Leo_G

((OOC: Bah! You all stink! I’m joining now in spite))

The cool autumn air wisped around his short auburn brown hair as he sat half-lotus on the window seal. The sound of brisk traffic 23 floors below faded away as Ian let his mind and body relax and call upon the voice of the wind. As his mind let its grasp on consciousness loosen, he let his spirit sing in the voice of the elemental winds.

Hiya, wind. How’s it going?

The pulsing current weaved around his slender form, not chilling but void of sensation even in his skin-tight black tanker shirt. Probably because the material of the shirt was weaved of insulating rubber/metallic hybrid material of some kind with integrated circuits for some purpose or another but that’s beside the point…

Ian paused silently for several moments before peeking an eye open as if to say ‘Hello? Anyone there?’. He closed his eyes and tried once more only to be interrupted soon after.

“Ian! Get down from there! You’ll catch a cold.” A woman with long blond-brown hair, seemingly in her early 30s, wearing a lab coat called out to the young man upon the window sill. She had only taken a step out of the hallway for a minute through the double doors of her lab to retrieve something only to step back to her son treacherously teetering from a window of the high-rise building.

“I’m fine, mom. I was kind of busy…” Ian sighed as he spun and let himself slide from the grate separating the building’s hallway from the wall. “Are you done? Can I go now?” he sighed again as he slipped back into the sleeves of his gi which was tied around his waist by his cloth black belt.

The woman frowned, “I told you we were going to test my invention today, silly. I just finished programming the corresponding AE mission scenario for it so now it’s up to you.” The woman, her name being Sandra Kelly, owner and head engineer of K-Tech industries, handed Ian a small high-tech-looking reticule that would fit entirely over one’s ear with a clear blue display window that would rest in front of your left eye. With a roll of his eyes, Ian received the seemingly mundane device. “I even made the display screen blue, your favorite color!” Sandra squealed in excitement “Go ahead, try it on.”

“How many times do I have to tell you, mom,” Ian grunted as he slipped the device on his face , “That crazy Architect stuff isn’t real. It can’t simulate the voices of nature or the true essence of an element. This is just pointless…”

“That’s why we’re testing it my invention under my conditions, silly,” Sandra quipped with a smile, “I programmed a mission with the specific data the EET (element essence translator) is suppose to pick up.” She went on about the kind of testing she did with it and the results but Ian just nodded, pretending to listen as he tapped the display over his eye with an index finger, supposedly to see if it'd break. “We’ll see if it aids you in regaining what you lost. If not, we’ll do whatever you think is necessary. We’ll get through this.”

After he’d stopped tapping the little machine strapped to his head, his emerald eyes locked with the same shimmering gems of his mother’s and he smiled. She had brought her entire research team to a screeching halt on his account. The least he could do is be grateful. With a flare of determination, Ian puffed out his chest and nodded. “Alright! I’ll do my best.” The young swordsman declared. With his bokken at his waist, Ian started to turn and bolt to the nearest AE facility but a gentle hand on his shoulder brought his upper body to a standstill a moment before his legs and nearly caused him to fall flat on his back.

“Here, take this too,” his mother added as she reached in her pocket and pulled out a thin silver and gold belt with a topaz jewel for a buckle.

“Aww, mom! I don’t want anyone seeing me wear that thing! I’m not a power-ranger, you know!”

“Just take it. In case you get into trouble,” Sandra protested.

“But I don’t need it. I’m capable of defending myself with just my sword and my wits,” he continued to argue.

“Just consider it a secondary test seeing as you haven’t tried it out either.” Even though Ian made a fuss, he knew better than to argue with his mother. He loved her too much to blatantly disobey so without further incident, Ian took the belt and the reticule and headed to the elevator.

Later at Skyway city’s Architect Entertainment building, Ian stood before the consol and input the code for the arc his mother created for him and let the data stream whisk him into the illusionary world.

((Now you must read my annoyingly long posts! Mwaahahahahaha!!))

((OOC: Should I? Or shouldn't I? It could be fun though ))

Just posing a situation with this suggestion in mind:

Take a look at Ice melee. In the wide consensus, it lack raw dmg output of sets like Super Strength or Stone Melee. But at least it's a dmg type that isn't resisted by many foes and it has strong control aspects to it. On the other end of the spectrum, Fire melee is loaded with dmg with its plethora of AoEs, strong single target attacks and its ability to buff fire damage for a long duration *BUT* it lacks controls and mitigation outside of just putting the foe down.

Now throwing fire damage on a broadsword and fire DoT? But mixing it with the strong mitigating KD/KU attacks as well as its +def self-buff attack?

Or applying cold damage to the consistent and potent War Mace that has good AoE and ST dmg as well as great controls on top of the slows of Ice?

Those combos seem to crap on the Ice and Fire sets, IMO. As is, those sets give up something to do their damage types. Just like the lethal weapon sets gain something from doing their damage types. In my eyes, I just don't see a way to thoroughly balance this suggestion and feel it leaves all those other sets out for no reason.

Eh, why not?

You probably already know how Ian would react in this situation.

Jase doesn't have many 'friends' though those he does consider friends aren't all that comfortable around him. If a friend of his started doing something annoying even after he told them to stop, he'd do one of two things:

1. Use his telethapy to get in their head and find out something that annoys them and then do that repeatedly. If that doesn't work, he'll probably look into their mind and find something to frighten them, a phobia or something. If that doesn't work he'd probably dump them in the Shadow Place which isn't a pleasant place to be nor a place you'd 'want' to escape from even if you could.

