Muon_Neutrino
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According to city of data, the fast cast times are:
Defensive sweep: 1.0
Crushing Blow: 1.2
Titan Sweep: 1.0
Rend Armor: 1.3
Arc of Destruction: 1.5
If you go to one of the Titan weapons pages on city of data:
http://tomax.cohtitan.com/data/power....Titan_Weapons
Check out the 'redirect' links in the powers. The top one in each power is the redirect to the fast version, with cast time listed. Now, I don't know at what point city of data was last updated - obviously sometime after titan weapons went into open beta, but I don't know if there's any way to know if the city of data version is the final one. -
In regards to the 'impact' effect, my guess is that, in pseudocode, it'd look something like this:
Code:Point is, it can't be tied to actually being held, because 'being held' isn't a state unique to gravity powers. It'd have to be a state flag or grantpower effect, which will have a precisely set duration (presumably the duration of the -KB) and not depend on whether the target is actually held. I'd be expecting something similar to beam's 'disintegrating' effect, which functions by granting a 'does nothing' power to the target and then having the other attacks check for the presence of that power.Power effects: X duration mag 3 hold .75*X duration additional mag 1 (if overpower) Smashing DoT Extra smashing DoT (if containment) Mag 'lots' KB protection (10 seconds) Enable 'impact' state (10 seconds) OR grantpower 'impact_effect' for 10s etc.
As for the changes themselves, while I certainly won't turn them down, they still seem a bit 'meh' to me. I certainly don't object to making gravity actually *be* the 'single target damage specialist' control set that it was apparently intended to be, but I still wish they'dve done *something* with wormhole. An extra 5 feet of radius. The ability to not eat an alpha while using it. *Something*. Gravity is still in a pretty dire place when it comes to actually providing AoE control.
Controllers will make out better with this. They're the ones who would actually be using propel, the ones for whom a 'single target damage specialist' control set, while still not necessarily a brilliant idea, isn't utterly and completely redundant, and the ones with a possibly mitigative secondary to cover up the primary's control shortcomings.
Grav doms are still boned. They don't have buff/debuff sets to paper over their primary's bad control, and their secondaries are still going to be better than the primary at damage. Check out the DPA values of a few representative dom single target attacks, compared to propel and lift:
Propel and lift will be better than a couple of stinker attacks like hurl boulder and thorny darts. They'll be competitive with most of the generic 4s and 8s blasts. They're still on par, at best, with most of the other attacks, and worse than the 'good' ones. They'll have to do something like 50% (for propel) or 20% (for lift) extra damage on the gravity distortion'd targets to really become 'good' attacks.Code:dpa Old propel 28.0 New propel 46.1 Lift 58.7 Hurl boulder 32.8 Thorny darts 33.4 4s blast 44.5 8s blast 46.9 Ice slash 57.8 Ice sword 60.5 Power push 65.6 Bonesmasher 66.7 Heavy mallet 72.0 Charged brawl 73.0 Fire blast 77.1 Mind probe 86.7 Bitter ice blast 91.3 Seismic smash 121.1 Blaze 141.4
I could see some doms using lift as a replacement for a weak blast from their secondary since they have to take either it or crush anyway, especially if it gets a reasonable amount of bonus damage. Propel is still pretty bleh. And doms are still, overall, *not* in need of extra ST damage from their primary. Wormhole is still very much in need of some sort of tweak. -
Just wait until you can drop freezing rain, nado, and lightning storm every spawn and creepers every other, along with roots spam, seeds, your pet's contribution, and the epic attacks of your choice. It should be illegal to have this much fun.
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Funny thing is that grav doesn't actually need too many changes. It's just that the changes it does need, it *really really* needs.
As has been pointed out, grav is kinda similar to fire in some ways. Both are somewhat more damage focused than the other original control sets, both have an AoE stun and hold as the big controls, both have a mostly ignorable utility power (smoke is better than dimension shift, certainly, but they're both still of minor use), etc. In terms of differences, it's mostly the exchange of propel and lift for hot feet and bonfire (ST damage/soft control vs AoE damage/soft control) and singy for imps (ST control/tanking vs pseudo-aoe damage). Grav is the ST flipside of fire.
