Muon_Neutrino

Dark miasma for controllers. Illusion for doms. Ninjitsu for scrappers. EM for scrappers. Stone melee for scrappers. Fire blast for defenders. All probably have issues - the uber-control of dark miasma, the PTOD solution of illusion, the high damage scalar of stone melee, the high damage of fire blast.... but I would play all of those in a heartbeat.

In general, I slot AA for end redux first, confuse second. It's a massive end pig, so I try to get at least 2 SOs worth of end redux in there asap - more if possible. After that, I tried to jam in a bit of confuse enhancement, and I ended up getting a bit of slow and recharge from some slow set IOs, too. IMO, it's a power you're probably going to 5 or 6 slot. The confuse is worth slotting, mostly because, if you want them to actually waste their shots on each other while they're so recharge debuffed, you're going to need longer than the base confuse. Also, a bit of slow can occasionally be useful to keep higher con enemies at the speed floor, and possibly also some recharge as it takes a bit to come back, and you'll probably find yourself turning it on and off frequently to save end (not to mention getting it dropped due to mez) For generics, I'd go 2 end, 3 confuse, or 3 end, 2 confuse, or 3 end, 3 confuse, or 2 end, 3 confuse, and a recharge, or 2 end, 2 confuse, a slow, and a recharge, or whatever. 2 end and 2 confuse at least are probably a must, though.

My ice/ice has shiver, but honestly I rarely use it in PvE. I mostly picked it up way back when for the occasional times I messed around in PvP, when slows were still useful there and dual builds didn't exist. It comes in handy occasionally, mostly when you've got a target or group that you *really* want to slow, but don't want to jump in the middle of with AA on. If you have spare slots it could be a worthwhile pick.

As for the extra power changes, /ice didn't get any IMO because it didn't need any. /energy and /psi were long overdue for tweaks, and /fire really broke with their new emphasis on harder-hitting attacks with its first two blasts. /ice didn't stick out, and so IMO it didn't get changed, aside from catching the PBAoE range extension/rebalancing that all the sets got

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I am able to take advantage of the 60 month vet badge and grabbed super jump at level 10 without opening the leaping pool.

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I officially hate you.

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Freeze ray is generally considered better than bitter freeze ray because it activates quicker (1s vs 2.5s), costs less endurance (6.9 vs 15.2), and recharges quicker (10s vs 20s). The damage bitter freeze ray deals is not usually considered very important, given that you rarely have room to enhance it (since you are usually slotting for the power's primary purpose as a hold) and thus it ends up being 2/3rds of an (enhanced) ice bolt's damage on a timer 5 times as long. Oh, and it comes in as the second from last power in the set instead of the fifth.

In general, for an ice/dark, I'd take freeze ray and petrifying gaze. Petrifying gaze isn't usually considered a spectacularly good power, but it's not bad either, and it *is* a better hold than bitter freeze ray. It's got the same duration, costs less endurance, and animates and recharges faster. Not to mention that it comes in at level 18 instead of level 35, allowing you to hold stack on bosses much earlier in your career.

Well, first thing I would say is that dominators are not a ranged AT. Like a blaster, we do lots of damage up close too. Unlike most blasters, we can often use our mez abilities to be perfectly safe doing that damage up close. All that is to say, take your melee attacks. Specifically, going through your build, here are my suggestions:

On the gravity side, drop dimension shift, it's total junk. Phasing out a group of foes is almost never useful, and it'll piss off your teammates, guaranteed, when they try to attack them and find they can't. If you really, really want it, you can probably find the occasional ambush or whatever where it might be useful, but for the love of $deity, don't overuse it.

Ditto, I wouldn't bother with crushing field. What is the use of it? You have no debuff fields to keep foes inside, no aoe KD patches to fix foes on top of, etc. By itself it does nothing but do a tiny amount of damage and convince all the enemies to shoot your face off. The only real use might be to stop people from staggering around while they're stunned from wormhole, but tbh that's not really that important - in my experience, they don't really wander that far.

