Nihilii

QoL for most, nerf for me. I used to keep shields up *and* blast/debuff without a trouble, now I will have to either stick glued to the team (ugh) or buff significantly less people, even if the recharge stays the same - and I'm doubtful it will.

Complain about teeth gnashing all you want, this change will hurt my performance, so I feel justified in not being doubleplussed about it. I can understand why it was done - not only the current mechanics of buffing annoy a fair amount of people, but for those of us who could buff we're probably getting more out of the powers than what was intended. Making it AoE will even it out.

Hmm... There's a political statement to be made here.

Save for that, everything else ranges from cool to awesome, with the possible exception of the vouchers. One of the cool things of the Incarnate system is that you had to play the character you wanted to incarnate, rather than use your most powerful character to farm for others. It brought a bit more diversity to trials. If the conversion rate with vouchers is too good, this might hurt that diversity. If it's not good enough, the feature will be useless. This is going to be tricky to balance.

Seemingly hitting only a few instances/zones, and not always the same for the (unfortunately for us who are affected, few) players who are hit by this lag, but it's there.

I know the official answer on this was "it's some data center between our servers and your internet provider and we can't do anything about it", but how come this lag always comes back *right* after a patch?

I've seen the pattern maybe a dozen times now, as I play during the day and often get to play right before a patch. Before patch - everything fine. After patch - red spikes all over the netgraph. It's hard to believe that evil noname data center somehow always start lagging right after City of Heroes patches, but hey.

I'm not yelling at the devs or anything, as a matter of fact this lag was introduced with the I8 release, so the people responsible for it may not even be in the current team... Just venting.

Now in the tradition of "I lag!" threads, feel free to post that the game is smooth for you and that you have absolutely no problem, as always.

I only got 2 astral merits on a Lambda that completed the sabotage phase and killed Marauder.

Buffing the enemies has the same identical effect as nerfing the players.

Scratch that ; it actually nerfs the player further, as those without incarnate abilities suffer a net loss at best.

So, in your attempt to stop the nerfs you're essentially advocating to nerf twice harder. Good job.

I just calculate it like a normal tohit chance, except that I have to hit three times in a row rather than one.

I can't see an attack chain using VS (except for the AV combo) being good ; maybe you meant SS? SS is the highest DPA of DB, while VS is one of the lowest.

That is odd. I don't see that option. Am I looking at the wrong place?

Screenshot. "Unowned recipes" doesn't hide memorized recipes for me (this particular character doesn't have any, but I doublechecked and made sure it doesn't work on a character who has memorized something).

I came to this game after years of playing MMOs where the Holy Trinity didn't exist ; last I experienced tankers and healers was in 1999 with EQ. So I assumed this fad died, and as this game had few ally healing or taunt powers, that surely players wouldn't be so silly as to assume the gameplay was based on these.

Yeah. You can guess how that went when I actually joined a team.

If only the tab for memorization recipes wouldn't be open everytime you open the window. That's the sole reason I don't go for the badges, it's a pet peeve of mine to have to close it everytime.

Another way is to pull the Nictus away from Romulus. If you stand at a certain distance, about 40-50 feet, you can pull a nictus away without Romulus following. Compared to the spawn point, that's more or less the spot with the big circle on the ground. One advantage of this strategy is that you don't need spawn point trickery to make it work, but on the other hand I haven't done the other thing so that one might be easier to manage.

As a DM/Inv scrapper, I would suggest to just try jumping in first. That particular combo could rush and win before the incarnate system, so with the level shift and reactive, it might be a piece of cake depending of your build and how far along you're into the incarnate path. The nictus only does one heal per target, and has to hit the target to heal. With the defense you should have, it shouldn't heal more than one every 30 seconds or so.

I can't help, but one of my friends has the exact same problem as you do, you're not alone. He's not fluent in english so he can't post here.

The same "data" that you didn't deliver when Arcanaville prompted you for it, I suppose.

As to why you might want to post a video, I will refer you to your own words.

"I've been proven wrong about AT's before and I would like to be proven wrong if it helps my teams get things done more efficiently."

It's obvious there are several key things you don't know about playing/building a highend tanker, and possibly a highend build in general (most telling thing for me was the part where you said good tankers don't have slots to put procs in attacks). If I had to play armchair psychologist, I'd guess you probably have a solid group of friends who know how to play together and are way above the average PUGer, but none of you probably understand the inner workings of the game much, and you mistake the lack of interest in the particular activity you choose to pursue for a lack of ability, and go on to assume you're the best at everything and nobody else knows better. Other telltale signs, in just the latest reply, would be you pointing out the rikti pylon thread results. There's several flaws in taking out rikti pylons as a DPS benchmark, although it is a good and easy to access approximation, provided one understands its limitations.

So, if you want to learn more, put some effort into it.