Yet, grav sucks and fire doesn't, and it's more than just the fact that AoE is generally preferable to ST. It's that grav's signature powers are crippled by weird quirks and fire's arent. The set doesn't need a complete ground up rebuilding, it just needs to not have what could be its best powers be some of the worst examples of their types.
All you'd really need to do would be to up lift's damage to match levitate, chop propel down to a ~1.5s animation, and give wormhole the proper radius for an AoE stun and have it apply the stun *first*.
At that point, grav would still have issues (most notably power order weirdnesses), but it at least wouldn't be the worst control set by such a ridiculous margin. You could go further; you could tweak the hold's animation, you could swap things around to put wormhole earlier and the hold as one of the first two powers, you could try to make dimension shift useful, you could fiddle with the damage/recharge on propel to make it hit even harder (I'd be a fan of a 1.5s animation/2.28 ds/10s rech version instead of the 3.5s animation/1.96 ds/8s rech one we have now - 3 times the DPA? sign me up!), but those three changes are the ones that are really needed most. -
To add to the comments on beam/, I have a beam/dark moving up the levels right now that works quite well. You want a set where you can just lay down your stuff at the beginning of the fight and go.
Traps works great for that, and would be a better hard target killer to go with beam's good ST damage, but I already have a traps character that I really like. On the other hand psi blast is boring so I feel no qualms in rerolling him into beam rifle, and beam/dark works quite well. Fearsome stare->DN->tar patch or DN pull->tarpatch->fearsome stare, and then commence the killing. You don't need to redraw at all outside of the rare cases when something slips a hit through your debuffs and you need to heal, and dark's heal is so burly I almost never need to use it more than once.
It's not quite as synergistic as traps would be, in that dark is great at neutering crowds while beam is more comfortable mowing down smaller numbers of targets. But dark's stellar mitigation means you can still at least handle crowds, if not as well as something like fire/dark, and the lack of redraw really allows beam's ST damage to shine.
On an amusing tangent, for some reason darkest night doesn't cause redraw of the rifle; rather, the character just does the animation with the rifle in hand and you can go right back to blasting. Pretty sure it's a bug, and not very relevant since you're usually using DN with FS and tarpatch which *do* cause redraw, but still, neat to have. -
My personal choice would be force bubble every time, but not because the two powers are redundant.
In many ways the two powers serve different purposes. Force bubble is for making entire spawns go thataway or into a corner, or for pushing enemies out of a large area like the center of the bowl on a mothership raid, or for creating ranged squishy safe zones. It can also serve the personal 'nobody is allowed to melee with me' function, but it's harder to use it for that without accidentally spreading out spawns all over the place since it's got such a large radius and will easily affect more mobs than just the ones trying to punch you in the face.
Repulsion field on the other hand isn't a tool for affecting whole spawns. It's more of a anti-melee shield and more precisely placable area denial tool. Unlike force bubble, it admirably fulfills the role of keeping stuff out of melee without much required effort on your part in terms of controlling it and preventing mass scatter. It's also a more precise area denial tool in that you can jump next to a squishy and use it to knock away the swarm of enemies trying to punch them without affecting the whole surrounding area.
Force bubble is a large-scale spawn positioning tool and a safe zone creator. Repulsion field is personal anti-melee protection and a small-scale enemy removal/positioning tool. Really, in an ideal world I'd like have both. I'd run repulsion field all the time and use it to protect me from melee and forcibly remove small clumps of problematic foes, and I'd activate force bubble when I wanted to engage in large-scale spawn moving or protect everyone from some horrible ambush-pile or something.