On the other hand, keep crush - it's very useful to immobilize tough melee bosses/EBs/AVs who you don't want to be able to run up and smash your face in. Doesn't need too much slotting, though - 1 acc is more or less enough to hit with since it's got an acc bonus, other than that some endredux, and maybe damage if you have spare slots (might as well get some damage out of it while you're spamming it on a EB). The duration and recharge are already very long and very quick, respectively, out of the box, so it doesn't really need slotting for either. You don't need it as a filler attack since you've got lift, so it doesn't really need full damage slotting if you need the slots for something more important.

Finally, take lift. Not only is it a third ranged damage power for a secondary that doesn't normally have one, it also is getting a damage buff in issue 15 and has 100% chance for knockup for great extra mitigation. Slot it as a regular attack and enjoy. On the other hand, you are right to skip propel - the eons-long animation makes it far inferior to the ranged attacks you already have.

On the electricity side, all of the powers are at least decent, with probably the snipe and (maybe) static discharge or voltaic sentinel being the most skippable if you really are looking for something to drop. If you skip dimension shift, crushing field, and propel (three truly useless powers for this combination), you have the space to take your entire secondary if you choose. Regardless, though, you *definitely* want to take all 3 melee attacks, both blasts, and build up. The melee attacks hit quite hard and are very useful, the two blasts are the usual reliable damage, and build up is, well, build up. Honestly, I'd take it all except the snipe - aid self, concealment, whatever, none of those are in my opinion very needed for PvE doms. Nothing should really be able to hit you enough to make you *need* aid self except PToD EBs, and well, those are a problem regardless. And concealment is really nothing special nowadays, just get SS + stealth IO if you really want to be invisible. Or, take personal force field (which you should be doing anyway if you're going with the mace epic) and just walk past everything while laughing at them. PFF is also the only real reason to take aid self, imo - combined the two are basically a time-out, let me get all my health back button. Useful, albeit not my style.

Nonono, you will still be able to use whatever enhancements you already have in those powers. Psi scream will still take targeted AoE sets (I think that's what it takes now), and psi shockwave will still take PBAoE sets. It's just the powers will calculate their damage off of the dominator's 1.05 melee damage modifier, rather than the 0.95 ranged damage modifier. The only effect you should observe is both powers jumping slightly in damage. You won't have to change your slotted enhancement types.

Where are we meeting? If nobody says otherwise, I'm just going to show up at sister psyche in IP. Is there some other place?

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More questions:

1. Are all of you having this looping download issue using MacOS X 10.4? Any of you using 10.5?

2. Did all of you try rebooting AFTER throwing out the City of Heroes preferences as shown above, but before running CoH? (that does a better job clearing the DNS cache than any command)

3. Did all of you who re-downloaded the Training Room client check the permissions after installing and verify you can create files? (Show Contents, go to Contents > Resources > transgaming > drive_c > coh > cider and try creating a new folder)

4. Do any of you have a section of Console Log (Applications > Utilities > Console) to show what happens IMMEDIATELY after the COHD file is downloaded?

5. Anyone who's brave using 10.4 willing to try to use the command line to decompress the COHD file manually with "tar" and see if it produces an error?

I'm going to try to confirm something with the devs...it seems some people's CoH updaters are still either getting ahold of the bad Patch Server somehow, or there's more than one, or there are multiple issues at work.

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Alright, trying this again.

1: Yes, using mac OSX 10.4

2: Did not try rebooting after flushing DNS cache before, but have just tried that; didn't work.

3: I do have write privileges inside the package - opened it up, made a folder and then deleted it.

