Muon_Neutrino
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Posts
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Joined
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Quote:Yeah, that's the thing that boggles me about this whole ridiculous tempest in a teapot. Once you get past level 20 (which presumably you plan to do at some point) the darn enhancements are WORSE THAN A LEVEL 21 DUAL ASPECT IO IN EVERY WAY. There is literally *NO* long term advantage to having them. What the heck is the point of getting all worked up over it? This is an outstanding example of the dev team doing it *right* in making a bonus which is useful but not too much so.Originally Posted by Wuigly Squigly
Meh they suck anyway. Ill keep using my real dmg procs and purples kthx.
I swear, I'll never understand why some people spend their lives looking for reasons to get offended. -
I always take nukes, and use them frequently. Are they the most optimal choice? Probably not, although I think their drawbacks are frequently overstated. I don't really care about that, though. I just think that blowing a spawn to kingdom come with a single ludicrous boom is great fun. I still giggle every time I PBU+aim+nova on my defender and send dead bodies raining down across the city. So, I guess:
Do you nuke? Yes. Very yes.
When? As often as possible, when I see an appropriate target spawn.
Best nukes? Anything that makes a really satisfying boom. Nova and the kheld nukes get extra points since they send the bodies flying.
What powers complement nukes? Aim/BU/PBU/anything that makes a bigger boom, hasten to get it up more often, and anything that makes it easier to get into the middle of the spawn safely (PFF is really good at that). I don't worry about end recovery tools as much, since my insp tray usually seems to magically fill itself up when I nuke.
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End usage? Maybe, that and the fact that they get turned off if someone sneezes on you.
Blazing aura also has a small radius and only does damage to things that you engage in *sustained* melee combat with. Blasters may melee things, but in *sustained* melee generally either you or the target end up dead pretty quick, and either way blazing aura won't do much. Hot feet has a much larger radius and some mitigation attached, so I would definitely use it myself even if I did have to retoggle it all the time, but blazing aura I don't really see any use for. -
Huntsmen do work well on teams, but I'm not sure I'd say they have weaker damage than an AR/dev blaster. Weaker than blasters in general, yes, but not weaker than an AR/dev. Blasters only do 112.5% of VEAT damage ranged, and venom grenade is more than enough to erase that. And while they may get trip mine, we get pets *and* buildup.
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Huntsman more or less means gun powers + leadership + bane armor/buildup/surveillance, usually with pool leadership powers as well as the TT ones. As Ideon said, it ends up playing something like a crab, in some ways - lots of ranged AoE damage, some pets, and relatively poor ST damage - with fewer pets and less personal toughness, but considerably larger team utility between the extra leadership and surv.
Even though they are technically 'banes', they really don't share much of their playstyle, since they don't use the mace (or any melee at all, generally). It's not a strictly stronger build than a crab, but I think it's roughly on par with slightly different strengths. And you don't have giant legs sticking out of your back.
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Quote:O.oOriginally Posted by Dark_Respite
I miss organizing Lobster Races in Atlas Park. The sheer volume of WTF responses from seeing a fleet of speedboosted Lobster-form Kheldians zooming around Atlas (in the seated position) along a preset course was just wonderful fun.
I'm trying to imagine what this looks like. I'm pretty sure I'm failing, but the mental image is still one of the funniest things I've run into this week.
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Quote:Yeah, got a prompt for the 400k the listing fee should have been, clicked accept and then found it had sold the wrong thing. I suppose I could try turning off the prompt, canceling, and then relisting.Originally Posted by UberGuy
Did you get a prompt first warning about the listing fee?
If that does turn out to be the cause, man that'd suck. It'd be a built in mechanism to screw you over exactly when it'd hurt the most - on the expensive trades.
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I like a lot of your ideas, you've got to watch out for the cottage role, though. Basically, the devs are extremely reluctant to remove or change the core functionality of a power - target, power type, etc. In this case, it's your suggestion to turn taser into a drop that isn't likely to fly. A cone taser could be done, but it'd have to be a click fired from the player as it is now. Time bomb's change is borderline, but I think you could get away with it.
