Maelwys

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Shifting out of Dwarf form on a Kheldian with a power (such as Hasten) set to automatically fire, when recharged, will allow them to use the power even with mez effects on them as they shift out, before the mez hits the now-human-form Kheldian.

In case that sounded incomprehensible:
1) Hasten is set to auto (ctrl+click, green circle) and is recharged
2) Enemy uses mez power
3) Dwarf form is active, mez doesn't affect player
4) Detoggle Dwarf form
5) Hasten is used
6) Player is mezzed

I'm assuming this is not working as intended. You can't use non-form powers in forms, and you can't use -any- powers when mezzed, so this little window of opportunity through abusing the autofire function should not be there.

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I suppose you could call this a bug, but it's one that affects all mez protection powers (in fact, all toggle or auto powers in general) and is inherent to the way the power system works.

Toggle powers and auto powers apply an effect for X duration, then a short time later this gets re-applied. Usually these are set to not stack with itself, so the result is one long consistent effect for as long as the auto power or toggle power remain active.

When a toggle or auto power is shut off, the last "effect application" of that power does not get wiped, it has to expire on its own. This typically takes anything from 0 to 2 seconds. The mez protection granted by Dwarf form is no exception to this, neither are any of the Fitness Pool bonuses (e.g. a few seconds after switching into dwarf, hurdle still applies if your Human form Kheldian had it).

What is happening is that the Mez protection buff from Dwarf is lingering for a short period of time and allowing you to activate Hasten before it expires.

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do decent damage... Sonic, Cold and Archery spring to mind.

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If archery is classed as doing decent damage, i'm afraid what the other sets do, cause my Trick Arrows / Archery Defender does so little damage with her attacks i'm almost certain her arrows are healing the targets.

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Maybe he wanted to say... ummm Energy or Electric???

Because i know from my Rad/Archery, even with a strong primary like Rad, Arrows damage crippling on the floor. If they didn't buffed since ummm i10? i think that was a slip of a tongue.

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Nope, I said and meant Archery.

Fast recharging ST attack chain (Blazing Arrow is fantastic DPS when you factor in the DOT) and Rain of Arrows up every other mob (20-25 secs). Mobs melt when they're specced right. The trick is to pick a secondary that adds to your survivability but doesn't cause much redraw... like Force Field, then add damage procs where you can to take advantage of the fast animations and recharge.

I've a FF/Arch build that has RoA up every 20 seconds and does between 360 and 550 damage each time depending whether you bother to use Aim and PBU... and while it's recharging has Fistful or Explosive to fill in up, both doing between 90 and 130 damage plus Procs. And a Single Target chain that's comparable with Ice Blast. And this is with FORCE FIELDS, not exactly known for its damage buffs!

Sure, Lethal damage is pretty highly resisted. But with that kind of output you still mow foes down...

And yes, Archery animation times got a major tweak not so long ago... issue 11 ish maybe?

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And? Defenders can do good damage, shannon said it was cack.I replied.

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...

I was gonna argue against it, but decided not to.
I'll just let it sink in on how flawed your reasoning it and hope you come to realise it yourself

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In fairness, there are a few Defender sets that do decent damage... Sonic, Cold and Archery spring to mind. The Defender version of Psy Blast is pretty damaging due to decent levels of damage output, lots of mez and fast animations. Not "AV Killer" levels of damage, certainly, but probably enough to kill an Elite Boss.

The point is pretty irrelevant though since this is the BLASTER forum... and the Original Poster was concerned with the BLASTER version of Psychic blast. As mentioned above, Psychic damage in general does ok until level 40ish, when high resists arise and it proceeds to suck royally versus anything other than Romans and CoT.

I think you can remove them from your temporary power listing manually too. Used to work, not sure if it still does... (power tab - right click --> delete power)

I'd say that the make-your-own content thing has the potential to be a HUGE boost to the game.

Just look at the success of "Little Big Planet"...

Of course, this assumes that anyone out there actually gets wind of it. Advertising for CoH is all but dead in games stores these days... heck I just got my three-year veteran badge the other week, and even back when I was starting you had to look very long and very hard to find even one GvE edition poster. I ended up joining up due to good online reviews, not advertising.

Minimal resources? To code and implement an "expert mode" system that sits apart from the traditional Heroic-to-Invincible difficulty tiers? One that is balanced so that it provides just enough reward to encourage "high performance" toons to use it without becoming the de-facto standard setting for all PUG teams?

Personally I'd give that at least a full issue's work for the CoH coding team...

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Add another level of difficulty and leave powers alone unless they are blatantly broken.

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Seconded.

