Muon_Neutrino

My personal slotting is 4 Dark Watcher's despair and two generic accuracy commons.

There's an issue with enhancements and pet powers you have to watch out for. If you slot a set enhancement into a pet, it will *only* enhance the powers of that pet which could slot that set type - even if the IO itself has an enhancement type that could benefit another of the pet's powers. This means that you have to be wary of slotting set enhancements of a type that only matches *some* of a pet's powers.

For example, dark servant takes accurate healing sets, but enhancements from that set will *only* benefit his twilight grasp power, even if they're enhancing something (like accuracy) that other of his powers (like tenebrous tentacles) could benefit from.

For this reason, I would stay away from accurate tohit debuff sets. Unless they've coded him an exception, those sets will only benefit his twilight grasp and tenebrous tentacles powers - the two powers with the *smallest* tohit debuff. On the other hand, dark watchers despair enhances the tohit debuff in *all* of his powers (including the two most important - chill of the night, and darkest night), and the generic accuracies also benefit all of his powers that require an accuracy check (and since he doesn't inherit your accuracy bonuses, he needs help hitting things). Plus you get a recharge bonus out of the DWD set.

Eh. His complaint about EBs in story arcs is one of those things that I just don't get. I've never been able to figure out how people have so much trouble soloing EBs. I've yet to meet the EB on *any* character who I can't kill by the simple expedient of a tray full of purples and reds. If you've built a character with so little damage output that you can't manage that, well, that's hardly the *game's* fault.

As for the rest of that complaint - some content is *intended* for groups. Since the core story arc style content doesn't actually fall into that category, I fail to see the problem.

And UGH please don't fall into the trap of putting core gameplay stuff in the market. If it *ever* comes to the point where I have to shell out extra cash above my subscription to pick up something like that, that's when the game will lose me.

I love faultline. The missions are fun, the zone is nicely atmospheric, the story is engaging, it builds up to a very nice finale, and I like the fact that it kicks in at 15, since there's not very much other interesting content in the 15-20 range. I'm pretty sure I've done the faultline arcs on at least 75% of all of my characters, probably more.

Croatoa is... eh. It's OK, but the missions and story aren't anywhere near as engaging as faultline, and I despise redcaps. There's a lot more 'filler' missions than faultline, and there are also a few *really really* annoying missions. Free 28721034 captives on that giant outdoor map, anyone? Basically that same mission again, one contact later? Stop 30 fir bolg? And the finale of Kelly Nemmers' arc is at least shorter, but on the other hand, redcaps. Bleh. And I have to agree that sticking the end of the story inside a task force is annoying.

The hollows and striga are kinda in-between, in my opinion. The hollows has the more cohesive story, I think, but I'd honestly rather just skip over those levels, and the zone is somewhat annoying to navigate (although I do have to admit I haven't done the arcs since it became possible to take travel powers so early). Striga is less like that, and is still reasonably interesting, but has to compete with all of the really nice content that's sitting in the 20-30 range these days. I still try to do the first arc for the temp power, though.

I haven't done first ward yet, but it's yet another of those 20-30 things - that level range is really starting to feel a bit crowded to me. I think you could also call the RWZ a 'story zone' - it's up there with faultline, for me. Certainly more of those arcs that I try to do on all of my characters.

Nice guide, hopefully this can help cut down on those frustrating sudden trial failures.

One thing I think you might want to emphasize slightly more is the difference between the 'targets acquired' giant float message and the 'targeted' state that shows up underneath your health bar. I find that some don't seem to realize that there's a difference; thinking that the 'targets acquired' message is the cue to run, and not knowing that the effect that's the important one they need to watch for is actually the much less noticeable words in the effects tray.

I've always had the problem of stockpiling insps, but I've tried to moderate that lately and use more of them.

I still keep a reserve stock (mediums/larges); this always includes one column of purples and one of greens. The other 'reserve' columns can vary by character; damage dealers often have a column with a pair of yellows and reds, squishies might have a column of breakfrees, and characters with endurance issues might have a column of blues (although I usually end up spending those faster than I get them, on characters which need them). (A wakie usually resides at the top of one of these columns, as well, but that's less of a 'stockpile' as just a convenient place to stick one.) These are usually held in reserve, to be used when I judge the fight at hand is both important and difficult enough to justify it. Purples, especially, are prized since a pair of them can make you effectively invincible for 60s; they tend to get used a bit more often as a result (especially on squishies) since they're so good, so they generally end up as the first priority for replenishment from combining drops.

