Miladys_Knight

Aquaman needs a buff. Sponge Bob has all the same powers.

Same thing still applies. I don't think that what ever bonus staying pure gives can possibly outweigh the advantage of being a vigilante without being vastly overpowered (rogue might be a different story though.) In fact as far as the market goes sliding from vigilante to villian might be nerfing yourself unless you are fully outfitted with IOs first.

Just a few quick points.

1) A Boss can kill a blaster in 10 seconds and PuGs with alot of new players tend to not cast their holds on something "it doesn't work on" so stacked holds on bosses don't usually happen unless the team has some experience. Not only that but if you are always teaming as the OP states your controller or tank will be handling that anyway and your job as a blaster will be doing damage.

2) Sirens Song and other sleeps aren't as good as you are making them out to seem. They are a hard control when you are soloing if you are careful about using AoEs, but teamed they are little more than useless (unless you are on a team of experienced players) wasting your casting time for almost no damage except in the case I mentioned. Damage Auras, AoE Immobs, AoE KBs/KDs (if your team lacks these it's probably a sucky team anyway) will all immediately break the sleep and sleep has no lingering after effects.

Additionally mobs that have a self heal can break your sleep if they had it queued up when you slept them.

3) Sleep and the aggro mechanics don't work like you seem to think they do. Sleep has no placate compnent in it unless you have the proc from the purple sleep set slotted. If someone else doesn't all ready have the aggro when you Howl you will have all of it. When you sleep the spawn you still have all the aggro the mobs just can't do anything about it. When the sleep is broken, if the player that breaks it isn't closer, doesn't do significantly more damage than you did and have a higher threat rating the mobs will immediately wake up and attack you and it is immediate.

Sleeping mobs aren't really sleeping. The AI is still fully functioning they just aren't able to act. Slept mobs that prefer range will have a ranged attack queued up on the target they are aggro'd on and the server tick after the sleep breaks that attack will fire. That's why sleep is not a good team control. Even soloing if you break the sleep by recasting Sirens you will get hit with all those queued up ranged attacks even though the mobs immediately go back to sleep (that's one reason Council are nasty for sleep using toons even solo). They finish casting those attacks in their sleep.

If the sleeping mob is melee prefering or had the melee AI on at the time they were slept they are still running at full steam in their sleep, they are simply unable to move because they are slept. If awoken they will continue to close, if they are all ready in melee range they will immediately begin animating their melee attack.

This leads to some amusing/annoying behavior.

In the case of a Sonic/ Blaster, if you use Sirens from range on a melee preferring mob, then follow up with Screech it will immediately be stunned but will still charge you at full speed due to the stun bug. As long as you weren't in melee range when you woke it up, it won't get it's attack off but, because it closed, you can whack it with one of your melee attacks. I tend to think of this as reverse kiting.

If the mob was all ready running away (because the run AI had kicked in) when you Screech it, it will charge away at full speed and not slow down until it has to due to being blocked by an object or until the mob trys to change direction. (Hence the annoying part.)

Sonic/Ice is an excellent combination for soloing. It gives you tools to handle anything the game throws at you. Sirens will be a key power early on. It's good since it's duration is longer than its recharge out of the box.

Sleep the spawn. Use chill blain to immobilize one of the sleepers and then single target attack it until it's defeated. While doing that when Sirens is recharged use Howl then Sirens again for some AoE damage.

At higher level you can replace Chill Blain with Screech.

Sonic/Ice gives you 2 sleeps that will stack on bosses making it very safe. Adding in a hold from an Epic allows you to stack holds on a sleeping boss.

Against things that are immune to sleep or slows you still have Ice Patch and Shockwave to keep you safe.

With a decent amount of recharge your seemless AoE attack chain can be Shockwave, Howl, Sirens, Shiver. It's not high damage but it's extremely safe.

You can take the Electric epic and fill all the bills, it gets you an extra hold, an extra AoE attack and EM Pulse stacked on Dreadfull Wail will stun everything (even Bosses) it doesn't kill. It's fun and safe soloing and it will hold it's own on a team. I highly reccomend it.

None of them are "really" good options for a teaming only character.

Shocking bolt - no hold in the primary or secondary so it can't be stacked on a boss which is where you would need it on a team.

Sirens - can be proc'd (which would be of low value) or it can be slotted as a set mule with a cheap purple set. It's main use would be to stop a team wipe by sleeping an Add before it got to the group. Either way it's very situational especially when used while on an inexperienced team.

Assault - may be your best option if you can handle the end burn. It boost's your damage and the damage of your allies which synergizes well with the -res debuff from your primary.

EM Pulse - This too is a situational power but in the situations that you may use it, it can be a team saver.