(although some form of 'extra benefit' would obviously be needed to promote playing in this mode, IMO this "extra level of difficulty" should be completely optional, and therefore would probably need to be slightly worse than "normal" uppermost difficulty levels when looking at influence or exp per hour)

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Aren't most Recharge Buffs non-resistable anyway? And designed that way precisely so that sets such as SR which have inherent recharge resistance don't only get 50% instead of 70% from Hasten?


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Doesn't matter if you're Super Reflex or not, you still get 70% from hasten.

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Aye, that was my point- the "Recharge buff/debuff immunity" idea wouldn't work.

It's impossible to actually prevent Hasten (and virtually all other recharge buffs) from giving you all of its allocated recharge buff, because it's flagged as a "non-resistable" buff.

The only thing you could do to prevent a toon from getting any benefit from Hasten would be to massively debuff their recharge so that they were at least -70% below the lowermost recharge cap.

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It must be possible in some way, since Strength of Will has been successfully flagged as unaffected by attack rate changes (including recharge buffs). A similar, switchable, flag could be attached to other powers (or whole powersets). So, the toon would receive the buff but the recharge rate of (some arbitrary subset) of their powers would be unaffected.

Of course, being *possible* wouldn't stop it being a fantastically bad idea...

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Agreed with the last point, certainly!

As far as I'm aware 'Strength of Will' and the other tier 9s are individual powers that have been told to ignore all recharge (buffs/base/enhancements/whatever) rather than powers that grant a certain level of recharge buff/debuff resistance to the user.

I suppose that you could setup entire powersets the same way - all effected powers within that powerset would then be completely unaffected by recharge (enhancement, buffs or debuffs). It wouldn't stop the toon from getting the usual amount of recharge buffs though - they just wouldn't affect those powers. The toon would still get all the benefits of the extra recharge on their other main primary/secondary powerset, along with any pool or inherent powers that were not setup to "ignore recharge".

So a toon would get +70% recharge from Hasten. Powers flagged as "ignore recharge" would act as if they still had 100% (base) recharge. All the other powers would work as normal, gaining benefit from the 170% recharge.

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The only time this would affect a Fire/ who is not /Kin is if that Fire/ was TEAMED with a /Kin.

[/ QUOTE ]And that's ok for all those non-Kin Fire/ Controllers is it?
Remember that not everyone solos their way through this game.

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Yes, yes it is.

Because when a Fire/FF troller is teamed with an Ice/Kin, it becomes exactly the same situation as a Fire/Kin teamed with an Ice/FF.

The problem is that the combination of Kin and Fire is overpowered. If it's overpowered on one toon, it's also overpowered on a duo (and if it's overpowered farmer FOTMs you want to cut down on, duos are not uncommon). However if you targetted the power combination itself (unlike other methods which nerf either Fire/ or /Kin) there would be absolutely nothing to prevent the Fire's Hotfeet from being buffed by other means than Fulcrum Shift - Fortitude, Assault, AM... even Siphon Power.

Another option is that it might well be possible to set up the flag so that it only triggers when the caster of the Fulcrum Shift buff is the same as the caster of Hotfeet (or other factors such as teamsize = 1, etc)... but I imagine that directly copying the code for Targetting Drone/Sniper Rifle would be the simplest fix.

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Aren't most Recharge Buffs non-resistable anyway? And designed that way precisely so that sets such as SR which have inherent recharge resistance don't only get 50% instead of 70% from Hasten?


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Doesn't matter if you're Super Reflex or not, you still get 70% from hasten.

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Aye, that was my point- the "Recharge buff/debuff immunity" idea wouldn't work.

It's impossible to actually prevent Hasten (and virtually all other recharge buffs) from giving you all of its allocated recharge buff, because it's flagged as a "non-resistable" buff.

The only thing you could do to prevent a toon from getting any benefit from Hasten would be to massively debuff their recharge so that they were at least -70% below the lowermost recharge cap.

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Fire Control gets +25% to its hold and stun durations.

Activating Hot feet makes you immune to +recharge buffs and -recharge debuffs.

Now, how does that effect the combinations:

Anything but /Rad or /Kin:
Woohoo I can hold for 25% longer! I am t3h ub3r!
Wow, im immune to -recharge debuffs. Thats pretty handy!
Hmmm, I cant get sped up anymore. Well, its not too bad, I cant do that to myself anyway
Overall, its hard to argue that this would be anything but an average buff for fire control (heck, Id be pretty pleased with this on my Fire/Storm).


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Erm, Hasten?

I'd be miffed if I had a Fire/Storm and someone took away my ability to stack Lightning Storm & Tornado.

