Nihilii

... I think it sucks, for highend performance.

Its DPS at high recharge levels, without the "right" secondary, is middle of the pack to good, and that's only if you leverage Power Siphon to its fullest. In real game situations, not so easy to keep those 5 stacks going.

PS can seem awesome at first glance, but spending 2 seconds of animation for 20 seconds of buff - and a buff that builds up rather than always on - isn't all that impressive. So much of the DPS being tied to it also means you get less out of damage buffs (be it external, or stuff like Assault and Musculature) than some other primaries.

The AoE isn't anything to write home about either. Burst has the standard terrible PBAoE radius, 8 feet, and Repulsing Torrent can't possibly be intended as a damage power, as it does less than Quick Strike.

Now for Concentrated Strike ; great damage, but the long animation makes some corpse blasting bound to happen. The chance to recharge Power Siphon is of course unreliable, and will often happen while PS is already recharged, and during the animation, you often go down to 4 or even 3 stacks of PS.


Thankfully, highend performance isn't everything.


In spite of all of that, in my opinion this is one of the best melee powerset the devs ever made, if not the best.

The feel in general of the attacks is great. The sounds make it sound like you hit hard, the animations are beautiful ; I find myself logging on my KM characters just to whack stuff and watch the pretty hand motions, and then later I glance at the time and notice I've been here for a whole hour doing just that.

The DPAs on the powers (speaking about the 4 melee ST attacks) are relatively even, with a slow, steady increase as tiers go. This lets you build all kinds of attack chains while leveling, or even not care about an attack chain and do barely worse than someone who would optimize each millisecond of fighting. It also means there isn't as wide of a gap between high recharge chains and lower recharge ones, and the DPS KM does while leveling is very solid (possibly one of the best, if not the best) compared to other primaries.

The first attacks are fast and recharge quickly. By level 4 you have your bread and butter ST powers, by level 8 you get your shiny buff. This makes for a great early game experience, as well as a potent character for exemplaring. You get your PBAoE at level 18, which is right about the time you need it ; a flavor power / ranged attack at level 26, which is more or less the point when team content gets more dynamic (Kal, Sutter) ; and finally, the tier 9.

Concentrated Strike does everything a tier 9 should do. It looks powerful, it hits very hard consistently and the whole nature of the power, a slow, hard hit whereas all previous ST attacks were fast but weaker punches can turn the playstyle into a fun minigame of ramping up damage to deliver a super buffed up CS to take down a lieutenant in one go or remove a significant chunk out of the HP bar of a boss. *Can* being the operative word, because you're not forced to do that either ; you can just as well play willy-nilly and remain at an acceptable performance level comparatively speaking. This is one of the greatest strengths of KM - it doesn't force you into doing something, but rather gives you all these options and tells you it's alright to use any of these. Just punch faces as you see fit.

There's other nice things about CS. Earlier on I complained about corpse blasting, but just as well doing more damage in one hit can be useful. Killing those freakshows before they get to pop Dull Pain. Killing a sapper in one go. Doing good damage while kiting against Apex Battle Maiden or Nightstar/Siege while under warnings.

The way Power Siphon works can also be nice for regular missions. While people often discount it, there are travel times, from the knocked out baddies on the floor to the next punching bags to be. PS doesn't root so can be used during that travel time, at which point its animation time is irrelevant.

The mitigation isn't too bad either. After Concentrated Strike, bosses often end up stunned while attacking at full speed, as well as under a ~-20% damage debuff. It's not fantastic, but it's there. At high levels, combining that with Void Judgement (for the -50% damage) and/or Paralytic Interface can turn KM into a nice damage debuffer. There's knockdown here and there, with % high enough to not feel anecdotal.

All in all, the powerset is more focused on providing a balanced experience through the whole game than balance at high levels, and that's smart. Let's face it, few players care about the latter part ; we're maybe a few dozens actively speaking about highend performance on here, there's maybe a few hundreds or thousands caring about that in game. Compare and contrast with the 70,000 or 80,000 subscribers we have - as in any game, most players are casual. More importantly, even for spreadsheet-loving number junkies like me, the set is so much fun than any concern about performance just disappears.

Kinetic Melee is a fantastic, well designed powerset. It's such a departure from older powersets, that seemed to be mostly about making cool animations and cool powers, and then trying to adjust the numbers to make it somewhat fit. With KM you can really see a lot of thought went into it, and everything just works as a whole.

Thumbs up for a job well done. It's things like this that give me faith in the current dev team.

Personally, I never thought they'd make buffs AoE and was very vocal about it, because I believed it'd either be horribly unbalanced or would come with a drastic reduction in power. I still think it's going to buff the best characters even further and widen the performance gap between buff/debuff and everything else, especially in team play, but as always I'm just going to play what I feel is overpowered at the moment and enjoy it.

Gotta agree on your main point though. First inherent fitness, now this. I expect either server merges or global server access to come around 2012.

Still for sale. Still asking for 3 billions.

Cold is definitely a good buffer. That said, with the unfortunate amount of people who skip the buffs, I could see an unknowledgeable person assuming Cold isn't a buffing powerset. Regardless, teams that look for specific things are bad, so yeah. You're better off without them.

Le 23 décembre... Un pré-réveillon trop arrosé, peut-être?

Anyone who wants to get low level SOs can do so by getting on a high level team with a level 1 character having XP turned off.

It looks fine to me.

Some things I would change, but just a matter of taste :

I probably wouldn't put a second slot to stamina, if anything this end mod would provide more endurance if it was in Energy Drain. That said, it'd be "active" endurance rather than passive endurance, so it might make sense to go for a lower benefit than doesn't require a power activation, I don't know.