I really like the rest of what you've got, though. The choke effect on smoke grenade is something I haven't seen suggested before, but it makes perfect sense. I'd even be tempted to give it a pretty good chance to go off, simply because the effect is pretty short - or else make the cloud persistent for 10-20 seconds with an ongoing chance to choke, like traps' poison trap (although not as strong). The only problem I can see is that it'd become pretty hard to justify it being no aggro if it's choking people.
I would vote for the +damage in both cloaking device and targeting drone. The cloaking device damage wouldn't be up too often, so I'd think the drone should have it too. -
I got bit by this myself today, tried to list an impervious skin mez resist my lowbie defender found, darn thing instead listed a stack of 9 runes that weren't anywhere near the enhancement. For 8 million each. The 3.6 mil listing fee was most of what he had on hand.
It doesn't seem to be based on how fast you do things. I was specifically watching the chat window since I had heard of this bug, and it clearly said that I had put the enhancement in the market. I even waited a few extra seconds to make sure it knew what it was doing.
Only thing I can think of to do about this for now is to make sure that the thing you're trying to sell is the only salable item in the market slots at the time. A pain if you have tons of stuff there, but better than posting a stack of salvage for some ridiculous price.
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However, that tohit debuff is tiny, so it's not worth enhancing if that's what you're thinking. Stick to heal.
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Quote:In this context, DM = dark miasma, not dark melee. It's probably a mistake to use the same abbreviation for both, though. Usually you can get it from context or which AT board you're on, but it can cause problems in situations like these.Originally Posted by Vega
Trying to figure out why you factor Dark Servant into the equation. There is no Servant in any of the DM sets.
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My ice/ice dom got a bots/energy blast clone, she was actually relatively useful. Didn't have to worry too much about her surviving ajax as I just kept him held the whole time, but she contributed quite well against the ambushes and helped me beat ajax down once he was vulnerable.
Fighting 8 of me was.... interesting. I've never seen so much -recharge and -movement in my life! 8 arctic airs is not fun at all. Thankfully I had my dom/PB/aoe hold ace up my sleeve. That and demonic saw me through. -
Since city of data is being updated again, I would like to renew a suggestion I made a while back. At the main AT selection screen, the only active links are the text AT names below the logos. Given the very large size of the logos compared to the text, it feels strange to me that you can't click on the logos to go to the AT's page. It would make a lot more intuitive sense, imo, if the logos were also clickable. Also, when first loading the page the text links jump around a lot as the logos load and display, and I always end up clicking on the logos anyway as the text jumps out from under my cursor.
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As for the 6gb thing, while I do expect to be doing some astronomical image work I wouldn't expect it to need that much memory. It just seemed strange to me that 4gb was still standard - I know some people had that much a couple years ago, so it just seemed odd that larger amounts weren't common now. I was bottlenecked by my 1gb of ram so long on this laptop that I wanted to make darn sure it wouldn't be a problem on my next computer. Is 4gb really still enough to do everything, is this just my limited knowledge showing up again?
And, related, if there are performance issues with doing 3x 2gb, are there similar issues with 2x 2gb, 2x 1gb? I imagine you could get a pair of 1gb sticks pretty cheap. (Although, can you even get DDR3 1gb sticks? I assume you'd want them all to be the same speed, right?)
Also, do you think it would be a good idea and/or necessary to get that extra CPU cooler from the 1375$ version? -
Father Xmas, if you have to keep memory in pairs, is there such a thing as 3gb sticks? Given how much memory CoH likes to use, it seemed to me that it might be a good idea to put in more than 4gb. Is that just not necessary? Also, the CPU cooler you have for the more expensive rig - do you think that would be useful on mine, and would it fit this motherboard/cpu combination?
DarkEther, thanks for the speakers, that looks about like what I was looking for. As for a monitor, I was indeed hoping for a bit cheaper than that one - I was hoping to spend no more than 150$-200$ or so, but is it even possible to get a decent LCD for less than 200$?
Also, for anyone who knows about this sort of thing - how does that whole dual monitors thing work? I had a chance to use a computer with two monitors set up, and I was impressed with how useful it was, but I know absolutely nothing about what such a setup would require. Do you need two video cards? I wouldn't be doing this immediately, but I might want to upgrade to such a configuration sometime in the future. Does this put any limits on the components I will be getting now? -
Greetings all, I'm hoping to get some help from all the technically inclined people who live here. I've been playing on a macbook pro for the past 4 years, but it's increasingly obvious that I need to upgrade. As a sort of graduation present to myself, I'm planning to put myself together a new desktop, and I need some help picking out components. While I'm technically literate enough to assemble the thing, install windows myself, etc, I definitely don't have the knowledge needed to pick the pieces.
