Oedipus_Tex

Just tried these on my Force Field Defender and while I didn't succeed (mainly because of endurance issues) I can confirm that both Repulsion Field and Force Bubble will push what's his name into the lava. Unfortunately, the game remembered I'm a Force Field Defender and I never could generate a flow of DPS-to-endurance that let me deal anything close to enough damage to kill him. He could not, however, really hit me.

I love Ice Control, but I can't help but wonder about its performance compared to other control sets as we continue to see more enemies with AoEs and melee auras. It seems to be designed to be a melee-oriented set, with a unique power in Arctic Air. It is also possibly the lowest damage set in the game, and the only control set founded almost completely on soft control. Many of its power conflict with each other and with the powers of other Controllers.

I feel like the cost of Arctic Air is too high and its Recharge a little too long. It looks like it was balanced using the same formula used for Hot Feet, and I'm not sure if that's appropriate for a set that has endure such long fights. The issue is the extreme risk Arctic Air (and Ice Control in general) entails in order to be leveraged. It is extremely vulnerable to de-toggles, and its cost means armor powers like Tough, Manuevers, and Weave, which would help protect you from getting hit, are impractical.

What I wish is that Arctic Air could have its endurance cost cut (to make it possible to run additional armors, which you will need more than many other Controllers) and be reclassified as an "armor" power, so that it suppresses-on-mezz instead of fully detoggling. If that's not possible, cutting the Recharge time from 15 to 8 seconds would be a huge boon. I also think the Sleep power needs to be revisted. Right now it's on a 90 second Recharge--twice as long as similar powers in other sets. I think it would be MUCH more appropriate to the set if the sleep duration decreased greatly, and the recharge were decreased to 30-45 seconds, OR the power's barely-there damage component upped to T1.5-blast level to at least give Ice Control a way to occasionally defeat enemies.

For IOs, Ice Slick should be slottable for damage procs like Earthquake is. At the least, Knockback IOs (which Earthquake does take).I also wonder whether Ice Slick should have a debuff of some kind besides -RunSpeed (-Damage? -Range?) to make up for the fact that Ice Control, which is inherently a team-dependent set, often gets stuck contributing little with one of its best powers because it gets cancelled by other Controllers setting up Containment.

Just my thoughts. What are yours?

Ok I take back what I said about elite bosses. These particular ones are not that bad. What changed my mind? Check out these screenshots:


The approach after eliminating the first set of portals:




Versus Boss 1 (forgot his name already, he pretty much stayed held the whole fight):




Versus Honoree (required lots of kiting, as you can see from the pic):




I used very few inspirations. Mainly, 2 purples, and some blues.

The reason I'm glowing green like that?

This is an Ice/Radiation Controller!

Someone lost this with a Bots/Traps? I find that surprising. Lots of techniques that don't typically work seem to function well on these bosses. No spawn-of-Satan purple triangles, knockback doesnt totally suck, possible to stack a hold without being a Dominator. Im sure having Indomitable Will helped me a lot, but Bots/Traps should have mezz protection too.

Good job devs. I actually like it, and I've always been a vocal critic of these encounters.

BTW to those still struggling with Trapdoor, the trick I used to solo is to pull him, then run or jump to the bottom with your toes at the edge of the lava. Ideally, set it up so the catwalk blocks his ability to shoot you from the platform. He will jump down and try to shoot you from the lava. If you can, Immobilize him there. If not, a knockback (especially a ranged one) can keep him from trying to melee you. The lava will deplete his HP very quickly.

For the fight with the other AVs, I think you can make some of the ambushes appear ahead of time if you go to the end room BEFORE grabbing the glowie. Kill them, go back to the glowie, then go back to the room. If you have ranged attacks, you should be able to pull the first group of portals without aggroing the AVs. Then try to pull each AV back one at a time. Most builds can do it eventually with luck. A few low damage Controllers may be stuck though (I seriously wonder whether my Ice Controllers could pull it off from example because they don't put out a lot of DPS and their pet dies easily).