Unfortunately, the problem with this ideal scenario is repulsion field's utterly ridiculous endurance cost. Force bubble costs 0.69/s, which is very high but still manageable for a toggle that you only turn on when you need it. Repulsion field costs a whopping 0.78/s *on top of* the unreducible 1 end per foe repelled. In other words, *while it's providing absolutely no benefit at all* it's one of the most expensive toggles in the game, and then it drains additional end on top of that if you actually try to do anything with it. I'm already running dispersion bubble, maneuvers, and temp invul all the time, force bubble occasionally, I actually use my attacks, and I like to turn on assault and tactics if I can. I don't have the endurance to even contemplate using something that ridiculously expensive - it was only at 50 with a fair amount of attention paid to endurance use and recovery in my set slotting that I stopped constantly running low on endurance in the first place. I don't want to be forced into cardiac alpha just to run repulsion field.
In my personal opinion, repulsion field should cost something like 0.1/s when not repelling anything. It's the only power I can think of that requires such a punitive cost to do literally nothing. At that point I'd definitely be able to take and find uses for both, since I could *choose* when I actually wanted to spend endurance knocking things back. And it's definitely not like we need to worry about making the set overpowered by such a minor overall buff. -
Quote:I kinda feel the same way about gravity. I first saw the game watching over my brother's shoulder as he teamed with our cousins. When he let me make a character on his account to try out the game, I made a grav/storm controller. As can probably be guessed from the fact that I'm still here 4+ years later, I had a blast. I had never had so much fun as I did tossing baddies into the air with lift and beaning them with cars with propel, not to mention hurling them every which way with gale. I was probably a terror to play with (although I don't recall any complaints about the KB), but I was too new (to the game and MMOs both) to realize that I was 'doing it wrong'. All I knew was that this was some of the most fun I had ever had in a video game.Originally Posted by Snowzone
The first character I ever made, and my first to 50, was a Gravity/Kinetics Controller and whilst I haven't made any Gravity Controllers or anything to do with Kinetics since, I have made several Gravity Dominators. I've found that if I play anything that uses Gravity Control then I end up getting a sense of nostalgia from my first forays into Paragon. It's a warm, fuzzy feeling that doesn't care if it isn't the best - it's just fun.
I remade that character when I got my own account, but he never got seriously played. Even then I was an altaholic, and I was far too eager to try out all of the ideas I had gotten by seeing other players' characters and messing around with the character creator. It was months before I got back to him, and by then I had learned enough about the game to realize just how subpar gravity was. He was still fun to play, but in a true case of 'ignorance is bliss' it was harder to get into him knowing just how much I was missing. He's still sitting at level 23 on a server I don't play on anymore - I moved him when we had the free transfers, as I just couldn't bring myself to delete him.
I've since come full circle and made a new grav/ controller - a grav/time who is both closer to the original concept I had for the character and arguably a stronger character overall thanks to the secondary. Nowadays I'm experienced enough with the game and have enough resources to not only know that grav's a subpar set but to get good enough performance out of it anyway, and one thing that hasn't changed is that it's still immensely satisfying to hit things with cars. And every time I fling a water cooler at something, I remember my first adventures in paragon city and smile.
Grav is my guilty pleasure. It may not fulfill the job of a control set very well, but it's just so much fun I don't care anymore. Perhaps someday it'll get the buffs it needs, and in the meantime if I need mechanical effectiveness I can lean on my secondary while still laughing maniacally as I have fun with my primary by teleporting mobs off cliffs, flinging them into the ceiling, and braining them with lamp posts. -
I try not to repeat powersets. It's not an *absolute* rule, but mostly so, so I don't have certain powersets that I use over and over again. But there are definitely some that hit just the right spot.
I think for me the nearest powersets to that would be dark miasma, storm summoning, and stone melee. Among my active characters I don't have any powerset repeats. However, these are the only sets which I made on no longer active characters and liked so much that I kept experimenting until I found the right AT/other powerset for them, and they're the only sets that I'd seriously consider repeating.
Dark is just awesome. It does everything I want - it debuffs things to smithereens, it has awesome mezzes, a great pet, and a solid rez and heal as well, with no clicky buffing stuff. (Which is why I'm very much not a fan of the proposed 'dark affinity' version for controllers - not only does it kill two of the powers I enjoy, it replaces them with two buffs that run counter to the original debuff-only set character. If I wanted to worry about buffs, I'd play my FF defender - and at least his are long-duration and quick to recharge and apply.)