I was thinking of using Father Xmas's builds as a baseline, but unfortunately it's looking like my budget will fall somewhere in between his two setups. So, looking at his 1375$ rig, what components can I trim down to get it to maybe 1100$? I also would like to up it to 6gigs of ram, could I just add another 2gigs of the same type already listed (i.e. will the motherboard take more)?
Also, since the only peripheral I have is a mouse, I will need a monitor and speakers. Does anyone have any suggestions for a relatively cheap, decent quality, medium sized LCD monitor and some 'budget' but decent 2:1 speakers? -
If you've got bane spider armor, wolf spider armor is totally skippable. All wolf spider armor gives is 3% S/L resist and mag 2 mez protection. Bane armor gives 7.5% res all, 20% max HP, and mag 4 protection. The only benefit to taking wolf spider armor would be the extra mez protection, but mag 4 is already enough for the vast majority of situations (and where it isn't, an extra mag 2 isn't likely to save you). While if you had unlimited power slots it might be useful, it's totally not worth it given how many other powers you have competing for your choices.
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Quote:If you're looking to keep baddies off of things like the reactor core and towers, you want to use force bubble, not repulsion field. Repulsion field's small radius means that it basically protects *you*, not others. You can jump into a crowd around a teammate and knock many of them away in different directions, but for overall keeping stuff off of things that aren't you, you want force bubble. That thing's got an absolutely huge radius, easily large enough to encompass whatever you're trying to defend. If defending things is the only reason you took repulsion field, I would just move force bubble earlier in the build instead.Originally Posted by Mortimer_NA
Here are some of the reasons for my power choices. I know that they are largely situational. Thats fine. I wanted to build a toon that may not use every power all the time but would have a utility belt to draw from when the need arises. That said, I took repulsion field(I have heard a lot of bad about this power) at level 28 for uses on mishes such as the Terra Volta Reactor. Is it necessary? Prolly not but neither are Bat-shaped (Insert weapon of choice). Keeping the baddies off of defendable objects just sounds useful. I also took Detention Field, another power I have heard a lot of hating on. I took it late as I have heard its nice effect on the towers in the Statesman TF. Again, Detention Field and Repulsion field on the towers will take them out of commission. Repulsion Bomb. hmm I have heard varying opinions on this one. I took it as an opener. Slotted for stun, I hope it will Knockdown and keep them dazed till my mates can wipe them out.
You've skipped aim, which is not a good idea. Even on a defender, the damage bonus is worthwhile for boosting RoA. I'd use the freed power slot from repulsion field to take it.
Don't slot repulsion bomb for stun. The stun is only mag 2 and has a measly 40% chance to go off. Slot it as an AoE instead - it does slightly more damage than fistful or explosive, so it's well worth it. I'd give it 5 posi and the recharge proc. It *is* a very good opener, though more because of the knockdown than the stun. Aim + repulsion bomb + RoA would be pretty nice I think, repulsion bomb putting them on their butts so they don't run out of the area while RoA is animating.
That does drop you slightly under the ranged softcap, unfortunately, down to 41.5%. One thing you can do is slot one of your defense powers (I'd suggest maneuvers, since it has the highest end cost) with 6 red fortune. You do lose 2.5% recharge and the regen/recovery bonuses, but you gain 2.5% ranged defense along with a minor damage bonus. That's 44%. If you can free up two more slots somewhere (hasten can probably get away with 2 level 50 IOs, so that's one), you could put them into super speed for a pair of zephyrs. They don't give as much as they used to, but it's still another 1.25% along with some more KB protection.
Detention field is cool - I have it too, and while I don't use it often, it's useful on occasion. One thing - acc/mez hamis act to increase the intangibility magnitude, and I think you might need to slot some in order to affect some targets. I know, for example, that it doesn't work on elite bosses with no acc/mez in it. I don't know about the towers specifically or AVs in general, but you'll probably want to ask around to see if you need any acc/mez in it, and if so how many. -
Yeah, that's the problem. There's not just one way to do things, there's many. While it makes things complicated sometimes, it's also one of the things that makes warshades so much fun.