2. If they were straight, he'd flirt with them and do/say things that would make them feel *really* awkward and stop or run away.

Don't take this the wrong way but:

This is just catering to min/maxers. It doesn't have as close a relationship to "My concept is an ice sword" as it is close to "I want to do uber energy damage and not lolethal".

The only time doing smashing or lethal damage would fly in the face of your concept is if you're sitting there reading the combat log. If I had a concept for a flaming broadsword user, I'd just want an aura for my broadsword or the option to use Fire Sword/Greater Fire Sword as weapon options.

And that isn't even mentioning the plethora of balancing issues. But all this work only opens up the floodgates. Where are my smashing arrows? My psi bullets? My toxic mind blasts? My netherworld ice shards?

I could see a possibility for future sets having an option to choose damage types but only because they'd be singularly balanced around this option.

I *always* have trouble with names...but then I suck at making names.

I do have my moments though. Just recently created an alternate version of an old character, his concept is his mom created a specialized magitech suit for him. My back-up was going to be something dumb like Magitech-Swordsman but luckily Golden Ronin was available (which describes the yellow electric armor).

Another suggestion, try adding colors to your names. We only recently got color customization so that's a resource not too severely tapped yet...at least I haven't. And there are so many names for colors...

Ha, didn't know that. Was it always like that when they added it to AS? Curious no one ever mentioned that in all those threads in the open beta.

Just to be technical, I think claws and dual blades have around about the same amount of stabbing and slashing attacks. Claws has 3 gut-punch-like stabs (Swipe, Strike, Follow up) and 5 slashes (Slash, Spin, Eviscerate, Focus, Shockwave). Dual Blades has 3 stabs I think(Power Slice, Ablating Strike, Blinding Feint) and the rest slashes (Nimble Slash, Typhoon's Edge, Vengeful Slice, Sweeping Strike and One Thousand Cuts). Really, the only difference between them is the subtle difference between hand-held blades and hand-mounted blades as well as one having combos and the other ranged attacks.

That's still plenty to make them their own sets though.

Has anyone got their hands on a Stealth IO? If I slot it in something like Sprint, does it suppress when you attack?

So far, I'm liking my lvl 28 claws/EA because he can start off the fight with 1/3-1/2 a fury bar because he'll claw at an enemy while his friends stare at the walls. Once the 1st target dies is when the fight really starts and everyone finally notices their friend in pieces. I'm curious if more stealth will let me keep fighting 1 target at a time until I get over 1/2 fury.

Even if it doesn't I'm still getting one eventually so I can have perfect PvE invis.

Meh, probably used nukes.

But besides that, unless specifically specified, I doubt they used some magical 'new' tactic that no one else thought of. Keeping it secret just makes you the person not to bother with to ask for advice....but then I'm the kind of guy that never uses guides and comes up with his own builds and tries stuff out on his own so it doesn't bother me at all.

I feel everyone has already made their point but I just want to clarify something I said:

In short, New Dawn, keeping people alive isn't force multiplication. Because everyone can keep everyone alive. My Sonic/Ice blaster can keep a team alive. My Grav/Ice dom can keep people alive. My Spines/Dark stalker can keep people alive. But that isn't multiplying anything. That's just playing the game.

Defense/resistance buffs effectively multiplies a team's effective max HP. +dmg buffs and -res debuffs multiplies the amount of damage a foe receives. etc etc. It's not so much if an AT is or isn't a force multiplier, it's more "what powers enhances a teams base performance?" If you want to multiply a team's effectiveness you need powers that do it. Maneuvers, Grant Invisibility, Grant Cover, Assault, Spirit Tree, Trick Arrow etc. But the times a scrapper takes such powers aren't common.

And further more, certain effects and power applications will multiply a teams effectiveness in different amounts. -Def debuffs and ToHit buffs will certainly make a team more effective unless the team is already hitting with high enough accuracy that it doesn't matter. Or adding more and more +def buffs do not scale once the team is at +45% def to the positions/types that are relevant to the mission. However, -res is always useful and stacking -end/-recovery on foes will keep them bottomed out.

I did say it would be for all melee ATs but that it is 'designed' with Stalkers and Tankers in mind. It's got something for tankers (AoE control and a 'get ova'hea yuss guys' cone as well as strong ST attacks) and for stalkers (it's got burst ST and a balance of AoE with a nice self buff to aid in survival). When ported to Scrappers, it still be a great set but the rech on its powers and the endurance costs would need to be over come before it match the DPS of Broadsword or Katana. For Brutes, the endurance would hurt and it would be hard to build fury without filler attacks in the early-mid lvls.

To [EDIT]Sam not Bill >_>,
I guess it all comes down to how good the animations would be. As of now, even using 2-handed weapons that don't have static points for your hands is out of the question. A new animation mechanic that allows the fluidity you speak is even further out. But I'd definitely like to have that for a set (or this set). Like you said, it's possible to be fluid attack leading into attack and keep the burst feel of the set. If the endurance and rech costs are appropriate for the burst damage it does, it's all gravy.

Currently, I think Katana is in the realm of animation I'd aim for. It's deliberate with its strikes and yet feels smooth (not fluid like you're talking about but smooth) and it looks several times better than the animations for alot of other set *including* claws. I'd settle for just smooth, myself. But if you can make it better, then better.

Yes, I would like Ice armor and Super strength for stalkers too...