As for DM/SD brutes, they're good characters as far as ST DPS goes, but nowhere in the same league as DM/SD scrappers. Anyone who understands the basics of both ATs and powersets should get that. Namely : DM and SD rely on heavy selfdamage buffing to deal their damage. Scrappers start at high base damage and have the highest damage mod, which means they get a significant buff from these buffs.

Quick and dirty calculation : assume 2 from base + enhancements, compare to 1.5 from 10 target SD and 0.8 from 10 target AAO, you're looking at more than doubling your damage.

Now, brutes start at lower base damage and ramp up through Fury. That means proportionally, damage buffs do less as they operate at ~350% rather than ~200% like scrappers do. Additionally, brutes get lower damage mods than scrappers.

Same kind of calculation : 2 (base + enhancements) + 1.5 (75% Fury), compared to 1.2 (SD at 10) + 0.65 (AAO at 10). Now, we're barely looking at a 50% damage increase.

Add to that Brutes get Gloom, generally stronger ST sets (i.e. SM and SS), and can pick the most damaging secondary (/FA) without trading aggro capabilities for it.

If you feel AoE damage isn't useful on speed TFs, you're probably running several things in a suboptimal way. Most multiple AV fights, for example, are done faster with AOE spam than ST damage. Generally, AOEs start being a better option as soon as you have 4 targets or more. LRSF, STF and ITF all include multiple AV fights.

There is little point to make a Fire/SS tanker rather than a SS/Fire brute in my opinion ; but then again it doesn't have much relevance to the argument. You came arguing that tankers are worse than scrappers (a phrasing that, by the way, implies that every scrapper should be better than every tanker, or in other words, a MA/regen scrapper should be better than a Fire/SS tanker ; good luck with that), I pointed out that this isn't my experience. Come to think of it, I can now think a point for you to roll a Fire/SS tanker - so you'd actually have some experience on something you speak about so confidently.

Words, words, words. I say words are overrated, moving pictures are much better ; and in your roundabout way you've drew the white flag to my video request, so I guess I should stop here.

Yes, I've played those alts. I doubt you have ever played a Fire/SS tanker.

Are you going to keep throwing meaningless words around, or take me up on the offer of posting actual video proof?

Another miss, I'm afraid. See, DM/SD is a combo that relies heavily on selfdamagebuffing. If you assume external buffs are going to up all the time, and to the extent to cap people (how exactly does that work during the cysts, I'd be interested in seeing a video, not just words ; having a lot of trouble buying that you can split 3, 4, 5 ways and retain damage cap through buffs on every character ; insps would be a lot more plausible to me) then FM/SD does slightly better ST damage as well as much higher AoE damage. As I already said, FM/SD doesn't compare ; so DM/SD, being lower on the food chain than FM/SD, doesn't compare either.

I don't think I've ever seen a scrapper of any kind outdamaging a Fire/SS/Soul tanker in ST *and* AoE damage - obviously some scrappers do better in one of these areas, but it has to be both as both are important in a speed TF. FM/SD/Pyre might come close, but the smaller radius on FSC really put a dent in actual playability (which translates to real DPS) in my experience.

Incidentally, while I don't run optimized teams, the times I managed to get with my friends aren't too far from what the speed crowd reports (at least in public), and before I played my SS/Fire brute all my fastest TF runs were done with my Fire/SS tanker, a much superior character than my FM/SD, ELM/SD, DB/Inv, DB/WP and DM/Inv scrappers.

The rez is considered skippable by many. The T9 is considered skippable by some (I wouldn't recommend it).

I might be going a bit too far, but I'm wondering if you're asking about skippable powers because you might think you need everything in DB, so here's my advice: don't buy into the idea that DB is tight. You don't need all the combos. Heck, highend builds focused on damage don't even use the combos.

The bread and butter combo is, IMHO, Attack Vitals. Blinding Feint -> Attack Vitals can be enough to get you through your whole career. I've played multiple DB characters to 50, and then ran through the endgame for hundreds of hours, soloing AVs or TFs using nothing but that (and before 26, I don't bother with combos). Add a Power Slice after Attack Vitals before you have enough recharge to run without it. It requires low recharge for the amount of damage it does, and the DoT is essentially free damage as far as endurance costs go.

Some people like to add Sweep for some AoE goodness. Chaining Attack Vitals and Sweep is more or less gapless as soon as you get both combos, which is certainly a plus.

Empower is in my opinion next to useless on a brute. Because of Fury, you're at a high damage enhancement value already, and the buff Empower gives is tiny compared to that.

As for Weaken, I can't really see such a small debuff being objectively useful, but some people like it.

It was all four badges.

Bump bumpity bump, this IO is still for sale.

Done a MoTin in under 19 minutes in I19.

Wow, so many great changes. The thing I'm most happy about is the Marauder S/L res change, this might be the first time we see concept being thrown out and actual gameplay being considered for damage resistance balancing. Two thumbs up!

This would require fairly high recharge in burn. I would rather go for SB BB Burn SB CS.

Ice Armor's slow res is 100%, not 95% ; last I checked, anyway. No matter how many slows are on you, they didn't have any effect.