Storm, like dark, is just inherently awesome. Almost as good at debilitating the mobs in terms of debuffs/mez and adds plenty of damage and delightful chaos on top of that, in addition to being one of the most viscerally satisfying powersets out there in terms of visuals, audio, and overall feel. Even less team buff ability than dark, but who cares?
Stone melee is simply smash incarnate. Absolutely nothing surpasses it in sheer visceral impact. With every single crackling boom and screen-shaking impact, it really feels like you're laying the smack down with the force of an entire planet. Nothing fulfills that inner desire to just break stuff like walking up to a boss and unloading on him with the mallets and seismic smash, and nothing feels more powerful than knocking enemies sprawling a dozen at a time with every monstrous blow. It just adds the icing on the cake that the set also has some truly godly powers (in mechanical terms) in the form of seismic smash and fault. I fully intend to repeat this powerset when scrappers get access to it, which would be a first. -
On a tangent, note that spectral wounds' increased damage on doms isn't quite as impressive as it seems. Doms do have a ranged damage modifier roughly 75% greater than controllers, but controllers get containment, which increases the actual damage but *not* the healback (dom's increased damage scale affects both). Damage enhanced contained controller spectral wounds (at level 50) does 137.9 net damage - 157.5 base minus 19.6 healback. Meanwhile, damage enhanced dominator spectral wounds does 135.1 net damage - 169 base minus 33.9 healback - *less* than controller spectral wounds.
Even in situations where the healback doesn't take effect, the damage difference is barely 10 points. The only real difference is when the controller is unable to mez the target. This definitely is important on single targets of higher than boss rank, as illusion doesn't have the easy option of immobilizing them. However I do question the importance of such a difference, as in normal play such targets are the minority (and reasonably well handled by PA anyway) - keep in mind that all this talk of soloing AVs/etc represents a decidedly fringe case.
Quote:And, again, holding aggro and being unkillable simply *duplicate things doms can already do*. PA mitigates damage by taunting and getting enemies to waste their attacks on something they can't hurt. Traditional controls mitigate damage by misdirecting attacks again (confuse) or preventing enemies from attacking at all. The effect is the same - mitigated damage. Considering that permadoms can already duplicate the effects of perma-PA against both single targets and large spawns, PA's ability to mitigate isn't a problem unless existing permadoms' ability to do the same things is.Originally Posted by Airhammer
The simple answer for me.. Phantom Army does damage.. holds aggro.. and is unkillable.. Thats the problem...
I will give you that they do damage. However, I will also note that so do hot feet, propel/lift, mesmerize/levitate/terrify, and vines/carrion creepers. Giving a primary set powers that do significant damage (above and beyond the damage done by pets and the ST controls) is apparently not a problem.
One, the days of unique sets are *over*. Ignoring sets which *can't* be proliferated because the AT in question is the only one with that type of set, there are exactly three unique sets left - ice melee, ninjitsu, and illusion control. Every new set they've released since... issue 11, I think, has been released for every applicable AT, with the sole exception of a couple 'loud' sets for stalkers (which is silly, but I digress). The devs have gone on record as saying that they plan to eventually proliferate every applicable set. They're not going to make some special dom-only powerset. It's just not going to happen, and wishing for it is pointless. The absolute most I could see is slight tweaking of the dom version of a set that's released for both control ATs.Quote:Again my hope is that the developers look at Dominators and give them something special and unique rather than.. oh well lets just give them Illusion too...
I really dont want to see Illusion dominators.. in fact in my mind it doesnt scream DOMINATION as a set to me..
I dont want to see dominators as the afterthought any longer..
And the devs never said they were proliferating every set...
Two, I don't see how giving dominators illusion control would be an 'afterthought', given how fervently and how long many dom players have been asking for it to be proliferated. Perhaps you might not be interested in it, but saying that an AT is being treated like an afterthought simply because they released a set that wasn't to your personal liking doesn't make sense. Especially when said set would be the fulfillment of a great many players longtime requests, and also especially if it comes anytime soon after the devs release two *more* sets that have also been requested for some time.