4: Console log from the moment I first opened the updater until just after the first time it looped (#s denote continued lines, as usual. Lines that begin with a ; are my comments):

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>Could not stat /Applications/City of Heroes Test.app/Contents/Resources
# /transgaming/f_drive (No such file or directory), ignoring drive F:
Could not stat /Applications/City of Heroes Test.app/Contents/Resources
# /transgaming/f_drive (No such file or directory), ignoring drive F:
Could not stat /Applications/City of Heroes Test.app/Contents/Resources
# /transgaming/f_drive (No such file or directory), ignoring drive F:
;
; This is from the updater opening, and then closing and reopening
; itself twice before actually beginnging to download anything.
; This is the usual behaviour I'm getting for a fresh copy of the test
; installation. The updater seems to echo this line each time it opens.
; After this, it spent less than a minute downloading the file.
;
Could not stat /Applications/City of Heroes Test.app/Contents/Resources
# /transgaming/f_drive (No such file or directory), ignoring drive F:
/usr/bin/tar: This does not look like a tar archive
/usr/bin/tar: Skipping to next header
/usr/bin/tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers
/usr/bin/tar: Read 7653 bytes from /Applications/City of Heroes Test.app/Contents
# /Resources/transgaming/c_drive/coh/cider/cider-COHD-Updater-002591.tgz
/usr/bin/tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
;
; After the updater finished with the file, it closed and echoed these six
; lines in quick succession as it reopened. It then began to download the
; file again. I let it go for a while to make sure it would loop again; it did.</pre><hr />
5: Um... not sure I know how to do that, and I'm a bit leery of messing around in the guts of the game that far, but if it's not likely to break anything and you can walk be through it, I guess I could try that.

Well, IMO you don't need three single target holds - two is enough. So you can leave out one of bitter freeze ray or shocking bolt, your choice. I'm not sure which one I would keep, myself - shocking bolt is a better hold, but BFR comes somewhat earlier in your build. Ditto, thunderstrike isn't *that* good - it's fun, sure, but not a must-have. From the storm/ice part, you don't have anything to stack thunderclap with, so it could also be skipped (though the FX and sound *are* really pretty on that power). You also probably don't need both gale and O2 - whichever you took for default, I wouldn't really bother with the other one.

If you skipped bitter freeze ray, O2 or gale, and thunder clap, that's enough to fit in both a travel power and stamina before the 40s, and then you can take whatever epic powers you want from then on. I echo the recommendation of charged armor and power sink, and if you're skipping BFR then obviously take shocking bolt (2 holds = instaheld boss = good). For the last one, whatever strikes your fancy. The immob would normally be my recommendation for a stormy since it prevents knockback, allowing tornado to grind a boss into smithereens, but for an /ice freeze ray also prevents knockback and thus fulfills that purpose. You could take thunderstrike if you want a toy power, or one of the storm powers you skipped, or another pool power such as hasten or whatever.

Open mouth, insert foot, shove foot down throat until it comes out your [censored]..... check. Seriously, dude, go look at what these changes *actually* do. It's not like we've been discussing these changes for weeks now... oh, right.

Oh, and learn to write. That hurts my eyes.

Um, sure about that? User named Ditzy_Blonde still exists under that name. Albeit they haven't posted since the 4th, and 'Southern_Comfort' only started seriously posting on the 6th, but at least as far as the board software is concerned they're not the same person. That said, southern does sound like ditzy in terms of mannerisms, etc, and the timing works out. Second account i guess?

Yep, issue seems to persist only if you tried to update at least once during the time the bad patch server was up. Somehow, doing so seems to screw something up on your computer so that patching fails even now that the bad server is gone - even if you completely wipe all traces of the test server from your machine. Yay computers.

No dice. Deleted the city of heroes test server folder from preferences, flushed the dns cache, emptied trash, and even deleted my most recent attempt to install test and loaded up a fresh one to boot. Still looping endlessly on that #^&amp;%@)!&amp;%@% "cider-COHD-Updater-002591.tgz" file. Tech support has run out of things for me to try, too. "The issue has been reported to the development team", but in the meantime they have no idea how to fix it either.