I'd stick a kismet +6% tohit somewhere. The build is relatively light on accuracy (body blow and smashing blow barely have enough to hit +3s at 95% chance while Power Siphon is down), so enemies with any kind of defense buffs or +4s might be annoying.

Heh.

EA without Overload makes me sad. It's certainly a valid choice if you dislike the playstyle it imposes ; still, it's the best T9 out of the long duration, high crash ones in my opinion.

The crash is just your end, so you can mitigate it with a well timed Energy Drain. It buffs your HP by 1200 (slotted up), and skyrockets your defense and DDR (good against tohit buffs, defense debuffs or mobs with increased base tohit - i.e. praetorians).

Repulsing Torrent does tiny damage and is mostly used as a KB power. For many people, that means it's a "skip it" power. YMMV, but seeing as your build is relatively highend I'd tend to agree ; or if I picked it, I wouldn't slot it.

500 millions over 154 days = 3.24 millions per day.

Congratulations on your sale, but I'm glad I'm impatient. If I was happy with those amounts of influence, I would never be able to purple my warshades.

I'd fix the performance issues ; after that, I'd probably tackle world hunger and invent the cure for death, as either can't be any harder than that first thing.

I don't get the hostility to this topic. Gathering data is always good.

Smashing Haymakers give half of the defense bonuses for 1/100 of the cost, use the same amount of slots and provide the same enhancements % (IIRC). I find these to be a good stepping stone before you get enough money to upgrade.

Quick Strike, the first attack in the kinetic melee powerset, has a 33% chance to do 0.7 knockback. That means it does knockdown to even level foes or above ; but to level -1 enemies, it does knockback.

With the incarnate level shift, it's fairly annoying to knockback level 50s. Raising the rep is an option solo, not so much in, say, a team running a task force, as many will prefer to fight level 50s. Regardless, is the knockback against -1s really intended? Even the description for the power says "KD". Quick Strike is, as far as I know, the only melee power in a melee powerset with 0.7 KB rather than 0.67 KB, leading me to believe it's an oversight rather than a deliberate design choice.

Something strange just happened to me, related to this. I was on a BAF where my netgraph was solid red with a few bits of green here and there (in other words, terrible lag). My client crashed. When I came back, I rejoined the BAF and... The lag was gone.

I've also seen times where other players report the red spike lag, whereas it's smooth for me.

So it's seemingly not tied to the instance alone but to the individual connection? Would have to test more, but if restarting the client is enough to get rid of the lag for a particular instance, that could alleviate the problem.

I am indeed living in France, and it seems the lag is actually much worse than the usual red spike lag, with huge blocks of red as seen in the screenshots posted in the french topic ; not to mention I haven't seen US players mentioning unusual lag. Meh. Seems like we're screwed, as always they'll pretend it's something on our end, even though the connections used worked perfectly fine before 05/24 and work perfectly fine for everything else.

At 50 inf a pop, you can use 20 lucks per minion and still make a profit.

I wouldn't skip MoG, but this is a very poor argument for it.

Melee/SL res toggle - 3 res, 3 def
Ranged/AOE toggle - 3 def
True Grit - 3 heal, 3 res
Mez protection - 1 rech
AaO - 1 end
Phalanx Fighting - 1 def
Grant Cover - 1 def
Shield Charge - 2 acc, 3 dam, 1 rech
T9 - 3 res

I never bother with end reduction in toggles (unless there's nothing else to slot, i.e. AaO) as the biggest end drain comes from attacks.

I can agree with that, but the question that remains is : why would you care about level 1-38 on SOs in a discussion about dedicated farming alts, seeing as this takes all of a few hours of solo AE regardless of the combo? All in all, you might save half a hour or something. Probably less time than you'd spend posting to defend the build on the boards.

I disagree with everything that guy said, and at the same time I understand where he's coming from.

This game could use more documentation. No, scratch that - go straight to hand-holding if you want to appeal to more players.

For better or worse (worse IMHO, but that's what sells), hand-holding is a standard in the gaming industry nowadays. If you're used to games telling you to Press E to open door with a big red prompt, how do you understand there's other things than repeating the ITF or AE/newspaper arcs over and over? How do you get the difference set bonuses can make, or even a few slots that aren't "Damage" in a key power?

I consistently see people who stay in Atlas AE 1-50 and move on to the same 2 trials nonstop once they hit 50. Many players simply don't have that much initiative when it comes to their gaming, and in a MMO will follow the lead of other people. Expecting people to go talk to a contact by themselves is already asking for too much, in my opinion. I don't think adding more content would help in that regard, you just want to direct people to the existing content they don't even know of.

Wow, you're right everyone. Sorry, I completely misunderstood that. The idea of a targeted AoE 30 foot radius buff with the same recharge is so insanely powerful my mind assumed the worst case scenario, heh. Thanks for clearing that up for me.

That's reassuring, Uber. I still think I'm going to be hurt in pure buffing power with this change, because typically I buffed people at maximum range with my shields (80 feet) while using the downwards momentum of a long jump to not lose any time. Add to that I play with 200-300ms ping, sometimes get extra "red spike hell" lag for days after patches, and play on a computer that occasionally slowdowns, and this makes catching people in a PBAoE, even a 30 feet one, much harder than simply clicking on their name.

Admittedly, I will get to blast even more than I do now, and that's something positive. I don't want to complain as much as explain my reasons for not being thrilled with this change. Ultimately I get that the needs of many outweigh the needs of a few, and all that, and I guess I'm going to get buffed more by other people who didn't buff as much because they didn't like it, so that's another plus.