The difference between this and what I used to do is that this leaves at least the first column free (and often the first two), and whatever falls into that space is always either used (either immediately or before the next fight) or moved/converted into one of the 'reserve' columns to fill a hole, so that I always have free space to receive new drops. One the one hand this means that I usually end up receiving and using many more inspirations per unit time, so my overall combat effectiveness goes up. Additionally, being in the habit of using inspirations makes it easier to remember to actually *use* the reserve stock when needed.

Unfortunately, this works best above 40 when you get the largest tray, and really doesn't work at all until you hit the medium size tray at 25. Below that you just don't have enough space to keep much of a reserve *and* open space simultaneously.

Yeah, clearing the cache fixed it. Looks much more sensible now. Thanks!

THANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOU for finally making the AT symbols clickable.... I don't know whether that happened with this update specifically or if it was one of the other semi-recent updates, but that's something that's been bugging me for forever. Very minor, I know, but that's one of those tiny little QoL things that just nags at you.

On a feedback note, the popup text when hovering over an icon is very hard to read. It's just standard black text with transparent backdrop on top of the regular text, and it's not easy to pick out. Shouldn't the popover text be in some sort of opaque text box or something so it's readable? This is what it looks like at the moment:



Not really easy to read. If it's not supposed to look like this, that screenshot was taken on a mac running safari under osx 10.6.

On a grav/ controller who's not getting any mitigation from their secondary, um....

Well, there's always your AoE hold every few minutes. That will negate alphas, at least for the ones it hits. Other than that, wormhole while hiding behind something, and pray the spawn isn't spread out enough to make you miss a significant chunk of them. Or summon singy in the middle of the spawn if you don't mind hurling them all over the place.

Really, though, grav just stinks at actually providing mitigation. If your secondary can't cover for the primary in that regard, you wind up with a very low 'control' controller.

Hey all, I'm hoping to get some help diagnosing a hardware problem I'm having, because I don't want to buy a replacement part and then find it wasn't the one that was actually broken.

I recently went home over the break, and I brought my desktop with me. It worked fine the whole time, but when I brought it back here and set it up, it wouldn't boot. When I pushed the power button, the case lights came on and all the fans started, but nobody was home - nothing on the monitor, no lights under the mouse, on the keyboard, or on the wireless adaptor in the USB port, etc. It would stay like this as long as I let it, doing nothing, and most interestingly I couldn't even turn it back off by holding in the power button. I had to flip the switch on the power supply to get it to turn back off.

I tried opening it up, taking everything out, and reseating it, hoping it was a loose connection from the travel, but to no avail. I then started disconnecting things one at a time to see if I could isolate the problem. When I removed the memory stick in the 3rd slot, the computer booted.

At first, I thought 'problem found, one of my memory sticks died'. The problem is that the computer's still being weird, even with the supposedly problematic stick removed. First, it no longer shuts down properly, but instead goes into that same weird fugue state where I have to flip the power supply switch to get it to turn off. Second, even with the remaining 'good' stick the only one installed, it still has problems booting. It seems that every time I remove and reseat the 'good' stick, it has a roughly 50% chance that it will boot; otherwise I have to reseat the stick again.

(Also, the computer clock no longer keeps correct time, but I have a feeling that's because I reset the CMOS as part of my 'find the problem' flailings and now some setting is screwed up, not because of whatever hardware problem I have.)

Those issues make me wonder if the motherboard is instead damaged, rather than the memory - it seems weird that somehow both memory sticks could be damaged at the same time in very similar ways. However, there definitely *does* seem to be something with the memory, too, because while it only sometimes works with the 'good' stick, if the 'bad' stick is in there it definitely won't ever boot (I tried).

I hope it just is the memory, because that's much easier to replace. However I don't want to just run out and buy more only to find that it *isn't* the problem. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I could narrow this down further, to tell for sure whether it's the memory or motherboard?

(For reference, the computer in question was put together about a year and a half ago from one of Father Xmas' parts lists, and runs with a Corsair 650W PS, Radeon HD 5850, Western Digital 750GB HD, quad-core 3GHz AMD processor, MSI 770-C45 motherboard, and 4GB of ADATA DDR3 ram. Also, *wow* memory is a whole lot cheaper than it was when I built this thing! )

I just want more TAoEs. The paucity of options there is just appalling, especially in terms of the actual enhancements themselves rather than the set bonuses.