Fire isn't particularly lacking for Control either, people just seem to think it is for some reason.

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Aren't most Recharge Buffs non-resistable anyway? And designed that way precisely so that sets such as SR which have inherent recharge resistance don't only get 50% instead of 70% from Hasten?

That includes Speed Boost and AM, plus Set bonuses and LOTG Uniques too.

In other words, adding 100% Recharge Resistance won't affect any Recharge buffs. Kin or otherwise.
All this idea would do is give Fire/ Controllers immunity to recharge debuffs.

Oh for crying out loud. Lets just call it what it is: "Fulcrum Shift plus Hotfeet equals overpowered".

Better?

Now in reality it's actually quite possible to target this combination and only this combination.

Whilst I could talk about the Stalker's hide/critical mechanic, the best example of this is probably in Devices. Targetting drone is setup to act differently than normal when combined with AR's Sniper Rifle.

The check for this is detailed in RedTomax's listing for Sniper Rifle itself -
"33.52 Lethal damage Targeting Drone active [Ignores Enhancements & Buffs]"

Therefore a check could be made to HotFeet in the same way (since toggle buffs are identical to click buffs, they just get reapplied very quickly) to see if Fulcrum Shift is active... and only deal the extra "containment" damage if Fulcrum Shift is NOT active (and perhaps also simply deal less than normal damage when Fulcrum Shift is active). The only time this would affect a Fire/ who is not /Kin is if that Fire/ was TEAMED with a /Kin.

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I do think a higher setting is okay but to be brief just imagine Unyielding with more higher ranks than minions. Forget setting to fight +5s as many peoples powers would be almost worthless despite IOs.

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Against +5s, normal defence rules still apply and your powers are still pretty effective (30% of normal).

The only real challenge encountered when fighting mobs that are +5 to you is that they'll hit you a little over 50% harder than even-levels, so squishier toons will tend to be two-shot fairly quickly by +5 LTs or Bosses. It just takes more effort to kill them - consider the +4 AVs on the STF, or the RWZ "Scrapper Challenge".

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>Table 4: COMBAT MODIFIERS
Level Above Below
0 1 1
1 1.11 0.9
2 1.22 0.8
3 1.33 0.65
4 1.44 0.48
5 1.55 0.3
6 1.66 0.15
7 1.77 0.08
8 1.88 0.05
9 2 0.04
10 2.1 0.03
</pre><hr />
For me, the "ideal solution" would probably be to add the "expert mode" difficulty setting I brought up earlier (perhaps an extension of the tech currently in place for buffing enemies on flashback arcs?) that say adds 25% extra HP or resistance versus all damage to mobs and gives them all a 50% damage buff, without altering spawn size or level. This could be applied to any difficulty setting and be available as an extra option from the Hero/Fateweaver NPCs (and have some form of increased rewards for fighting foes with it turned on).

A few brief points:

Firstly, I agree that the game is easy. And likely, becoming TOO easy.

Secondly, this is not necessarily down to decreased mission difficulty or buffed powersets. It's down to having a lot more incidental buffs or extra fluff powers to rely on in a pinch than we did N years ago.

To give an example of this... if your team gets into trouble fighting an AV, or a big spawn, what do you do nowadays compared to a few years ago?

Well a few years ago you didn't have dual-builds. You didn't have Set bonuses giving you softcapped ranged defence or Perma PA/Dull Pain/Adrenaline Boost. You didn't have Procs giving you Full Invis, extra damage or boatloads of recovery. You didn't have the veteran attacks or Self Destruct. You might not even have had Shivans or Warburg Nukes. Fluff powers. Powers that are "extra" to the normal powersets but ones that come in incredibly handy in a pinch.

Yesterday I joined a ITF run on Defiant. Asked what AT they needed and they said a Tanker. Fair enough says I, and joined with my INV/SS. We had a Kinetic Troller and a Dark MM with us, along with two Blasters, a Scrapper, a Human Form PB and a Brute. No dedicated Healer or Bubbler, but we breezed through all the content until the last mission with only a few deaths (mostly self-inflicted "Blasterisms"). We stealthed straight to the Boss fight, but Nictus Rommy caused us some problems.