Finally, I'm sorry that you can't think of illusion as a dominator set. However, I don't see why that should prevent others who do find such a thing to fit their conception of the AT from playing the set. In general, I find concept to be such a subjective thing that it isn't really a useful point to bring up in these sorts of discussions. You've said that you don't think illusion fits doms conceptually. I now say that I think it does. Who's right? Neither and both, because concept isn't an absolute that can be debated. The only people who get to actually make decisions based on it are the devs. -
Quote:I'm pretty sure he was referring to the general type of secondary (i.e. buff/debuff), given that the distinction between buffs and debuffs has already been brought up at least once. Regardless, it's a really significant difference.Originally Posted by Airhammer
This has nothing to do with it.. Phantom Army is immune to being buffed..
I have just one question about this scenario - how is it any different from any *other* permadom mezzing everything to kingdom come and ripping them up with impunity? That's what doms are *supposed* to do - tie things up and then beat them mercilessly when they can't respond. Perma just lets them do it more easily and without having to worry about a lucky shot from a mez. The only difference between an illusion dom and a regular one here is that the form of control is slightly different, and actually arguably *inferior* to a traditional control against large numbers of foes. Again, if a *regular* permadom cycling, say, powerboosted total domination and mass confusion for perma mag 6 AoE hard control isn't overpowered, than neither is an illusion permadom.Quote:However a Perma PA pet army with a Phantom that also casts a decoy Phantom with a Spectral Terror that casts fears on mobs and the ability to Deceive a powerful LT or Minion in one application..
WHILE allowing the Dominator to liberally toss around their attacks with little to no fear of drawing any aggro and no threat whatsoever of being mezzed with Permadom makes a very very strong case for being overpowered...
The only real difference is that the illusion dom's 'regular' control also works on PToD bosses. However, that's rendered moot by the fact that a perma fire or mind dom's regular control *also* works on PToD bosses. Again, if a mind permadom perma-confusing or permaholding members of the freedom phalanx in the LRSF isn't overpowered, than neither is an illusion permadom. -
If dark control/assault are truly the 'special stuff' we were waiting for, then that explanation for why we didn't get any proliferation becomes even more stupid.
By the devs' own example, having multiple *new* sets in the works is no barrier to *other* ATs getting proliferations. See street justice, staff fighting, titan weapons, time manipulation, and beam rifle and the blaster (dark/, /dark), controller (poison), defender (therm, fire), scrapper (BA, WM, EA), tanker (SR, MA), brute (kat, BS, regen), corruptor (psi, poison,), mastermind(sonic), and stalker (/ice) archetypes.
*Every other base AT* got proliferations despite *also* gaining access to one or more brand new sets recently. Not to mention that the new dark control type stuff also gives *controllers* dark/ and /dark - if that was enough to prevent doms from getting anything, why did *controllers* still get proliferations?
The devs need to stop being coy with us. Either tell us what the special stuff we're supposed to be waiting for *actually* is (because dark/dark are nice, but shouldn't qualify), or just come out and admit that they're not going to port illusion, and why.
Quote:Sorry, but the comment about debuffs not being very important is, quite frankly, silly as all heck. The wiki doesn't seem to have the info on giant monster, for example, HP, but it does for archvillains. A level 50 AV has 28,271.7 HP and regens 5% every 15 seconds, for a HP regeneration rate of 94.3 HP/s. They resist -regen debuffs by close to 90%, but since most of the really big -regen powers are -500% or so, they're still debuffing by ~65%, accounting for 60+ DPS from regeneration debuffs alone (or the full value for traps and its -1000% regen poison trap, once controllers get that). A giant monster has significantly more HP and regens faster to boot; strong regeneration debuffs are going to be accounting for hundreds of DPS. I wasn't able to track down exact numbers, but regen numbers north of 300 hp/s were being thrown around in one thread I saw for *monster*, not even GM, class entities, which sounds about right - if GMs had merely 3 times the health they'd regen over 400 hp/s, and I wouldn't be surprised if they had more than that.Originally Posted by Pyro_Master_NA
Illusion/rad solos them so easily because of the perma unkillable agro holding pets. Debuffs just make it go smoothly. The secondaries are there because as you said, PA can't be buffed, so why pair it with a buffing set rather than a debuffing one? Doms don't get those debuffs but they get crazy high PDS attack chains, and that will combine with pets to be a lot more than what the debuffs would add.