EM Pulse + DP + Dreadful Wail can completely lock down an entire spawn that is loaded with bosses (think Crey and PPs). If your DP is slotted for end mod you can avoid the end crash entirely and pick stuff off in safety after Dreadful Wail. Even if you fail to avoid the end crash, proper slotting of Dreadful Wail and EM Pulse will keep the entire spawn stunned until after the end crash has expired.

The vendor value on goods is where inf is created. A good that is consumed has no real value in the terms of inf or wealth as it has been used up. (Think in the tems of food. Unspoiled unconsumed food has value. It's by product doesn't except as fertilizer.) At that point the IO that has been produced may have intrinsic value depending on what atribute it enhances or set bonuses it provides but it's "real" value in terms of influence when sold during a respec is usually much lower than the sum of it's parts. It's ability to generate wealth is then more difficult to determine.

New influence is only created when goods are sold to a vendor, mobs are defeated, or non-AE missions are completed. Anything else is simply transferring existing inf around.

In terms of actual wealth generation from soloing, villians have an advantage over several hero AT combinations and are on an equal footing with the rest.

In terms of merit generation it should be equivalent since merits are a time based reward.

It would have to be too big an incentive to remain where you are (the advantages are too great at the moment, especially considering the villian's comparative lack of content) and it can't be a punative punishment for migrating (that goes back to the devs observation that the players view that anything less powerful in X state is a nerf).

I don't see how the reward for staying pure could possibly outweigh the advantages of switching without being vastly overpowered.

While all this may be true merits are not a "true" source of wealth because the "real" value of a pool C/D recipe is it's vendor value. That is all the real inf that is being created. Sure more inf can be transferred from one player to another by selling but the real wealth is generated by defeating mobs and vendoring Common IO recipes especially for a toon that has that particular recipe memorized and things like the SOs that drop. Every thing else is just transferring inf around with a 10% cut being eliminated per transaction.

When I did Cat's original 1 hour challenge on my 50's (which is where the majority of wealth is created) 25-33% of my total income in a 1 hour period was from vendoring things that I wasn't going to be using and the lion's share of that was common IO recipes.

I agree with the Goat on this one. If the devs have been paying attention, every time they have diversified the number and types of drops, or have expanded the system by adding in another currency, prices have climbed for some things and the costs for others have skyrocketed (Costumes, Merits, AE tickets, PvP recipes are all prime examples) adding goods with out increasing the rate at which those goods are supplied increase the rarity and therefore the price.

I'm hoping that the devs aren't so blind to the in game economy that they realize this.

The other thing to note would be restrictions on the IO sets that you posit. What happens when you slot one? If the result is that you can't switch sides then the devs have just blown their entire new expansion out of the water which would be a bad thing to do.

Would the IO pop out of the slot when you switch? That would be something that has never been done previously and would also be a bad precedent to set especially considering the costs in time or inf of set IOs.

Would the villian/hero be able to change sides after slotting one without a punative penalty? If so, it defeats the purpose that you posit.

I doubt it happens for any or all of those reasons.

Edit to add - that the TF/SF discrepancy is being adressed by side switching and the so called PPP discrepancy has been blown out of proportion. Villians are generalists, PPPs are nice but aren't nearly as important for the villians in general. Heroes on the other hand, being specialists, have several survival/damage tools withheld from them until they get their APP. The hero exception is the scrapper and look how few APPs there are (especially prior to I16) and how hard most of their APPs suck. The scrapper, like the villians, can get along just fine without an APP/PPP.

It isn't convincing to me and never has been, because it operates on the flawed premise that villians are disadvantaged at soloing.

It's been made fairly clear that drops (and therefore wealth generation) are better when soloing than when teamed.

There are no villian AT Primary/Secondary combinations that aren't capable of soloing at a decent speed (as a way of measuring; at or very near the mean amount of time for story arc completion as used to determine merit awards). The converse, however, is not true. There are several combinations on the hero side that either lack the raw damage out put (some controller and defender combinations) or the survivability (blasters having long activation times in the primary power set when not paired with a mitigation heavy secondary, notably, AR and Sonic) especially outside IO sets, to solo at speed.

Oh, I completely agree. This is the reason that my TA/ defenders all languish at level 33 but my /TA controllers all run up to level 50 and still see play time. I'm just pointing out a potential developer concern.

I think to get past the potential developer hurdle though the buffs to TA should be things that are redundant for a controller. For instance entangling arrow could be an arrow tipped with web grenade instead. Web grenade's new graphic suggests that it "should" be a small radius AoE.

An idea along this line would be to use the Explosive arrow, grenade graphic, the web grenade explosion graphic, and give the power a chance (25-33%) of immobilizing (or applying a minor debuff) to up to 4 more targets within a 10' radius.

Using the debuff would make it better for controllers but immobing more targets would be better for the defender and redundant for the controller.