I can slot a melee or ranged power for almost 250% total enhancement value (about 7 and a half SOs worth) with *uncommon* level 30 IOs in 5 slots *and* get worthwhile set bonuses at the same time (thank you thunderstrike/crushing impact!). In a TAoE I can slot 5 level 30 posi's if I want set bonuses, but I get only ~200% enhancement (ignoring range because it's worthless 99% of the time). I can't even really frankenslot effectively, because there are so few triples available. The best I can do in 5 slots is still worse than what I can do for melee/ranged *and* offers no set bonuses to speak of. And even trying to add a 6th slot to round things out is problematic, because there's no TAoE set ios that *don't* enhance damage, and you're at the ED cap if you've already got 5 IOs with damage components. If the attack happens to take another type of set (defense debuff and knockback are the most common) you can toss in an end/rech, but even there you generally can't add a triple, and your only option is a generic for something like fireball.

Apart from that, I guess my biggest annoyance is indeed slow sets. It's certainly true that their bonuses are mediocre, and the mix of enhancements is rather weird. For one, why is there damage enhancement? For another, why is there so little recharge? And why are the enhancements combined as they are (who actually wants to enhance both damage and slow on the same power?). And why are all the sets (effectively) identical? Even more than most, powers which slow can be *very* different. Lots are autohit, lots aren't, many slow as a primary effect, many don't, some are toggles, some are clicks, etc. You can't going to be able to cover all of them with just one mix of enhancements.

It's perhaps close to 50/50 for me - some of my characters started as concept, some as powerset combos, and a few as both simultaneously. If anything, it's slightly shaded toward powersets, as it's almost *always* performance dictating power choices rather than concept (i.e. I don't allow concepts to get extreme enough to dictate skipping important powers).

Can anyone confirm how the cape/aura unlocks work? I am assuming they're global account-wide 'capes/auras are available in the initial costume creator' type unlocks, which is quite appealing to me, but I want to be sure before I drop the points on them that they aren't actually something silly like a one-use voucher to unlock them on a single character.

Wait, less than a *tenth* of a percent chance of dropping? One every 1250 packs on average? Or looking at it as a cumulative probability, an item that even after opening a thousand packs you only have a bit more than 50% chance to have gotten it?

Geez. Glad I had already written these packs off as unbuyable. This is just ridiculous. It's pretty, for sure (although I'm amused that they've now released *three* things using this new rig, and none of them are the 'wolf pet' that I actually might have been tempted to buy, and was in the game as early as halloween), but no way in hell is it worth that kind of outlay.

I'ts *supposed* to work by ticking a 30s duration debuff on the target every half second or so while they're in the patch, so they'll be debuffed the whole time they're in it and for 30s after they leave.

However, the power (and variants like freezing rain) have a weird bug that, *if* the target is still inside the patch area when the 'rain' pseudopet expires after 15 seconds, then the debuff on them vanishes with the patch instead of lingering for 30s like it's supposed to. IIRC, back when Castle was still around he looked into getting this fixed, but apparently there's some weird technical oddity of the combat system to blame and it's not a simple bug to squish. So amusingly enough, it's actually *good* to have them wander out of the patch, at least if you're more interested in the debuffs than in the knockdown effect.

This is the only the second thread in this section I've ever opened, let alone posted in. The first was the mids' thread, so no, this forum section isn't at all useful to me. For me fiddling with builds is a solo exercise, and I don't have any real interest in optimizing posted builds just for the sake of optimization. I'd much rather participate in a thread with an interesting discussion of tactics, powersets, content, or whatever, which might happen to include builds but isn't *about* them. And even if I *did* have a build I wanted help with, I'd post it in the appropriate AT forum since I would be looking for feedback from the AT gurus who frequent those forums.

So a couple months back when the Eden trial was the WST, some friends from my SG ran it, and I ran it with them on my warshade. I had never done that particular piece of content before, and so while I had read about it and knew more or less what it was about, I had no real experience with what to expect. (On an aside, that's a fun trial - I don't know why it doesn't get more play. The unique map is very cool.)

After much stomping and blasting and delightful mayhem, we finally reached the last room. For some reason or another (I forget exactly why, I think someone had to leave soon) we wanted to finish quickly, so we decided to buff up and just charge the titan. Apparently if you do that, you aggro the *entire room* and bring all few hundred DE in it down on your head at once. Suddenly we went from a group of heroes beating on the crystal AV, to a group of heroes trying to *find* the crystal AV whilst attempting to avoid drowning in the endless sea of DE. I'm pretty sure the entire team was at the aggro cap. It was sheer mayhem.

My warshade has a couple recharge bonuses and hasten, but she's by no means a purpled out perma-eclipse beast. However, it didn't matter, because while my memory is slightly fuzzy on exactly what it was (SB from our controller, I think, plus maybe the +rech secondary mutation), someone had a recharge buff on me, and hasten was up. I saw the tide of foes and smiled.