This is really getting annoying. What the heck did this dumb patch *do* to my computer that's so persistent?

On the (sorta) bright side, at least the test server works on the windows partition, if I go to the bother of hooking up the external HD where it resides. I don't *like* using that side of the computer, though... The Mac side is in general more stable, less prone to overheating, and (usually!) less prone to doing random wacky nonsense crap for no particular reason. Not to mention that on the mac side, my headphones work.

Ok, looks like it'll be my level 22 grav/storm. Should be fun. Could also bring a level 29 storm/dark, but if it's gonna be storm either way I'd rather bring the one who will get XP.

Um, when I type "dscacheutil -flushcache" it throws an error, saying "dscacheutil: command not found". Any suggestions? I'm on OSX 10.4 tiger, if that makes any difference.

I'm in, not sure what character just yet though - need to check and remind myself who's on victory and who's on guardian... Definitely will have something in range, though.

Ditto - never ever ever ever skip fault. Tremor, maybe, but not fault. Best dang power in the set imo, and yes I am including seismic smash in that.

As to the stone/wp vs stone/fire question, I went stone/fire, mostly because of the AoE issue. I just wanted to actually have a bit of AoE, which /fire provides between blazing aura and fiery embrace (and concept too, but that came second). Both sets have an end recovery tool, which is very nice considering stone's end burn problems - WP's may be better, but consume isn't *that* bad. Only thing that really annoys me is that leveraging burn by taking electrifying fences would interfere with fault/tremor's KD, and the patron immobs that don't prevent KB are all cones, making them difficult to use in melee (or else have redraw, a huge cast time, and an ugly concept-breaking mace).

Plus, I think RoTP is hella cool. Yeah, it's probably more efficient to have a true tier 9 that prevents you from dying in the first place, but imo nothing says 'I'm unstoppable, bish!' like getting back up off the floor in a gigantic explosion that sends everyone flying. And who cares about debt? You're a brute - go smash a bunch of eyeballs in and the debt will go away soon enough. Honestly, that's why I play this particular combo - stone melee is just orgasmically smash-tastic in terms of how powerful the set feels (love them SMASH sound effects), and if you pair it with /fire you're a rock that is on fire and can explode! What could be cooler than that?

To elaborate a bit, this is because of a quirk in the way the enhancement system interacts with powers that grant resistance. Internally, resistance is a 'damage' type effect - it's just got negative strength. So, any boost active on your character which boosts damage would also affect the resistance granted by the power. It would become possible to cap your toxic resistance by popping enough reds before you cast healing flames, for example. This particular effect might not seem especially notable, but those same reds would also cap your resistance to smashing/lethal/energy/negative by boosting the resistance offered by your two main fire shields!

Obviously, this is bad. Not only is it an obvious buggy quirk in the system that shouldn't exist, it'd also be a balance problem - allow reds (or any other damage buff, such as fury (!), fulcrum, etc) to cap your resistances at the same time as they fulfill their usual damage increasing purpose? There are two possible solutions to this. The first is to flag the resistance effect as un-enhanceable (which also prevents it from being boosted by buffs). This is what they did for the one force field bubble that grants toxic resistance - that resistance isn't enhanceable. The other way to prevent this aberrant behaviour is to leave the resistance enhanceable, but flag the entire power as 'ignores buffs or debuffs' to prevent damage buffs from increasing the resistance. This is what they did for the sonic bubbles, and for healing flames and other heals that give toxic resistance. Unfortunately, flagging the power as 'ignores buffs and debuffs' also prevents the +heal set bonus (which is treated as a self-buff by the system) from affecting the healing portion of the power. Regrettable, but the only way to stop things from getting out of hand. Also, when they implemented this system way back when, IO sets didn't even exist, so they had no way of anticipating that it would cause a problem with them.

