View Post
    It seems to me the Incarnate slots are overpowered.

    Digressions aside, slots that add 30-50% to ALL of a characters main powers just seem over the top to me. We already have heroes/villains who can solo AV's and GM's, though I don't suggest that is a large proportion of the playerbase. It only takes a small proportion of min/maxed characters to distort a game out of shape though.

    What kind of challenges can they present to players who can already solo virtually anything in the game, who then get 30-50% more powerful (roughly)?
    The math is a little trickier than that, and this is what keeps the Alpha slot from being overpowered. First, the power increase is to the base values of the powers, and second, only a fraction of the increase bypasses Enhancement Diversification.

    Consider a character with an attack that does 100 points of base damage, is slotted to the ED cap (95% enhancement), and adds a Musculature Core Paragon Alpha enhancement. Before the alpha slot, the attack would do 195 points of damage; after, it would do an additional (100 * 0.45 * 0.66 (non-ED enhancement)) + (100 * 0.45 * 0.33 * 0.15 (ED enhancement)) = 32 points of damage, for a net increase of 16%. Since the Alpha slot applies to to all powers, someone with a maxed-out attack chain would do about 16% higher DPS -- still not enough for a scrapper to solo a Giant Monster.
  4. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Bad_Influence View Post
    QR: I'm getting better at this, and Trapdoor is no longer a problem, however I decided I wanted my Bane to try to fight Honoree and his sidekick the... well, the honorable way. Off I go.

    I get to the final room, its all good, etc etc. when someone, somewhere - dont know if if was Honoree or someone else - hit me with this absolutely gawd-awful debuff that literally almost completely stopped my recharge.

    Don't know about y'all, but Endurance is a requirement to fight over here. Tried running off to recover, etc. etc... haha! That must have been a ten-minute debuff, because I never was able to recover my endurance in any meaningful fashion. Meanwhile Rikti ambushes kept spawning on me.

    I finally just stood still, let Honoree kill me and OUT. A larger sense of "epic fail" can hardly be imagined... I have a strong suspicion that the same person who designed the Reischmann TF designed this thing, epicfailepicfailepicfail. Bleh. Not fun. Taking away my ability to fight is not a "challenge." Heck, Trapdoor is more of a challenge than that.
    Sounds like you got hit by the Curse of Weariness. Cuts your max endurance in half, and I believe it lasts five minutes. Grab a Cursebreaker temporary power from the Vanguard base, or simply stock up on blue inspirations.
  5. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Shubbie View Post
    My guess is the defender would have the most trouble.

    I havent had any trouble with melee's beating him fairly easily, and MM's tear him apart if you hold your pets back and dont aggro the portals.

    Storm's tornado is very similiar to water spout so should just about have the same effect.

    That leaves the defender.
    The Honoree fight on the defender went fairly well.

    The first try didn't work: fire godmode, charge, and go toe-to-toe with the Honoree. I was doing fine until some of the Rikti Guardians took an interest in healing him, at which point I couldn't get the Honoree's hitpoints to budge.

    Second try went just fine: drop a Fulcrum-Shifted Blizzard on the nearside portal, removing a few dozen Rikti from the room (and earning the Zookeeper badge in the process). Wait for Blizzard to recharge, then fire Force of Nature and pull the Honoree with Siphon Speed. While he's making his way through molasses to try to reach me, sap him with Transferrence, Siphon Power, and Fulcrum Shift, then hit him with Ice Storm for further slowing, and use Transfusion to slow his regen and keep his endurance from recovering. By the time he reached me, I had him so far debuffed that the combat log was full of things like "Honoree hits you with his Total Focus for 45 points of energy damage".
  6. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Shubbie View Post
    Its not success or failure thats determined at character creation, its if this mission is done with a lopsided bowling ball with a blindfold or a bowling ball with target acquisition. Its difficulty, thats determined when you make your character.

    So with one you need a ton of practice and still might never get it, and the other you just throw it widly in something resembling the direction of the baddies and they all die...

    How is this balanced?
    I've got the following 50s. Which one is the lopsided bowling ball?

    Claws/SR/Body scrapper
    Plant/Storm/Psi controller
    Stone/Fire tank
    Katana/Elec/Weapons scrapper
    Bots/Traps/Mu mastermind
    Kin/Ice/Power defender
  7. Katie V
    Sounds like an old bug has popped up again. Have you reported it?
  8. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Techbot Alpha View Post
    I managed to aggro the first EB and draw her out of the mob.
    That...woman has so many cheaty powers its unbelievable. Not to mention that asdjahfgag curse. I HATE the god damn Curse of Weariness. If ever there was power that was Not Fun its that one.
    So, by the time I'd finally dragged her down and beaten her to pulp?