Combine that with resistance debuffs, which are straight multiplicative bonuses to not only your own personal damage but the damage of phantom army and phantasm, and debuffs are going to be what's accounting for the majority of a controller's damage against AVs and especially GMs.
Debuffs don't merely make it go more smoothly, they're essential for making it possible at all (ignoring incarnate stuff since that's equally broken for everyone). Don't get me wrong, the aggro holding perma-PA is definitely essential as well, but the debuffs are hardly a sideshow. Unless your dom can maintain a significantly more than 400 DPS attack chain indefinitely, you're still going to solo a GM slower than a controller.
Not to mention that if you've got perma-PA levels of recharge, a dom can just hold the stupid AV through the purple triangles *anyway*! Sure, it requires one of the sets with a fast-activating hold, but there are still a couple of those already, plus some primaries or secondaries with extra hold potential. Doms can *already* mimic the AV-mitigating effect of perma-PA. We can't do that for a GM, but barring -regen a dom is going to have a hard time taking one down anyway so it hardly matters. Bottom line, if holding an AV through the purple triangles on a mind or fire permadom isn't overpowered, than neither would be holding an AV's aggro with perma-PA on a illusion permadom. -
Quote:Wish this happened during the various war walker fights too. Only UG I ever got on, a good half-dozen or so people didn't move after getting targeted by the first WW, so of course the power used was 'lethal force authorized' and 90% of the league wiped - everyone but me and 2 or 3 others who actually noticed the 'targeted' text and moved away. Of course, as soon as everyone else went down Des decided it would be a great idea to go melee the WW. Squish. Was really fun to spend three times as long forming the league as we actually spent in the trial.Originally Posted by Kragothe
*8) If Des drops to 20% health during the Avatar fight she will become untargetable and invulnerable, this is supposed to happen as a safety measure for league wipes.
Is there a particular time/etc you run these? I'd like to try this again at some point, but I'm getting the impression that it's not a good idea to run this trial in a PuG with an inexperienced leader. -
Quote:This. Ice's true problem is alpha strikes, not control ability in general. Ice slick is great, AA is monstrous, and shiver is a lot better than most think. The real issue with the set is how to get those controls rolling, when no matter how many slows you pile on that first round of attacks is still coming for you.Originally Posted by Oathbound
Really If they at least removed the utterly trivial damage (which I doubt anyone would miss) so that it didn't proc DoT Interfaces, and fix the Duration:Recharge (Why exactly did they feel it needed twice the recharge of Mass Hypnosis?) I think that would go a LONG way to improving the power.
Knockdowns delay alphas, but those powers are still sitting there, ready to be fired the moment the mob regains its feet for even an instant. Slows greatly mitigate everything *after* the alpha, but can't stop that first round. To actually *negate* those attacks, you've got to get in there with AA and convince the mobs to waste them on their friends, or else defeat them before they ever get a chance to act (iffy without an every-spawn hard mez like an AoE stun).
Fixing flash freeze would fill this hole. It can stay a sleep (giving ice an every-spawn *hard* mez on top of all the soft controls would probably be a bit over the top), but just remove the trivial tick of damage and look at the duration/recharge ratio - note that that tick of damage does more than just render it useless with interface, it requires that the sleep be delayed so it doesn't break itself, leading to you taking partial alphas on use, which is a big part of why the power is currently extremely bad. This would give you that critical opening to get in and let AA start confusing stuff, without the randomness or necessity for cover/excessive slot+power investment (range+stealth?) of ice slick. Flash freeze -> run in with AA on -> lay ice slick as stuff starts getting confused -> profit. -
I am somewhat in the same boat of not liking the login screen music. The problem is, changing it requires doing some things that the developers frown on; we're not supposed to go looking inside the game files to figure out where things are.
