Muon_Neutrino

It's always possible for it to be a part of the connection between your area and the servers - not the ISP, but something along the way. That would affect everyone in an area, but not every single person connecting. If it was happening for *everyone*, the devs would already be on it.

Servers - Infinity, victory
Location - Detroit area, michigan
ISP - ATT
Lag - No undue lag noted

For hard numbers, just look at the in game info. As far as I know, city of data hasn't been updated yet. Both sets have absolutely identical damage per end, as that is baked into the powers formula. One thing about these particular sets, though, is that /ice tends to have quick animation times, which can lead to faster endurance use. Assuming that at these levels you don't have a gapless chain, and are thus using each power as fast as it recharges, end usage for each power looks like this:

Psi dart: 4.37 end, 4.58s cycle, 0.953 end/s
Ice bolt: 5.2 end, 5.188s cycle, 1.002 end/s

Mental blast: 8.528 end, 9.848s cycle, 0.866 end/s
Ice blast: 6.864 end, 7.188s cycle, 0.955 end/s

Mind probe: 10.192 end, 11.32 cycle, 0.900 end/s
TK thrust: 8.528 end, 10.244s cycle, 0.832 end/s
Ice sword: 8.528 end, 9.58s cycle, 0.890 end/s

That's not *huge* differences, but they're there - and the effects of short animation times will actually become more pronounced as attack chains tighten up.

The other possible big difference is in your low level control powers. While the holds are effectively identical, ice may have a ST or AoE immob, while mind may have a confuse. The immobilizes cost a lot of end for relatively poor damage, but you may be tempted into using them to fill out a poor attack chain. Confuse, on the other hand, is likely to *increase* endurance efficiency through causing enemies to damage each other.

Or, it may simply be a perceptual issue. No real way to tell.

Boy, *this* is gonna get ugly fast...

About the damage changes: there were two separate parts to the change. The first was to remove the damage boost from domination, and then increase the dominator base damage modifiers so that all attacks (even the ones that weren't further tweaked) now do as much damage as they used to do in domination.

The second part was to tweak some attack powers, above and beyond the base modifier changes. In most cases, this was to make some powers hit harder, at the cost of more endurance and a longer recharge. It is only for these attacks that endurance usage was increased. You will notice this most when playing psi and fiery assault, as they received the most tweaks, and to a lesser degree energy assault. Icy and thorny were barely touched, and electric actually had some of the melee powers get cheaper.

In regards to specific sets, psi shockwave finally got the nerf that everyone's been expecting for years, but the rest of the set was significantly buffed so that it's not '37 levels of suck' anymore. Energy assault got massively buffed (the centerpiece being power push getting bumped to scale 1.64 damage for free) and is now one of the better assault sets. Oh, and lift finally got buffed to do the same damage as levitate.

If you've been gone since the beginning of the year, you missed the launch of the long-awaited mission architect player-generated content system. You will likely get a pop-up about a contact for the MA tutorial, and running through it will give you at least an idea of what's going on. There are nigh-endless amounts of player-made story arcs floating around in there - the challenge lies in separating the fun arcs from the farms and the ones written by illiterate monkeys with no concept of balance. Be warned - while dev's choice and hall of fame arcs usually got their status because they were good, fun arcs, once they attained that status they became un-editable, and thus a number of them have since been broken by updates to the MA system. If you play one and something doesn't seem right, it probably wasn't intended to be that way. Nevertheless, the MA as a whole is a pretty good way to find new content, if you are willing to pick your way through the bad and un-fun arcs to find it. A pretty good way to find em is to look around in the "MA stories and lore" forum.

Heh, I remember being a newb.... I had a grav/storm as either my first or second character (don't remember which), and I'm standing there in atlas fiddling around with my powers when I get invited to a team. Turns out we're going to the 'sewers', wherever that is. So we go in, and looking back on it now it was actually a pretty competent team. We all ran around killing stuff and leveling like mad, but as usual eventually people wanted to get on with the game and the team broke up. One team member told me to go get killed and I would wake up in the hospital outside. To my newbish self, that didn't sound like a very good idea ("why would I want to get killed on purpose?" - it didn't help that at the time, the game I had been playing most often was diablo 2 on hardcore mode!), but I remembered that I had some sort of teleporter power that I had stuck on one of my alternate trays, so I used that.