    The end room was COVERED in Rikti.
    I'm a Bots/Traps MM. Ignoring them is not physiucally possible when one shot of AoE Aggroes the whole damn lot!
    I'm a Bots/Traps MM. I found the mission to be quite easy, running at a casual +0/x4.

    Basic procedure: before entering, make sure Forcefield Generator is recently summoned. As soon as the portals spawn, charge into the room, put down the basic traps (Triage Beacon, Acid Mortar), detail two bots to destroying the portals, taunt the Honoree (the remaining four bots will concentrate on him), and work on immobilizing him. Toe-bomb him with Poison Gas Trap once he's immobilized, and he'll go down in a hurry. At this point, there was only one portal left and maybe two dozen Rikti, so I took the two bots off portal duty and started taunting everything in sight. At some point in the fight, Holtz became collateral damage, and I talked to the Honoree while the bots finished off the Rikti.

    I found the Curse of Weariness to be only a minor problem: Taunt doesn't use endurance, and with Holtz focusing on me, the bots were free to attack.
  9. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Spazboy View Post
    ... i thinki want a burte now o.o....
    Brutes have a high bonus damage cap, but a low base damage. Net result is that a brute at the cap does about as much damage as a scrapper at the cap.
  10. Katie V
    Bought the Mac pack. Tried to buy the Science pack, but it wouldn't let me.

    Quick tip to the marketing department: "spend half an hour on the phone to Customer Support" isn't part of "impulse buy".
  11. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by EmperorSteele View Post
    Just wiped the floor with the ice lady using my Mind/Kin. Borr-iiing!
    The "Crystalize" power is a great big "&(%*$ YOU" to everyone who fights in melee range: it's an unresistable 5% defense debuff and unresistable 10% resistance debuff autohit PBAoE with a 30-foot radius; it typically stacks about eight-fold.

    To put that in perspective, my Granite tank bottomed out at 3% cold resistance/9% cold defense and went through a half-tray of medium greens while soloing her. My SR scrapper was sitting at 5% defense to all until I fired Elude.

    A level 39 un-IOd AR/Dev blaster I haven't played in a year used four inspirations: a small purple, a medium green, and two small blues. It would have gone even easier if I'd thought to set up a minefield before opening fire.
  12. Katie V

    Orange Drop Rate

    POST-ACTION

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Hercules View Post
    Well, the "random" number generator still has not seen fit to drop any oranges today. Farmed the wall for a while and did both an ITF and LGTF. Still nothing. I'm convinced the drop rate has been decreased by the devs due to the introduction of hero merits.
    If you want us to believe you, run DropStats and post the numbers. "Feelings" don't cut it when trying to figure out if a random event is happening as often as it should.
  13. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Ice_Wall View Post
    So I got to thinking, why is the Influence cap set at 2 Billion? Couldn't it be raised given the economics of this game, and why is there an influence cap at all?
    The Inf cap is at 2 billion because the largest number that can be stored in a signed 32-bit integer is 2,147,483,647. Raising the cap would mean finding every location in the game's source code that manages Inf, and changing it to a different data type. This may also require changing the database format used to store character information, and the client <-> server communication protocol.
  14. Katie V

    Ubuntu and CoX?

    POST-ACTION

    Currently it works best under Linux if you've got ATI graphics. If you've got Nvidia graphics, CoH won't detect your card properly and you can't use Ultra Mode; if you've got Intel graphics, it's unlikely that you'll be able to play.
  15. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by William_Valence View Post
    Also, I was on break from playing for a while, coming back I was suprised. Since when has rare salvage been so cheap? Lots of rare salvage has more supply available than common. If I actually tried, I could probably jack the price of stabalized mutant genomes up to 1,000,000 instead of just 500,000, yet some rare salvage is going for less than 10,000. I thought some rare salvage (Chronal skip, enchanted impervium, mu vestment being some iirc, but I might be wrong on the actual ones) used to be 100,000,000 each. There going for 1,000,000 each. It's wierd to see.
    The fastest way to turn AE tickets into cash is to purchase rare salvage: a full stack of tickets will give you 18 pieces of rare salvage, which you can list at sell-it-now prices to get over a million inf. There are ways to get more inf out of your tickets, but they are slower (a stack of tickets will give you 1249 pieces of random arcane salvage, which requires 25+ trips to the market) or less reliable (three gold rolls may give you three top-tier recipes, or three pieces of vendor trash).

    With the current AE farms, the number of people cashing out tickets as rare salvage has gone way up, meaning the prices are collapsing.
  16. Katie V
    I'm guessing it's a WINE change that fixed the earlier crash, exposing the new crash. I upgraded WINE recently to pick up a fix to cursor handling with ATI graphics. I didn't see anything in the changelogs that looked like it would impact Titan Sentinel, but the only way to be sure is to test it.
  17. Katie V
    The new version crashes differently under WINE -- whatever Titan Sentinel does, it's causing CoH to freeze with all four CPU cores maxed out, which is three cores more than CoH usually uses.
  18. Katie V
    There isn't much downtime if you're running the respec at +4.
  19. Katie V

    Provoke?