Although these won't be complete until some of the later powers roll around, some of the general opening maneuvers I use are:
Open with gravitic emanation, jump in, mire/eclipse, (grav well + unchain essence optional), nova, kill. Basically what Obsidian said.
Run in with nebulous form on, let them waste their alpha, drop phase, eclipse/mire, see above.
Teleport into the middle of the spawn in dwarf form, soak the alpha while miring, drop to human for an eclipse/mire, see above.
I also took hasten/super speed since I had the extra power choices. Hasten is very useful for all your long recharging stuff, and shadow cloak + SS = invisibility. This allows me to ghost missions (and I can recall people when I get there, too), or to stealth into the middle of a spawn to begin the mire/eclipse/etc cycle above. For hasten, I just usually leave it on auto, as with so much other stuff going on I have a tendency to forget about it otherwise.
Of course, in all situations once the fight's over you'll want to top off with stygan circle and raise a pet with dark extraction (if it's up). In the first and second patterns, you can alternatively jump to dwarf, mire again, and scrank things out if you like, or just jump to dwarf, mire, and then drop to human and nuke. You could also nuke out of the third pattern too. You also can get away with being less fancy and just run in with dwarf and beat stuff up. It won't be as flashy as the more complicated dances, but it still works, especially when you only have a few foes to beat up. -
The problem is (ignoring non-proliferatable powerset types like blaster manipulation, dom assault, etc), brutes, corruptors, doms, scrappers, defenders, and blasters all *already* don't have any unique sets - in fact, only stalkers, tanks, MMs, and controllers *do*. And I very, very highly doubt they'll introduce a new set for each of those 6 ATs and *only* for them - imagine the outcry! So trying to leave each AT with a unique set is already screwed, and it'd be pretty silly to make it so that *some* ATs have unique sets.
Aside from that, though, I don't think we need to keep sets exclusive to preserve uniqueness, because the ATs themselves play differently. A /nin stalker would still be unique if /nin went to scrappers, since stalkers and scrappers play significantly differently. Even if /illusion went to doms, an illusion controller would still play like nothing else in the game, since dom and controller play is usually so different. An /ice brute wouldn't play anything like an ice/ tanker, etc, etc.
I personally would rather they proliferate everything *because* of those differences, so as to open up the widest variety of possibilities - at least, those which fit within the AT framework. If I want to play an illusionist who also beats his foes up with energy (a combination of abilities which fits the dom AT), 'roll an ill/ controller' isn't really a solution. -
To elaborate, there are several types of powers that might possibly be called +HP buffs.
One would be straight up heals. These just restore any HP you may have lost. They come in many strengths and varieties, and it's hard to pick a 'best' one since they often have different functions and are strongest in different situations.
Another would be +regeneration buffs. These don't immediately restore any HP on their own, but they increase the natural health regeneration rate that the target has. In other games these might be called 'heal over time' powers, but not usually here since they operate off a different mechanic. Again, they come in many different strengths and varieties, and it's difficult to pick a 'best' one.
The last would be +max HP buffs. These generally do not have any effect on your current level of HP (if you were at 50% before, you'll be at 50% after), but they increase the total maximum amount of HP you can have (so that 50% of your HP bar represents more total HP). The only *buff* like this in game at the moment is frostworks from cold domination, although the self-heal/buff dull pain, several accolade powers, and +HP set bonuses also have this effect.
If you can let us know which category you were talking about and a bit about what use you want to put them to, we should be able to help more. -
Elec/something is probably the way to go, then. It's the stalker primary with more or less the best overall AoE, which is what is most important on teams. You might also consider spines.
Lightning rod, as a pseudo-pet summon, unfortunately does not crit. However, it also doesn't break hide, so you can lightning rod -> thunder strike and still get a crit off of TS. -
Dominators in first place for me. I love control, I love freezing things in place, and I love then beating them to a pulp. I'm not squishy, but only because nothing gets a chance to swing at me - it's considerably more interesting than not being squishy simply because you're not a squishy. The adrenaline rush is akin to playing a blaster, but with less floor-eating. The only fly in the ointment are those #*%$&(*@ PToD EBs. They're the reason I'm waiting with such bated breath for doms to get illusion, for then I WILL BE AN UNSTOPPABLE GOD MUHAHAHAHAHA!
