PleaseRecycle

Legend
  • Posts

    1653
  • Joined

  1. Quote:
    Originally Posted by DreadShinobi View Post
    I'm the only person who has put out dps times so far, it's all we have right now, I am well aware of what only a single sample size means. However it's all we have right now. If you want to be helpful, CONTRIBUTE, rather than dismissing the only solid data that has been posted so far. Next time I just won't give anyone a hint of what a set is capable of and the next set can go live in a completely untested and potentially worse state than staff.
    Sorry for jumping on you like that, I've just been annoyed by the fact that everyone has taken your brute pylon time as incontrovertible evidence that the set is completely horrible in all ways. As you yourself would no doubt say, there is more to life than ST DPS. Somehow the fact that staff's AOE is actually quite excellent is being completely ignored in the stampede of negativity. Microcosm's point that 228 DPS isn't even that bad has been ignored even more totally than that. Some might say that those perpetuating this specious argument are simply ignorant but I suspect some of them know better and are fishing for mass anti-staff sentiment and ensuing buffs. What a pylon time does not answer at all is whether the set is good on the whole. Nevertheless, your pylon time is being used to argue precisely that.
  2. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Darth_Khasei View Post
    Average ST and excellent AOE is not under performing on any scale other than a min/max.
    And it isn't even underperforming by that criterion, just watch the haters rollin' their staff fighters through AE. But hey, if we whine hard enough maybe we can eat the cake that we're currently having.
  3. Quote:
    Originally Posted by DreadShinobi View Post
    Staff attack chain thread ----->

    All the proof you need.

    I'm sure the set is somewhere between fine to great for a casual level up set, however for lvl 50 performance the set isn't performing too hot, as it lacks a strong ST power to work in tandem with Sky Splitter for every AT sans Stalkers.
    That isn't any proof at all. It's one build you made on beta that to my knowledge you didn't even post. It's also nothing more than a pylon time, and you include some but not all incarnate powers. That proves that the exact character you made can get that exact time in those exact circumstances. I'm not impressed. Microcosm has been doing a thorough job of debunking your and everyone else's claims that you've showed that the set is underpowered at all, and you're the only one who even made a cursory effort to provide any evidence whatsoever. So yeah, all the proof I need? Try again.
  4. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Shubbie View Post
    Right now Staff is looking somewhere between mediocre to slightly under mediocre.
    Prove it.
  5. Elec/fire actually has good synergy because ring of fire fills in the gap where the tier 3 blast should be. Elec also has a pretty good TAOE and arguably the best damage type. Depending on how you feel about their respective control powers, psi blast may be gimpier than elec for your purposes. Its aoe is worse, its damage type is in some cases much worse, and its soft control elements are either tied to crappy powers or simply unreliable. In addition to a nice blast, fire also does get a good aoe in burn. I'd say psi/elec would be a pretty poor combination since both sets absolutely lavish single target powers upon you. Do you go for /elec's better DPA and damage types or do you go for psi's range and woobliness? Whoever wins, you lose.
  6. PleaseRecycle

    Celestial Armor?

    I wouldn't say tokens are terribly wasted on super packs but if you're purely looking at it from a point value perspective they are lower on the list than enhancement boosters. Whether that's relevant to you or not depends greatly on how badly you want enhancement boosters compared to the other things you get in super packs, but after buying a colossal pile of super packs I found that the one thing I was at risk of running out of in the foreseeable future was enhancement boosters. One could easily say that this is my own fault for becoming a pitiful booster addict, of course.
  7. Correct. You said "if you want" and then listed a bunch of things that you've lobbied for for years. Either you no longer want tankers to have buffed damage or you just admitted that you believe they should be the AT that leads teams.
  8. PleaseRecycle