Needless to say, I spent an awfully long time wandering around pocket D before I found the exit. Then, I had no clue which zone to exit into, so I ended up in faultline. I very quickly figured out that it was much too high level for me, but I couldn't find the pocket D entrance again. So I had to trek through skyway to the train - did you know that skyway is a very confusing zone to traverse on foot? And since it was the first time I'd used the train, I then got very confused as to why it wouldn't let me go in the out door. At this point, the most experience I had with the game was a couple hours watching over my brother's shoulder, which is the only reason I knew to take the train at all. I'm just thankful to the vet who told me that there was a train station in skyway, when I started asking in broadcast how to get back to atlas from faultline!

And I had the 'sands of mu <--> flurry' confusion for quite a while, too. I remember thinking: "I keep hearing that flurry sucks, so why does everyone I meet seem to have it?" Ahh, to be a noob.

This whole procedure works for the squishier ATs, too, albiet the lower regen cap and hit points make the whole procedure take much longer. For my dom, I found that a single +1 guide (at level 50) was just below the maximum damage she could sustain (did about 30 less damage than I regenerated each cycle) - this was good for about 270k damage per hour. It makes me cry to see you meleers getting 250k damage/hour at level 24, though...

Well, the info window does not show the pet abilities by default, but there should be a button/bit of text or something that you can click to get it to show the pet's powers. As for differences in summon powers between defender and controller storm...

Freezing rain, in the hands of a defender, has stronger slowing effects and debuffs resistance by 35% instead of 30%. Both defenders and controllers summon identical versions of tornado. Lightning storms summoned by a defender do about 10% more damage, drain slightly more endurance, and have a slightly stronger -recovery effect than those summoned by a controller.

It is true that, if you can get it to consistently stick to one foe over its lifetime, tornado can do a rather large amount of damage. Over its 30s lifetime, tornado will dish about 400 points of damage, unenhanced (by comparison, most defender nukes do less than 200, unenhanced). However, this is only true if it is able to grind on one foe the whole time. Tornado's knockback tends to hurl things out of range of its attack, and it has a rather ADD ai that causes it to switch targets often. This is usually a good thing if you want to use it to cause chaos in the enemy ranks while your team escapes or regroups, but bad when you want to use it to kill a boss.

To get tornado to focus on one target, you must do two things. You must remove all the other possible targets by killing the rest of the boss' spawn, and you must ensure that the boss cannot be knocked back. If it's an EB/AV, usually they are immune to knockback by default (but not always). If the boss is not, you must apply an effect that renders him immune to knock back - many holds and immobilizes carry this property. Specifically, among powers defenders have access to, the powers that have this property are: entangling arrow & ice arrow from trick arrow, freeze ray & bitter freeze ray from ice blast, and electric fence from the electric epic. These powers all prevent the target from being knocked back for 10 or 15 seconds.

In general, one major difference I note for storm on defenders as opposed to controllers is that hurricane becomes a much more important part of your arsenal. Lacking the mass mezzes common to controllers, hurricane combined with freezing rain become your bread and butter mob neutralization tools. Slot up hurricane for tohit debuff and practice shoving mobs into corners. Snow storm is very useful to keep mobs from running around too much while you debuff them with hurricane.

For storm, some common secondary choices are /ice, /dark, /elec, and /sonic.

Ice has two holds that prevent knockback allowing you to leverage tornado, and two extremely strong 'rain' powers that will do massive damage combined with freezing rain. If it had been available at the time I made my storm defender, he would have been storm/ice. If you already are leaning towards ice, you certainly can't go wrong with this secondary.

Dark has a lot of synergy with storm - it has a cone immobilize that does not prevent knockback, allowing you to immobilize things in your freezing rain. It has an AoE stun to stack with thunder clap. It has a minor self heal on a powerset that tends to draw fair amounts of aggro. It also has very good, steady aoe damage from its two quick-recharging cones. This is what my storm defender has as his secondary.

Elec's synergy mostly comes in the areas of endurance drain and thematics. Between lightning storm and your various electric powers, you can be a reasonably effective single target sapper (although not to the extent that a kin/elec can). Elec also has decent amounts of AoE damage, and is very thematically fitting.

Sonic is for those who just want to melt individual targets. With all of the resistance debuffs you can lay out, combined with storm's single target damage, you dish out a *lot* of damage to one target, and storm can also provide the tools to survive. Howl is also an important part of your arsenal, allowing you to lay an extra -20% resistance on an entire spawn for your team.

Eh, I don't think I would go that far. Arctic air does have several advantages over shiver and chilling embrace.