These elite bosses are business as usual. Characters with the "right" sets will blow them away (and probably come to the boards to post about how easy it was) and others will struggle. The only thing I noticed that was different was two of them lacked knockback protection.

I found the missions overall pretty good. But my god does the AV/elite boss system in this game need an overhaul. It's probably the worst feature in the game. I can't think of a video game I've played in the past 20 years with less fulfilling boss fights actually, which is too bad because the rest of the battles in CoH are pretty good. On a team, half the time the boss is dead before I even realize there's one there.

EDIT: The Trapdoor fight was actually pretty good. And I didn't mind the fight with the two elite bosses. The set up was all there, but the actual mechanics of fighting an elite boss are still a turn off.

Get both and swap the bonuses out depending on the team you're on and what you need at the time.

Kinda tired of hearing that people who come to the boards to gloat about their bug abuse are being victimized. If you benefited from this bug and didn't know it it's one thing. If you benefited from it, then came to the boards to taunt the developers... well let's just say I think of you like the guy who peed in the lobby of the Ritz to protest the price of room service after winning a free holiday in a contest he didn't qualify for.

Further, we are not talking about a "farm." Nothing in this thread has anything to do with farming in general, and attempts to portray it otherwise are misleading. What we are talking about is an extreme case of bug abuse--intentionally breaking the XP system by manipulating values in the AE a way that causes it to award hundreds of times (using Arcana's info) as much XP as it should for one-shotting Underlings. To hear some people tell it, they deserve a medal for pulling one over on the devs. How ridiculous.

Our relationship with the game developers is not adversarial. They are not our enemies. Nor are they some kind of angry, cheapskate god that leaves us starving for experience, forced to scrounge for every illicit scrap of it we can spirit away from them.

A number of people have asked what the harm in abusing exploits for maximum personal gain. The answer to that is it changes the entire focus of the game. It changes because this "game" is actually a "place" that happens to have a set of rules, some of which are hardcoded and others of which are social. It does effect a game when the social rules change.

Finally, we cannot ensure that there will never be bugs again. Anyone who insists on that hasn't worked in software development a day in their life. If you're going to abuse this bug at least have the dignity to take 50% of the blame, or you just sound like the lady who sued McDonald's for making her kids fat.

Trick Arrow could definitely use a lift.

If you can live with the eye beams in Radiation I bet that would look really awesome on a fairy character. You even have Exploding Fairy Dust and Mushroom powers.

Anyone caught exploiting bugs in the future ought to be forced to read this thread (and take a quiz on it to prove they didn't skim) in order to be let back into the game.


Q22) What is the "something like that" a "dev-adoring defend-Paragon-Studios-to-the-last fanboi" can't be expected to understand?

Q47) As presented in this thread, which came first, the chicken farm or the egg farm?

Q90) In 500 words or a sarcastic picture or less, "should players whine when the devs get around to derailing the reward train"?

Q109) What IS the magic word?

I agree that Jack Frost is a comparitively disappointing pet, especially next to Earth Control. I almost feel like the two pets got accidentally swapped. Ice Control would benefit tremendously from a pet that could hold aggro and take a bit more punishment. The set already has so many built in tradeoffs that a straight up bump to Animate Stone levels would not be unbalanced at all. But that's how it goes. When they bumped Stoney up in power they didn't change Jack Frost. I don't know the history on that one but it is too bad.

Someone beat me to it, but a semi-standard way to handle this is to create tokens with an exchange rate equivalent to a set amount of money (say, 1 billion) or a second denomination of money (in the same way there are different kinds of bills). Could be a lot of work though.

I do have to say, btw, that one thing that surprises me about the game is the requirement that they do a whole new build to change enemy stats. I don't know if that's standard of graphical MMOs or not, but I always assumed all creature stats would be maintained separate from the user client and could be fixed by rolling out "behind the scenes" changes, which would roll in either immediately or at the next server reset.

And a lot of this would be more relevant if we were talking about a "farm" and not a set of conditions where you can manipulate the system into making a Rikti monkey give boss level experience.