The first fight I was able to aggro both Rommy and the Nictus and get the team to immob Rommy, and he went down like a Fire/Fire Blaster with a trayful of blues. When he rezzed the team got mezzed. I kept aggro on the AV and fluffies (thankyou IOs for the extra survivability) but the ambush mob wiped some of the team. This time we weren't able to maneuver the fluffies away from Rommy (I was taunting Rommy like anything, but the Nictus followed him everywhere and stayed put when he was immobilised). Cue the team all hospitaling and then wiping repeatedly at the mission entrance (ambush mob). Depression starts to set in. Eventually we get back to where we started, staring at Rommy and his two fluffies. What do we do now? We don't have the firepower to "brute force" a kill with the Nictus healing him, certainly not without more buffers or someone locking down ambush aggro. If try and fail to pull Rommy and his Nictus apart, then we might wipe again and teammates will likely start dropping out of frustration.

In the old days you would have relyed upon tactics and luck, trying to pull them apart. Or perhaps an inspiration rush. These days it just took the usual three Warburg Nukes and a Shivan, the resulting fast kill got the team spirits back up again rightly and we kicked his [censored] twice more for good measure, followed by some tower hunting for the TF win. We had some other options to fall back on too, as the PB had a dual-build with Dwarf + Taunt available... or there are always the SG base temporary Empowerment Station buffs.

Now in my opinion these extra powers increase the fun level of a game (it's not fun to lose, just to be challenged) and I don't think nerfs are in order. But what I would like to see is a higher level of difficulty, perhaps an "expert mode" setting that greatly increases mob damage output/damage resistance/HP, but gives you a boost in influence gain, chance for a recipe to drop or EXP. This would provide an incentive for those of us that have more extreme capabilities (all IO'ed up, min-maxxed etc) to fight foes that are far more challenging than usual, whilst not affecting those of us with "normal builds".

I've seen a few very good charts on Enemy Resistances/Defence/Mez Protection.

There's not really any big charts for player-toon mitigation out there though. Mainly because your power choices are mostly dictated by (1) What primary/secondary powerset you end up picking and (2) Slotting.

Your best bet is probably to try out a few powers in Mids builder.
In general, most mitigation levels from general power pools pale in comparison to primary/secondary pools, with Clicks generally being more powerful than Toggles, which are virtually always far more powerful than Autos.

There are few power choices outside your primary/secondary that noticably benefit your survivability.
For Scrappers these boil down to Tough/Weave from the fighting pool (Resistance and Defence respectively, but usually only noticable when stacked with other sources of Resistance/Defence) Aid Self from the medicine pool (very good heal when slotted) and Air Superiority from the flight pool (Perma Knockdown on one foe).

Increasing your in-combat maneuverability can also help considerably, depending on your playstyle (Hurdle + Combat Jumping, Slotted Hover, etc.)

I had a dig up at the resistance spreadsheet... Essentially Psi is at 40% strength versus anything metallic (Nemesis/Council/Malta Robots, Turrets, etc) and Hydra. 50% against lots of Arachnos, all Preatorians, Psychic Clockwork, Zombies and Banished Pantheon. 60% against all Rikti. 65% against all Vanguard. 70% against Longbow. 75% against Wolves, 80% against Carnies and Rularuu.

So Cinemorans and CoT are about the only endgame foes you aren't penalised for (CoT ghosts are weak to Psi, extra 30% damage). The "human" Council/Nemesis are also susceptable to Psi damage, but not wolves/robots.

Level 20-40 when you're fighting DE, Crey, Family, Warriors and Freakshow is really your "sweet spot".

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the devs where so terrified of it being FoTM in PvP (that joke, yes) that they nerfed it to oblivion.

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Pretty Much...

It's meant to be stronger because of all the mez types: -recharge, stun, sleep, knockup, knockback.

The normal attacks are actually not too shabby - the animation times of TK Blast and Will Dom are quite fast and overall ST damage output is somewhere between Energy Blast and Ice Blast... but sadly the recharge times of the later attacks are rather high, the AoE sucks and Psychic damage gets very highly resisted after level 40.

The latter problem is one of the reasons I'm having trouble convincing myself to go with an Elec/Mental rather than an Elec/Fire for my next Blaster "PBAoE tanker" experiment...

I ended up being online most of Saturday but not long on Friday/Sunday. Wasn't really bothered about the Double Exp, but the 2x Prestige bonus was handy. Managed to get from 40-44 on an Empath Troller, along with enough Prestige to afford a plot upgrade in my SG base, a few hundred million inf and some 800-odd Merits.

My INV's main weakness is the Aggro Cap...
They usually only survive two foot stomps though!

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Most durable tank is probably Stone/Ice although there good arguments for other secondaries.

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Indeed.

I'd argue /Stone to be slightly superior to /Ice, given that it has two very spammable Knockdown PBAoEs (Tremor and Fault, Fault also Stuns) for extra aggro grabbing, and actually does a fair amount of damage. Ice can be built to do damage too, but even with the changes to Frozen Aura it's still normally a little weak.