The fight is somewhat a blur. Eclipse! Mire! AoEs! Grav well a minion, blow him up with unchain essence. Nova and unload more AoEs. Somewhere in here I drop to human, stygan, grav well again and raise a fluffy. Dwarf mire, some punches, more AoEs. Blow a dozen off the platform every now and then with gravitic emanation, there's more where they came from. Dwarf mire again and nuke! Eat a blue, more stygan. Regular mire again, more AoEs!

Purple death is flying everywhere. On all sides the rest of the team is fighting the same epic battle. Fire everywhere, buffs, blasts. The squishier members start dropping, and I'm being passed inspirations from the downed players. Someone rezzes, wreaks some havoc, and falls again. At the other end of the platform the softcapped dark armor tank (and what a beastly build that is) is just as buried in foes as I am. They try to take me down, but I'm making bodies and eating souls faster than they can wear me down through eclipse. The recharge buffs keep the eclipse/mires/explosions/etc coming, and the carnage just won't stop. The only thing that could stop me is mez, but I have breakfrees. I know I had to refresh eclipse at least once, twice possibly, and I believe I nuked twice, as well, eclipse keeping me safe. Multiple unchain essences, fluffies (for the few seconds they survived, anyway), gravitic emanations everywhere. It was glorious.

Finally the flow of enemies slows, the crowds thin and we can finally see the crystal titan again through all the chaos. The other teammates climb back up, and the growing tide of heroes sweeps the floor clean. At the end I'm left with an empty inspiration tray, a ton of XP, a room that would be wall-to-wall in bodies if most of them hadn't faded long ago, and the biggest damn grin ever on my face. It was one of the most awesome experiences I've had yet in this game - to stand strong amongst such an incredible sea of foes, and not only survive, but mop the floor with them. Warshades are amazing. (So are teammates who pass out speed boosts and inspirations! )

.3 scale is indeed a different total amount of damage between controller and dom, since doms have an 0.95 ranged damage modifier and controllers have 0.55. Lift is 1.32 scale and propel is 1.96, so a flat 0.3 scale bonus is ~23% on lift and ~15% on propel - in other words, rather small.

As I noted in the controller thread on these changes, lift needed at least a 20% bonus, and propel at least a 50% bonus, to become reasonably 'good' attacks relative to other ST attacks available to doms. Lift would now have a DPA of ~72, which is comparable to heavy mallet and charged brawl, but still far inferior to such monsters as seismic smash, bitter ice blast, and blaze. It'd still be superior to some of the worse attacks in each set, though, so it'd actually be worth using. Propel still sucks.

Yeah, RotP is made of seven kinds of win and awesome. Definitely best self-rez in the game, and very little is more fun than taking the enemies who *thought* they had won and blowing them to kingdom come. My fire/stone tank has RotP on auto.

I'm very glad more ATs than just meleers have access to it. I don't care too much for fire armor on scrappers/brutes (even though I loooove RotP), so it's nice to have access to the power on more than one character.

On another note, according to city of data the rez in thermal summons the same pseudopet when it rezzes someone. It sounds like an awesome mix of fallout and a rez - for anyone who's played thermal, is it indeed that awesome? The idea of blowing the spawn to bits at the same time as rezzing an ally sounds very fun.

edit:

I've got a beam/dark corr at almost 30, so far I'm enjoying it, but I do have to agree that beam is a bit of an odd blast set.

It *does* have pretty darn good ST damage. Between being able to drop an extra 15% resist debuff on things and getting all that extra damage from disintegrating stuff, you burn down single targets quite quickly. But, it requires fiddling. It's not high ST damage just because you have attacks with flat-out ridiculous DPA like fire - you have to be careful and methodical - and it requires a bit more effort.

Solo, I have no problems with the set. It's never going to be an x8-spawn-munching AoE powerhouse, but it's still fun and effective. Lancer shot's stun is awesome, and the one real AoE you have is at least a decent one. You have time to decide who to shoot and in what order, and when you do, it's very effective. I might not be able to simply blast all the minions out of the way at once, but I can burn through them with ST attacks almost as fast. And it's nice to burn down EBs almost casually.

On big teams is where I kinda feel a bit let down. There's two issues - large team spawns bring the set's poor AoE to the front, and the chaotic team environment makes it harder to leverage disintegration. With AoEs flying all over the place, my net damage contribution usually ends up being one shot from cutting beam (with no disintegration in place because I need to use it *now*), and with all the explosions and chaos spending time trying to find a good target to disintegrate for ST damage often means I don't end up shooting at all. I mostly find myself first using my debuffs and then just spamming attacks at whatever I can see so that I have a chance to actually shoot something. And if that's all I'm doing, basically any set with more than one AOE would do it better.