    Psionic Armor

    This thread is fairly moot since something like nine new power sets have already been leaked and psi armor isn't one of them. What they tell us, though, is that there will never be another armor set that relies solely on the old melange of defense, resistance, healing and status protection. At minimum it would include absorb, but I find it incredibly unlikely that they would stop short of giving it its own novel mechanic. How else would they justify selling it for 800 points?
  9. Seems to me you think they maybe should be "the leader AT!"
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane View Post
    Furthermore, if you really want the Tanker to be the "Leader AT", then that's even more justification for their damage to not be crap. Superman, Optimus Prime, Cyclops, they're more powerful than their subordinates. They have the devastating power and it comes with the burden to use it wisely that teaches them responsibility, thus the mantle of leadership falls to them. CoH Tankers have the burden, but not the power. If you think they're intended to carry the team, they need to start being treated better than aggro monkeys. If they're going to be leaders, they need to be someone to follow, not low damage decoys.
  10. Hey, late to the thread but I just have to echo all the calls for buffs for controllers. Honestly it's shameful that the devs have allowed them to wallow in their mediocrity for so long. Have you seen their HP and damage modifiers? No wonder you never see controllers on trials: wise leaders spurn them. They need a lot of work but if I had to suggest just one improvement for controllers it would be inherent mag 15 protection against sleep, hold, disorient, stun, confuse, terrorize, and typed and untyped damage. I don't think that's much to ask for and if the devs finally took this reasonable suggestion we might start to see people playing controllers again.
  11. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Miladys_Knight View Post
    Yep. In fact the Grav/FF previously mentioned was a 5 year vet that had PL'd his Grav toon. He thought he was supposed to Dimension Shift every thing and then anything he missed was supposed to be Detention Fielded. He ran Force Bubble constantly so any melee focused toons couldn't benefit from Dispersion Bubble and he made sure that he pushed stuff off of all the debuff patches. He was really fond of Worm Holing stuff all over the map because he was "saving" everyone.

    He single handedly flung everything except the squid nicti off the temple platform in the first mission of the ITF. We literally had to clear the entire map to find all the romans that were in the spawn guarding Sister Solaris. The TF went downhill after that.
    Are you aware that you're allowed, even encouraged, to talk to your teammates? You can say anything from casual banter to strategic advice! But wait, what if a teammate won't listen? Good news: you can even talk to the team leader; unless someone hawked it for booze money, they should have access to a kick button.
  12. Well in response to that, Reiska, I'll go back to something I said earlier in the thread. Titan weapons isn't as big of a deal as SS because titan weapons is primarily good in terms of performance but bizarre in terms of concept and look. SS is pretty much equally overpowered yet it fits a massive array of concepts. It's one of the defining sets of the entire genre. Combine that with OP and you have a problem. Combine weird giant anime swords with similar imbalance and you have a problem in a parallel universe where people are going to put the same amount of effort into a set they can't relate to.

    On the topic of this thread, I would say staff fighting is actually a rather more relatable theme than titan weapons. I expect to see more staff fighters than titan weaponistas in the long run regardless of how well it performs.

    As to the performance shifter PPM, it seems to me that the outcry over that was completely and cynically overblown in a last ditch attempt to somehow change the devs' attitude regarding balance in general. Last I looked the people arguing against the nerf took the position that they might some day want the existing PPMs so depriving them of that potentiality was cruel and unusual. In other words, nerf TW tomorrow y'all.
  13. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Cyber_naut View Post
    And knowing shin, I'll take his 'garbled hearsay' over yours any day - what is your experience with the set, or are you just blindly defending it?
    I was hoping I'd made it apparent enough but by garbled hearsay I meant that people read Shinobi's post about his staff brute and it somehow became about a staff scrapper even though it was just a series of re-quotes over and over through the thread. I mean no offense, I simply mean to point out that that was a pretty ludicrous situation. When the entire "staff sucks!" argument boiled down to quoting one guy's non-specific anecdote, the least we could do is ensure we got that right.
  14. Right, I'm wondering where the "third" thing came into play at all I guess. Some sets CAN fire AS more than once every five seconds but it doesn't seem to benefit them to do so. Staff can't reasonably do that in the first place.
  15. If that's the case I guess I don't understand what you mean. On my elec stalker when I run CB-JL-CB-AS-CI the hide procs every second time. When I run CB-JL-AS-CI it procs every third time. How is that an improvement? Elec could perhaps be an exception to the rule but in my experience the guaranteed proc on the set's second best DPA attack is more valuable than the slightly higher overall DPA, especially if you factor in the increased likelihood for three stacks of AF. That's all pretty moot for staff, though, if you're using sky splitter at all you're definitely going to have a chain longer than five seconds so the hide will proc every second time.
  16. Okay I have to step in here and inform you that 1 -> 3 -> 5 is every second time. I think we do secretly agree but I don't know where you got the three rotations thing from, every stalker set I've ever looked at does best when you shoot for AS's hide proccing, not proccing, proccing, not proccing. By that standard, all of those staff chains work.
  17. Shouldn't your goal be every second rotation, assuming the chain took exactly five seconds? You can't make assassin's strike recharge in the three and a third seconds you'd need for three chains to be optimal.
  18. All of those chains involve sky splitter. Therefore, all of those chains give AS more than five seconds to recharge. None of them give it ten seconds because that would be a crappy chain. Maybe I didn't understand the question?
  19. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Microcosm View Post
    If the staff brute is matching that km/sr scrapper, I don't think we can say the damage is terrible.
    Nonsense, my good man! We've got garbled hearsay, what else do we need? Staff is clearly broken, just as the devs announced was their intent, for their hatred for players knows no bounds.