They calculate endurance not off of final damage number, but off of damage scalar number - which (effectively) didn't change (for example, ice bolt's end cost didn't change, even though its damage went up thanks to the modifier increase, and that's because the base damage scalar of the ice bolt power didn't change). Flares went from a scale 1.01 attack to a scale 1.0 attack. Normally that should have meant that its endurance cost wouldn't have changed, but the problem is that flares used to have scale 0.71 damage that it paid the correct amount of endurance for, and then a bonus 0.3 scale damage that it didn't pay for as its secondary effect due to being a fire attack. Now, they decided to balance flares as a scale 1.0 attack with a 4 second recharge and the 5.2 end of all scale 1.0 attacks, but they accidentally forgot about the free scale 0.3 damage from the secondary effect. Flares *should* have gone from a scale 1.01 attack costing 3.69 end and recharging in 2.18 seconds to a scale 1.3 attack costing 5.2 end and recharging in 4 seconds, but someone dropped a number along the way.

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Sonic could be an interesting choice. Sonic is not actually a very good AoE set - it only has one real AoE damage power in howl. It's only when paired with something like mental manipulation on a blaster, or when using howl to perform mass resistance debuffing for a team, that sonic's AoE really starts to shine. However, the secondary effect of -res on sonic's single target attacks would greatly increase your partner's damage as well as your own - sonic is probably behind both ice and fire for ST damage on its own, but add in a partner who is attacking the same thing you are, and it gets interesting. On the other hand, sonic's signature power of siren's song is totally redundant compared to mass hypnosis.

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You say redundant, I say stackable. Mass Hypnosis and Siren's Song will let you effectively put bosses to sleep in the first salvo and keep them that way - all the while you're picking them off very quickly one at a time. I say very quickly because - when duoing - Sonic is the best damaging of the choices listed. Remember, technically you add to the damage you deal all the EXTRA damage he deals as well. It adds up quick.

Sonic will out damage fire when you consider its stacked -Res effect, you won't need Ice's slows when everything is fast asleep, nor will you need Cosmic Burst's disorient effect from the AoE heavy Rad primary... Sonic is the way to go.

Just my two cents. I duo about 95% of the time and make all the builds for both of us.

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Well, I wouldn't say stackable, here, to be honest - siren's song does damage. So, you'd have to use it first to avoid breaking MH's sleep, which can lead to the corruptor taking a partial alpha given the short range and small delay before the sleep takes effect. It's a lot better than no AoE control at all for a solo character, but it's got some real downsides compared to MH.

I agree on the resist stacking, though, and I said as much, though perhaps not in emphatic enough terms. I mostly recommended fire in the long run because it's simpler than sonic (no need to coordinate to ensure you're attacking the same target all the time), because of the fast animations, and because of the AoE damage for those cases where it would be useful. Also, to be honest, I have a feeling that between the two of them they'll be dishing out so much single target damage that the stacking resistance debuffs would end up pretty redundant on anything below a boss. That's not to say that sonic won't work as well, though - they're probably close enough that it's more or less personal preference.

Um... I've deleted my test server installation, re-loaded it from the downloaded .dmg, and tried to get it to run at least a dozen times since the patch server was fixed this afternoon. It hasn't worked yet. (and what exactly do you mean by 'run it a couple times', anyway - open it up, see if it loops, and close and try again if it does?)

And to answer your question from the other thread, I am running an administrator account (yeah, yeah, bad computing practice, I know...).

Oh, yeah - odd tidbit. At one point I went into the test server package contents and found the patch file it kept trying to download. Even though the console error messages said it was only 7k or so, the actual size of the file *was* the advertised 12-something megs. Very odd.

One thing that strikes me as odd, though. This problem first appeared for me with the 6/2 patch, the one *before* the most recent patch that broke all the windows people's test server installations and was linked to a bad patch server. Are we sure this issue was caused by that bad server? If it was, why did it fail for the mac people several days before it failed for the windows people?

