Laevateinn
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Posts
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Joined
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Quote:Calling for balance changes isn't necessarily the same thing as claiming that an AT is useless or wanting to exclude them from teams. I suspect this sort of paranoia (not helped by certain people's hyperbole) is what prevents some people from even admitting that some characters are weaker than others.Originally Posted by je_saist
Cases in point on why this can somehow be a bad thing can be found in threads from the likes of Kioshi or Johnny Butane; threads which go to extensive lengths to convince the player-base / developers that massive changes must be undertaken on existing archtypes such as Stalkers and Tanks.
Some ATs and powersets are demonstrably weaker than others, and this should be pointed out repeatedly until the problem is fixed. The people who did this have always been vindicated, most recently with the (significant) buffs to energy aura and fiery aura - long noted as sub-par armor sets prior to the buffs. Even tankers and defenders got buffs to their inherents over the cries of those who insisted they were 'fine all along'. One way of looking at all the stuff in recent content that disrupts the ability of melee characters to perform e.g. Apex blue patches is that it's to address the complaint that blasters, despite being at a significant survivability disadvantage, didn't offer much of a damage advantage over melee characters. Now they do, and this trend should be continued and aggressively expanded.
In order for choice of AT to come down to playstyle and playstyle alone, all ATs have to be roughly equal in power. Otherwise, certain playstyles are always going to be mechanically disadvantaged and that detracts from everyone's fun. -
Quote:Sure. In CoH, 8 support characters actually do a lot better than 4 support + 4 DPS. I once did a +4/x8 players debuffed, enemies buffed LRSF with an all-Corruptor team long before any incarnate stuff or inherent fitness came out, and it was the easiest LRSF I did.Originally Posted by LokaiDraxmartis
So is it possible/viable to get a group together consisting mostly of controls/debuffing/buffing and get through all the content?
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Power boost doesn't work with +Def from toggles, despite what Mids' tells you. I strongly suspect it's impractical to get softcapped S/L/R on most squishies, unless they already come with +Def out of the box e.g. Shadowfall, or have extremely efficient powersets e.g. Rad emission - but I'd love to be proven wrong on this.
I'll need to be in the game to check what mezzes will punch through S/L def. But there are quite a lot of AoE mezzes in the 40+ game - malta grenades and titan missiles, warwalker death explosions, nictus crystal explosions, CoT death mages, etc. -
Cold/Ice is great. I play Ice/Cold instead, as a corruptor. You have the standard spread of debuffs, lots of -res from stackable sleet and Heat Loss, and respectable single-target and AoE damage with blaster-scale Ice Storm and blizzard.
Cold has only 2 problems:
1) It blooms late, with Sleet and Heatloss at the very end
2) It gives less protection for you compared to the other debuff powersets. Cold is unusual since it gets ally shields instead of -ToHit or heals. The main mitigation is -Rech which I found to be not effective.
1) won't be a problem for long if you like the character and 2) can be fixed with IOs or careful play. -
Most well-designed buffdebuff ATs can solo pylons and AVs.
Soloing pylons/AVs for defenders comes down to softcapped (45%) defense backed up by heals/resists, good single-target damage, and -resistance and -Regen debuffs. With dark miasma you have -resist in tar Patch, and two sources of -Regen: twilight grasp and howling twilight. You may need to use twilight grasp constantly because the -Regen from howling twilight cannot be made permanent.
Here's an improved version of the above build with 45 ranged def and 62 S/L res. Hasten and soul drain are 2 seconds off permanent with the Spiritual core paragon. Personally, I would also drop superspeed and combat jumping, and take hover and fly instead. Flying makes it easier to take advantage of the ranged defense.
N.B. Pylon's only attack checks AoE defense, which the following build is not softcapped against. You will probably still be able to solo pylons since my rad/sonic defender, who has similar defensive stats, only gets hit for ~200 by the pylon after debuffs. There's no way the thing can kill me unless I'm afk.
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Quote:That's an advantage. IOs can fix recharge and endurance problems. They don't increase the radius or base damage of AoEs.Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
FSC would be great if it had a standard recharge, but in reality it has a highly protracted recharge for the same DPA that most other sets get out of their pbaoes. It's also curiously expensive.