First off, as a toggle it doesn't require activation time, unlike shiver, so you can jump into the fight with both arctic air and another power at the same time. Second, it's auto-hit. Third, there's the confuse effect. Fourth, it's got a much larger radius than chilling embrace. Fifth, it's got the flee effect, which (considering how little they can actually move) is quite useful extra mitigation. Finally, a PBAoE is much easier to position up close than a cone, and in melee is where doms do their best damage anyway.

I'm not saying that it's unambiguously better than shiver (though I would say it's better than CI - the only area where it's not is end cost, and the huge radius more than outweighs that), but it's certainly a useful addition. Personally, I think the two powers are complementary, and I have both on my build.

Defense above the soft cap helps in *exactly* two situations: when the enemies have greater than the normal 50% tohit, and when your defense is debuffed. Modifiers due to level difference (of less than +6, anyway) and enemy rank are *accuracy* modifiers, not tohit modifers, so defense above 45% has no extra effect.

Basically, the math is:

final hit chance = accuracy * clamp(base tohit + tohit buffs - defense).

The clamp() function limits the result of the expression inside the brackets to a minimum of 5% and a maximum of 95%. Almost all enemies have a base tohit of 50% and no tohit buffs, so 45% defense will reduce the expression inside the brackets to the 5% minimum. After that, there may be accuracy bonuses applied due to level difference and enemy rank, but these apply outside the clamp function and thus aren't affected by any extra defense you might have. +3 bosses will hit a defense soft capped character more often than +0 minions will, but it'll still be a small chance. However, popping a purple won't have any effect, since the inner part of the expression has already been reduced to the 5% minimum.

What you may be seeing with the packs of +3 bosses, though, is defense debuffing. If they are of a type that has guns/etc, then popping a purple will give you a nice cushion allowing you to take a couple debuffs without dropping below 45%. Builds with only ~45% and no/little debuff resistance are vulnerable to what is referred to as 'cascading defense failure', where the first hit debuffs your defense, allowing more hits, which debuff it further, and soon enough you're staring at -20% defense.

i don't think even 100 million is enough to qualify as 'rich' nowadays, but that's the point at which I begin feeling that I don't have to worry about money. It's a big enough cushion that I can take a bunch out of it to give another character some starting cash, or buy another of my characters some enhancements, and not feel like I'm running myself dry. Since I don't buy the sort of enhancements that cost 5+ mil each, it's a relatively comfortable cushion.

On the other hand, if I'm not worrying about giving money to other characters, I stop worrying once they've got 10-20 million or so, because that's enough to keep them personally in enhancements their entire career given that I frankenslot by default.

If you wanted to be considered actually rich, I don't think even 1 bil is enough anymore - you can blow that entire amount on a single PvP IO. I actually don't think it's possible anymore for a single character to carry enough inf to be considered rich. The amount is probably somewhere in the 10 billion range.

I think you've hit the nail on the head in this matter - between RA and vigilance, you *can* get away without stamina, but it *is* kinda a pain. I can certainly understand wanting stamina in order to free you to pursue your true defebcer destiny.

You could eat up two of your upcoming powers, but honestly I'd do a respec instead - there'll be a free one coming with issue 16, at the very least. Mostly it's because I don't think an empath actually needs both absorb pain and heal other. Also, unless you actively use hover a lot, or object to super speed as a travel power, you can save the other power you need by switching to SS. Drop both of those in a respec and you can fit in stamina sometime before 30.

Alternatively, if you don't want to drop fly (or if you do use both AP and HO a lot), you can get stamina at 35 by dropping just one of those and scramble thoughts, because scramble thoughts kinda sucks. It's got a huge cast time, longish recharge, and only average duration. Dominate, which you are getting at 41, is better in every way - longer duration, shorter recharge, quicker cast time, a 'harder' mez, and even a 20% acc bonus.

Well, you can basically go two routes with this power - try to absolutely max out the holding ability, or take advantage of the fact that the pseudopet hold powers have a *recharge* instead of being autos (hence proc every cast instead of every 10s) to damage proc it out.