[edit: I just spent twenty minutes futilely opening the updater, letting it loop a couple times, closing it, and repeating. No dice. There's something more wrong here than just a patch server which has already been fixed. Either there's still something wrong with the patch servers, or the bad download somehow has some lingering destructive effect on my computer that remains even after the complete removal of the old test server installation. Screw it, I'm booting into the windows partition, digging up that old external HD, and hooking up the test server there. At least the windows people seem to have had their problem fixed.]

Well, if you want strong single target damage, some possible choices that come to my mind are fire, sonic, and ice.

Fire, though often thought of as an AoE set due to fireball, also has extraordinarily strong single target attacks in flares, fire blast, and blaze. Plus, the lack of mitigation in fire won't be a factor at all given your partner. Also, for the times when you do team (or just when the situation calls for it) fire can still give you good AoE - even if you don't use it very often, it's still a useful tool to have in your box.

Ice is a stereotypical single target set. It's a bit behind fire, but the secondary effects and single target mitigation are very good. There is an interesting synergy possible here in that freeze ray from you plus his single target hold will lock down a boss instantly - however, this is not as important as it might seem since he can do that some of the time anyway with domination. Otherwise, though, all that extra mitigation seems to me like it might be a bit wasted with your partner around. It's still a good single target damage set, however.

Sonic could be an interesting choice. Sonic is not actually a very good AoE set - it only has one real AoE damage power in howl. It's only when paired with something like mental manipulation on a blaster, or when using howl to perform mass resistance debuffing for a team, that sonic's AoE really starts to shine. However, the secondary effect of -res on sonic's single target attacks would greatly increase your partner's damage as well as your own - sonic is probably behind both ice and fire for ST damage on its own, but add in a partner who is attacking the same thing you are, and it gets interesting. On the other hand, sonic's signature power of siren's song is totally redundant compared to mass hypnosis.

Radiation is also a possibility - cosmic burst is a very strong single target blast that also carries a nifty mag 3 stun. On the other hand, you may be annoyed at neutrino bolt's plink-plink-plink piddly damage, even if it does have a lightning quick recharge. Rad, like fire, also brings some decent, though not as good as fire, aoe for the times when it is appropriate.

Of those, honestly I'd probably go fire. It's more than likely got the best single target damage, has quick animations, is pretty endurance efficient thanks to the free bonus DoT, and the lack of mitigation really shouldn't be a concern.

Oh, yeah! I would play that in a heartbeat. Matter of fact, if they proliferated illusion to doms at the same time, I have a feeling you wouldn't be seeing me on any other character for a *long* time. And that's a heck of a statement for me! &lt;points at sig&gt;

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And seriously, you're complaining about the nuke which does blaster level damage *and* scourges?

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Yes, yes I am.

Because it's coded that way should not be a reason or an excuse.

Anyway I'm gonna go ahead and bug it. Hopefully others have done the same in the past.

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Erm, from what I understand of the game engine, it *HAS* to be coded that way. If you want a persistent rain type power that isn't just a glorified long-dot AoE attack (a la AoE immobs), it *must* be coded as a pet. As far as I know, there isn't any other way to do it (and if you want the knockdown in blizzard to stay, you can't make it a fancy looking vanilla aoe with a long dot; you can't apply tick based effects that way iirc).

Now, if you're arguing that it should get the same exemption as gang war and WS fluffies to allow it to persist after the caster's defeat, you can do that. Frankly, I forgot that there existed pets with such an exception, or I would have mentioned it in my first post. But railing against limitations of the game engine is a silly thing to do.

At the moment, I would NOT suggest you try to get into the test server, as there seem to be some big problems with the update servers that are giving people fits when they try to patch up their test server installation to the most recent patch. Once these are fixed, though, follow the instructions in this thread:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat....=0#Post12815277

CuppaManga, is there any chance you could post any details about what you're thinking the cause may be? My version is still refusing to patch properly, even after completely deleting my test installation and trying to reinstall from scratch. I would love any help in figuring out how too get this dumb computer to cooperate.