In a rough tie for second are defenders and tanks. Both have the same sort of careful-attention-required demands as dominators, but in a manner than focuses on others rather than myself. In general, I like to have interesting tactical possibilities available.
Then there's scrappers, for when I *don't* feel like having to think. These are for when I just want to zone out and kill stuff.
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Yeah, to elaborate on what EricHough said, it's actually mathematically provable that a tohit buff will always improve your final hit chance more than an equal sized accuracy buff does.
Imagine that for a certain attack you initally have an accuracy modifier of a, and the tohit portion of the equation is initially b. Then, unbuffed, your final chance to hit with that attack is just a*b. If you have an accuracy buff of x, your new final chance to hit will be (a+x)*b = (a*b)+(x*b). If you have a *tohit* buff of x, your final chance to hit will instead be a*(b+x) = (a*b)+(a*x).
As you can see, the difference between them is that the accuracy buff improves your initial chance to hit by a factor of bx, while the tohit buff improves it by ax. However, b is the inital value of the tohit portion of the equation, and so is a number between .05 and .95. a, on the other hand, is the inital accuracy mod, and is so a number equal to at least one with no upper limit other than the total number of enhancements and set bonuses you can get. Thus, bx will *always* be a smaller number than ax, and the tohit buff will always improve your chance to hit by a larger amount than the accuracy buff. The only exception is if the tohit buff is large enough to run into the 95% cap, but in that case you end up at that cap either way so there's no difference.
Now, that doesn't factor in CT:O's resistance to tohit debuffs, or the fact that slotted CT:O gives slightly more accuracy than slotted CT:L gives tohit. Playing around with this in some plotting software, though, CT:O is better against even cons, when you have less accuracy slotted, or against stronger tohit debuffs, while CT:L is better when you are fighting higher cons, have one or more SOs worth of accuracy already slotted, or against only moderate amounts of tohit debuffing.
However, while CT:L isn't always stronger, it does provide its benefits to the whole team. For that reason alone, I'd always rather have CT:L. -
Quote:Sort of. Repulsion field is more or less a melee shield - stuff that runs up to you gets knocked back as soon as it touches you. It doesn't prevent them from swinging once, but it does keep them from swinging *more* than once. You can also use it offensively, trying to knock things into corners or jumping next to an embattled teammate and knocking their attackers away.Originally Posted by Mortimer_NA
Is there any point to taking both Repulsion Field and Force Bubble?
Force bubble is more of an overall mob positioning tool. It's not intended to save you personally from melee, although it does do that. It's often used to shove spawns into advantageous positions pseudo-stormie style, as well as keeping large amounts of melee enemies away from squishies. It's much more of a broad brush type tool, and it does draw a fair amount of aggro.
There *are* significant differences between the powers. Where repulsion field keeps mobs from meleeing you, force bubble stops them from meleeing the entire team. Where repulsion field is a precision instrument to knock back one foe or a small clump, force bubble moves around the whole enemy spawn. Since repulsion field doesn't do anything unless the foe is right next to you, you can safely leave it running. On the other hand, force bubble has such a huge radius that you'd really best turn it off when you aren't actively trying to position something lest you just make a mess.
The problem is that, while there *are* differences, the overall functions of the powers are broadly similar. They both move around foes, even if they do it in slightly different ways. And so while in an ideal world I might want both available, I find it hard to justify the power choices to take both, especially given the near requirement to take an extra pool power in maneuvers.
Also, they both use a large amount of endurance, especially repulsion field when you're actually hitting foes. So if you took both you'd end up with massive endurance drain whenever you tried to use force bubble, since you'd presumably have repulsion field on all the time, along with dispersion bubble and maneuvers to boot. Those 4 toggles between them cost about 2.4 end/s base. Even with stamina and 2 endredux in each, that's about 60% of your recovery - and that's ignoring the extra 1 end (irreducible) drained each time repulsion field hits an enemy.
Ultimately, I decided I couldn't afford the extra end cost or power pick on my FF. I already had to skip an epic power or two I wanted, and my end recovery was touch and go even with the equivalent of 2 or more end redux in every single power I have (that particular issue didn't settle down until I got a performance shifter proc). Your milage may vary, but I don't think the tradeoffs of taking both are worth it.