Don't sell the combination short. It's VERY handy in high defense debuff situations like ITFs and Ship Raids, it allows team members to roam outside of dispersion bubble and remain at the soft cap, and all the to hit debuffs self stack, which is different from many secondary power effects.

It also puts out a respectable amount of AoE Damage (for a defender secondary) and can keep an entire spawn immobilized.

First - with defense set bonuses you can soft cap to at least 2 positions with Dispersion Bubble and Manuvers which, if they are ranged and AoE, allows you to hover out of melee range and pretty much have the same defense values as you would in PFF but with the ability to attack out of it. You don't have the resistances provided by PFF but you still get the mez protection from dispersion bubble and so do your allies.

Second - It depends on what you envision your team roll to be. Forcefields is almost entirely a pro-active buff set. That means that you will get almost no benefit from the defender inherent, soloing is mainly time and endurance consuming, your damage is anemic, and your primary buff powers are useless without teammates to cast them on.

Energy secondary allows you to synergize it's knockback with the knockback in the primary.

Electric secondary allows you to pretty much ignore one of the main problems of the FF Primary which is the rate and amount of endurance use. Damage with this set is even more anemic though since it lacks a tier 3 hard hitting blast.

Sonic solves some of the low damage problems by stacking resistance debuffs from the blasts.

Dark's accuracy debuffs synergize well with the defense provided by the primary and dark has an AoE immobilize that has no -KB component. This means that all your positioning powers in FF and Dark aren't self nullifying. The dark secondary also has a ranged damage power that has a self healing component. It allows you to immediately compensate for the 5% of all attacks that make it through the defense and do damage to you. All of this while doing relatively decent amounts of AoE damage.

Radiation allows the slotting of the Achilles heal procs to increase damage (sonic does a better job of this though).

Archery and Assault Rifle are both primarily lethal damage and Assault Rifle is further hampered by lacking Aim. Both of these sets however, have a tier 9 blast that has no endurance crash so they can be used without the bubbles dropping.

Ice gives you 2 holds that can be stacked on bosses and the ability to keep the mobs at the slow movement cap and very near, if not at, the -rech cap.

They are a non factor. Mission complete bonus is far larger than any total bonuses you get for street sweeping and any defeats you suffer in a mission are at half XP debt rather than full XP debt that you get on the outside.

Mobs outside aren't affected by the difficulty sliders and almost always spawn at the character level or higher depending on the levels of that zone.

I'd point out that the main reason for me to soft cap is so that I can drop parry from my attack chain and increase my DPS. It's an ok strategy as a mid point in your build but I wouldn't stop there.

That will be the best way for all toons. Even red siders. Become a Rogue, then go all the way to being a Hero, then fall back as a Vigilante and stay there. You can access content on either side but you get to shop on the robust side. Just another reason that leaving the markets separate is ....... well there's no polite way to say it so I'll leave it to the reader to fill in the blank.

I remember it. You and I were on the same side in that debate. I can't recall who it was that was so upset by a potential merger either though. He was pretty adamant about his position and kept going back to the post that Ex Libris scribed for Posi that listed the hero head start on inf and salvage as the main reason that the merger wouldn't go forward.

You had pointed out (quite correctly) that base (or any other type) salvage didn't exist prior to villians and so the salvage comment in that statement of Posi's (via Ex) was incorrect, which for me had the effect of making the rest of that statement invalid as a supportive arguement.

How much of it was fact? How much was a mis-statement? How much of it was Posi shooting from the hip to avoid doing something he knew he "should" do but wasn't going to because he "didn't want to?"

You have me confused with another poster. My personal belief was that there wasn't really all that much per captia difference between heroes and villians on total inf. since pre IOs you spent more than you made until the late 30s early 40s. I didn't believe that there was that large a bank of influence blue side after only 5 issues.

Dev released numbers showed that there was a disparity.

I have never been worried about villian purchasing power either. We had a long discussion about this at one point and my stand was that if there was a difference a EURO solution would work but was probably not needed.

I have always maintained that villians would be able to prosper in a healthier market and that merging them would create a healthier market for both sides. Slightly better for blue side toons and vastly better for red side toons.

My red side toons have larger banks than the majority of my blue side toons for the simple reason that there is much less to buy red side. I frequently out leveled bids before they were filled and cancelled them to bid on other or higher level recipes.

I tend to bid about 80% of going rate on things and let them sit. Blue side things come in with in a week or 2. Red side I have out standing bids on things that are months old. Even though I have FAR fewer villians I have far more unfilled and outstanding bids red side.

Quite frankly, I don't care if my red side inf is devalued if it means I have access to more goods through a merger.

Your Blaster(s) and/or Controller(s) should be able to keep her immobilized so that she can't close to melee on the tank.