For the 'max holding' option, you want to max out on hold, recharge, and stick in the lockdown +2 mag proc. Slotting for hold does not improve the overall duration of the power (which is a bit over 60s no matter what) but it does improve the duration of each pulsing hold cast by the pseudopets. This means that if a mob is attacked by a vent but then missed (or the vents target something else) several times in a row, the hold mag will remain on him longer, giving a much greater chance to remain held until the vents get back around to him. This greatly improves the patch's ability to hold bosses, as well as increasing the overall proportion of the spawn which is held at any one time. The +2 mag proc is just gravy, having a chance to go off with every 10 foot aoe hold burst (which occur on average about every 3.5 seconds if I recall correctly). I also try to get a bit of acc - the power has a 40% boost, so just 1 SOs worth is enough to ensure hits on +2s without any -def. I just enjoy the novelty of a hold with GOOD accuracy. :grin: I would try to get 20-30% acc, max out hold and recharge, and get the lockdown proc in if you go this way (frankenslotting, ofc).

The other way is to go with damage procs. As mentioned, those aoe hold bursts go off very frequently, so they're a perfect place for hold set damage procs (not the posi proc, though, as that's only attached to the slow DoT and only has a chance to go off every 10 seconds). For non-purple slotting, I would do 2 hold/rech, 2 acc/hold/rech, and the ghost widow and neuronic shutdown procs. The hold/rech are pool B, so hopefully not too expensive, and there are two cheap pool A acc/hold/rech. The procs may be expensive, but whatever. This gives you about 35% acc and almost 80% hold/rech, assuming 30ish IOs. If you want to splurge on purples, there's another damage proc there and the superior IOs would still allow you to maintain good enhancement percentages.

The whole rep thing is just rather silly. Those with very high or very low rep will generally be names we all know already, or just be at the top of/have been dogpiled by some little clique or another. Either way, the system fails to provide any useful information, leaving it mostly an irrelevant popularity contest. Personally, I turned mine off as soon as I remembered it was there.

Honestly, kin/elec is one of the defender combos where nukes make the most sense to take, IMO. I like taking nukes on defenders in general, but kin/elec is especially suited. You don't have any toggles to drop, said nuke is *ranged* so you aren't put at risk jumping in to fire it, and kin can cap your damage, help the nuke recharge faster, and (after a single blue) bring you right back up to full end afterward.

Additionally, if you take power build up from the power epic, not only will it boost the nuke's damage, it'll also double the endurance drain - which will put it at about 110%. A single endmod enhancement and it'd likely be enough to drain even +2s or +3s, so you don't have to worry about retaliation.

Eh, I dunno. Randomly making a stranger's day seems like a good use of it to me. A lot of people take this whole thing way too seriously, I think.

Well, though I doubt you'll make much headway, I wish you luck anyway. Sad that this is necessary, really.

The Huntsman is a sort of 'unofficial' variant on the soldier AT - it's the name that's been given to a spider that sticks mainly with the wolf spider gun attacks, probably dipping into the bane trees for such goodies as surveillance, the bane armor, or build up. It usually also takes extra power pool leadership powers with any leftover power choices. It ends up playing somewhat like a more team-focused doppelganger of the crab spider - they both put out tons of AoE, and the huntsman trades a bit of personal protection and some of the crab tricks for more team buffage and some of the bane tricks. And, of course, you lose the silly legs and become about 276197547 times more badass looking (imo, of course).

There's a nice guide to the huntsman here, written by Aisynia (who popularized the concept and came up with the name).

It looks like the attacks which didn't get new animations were crane kick and dragon's tail. Dragon's tail I can understand, somewhat, but not sure why eagle's didn't get one. Perhaps these are just the ones that they had done in time for comic con?

And I hate CAK because I think the animation looks dumb as heck. To me, it looks jerky, awkward, and out of sync with the rest of the set. Lose the odd half-kick at the beginning of the animation and just have the character do a straight dropping kick like the second half of the current animation and it'd be a lot more tolerable, imo.

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hows Gravity?

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/e sticks hand out....

Feels like 9.8 meters per second, per second..... same as always.



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Fixed that for you.

(Seriously, when is this country going to get off its rear and adopt a sensible measurement system like almost the entire rest of the world? )

For me the concept actually came out of the i16 customization - the idea of coloring fire blasts white and making them holy fire. What to pair that with, though? Why gold-tinted empathy, of course. The gods aren't too pleased with all of the villains nowadays, you see.

I love the new KO blow animation - maybe I'd actually be able to stand playing a super strength tank now. Not sure exactly on the other ones; I'm not actually that familiar with most of the set's animations as I haven't played it. I'd have to mess around with it to see which set of animations I like better.

Definitely would keep the current foot stomp animation, though. For some reason all of the various stone/SS/whatever powers that involve slamming your foot down just feel powerful to me.