The closest anyone can give you without breaking rules is what's outlined in this thread:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=113746 -
I have a shield/mace at 50, and she's one of my favorite characters. But yeah, no AoE until 26 is indeed painful (and I even went until 20 with only two ST attacks... yeah, not fun). It really picks up by 30, though. Shield charge plus whirling mace is pretty decent, and the knockdown helps a lot with mitigation as well. On the 'slow' side, though, I'm not sure what you're seeing. Bash is a bit slow for its damage, but jawbreaker and pulverize are both fairly decent, and clobber is awesome in a can (you *do* have clobber, right?).
The 20s, though, were where I started feeling not squishy. Once you get SOs in your defenses and start picking up stuff like combat jumping and tough/weave, survivability really goes up. And you should have perma mez protection now that you've got SOs, so I'm not sure what might be wrong.
I guess my point is, it *really* does get a lot better. Once you get softcapped, you're just a beast - huge AoEs, lots of +damage, very tough to hit and with good resistances and HP even if you do, and a godmode you can use whenever you feel you need it with no crash worries. Incarnate stuff can still rip you up on occasion, but it does that to everyone, and once you get the incarnate powers that equation levels out. My shield/mace can solo the crates/tubes in lambda and she doesn't even have any tier 4s.
If nothing else, try to get on a TF team or something and get to 26/27 or so. If you're worried about survivability on a team, go to striga and do stephanie peeble's arc and get the ring temp power - 5 missions, but on low settings it shouldn't be too bad, and you can drop one of the defeat alls. The 2 hours of +resist should be more than enough to get through a TF or two if you turn it off outside of combat. I still use that at 50 as a sort of ghetto godmode if I need it and OWtS is recharging. -
Just FYI - image uploading at the ouro portal appears to be broken. Attempting to upload an image results in a page with the following error:
Fatal error: Call to a member function free() on a non-object in /var/www/ouroportal.com/public_html/w/includes/filerepo/LocalRepo.php on line 172
An identical error also appears when attempting to click on any existing images on various pages. -
Those are some *very* pretty movement animations for the dog pet. I have a feeling the panting sound might get annoying after a while, but such things can be dealt with. I have to admit that is the first non-combat pet that might actually tempt me to use it (I've literally never so much as put on my power bar, let alone summoned, any of the ones they've already given us). Of course, that depends on how much it costs. I would have preferred the wolf skin from the haunted house, though - perhaps multiple skins might be an option?
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Going back to the OP's topic, for those suggesting running at higher difficulties (especially +level) as a solution to having incarnates on a team - what about the *non* incarnates on the team?
Sure, upping the level brings the incarnates back on a bit more of an even footing with the foes, but it degrades the effectiveness of the non-incarnates at the same time. If you up the level enough that the incarnates can't trivialize things, the non-incarnates will still barely be contributing - it's just now that instead of not contributing because the incarnates are killing everything too fast, they're not contributing because they're fighting +4s (or even +5s, if they're sidekicked) with no level shifts or incarnate powers. For most characters (the ones not focused primarily on buffing) it's hard to do anything useful against such foes.
If someone considers an appropriate level of challenge for their character to be fighting +1s in groups of whatever size, upping the level doesn't change the fact that they're still contributing very little compared to the incarnate characters.
As a side note, I agree with merging shards and threads, but I'd credit existing shards as better than a 1:1 conversion. A common alpha component requires 4 shards; a common trial component needs 20 threads. For uncommons it's 16 shards to 60 threads. For this one-time trade, shards would need to be converted to threads at better than a 1:3 rate (and the thread drop rate would also need to be improved over the shard drop rate by the same factor).