    I do think it's pretty funny that I'm apparently one of the only people who posts on the scrapper forum who will be making a staff scrapper and it's all because DreadShinobi didn't like the DPS he was getting on his brute. Not that this is his fault.
  20. The reason I value BU less than analysis of its buff alone would merit is the additional factor of its animation time. It's still worth using but that makes it much less worth using than it would be in the ideal, zero animation environment. It varies set by set what the cost of that animation time is and I certainly haven't bothered to work it out for every case, but it bugs me. Regardless, it's a fine power and I could understand someone preferring it to having forms on tap.

    What I don't like about stalker staff fighting is losing innocuous strikes. Without it staff is still one of the better stalker sets for AOE and you get to keep a pretty good cone that incidentally buffs your defense for free. Scrappers have the option to skip that cone and use the better one, though, or take both and go cone-crazy, or take both and use them in different circumstances. Maybe it's because my last character was a stalker but I'm hankering for some real AOE.

    In faaaact... GS-IS-GS-EotS is a little bit sexy, I think you'll find. Hrm. Hadn't thought of that.
  21. These days I think you need to consider confuse and fear protection relevant, as well as things like endurance, recovery and slow resistance. That's all really beside the point I was making, though. Fiery aura is a good set. It does not do every desirable thing. Staff fighting is a good set. It does not do every desirable thing. Some people won't value the things it does do as much as the damage it doesn't do, but MajorPrankster is dead on in saying that comparing it by one metric to the set that is the best by that metric is not a useful comparison.
  22. Right, but that's one trick. It's a good one, except when it isn't. Fire armor is a great set but you have to spend considerable resources just shoring up its defensive holes for normal play. -KBs aren't expensive but the slots they occupy are. Having zero debuff resistance and bare minimum status protection is questionable in modern content. In exchange for that you get tons of damage, good resists and a good heal. Worth it? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. That's all I'm saying here. Saying "average damage, set sucks" is painting with a brush just as broad as the one that comes up with "bad against IDF, set sucks" for FA. They're actually pretty cool sets, but they are what they are.
  23. No, suggesting that the top damage farmer is going to run into a lot of situations in the game that overwhelm its weaknesses. I'm not saying staff itself gets you through any given situation, I'm saying staff contributes to your ability to make build choices that make that character more well-rounded. Good luck finding a well-rounded TW/FA, anyone who makes one of those is going to be building for damage and s/l defense because that's the entire reason they made the character in the first place.
  24. Actually when I said I see less TW than SS, I meant in terms of non-50s. Maybe it's just my luck or something but they seem kind of rare anymore. I do play non-50s a lot more than I play 50s, though.

    On DA and suboptimal choices, I think it's a matter of one's outlook on the game. I don't need my staff scrapper to be as good at damage as my TW scrapper because if I want the best damage I'll just play my TW scrapper, you know? I don't even see them as competing in that area: my staff scrapper will have quite good damage for my purposes, which will be different as they will take advantage of the things that staff can do that other sets cannot. In practical terms that all gets fuzzy. There's only so much content in the game and I don't actually perform a detailed evaluation of which of my characters would be optimal for the next thing I'm going to do before I do each thing. Once doing the thing, it gets even worse: how much is my endurance discount contributing on this particular full STF? Hell if I know, the system is too complex for real time statistical analysis off the top of my head in the first place. It all comes down to feel.

    How does one know the right time to add DA to one's attack chain, sacrificing however much DPS for survivability at the right time? Through their diverse experiences of myriad scenarios in the game, it'll pretty much just feel right. They could be wrong and end up with more defense than necessary and not enough damage to whittle down that last bit of AV health before running out of endurance. They could be right that the defense is necessary but still get unlucky and die anyway. The important thing is having the options available to you that you want to have to maximize your ability to do what you'd like to be able to do. I'm not trying to tell you anything you don't already know, just articulating why I value more than just damage. I'm getting flashbacks of Werner arguing for cardiac and rebirth instead of musculature and ageless for edge case survival on DA scrappers that one time. But that's different, he's a total survivability weirdo, not like me.

    No amount of damage is going to keep the Clockwork King from pounding a TW/FA brute into the ground if said brute eats the alpha on a +2 LGTF. Does that come up that often? No. Are there other things the brute can do about it? Sure. It's just what you choose to prioritize. Staff lets you put your eggs in a lot of different baskets while arguably shorting the single basket that people tend to like the most. Or not. It depends.