Put another way, if I could chose a weakness between 1) small radius and low damage and 2) long recharge and high end cost, I would always chose 2) because I know the tools to fix it are at hand and the end result will be dramatically better compared to applying those tools to 1). -
Purely from a minmaxing perspective, I'll always be willing to consider defenders for the -20% res they get on sonic blast.
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I don't farm so I'll withhold judgement on the fire farm video. But I wonder if I'm supposed to be impressed by an IO'ed controller soloing -1 Carnies without bosses. In my experience, Lt. and below generally do not threaten characters, and the real danger (especially for squishies) are the bosses you can't easily mez or kill.
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Quote:FSC is great. City of Data says it's 1.91 damage scale (compare 1.2-1.4 for whirling sword, lotus drops, dragon tail, burst, etc.). It also gets radius 10 instead of 8.Originally Posted by BrandX
Is it really that much more limited in AOE than others?
ELM, Swords, DB, Spines (weak on the ST), Claws...
Kin Melee has one PBAOE and a weak cone many skip.
Fire Melee has one PBAOE and a weak cone many skip.
Dark Melee isn't exactly an AOE Specialist.
Martial Arts has one PBAOE that's really only buffed up by leading it with Eagle's Claw.
The only think that helps the Swords is they have a PBAOE, a decent cone, and their tier 9 has such a weak cone, no one really uses it as an AOE.
That said, after some thought, KM will probably be a lot better than it looks to me if you can leverage the +Dmg to get wonderful things from shield charge, fireball, etc. Still not my playstyle though. -
Quote:Nope. Sub-par, if the hyphen makes it clearer.Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill
o.O
O.o
....
Wait, I know, that's a typo. It's supposed to be "super."
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Quote:Think about it, though. You're playing a top-tier blaster primary against enemies weak vs. your damage type. That's an edge case if I ever saw one.Originally Posted by Le Blanc
This is only partly true. On my Arch/NRG (I know, I know, thats NOT what the OP has) I LOVED getting Carnie mish's. Her all lethal damage made them drop like I was shooting through paper. I loved it so much I went on the hunt for other MoB's with lethal weakness. Unfortunately there was no more, but I still had them lil Carnies.
Carnies at any significant spawn size will be dangerous to most blasters due to their ability to survive massive alpha strikes/controls with phase, mezzes and pets with 75% base tohit. -
That you think soloing a boss is any sort of achievement at all is evidence enough that empathy sucks at soloing.
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Thanks for the explanation. This changed my opinion of the proc.
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No. You can reroll anything you like for any reason you like. I once rerolled my Mind/Emp controller from 50 just to change her name.
Said Mind/Emp got rerolled again (from 50, yes) into Ill/Emp, because Mind on controllers is so horribly subpar. The character's so much more fun to play now that she's more powerful, so I consider it worth the time.
And now I'm considering rerolling my Fire/Kin (yes, from 50... how'd you guess?) to change her origin. She really ought to be Natural origin, and the OCD is eating my brain. -
Daggers wouldn't make a difference. The difficulty with rom is doing enough damage to overpower nictus heals (so -Res helps more than -Regen) without getting wiped by the nictus essence with the autohit AoE attack.
Anyway, don't feel bad. Failures happen, etc. I think of them as a learning experience and like to ask what I could have done to change the outcome, if anything.
I'm much more interested in hearing about failed TFs/trials than wildly successful ones. One learns nothing from coasting to success on other people's coattails. -
Don't like it. As someone else wisely said, it's another single-target set in a multi-target game, and besides, I've had enough of characters whose damage bonus is chained to constantly attacking, meaning I can't indulge my fluid, extremely mobile playstyle.
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Fourthing Rad/Sonic. Also consider Fire/Dark corruptors, for other support squishies that solo well and do great damage.