I'd also allow alpha slot components to be side-graded to trial components at the same thread costs as trial components currently can be side-graded for. At least for commons and uncommons, anyway - notices are probably a bit too easy to get to be sidegradable to rares, so I'd probably say favors could be sidegraded to rares and very rares you'd still need to upgrade from rares. Between this and the ability to earn threads (and thus buy incarnate XP) in normal content, it would give a reasonably viable non-trial incarnate progression path. It still wouldn't be a *solo* path, and it'd be a lot slower, but it'd be better than nothing. -
Quote:It depends on what you're talking about. Most of those complaints tend to be about the single target blasts, and you've got to admit that executioner's shot and piercing rounds (effectively a ST attack) are two of the three slowest animating ST blasts out there. Only shout from sonic has them beat, and people complain about that one too.Originally Posted by Obscure Blade
No they aren't, that's been debunked repeatedly.
The first two blasts are, of course, normalized, and the regular AoEs aren't too out of line with other typical examples (though they're still not exactly fast), but the ST attacks do suffer a bit. -
Known bug, will be fixed in i21.5.
edit: aggh, a second too slow. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Zombie Man
Best. Posts. Ever.Quote:Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
Burma-Shave
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There was a fairly big thread on this a while back, check this out:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=254276
Later in that thread, there were a few different graphics packs people posted to allow you to change the appearance of the mouse pointer for better visibility. You can't do things like pointer trails, but it turns out that it *is* possible to tweak the basic appearance. I'm personally using the pointers given in this post, and it makes the mouse a *lot* easier to see on my big, cluttered high res monitor.
Note that while the tweaks themselves are *not* modifying any game files (you are simply adding extra files to the game's directory in such a way that it uses them instead of the usual ones) and are thus OK, asking how or why this sort of thing works is not allowed according to the devs since such knowledge could be considered 'reverse engineering' and thus be against the EULA. -
Quote:Ugh, this, so much this. Was on a league that attempted one of these for the first time yesterday. I'd like to say it was fun, but that'd be a lie.Originally Posted by Snow Globe
Problem 2 for me - Visual cues, or lack thereof:
...The same issue is to tell who is being targeted by any of the three War Walkers. Why? I don't want to be anywhere near ground zero of any of the War Walker's special attacks, particularly Lethal Force. I'm not shown who isn't listening to instructions and staying with the group when they are being targeted, and I'm not being given the tools to protect myself from their mistakes.
- People not getting away from the group when targeted can cause the trial to fail.
- People not paying attention to the bright red letters under their health bar can cause the trial to fail.
We spent more than an hour forming up and having the leader explain everything - including many repeated warnings to *get away from the rest of the league* if you get targeted by the war walkers. We got to the extinction walker and an inexplicably-left-on-agressive-mode MM pet aggroed him while we were buffing up. The league jumps on him, and immediately a big message flashes on my screen that said something about being targeted. I jumped away to the corner of the room, but apparently he targeted at least one more person, and I didn't see anybody but me actually trying to move out of the way. Half the league drops dead instantly, and then the WW aggroes on Desdemona and stomps her into the ground in 5 seconds flat.
Total time between aggroing the WW and the trial failing? About 20 seconds. All told we spent at least twice as long in pocket D beforehand than we spent on the trial map. And the worst part is that none of us had any real idea of exactly what went wrong. No way to tell who got targeted and didn't move away from the group. No way for the group to tell that someone got targeted in time to move away from them. And then the 'idiot AI' bane of all escort missions kicks in and the dumb NPC thinks it'd be a great idea to run up to the AV that just wiped half the league and hit it with her whip, instead of running away like a sensible person. (It figures - about the only time in this game that the AI *doesn't* run away all the time is when you actually *want* it to!)
I suppose it's a good thing that whoever wasn't following directions wiped the trial on the *first* war walker instead of, say, the end boss, but it was still a waste of almost 2 hours for absolutely nothing. I'd still like to see the rest of the trial at some point, but that experience certainly makes me want to never ever do it with a PuG again. When just a single idiot can fail the trial for everyone, I don't think I want to run that risk on a trial that involves such a huge time investment. -
Ok, just for the record, if anyone else is interested in getting rid of the new menu music, the correct path is:
Data/sound/ogg/N_UI/Music
and the file name is:
N_MenuMusic_loop.ogg