*However*, if the situations where it falls down are the ones where stuff is dying at lightspeed *anyway*, it doesn't really *matter* that much that you're only getting the chance to toss one AoE instead of multiple. That's why I'm not really too bothered by it - well, that and the fact that I know I'm doing a lot of good with my secondary, too. I could see why a blaster might be less impressed, though (although they don't have to worry about spending time debuffing stuff). I also still don't have the critically important last power out of each set - we'll see how much better the AoE feels once I can mininuke every second or third spawn, and once fluffy is doing a good chunk of my work for me so that I have more time to blast.

I do think, though, that the disintegration mechanic could use a further buff (afaik, it was already buffed once in beta by improving the chance for spread on various attacks). I personally would give *all* beam rifle attacks a chance to cause spread (why would it just be the ST ones?), and probably buff the spread chances a bit more (at least on the low chance powers).

As it stands, the problem is that you just don't get much disintegrate spread in crowds unless you've got a bunch of beam rifle users who are actively trying to maximize it. Solo, it's difficult for one character to physically fire attacks fast enough to get much in the way of spread, and on teams it's even worse because you can only spread to up to 3 targets even if you do get it off, and stuff dies faster. Spread seems like it's supposed to more or less act like a pseudo-AoE, but the problem is that since it only triggers off of ST attacks and has such a strict target cap, the extra damage that results doesn't really scale with number of targets like a *true* AoE would.

I would buff disintegration spread itself to have a 20 foot radius/5 target cap, raise the spread chances by ~20% across the board, and give all the AoEs maybe a ~30% chance to spread. The idea being that if you disintegrate something and nail it with a pair of ST attacks, you've got a pretty good chance to have spread disintegrate at least once, and then a cutting beam will add another one or two spreads - just in time for an overcharge. Basically, just make it easier to spread disintegrate to most of a crowd.

Oh yeah, I would also fix the bug where if you queue up another attack while animating disintegrate, the second attack can activate fast enough to not get the benefits of the disintegrate buff. The disintegrate power needs to apply the 'disintegrating' state earlier in its animation.

Scarily, I agree with EvilRyu. There is too little *mitigation* in the set, especially given how many arrows you have to shoot off to get what little there is. There certainly are some other weirdnesses that ought to be corrected, but adding some real mitigation to the set ought to be the first priority, in my opinion.

Poison gas arrow is still a sleep, and every other incarnation of 'poison gas' in the game is a hold. This should be as well. I'd change the sleep to a (mag 3) hold and fiddle with magnitude, proc chance, and duration. Something like a 33% chance for mag 3/2.5s duration, so at any given time you get a third of the minions/LTs held, and then once you slot for hold you bump that to roughly 45% (vs even levels).

It wouldn't be as good of a chance to mez, at least against minions (rolling every 2.5s with a 66% chance/9s duration sleep has a *very* good chance to put basically all the minions to sleep after a few pulses), but it'd be a lot more useful for mitigation (IMO) because of being a *harder* mez as well as affecting LTs. It might be nice to give it an initial guaranteed longer-duration pulse of sleep as well, both to satisfy the cottage rule and preserve the use for people who want to use it to keep stuff slept while they layer other debuffs.

The other place to add more mitigation is flash arrow. Currently, it does indeed work just as well as any other perception power, but that's honestly not saying much. Perception debuffs are, frankly, of highly limited use. The set needs some more direct mitigation, such as tohit debuff, and it ought to go *here* rather than in disruption arrow because the mania the designers had towards forcing you to layer a billion arrows to get your debuffs is a *bad* thing, not a good one. Also, the only other set which opens with two powers which are so (IMO) unimpressive is storm (which is a much better set in all sorts of other ways), so this would give TA users the chance to actually take something slightly exciting with their mandatory level 1 pick.

Leave flash arrow's current -6.25% unresistable 30 second tohit debuff alone. Add in a 12.5% *resistable* 30s duration tohit debuff on top of that, and double the power's recharge to 30s. The total of 18.75% tohit debuff is still only half that of a set like dark (equal to darkest night), but it'd still be useful in a way which a straight perception debuff *isn't*.

I don't really disagree with your other changes, but I just don't think they help the set where it actually needs it. Small chance for a short duration hold in glue arrow isn't going to do much, honestly. More -recharge is nice, but does nothing for alpha strikes (especially solo, and especially the ST parts). Give the set some *real* mitigation.