More broadly, all the generalist debuff sets are good for this: Rad, Dark, Traps, and with some caveats Storm (no -Regen so needs pets/temps to solo GMs, using Hurricane takes fine control) and Cold (comparatively little protection for yourself, but can be fixed with IOs). They have good survivability due to either heals, flooring enemy tohit, or res/def buffs, and boost your damage with -Res and -Regen. -
This is the Blaster forum, so people are very sensitive to any suggestion that blasters might be disadvantaged. But yes, the endgame for blasters is very tough. It has nothing to do with the particular enemies you're fighting because all 40-50 enemy groups are dangerous. You'll need to play cautiously, use your APP mez and soft control well, learn to manage inspirations/APP rez/godmode, and in the long run think about building for defense. You'll also need to accept that sometimes you will die due to bad luck and there will be nothing you can do about it.
Try to look at it in a positive light: the skills you'll learn are valuable and will serve you well on other characters. My first character was a blaster (Fire/Fire, so even more naked than yours is) and I eventually got good enough that I can speedrun ITF on a build with no defense. When I run Lambda and watch other squishies die over and over again, rendered completely useless and whining they got 10 threads as rewards, I smile. -
Panacea is significantly better than Doctored wounds if:
1) You are over the cap for 5% rech bonus. For example, melee characters easily hit the cap on 5% rech bonuses, but not on 7.5% rech bonuses. If you could slot Panacea instead of doctored wounds, and get back another 5% rech bonus elsewhere, overall the gain is 7.5% rech rather than 2.5% rech.
2) You can slot many sets of it. For example, my empath has 4 full Panacea sets. That's a total of 10% more recharge than if I'd used doctored wounds - equal to having an extra purple set in the build at no slot cost.
Panacea is worse or not vastly better than Doctored wounds if:
1) You are putting it in very long recharge powers where uptime/availability is a big concern (e.g. Dull pain). Panacea doesn't come close to capping recharge enhancement, not even at level 50. It's especially bad if you need the last slot for frankenslotting (e.g. Drain psyche. 5 Panacea + 1 acc is usually not better than 5 doctored wounds + 1 acc)
2) Neither of the above advantages apply. The slightly increased rech, recovery and hitpoints are nice, but not really a huge difference. -
Time Bomb is a trap. Like the 1 Emp merit > 1 Astral merit conversion, or the inspirations sold by the reward merit vendor. Its purpose is to con inexperienced build-makers into spending slots, IOs (and later, respecs) on it.
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I don't think blasters are superfluous in the sense that they add nothing to a team. I do think it would be very hard for me to justify making another blaster knowing that I can build characters that do roughly as much damage but with 10x the survivability and immunity to mez. Until the day that blasters gain some other advantage over the other damage-dealing ATs or ranged damage becomes more relevant (in all content, not just trials), this will remain the case.
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AT/powerset description in the character creation screen.
Many of them are awkwardly written, unhelpful or misleading, and it's really obvious that the person who wrote them never played the powersets in question. For example the description for Mind Control says its powers are "extremely accurate", implying they have higher ToHit than normal (they don't) when it's presumably referring to the nonpositional nature of its powers. Others are just factually wrong, e.g. "[scrapper's] aptitude for melee is countered by a total lack of long distance attacks." The description for Kheldians actually still implies they have lower than normal resistances. -
Quote:Can you elaborate on this? I must have missed something in patchnotes since I don't remember reading about a change to this proc.Originally Posted by Auroxis
The Force Feedback +rech proc got restored to its former glory.
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Quote:It means you have to put aside your greed and learn to do without.Originally Posted by Rial_Vestro
When you have it programmed so there's no other way to get the rewards than to do this one specific thing, that's force.
And that's something I think the vast majority of the CoH playerbase needs to learn. -
Sorry, no. Nothing that reduces the difficulty of Keyes.
If some people can't do it, too bad. There is no need for the game to be balanced around the lowest common denominator. If people are missing out on badges, merits and incarnate components, too bad. There should never be a guarantee, implied or not, that every reward should be obtainable by every player.
If you want to make it less about spamming heals while maintaining the difficulty, one change I could get behind would be stronger pulses at longer intervals e.g. instead of 50% every 30s, make it start off with 80-85% every 60s. You take less damage per unit time and have a longer window where you don't need to worry about it, but the pulse is deadlier.