    POST-ACTION

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by plainguy View Post
    I might be missing something but I did not read anything about your defenses. Are you defense capped ? I know Darkest Night will help in that department, but if you Provoke and miss the anchor, you will surely have issues when the anchor runs off. I can see this a big issue with werewolves.

    I can see you taunting and then falling flat on your face otherwise.
    That's what bodyguard mode is there for. A mastermind just standing there with their pets out has an effective 75% resistance, and with the proper build, can actually be more durable than a Granite tank.
  20. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Sailboat View Post
    I've recently taken to running Oroborous arcs with Nemesis in them to pile up Fake Nems and Merits at the same time. The Nems are always in my level range when in Oro flashback mode, not gray, so I get other rewards too.
    The Shard TFs are also good for Fake Nemesis hunting -- I've been on TFs where half the team would pick up the badge.
  21. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by slainsteel View Post
    @Katie: Any clue on how a WP does against Recluse?
    I've never played a Willpower tank, and I don't think I've ever been on a STF with one, so this is strictly from a theoretical standpoint:

    I expect an unsupported Willpower tank will have extreme difficulty with Lord Recluse. Willpower gets its survivability from high smashing/lethal resistance, and from recovery buffs from having a large number of enemies around you. Against Lord Recluse, you'll be facing strong energy attacks, and you'll have at best two enemies to regen off of (Recluse and a tower). Additionally, Recluse has an endurance-drain attack: without energy defense and without endurance drain protection, you can get sapped down to nothing in a hurry (I've seen it happen to an Invulnerability tank). Against Recluse, you'll want to have a good team to back you up: either another tank or illusion controller to tag-team with, or enough buffs to keep you alive.
  22. Katie V
    A stone tank will give you the survivability you want:

    * You can tank anything currently in the game except Lord Recluse or Hamidon without support on inspirations. Lord Recluse requires about one medium inspriation (purple or green) per minute until the blue tower goes down; I've never tanked Hamidon.
    * Single-target damage for a stone tank is low, but since enemies tend to group around you, your AoE damage is good.
    * If you IO for recharge and movement speed, there's little downtime during or between fights.
    * Psi is only a problem if you let it be a problem. A perma-Granite tank will get shredded by psi-using AVs or bosses, but if you're willing to switch to Rock Armor + Minerals, they can't touch you.
  23. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by EvilRyu View Post
    And I still dont see why this is a problem, your still going to have piss poor damage as a defender/controller/corrupter so its kind of pointless if your hard to kill or your attacks recharge faster. It flatout needs to be changed to allow self buffing. It would put support ATs as well as melee on the same level for a change.
    Did you bother to read my earlier post? By my calculations, a Kin/Ice defender able to self-speedboost would have a single-target attack chain at least as good as a fire blaster's, a godmode active two minutes out of every four, and a nuke better than anything a solo blaster can manage ready every 85 seconds -- and all of it without endurance issues.

    I know it's an article of faith around here that defenders have "piss poor damage", but that's only before you start self-buffing. I'd love to see the solo blaster who could manage that level of survival and damage.
  24. Katie V
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by docbuzzard View Post
    The kin, OTOH might actually get rather powerful, but would still probably lag a blaster in damage even if they did get to fulcrum shift all the time.

    That's the thing people tend to forget, even at the damage cap, a defender's damage is still rather underwhelming.
    It's not Fulcrum Shift that's the key (my Kin/Ice defender can double-stack that with SOs), it's the other powers. If my calculations are correct, I'd be able to use Blizzard (a nuke that does Blaster-level damage -- before Fulcrum Shift) every 83 seconds, Force of Nature (my APP godmode) would be up better than two minutes out of every four, and Transference (my means of alleviating godmode and nuke crashes) would be up every 7 seconds. Given a face-planted teammate to teleport around, Vengeance would be perma. For single-target damage, I could use an attack chain of Ice Bolt -> Ice Blast -> Bitter Ice Blast for an estimated 150 DPS (factoring in the cast times of Siphon Speed and Fulcrum Shift, but not Hasten).
  25. Katie V

    Problem Enemies

    POST-ACTION

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Khenal_Baroney View Post
    A lot of people mentioned the Carnie Master Illusionists, but I have a much harder time with the Ring Mistresses. That mask debuff they give is downright painful...
    My SR scrapper is the other way around: if it can't hit, it can't debuff me, so Ring Mistresses aren't a problem. Master Illusionists, on the other hand, have psi attacks that ignore positional defense, and summon a half-dozen pets that hit at 75% rather than the normal 50%.