They're very close, so it comes down to personal preference I suppose. To my mind /Ice is more controllery than "tankerish" - holding Foes back rather than beating them back...

The others? Fire is great at holding aggro but has no extra mitigation worth talking about, SS has Footstomp. The rest are all fairly decent apart from Energy Melee - it only has one very short range and weak PBAoE, and one that inflicts stun (which causes foes to stagger away from your aggro aura) at that.

It's an Auto Power affecting the Caster (the pet) so yep, it's a tohit debuff. But given the very, very high survivability of Animated Stone and Singy it's a decent tradeoff.

Pets tend to hit fairly reliably anyway, especially with typical IO slotting.... allied +Tohit also isn't that hard to come by (Tactics, Fort, Forge etc.)

Two KB resist IOs are pretty much as good as Acro when it comes to negating Knockback.
A Single KB IO will get you past the vast, vast majority of PvE without any bother.

There's one in the Defence and Resistance sets, and they'll slot into loads of SoA powers. There's also one in the new Universal Travel IO set, but they're very hard to come by below level 50 (unless you save up a lot of merits - It's 240 Merits for a 'Blessing of the Zephyr' KB IO compared to 50 for a Karma/Steadfast KB IO).

Or if you've slots to spare you can just slot three Kinetic Crash IOs into something like "Kick".

Tejas - Fire/Ice/Fire - Ranged AoE Monster. Abuses "Rise of the Phoenix", Hover and Ice Patch.
Decryptor - Ice/Devices/Ice - Sneaky B*stard. Abuses Teleport Foe, Full Invis and Hibern00b.
Coulomb - Sonic/Elec(/Elec or /Munitions) - Single-Target Blapper. High Ranged Defence Build.
Phosphor - Elec/Mental/Fire - PBAoE Monster. Soft-capped Ranged Defence, Stupidly survivable.

Also had a Elec/Fire and a Fire/Energy going at one point but got bored of them.

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I respecced INTO MoG once it changed, it's a superb boost now.

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^--- This!

My active ones at the moment are:

Terracotta Sentinel - Earth/Kinetic
Bel Mazda - Fire/Radiation
Purple Lightning - Illusion/Empathy

I'd also levelled a Mind/Empathy up fairly recently before deciding that Illusion suited me better and rerolling it.

An Ice/Thermal was in the works for a while too, but was deleted in favour of remaking it as an Ice/Fire Tanker and is unlikely to end up being rolled again in the forseeable future. Likewise, a Ice/FF lowbie placeholder toon was deleted in favour of a FF/Archery Defender.

The Earth/Kinetic is probably the best all-rounder... extremely high Damage/Recharge/Endurance/Recovery buffs, plus targettable +Resistance/Mez Protection and decent healing potential, combined with Regen/Damage debuffs and a Pet that can tank virtually any AV in the game. And, erm, lots of controls (including -knockback on the AoE immob for those pesky Squiddies and Energy Blasters)...

The Fire/Rad is pretty typical of most Fire/Rads everywhere. Debuffs, Healing and AoE Damage Output. His Schtick is mainly the Fire Cages/Flashfire Combo combined with having Full Stealth, TP Self, Recall Friend + Vengence/Mutation for more tricky situations, and Assault/Tactics to stack with what is virtually Perma AM.

The Illusion/Empathy is built around the "Empathy", with emphasis on +Recharge. He's essentially got Perma Hasten, meaning Adrenalin Boost is Perma, about 65% uptime on the Auras and around seven seconds short of Perma PA. In theory he can keep Fortitude on Five people at once. Has Powerboost from the Epic Pools in order to buff up the Defence/Tohit of Fort, with slightly under 50% uptime. His only attacks are Blind, Power Blast and Energy Torrent (Deceive doesn't count!!)

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At higher levels, a REAL Fire^3 Blaster makes Rise of the Phoenix part of his/her attack chain.

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Heck, I've a Fire/Ice/Fire Blaster (which unlike their Fire/Fire/Fire bretheren, can sometimes actually have trouble faceplanting even in the more "Ohh this looks fun!" situations) and ROTP is part of his attack chain.
I even recently respecced out of 100% Heal/100% Rech in ROTP in favour of 100% Damage/100% Rech.

Most PUGs don't quite get the hint the first time I tell them that post-level-47 my Nuke has no end crash... although I have been known to run ahead of "good" tanks so I can take the alpha from the next mob...

Currently Inferno recharges in 140 seconds. ROTP recharges in 117. The only reason for the difference is that Inferno tends to kill the first group so I need to spend time finding a second one to Pheonix...