PleaseRecycle

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  1. The technology to let just some specific players be taking part in a zone event doesn't exist in the game. If they can do phasing for story arcs then presumably they could add it for events, but the question there is is it worth it to the devs when they probably don't agree with you in the first place about the limited availability being bad?

    From their perspective, the advantages of holiday events are manifold. Players don't get tired of the content since they don't always have access to it so every time it rolls back around it feels fresh again (obviously debatable) without the devs even having to do any additional work on it. It gives players something to look forward to and changes their usual routines, whereas if it were always there some people would probably never even know it existed because there would never be any push for them to try it.

    All of the holiday events clash heavily with the game's canon. I know you guys tend to knock the game's canon in the first place but just setting fire to it doesn't seem like the best remedy. It makes some sense to have large glowing gifts with monsters in them lying around during "the holiday season," for instance, but if that's still going on in June then it's obvious that nothing in the game is meant to be taken seriously at all, cf "the other super hero mmorpg."

    Finally, if all events were happening at all times I think it would be rather more difficult to wrangle up a full team of players to do any specific thing, and not just between the different event content but also for normal content. Some people probably love running around clicking on doors and presents, and if they have the opportunity to do nothing but that all year long they will take it. That's one less person who can interact with other players.

    Whew, I came up with more reasons not to do that than I thought I was going to!
  2. This is the first time I've agreed with Shubbie about anything. How many characters have I already taken to hero in the past? I don't know off the top of my head but it's a lot. At least a dozen. It would be rather poor form if their stance going forward is that this kind of rollback is a good way to solve legitimate problems, but we don't have any proof that it isn't a bug until a dev comments on it.
  3. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Kitsune9tails View Post
    Essentially, IMHO, the line that must not be crossed is for it to be possible to purchase anything with Real Money that can then be traded.

    This must never happen, and if it has happened, it must un-happen.
    This pretty much sums up the thread. Being able to buy stuff that you can't trade and that isn't any better than what you can get the normal way is completely innocuous.

    Another_Fan, hearing you talk about doing what's best for the game is like hearing T. Boone Pickens talk about what's best for the environment. It's in his interest to destroy what he pretends to protect.
  4. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Todogut View Post
    But, my second character was a flying energy/energy blaster.
    The only character I never remade or deleted since launch is a flying energy/energy blaster. Not my first 50 but neither my last. That combination seems like possibly the second most iconic go-to pairing behind inv/SS tankers.
  5. Shield defense doesn't have a self heal, and who wants to use aid self anymore?
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Thurmin View Post
    Solid Defense
    Respectable Resistance (as backup)
    a self-heal
    an PBAoE Aura, preferrably one that does damage, but happy with a buff or debuff.
    This is an exact description of energy aura. Yeah, no damage aura, but at least you get debuff/self buff. Elec is a great set too but it has zero defense besides what you get through pool powers and IOs.
  6. Seems like the current thrust of the complaint is that you guys really hate the concept of in medias res. Don't you find it a little tiresome when you see every detail of the story that you're playing through? When that's overused I immediately become disinterested because transparent pandering regarding everything revolving around the player is only amusing to a limited degree.

    What if praetorian war witch has her own reasons to be doing these things and as someone who just showed up via a trans-dimensional portal last week you simply aren't going to have been there for the kickoff of events? It's not like they didn't drop loads of hints about the bad blood that courses through the zone.
  7. Nihilii pretty much nailed it. To put it another way, nobody can do 4x8 against every faction because despite what people think, the game actually does have some semblance of balance to it. Even his proposed invuln tanker with rebirth is not going to be able to swiftly get through 4x8 psychic clockwork, seers or unlucky rularuu spawns without some form of outside assistance, aka insps. Or at least, I don't see how it could.

    Now if you were willing to settle for 2x8 on most types of enemy, I would heartily recommend a dark armor scrapper, brute or tanker. Was about to say you're fine with any melee set aside from fire since it lacks mitigation but then I remembered one of Dechs' videos. You're fine with any melee set.
  8. Easiest time... I really think you're pretty much okay with anything on that difficulty. People will say fire blast is the easiest but they're all going to be very very okay with what you're shooting for. Like, do you have any interest in beam rifle? That would be fun and it shreds anything placed before it. If not beam, perhaps dual pistols strikes your fancy? Even the oldies like energy and elec can dish out plenty of hurt. Energy is in fact a good option here as it does solid damage and the knockback is almost incapable of harming your kill speed when you're only blasting a couple guys at a time. Meanwhile, power push is great against tough bosses as few of them are immune to KB.
  9. Hah yeah just from the thread title I assumed you had a more ambitious difficulty setting in mind. There is no blaster combination that cannot kill any boss in the game at -1, +0, or +1 and on x1 you'll almost never have to fight more than one boss at a time. I found trapdoor to be a pushover for all of my blasters, for example. I think weakened honoree might have killed a couple of them once only to have them rise of the phoenix back up and finish him off. Gets the job done, eh?
  10. In my case, dragon's tail is up super quick due to the global rech and the periodic punt of ageless, and I supplement it with fireball and judgement, the former of which comes up about every twelve or thirteen seconds. As for dark regen, heh, it's a great heal but you don't usually need it very frequently when you're s/l softcapped and sitting pretty on e/n as well. In retrospect it's almost like I set out to make the best character I could think of that would be a repudiation of hasten. Edit: On the subject of dark regen, one amusing use for it is as an aoe attack once you've got your radial reactive interface slotted. DR -> DT -> FB -> DT is a gappy but impressively number-producing chain in large crowds.

    I think with enough effort you could come up with a combo in almost any archetype, not so sure about the epic ATs, that would just not need hasten. Some are easier than others, i.e. masterminds. But like, take a rad/sonic defender. Sonic blast only needs recharge in a couple powers to run its best debuff chain and its best damage chain is pretty trivial. Meanwhile, rad emission doesn't especially need recharge for anything but permaing AM, and AM itself helps you perma AM. If you have enough global recharge for that, what good does hasten do? If anything it harms you since it then means you can't put AM on autofire. Not that perma AM is trivial without hasten... But the other option is just let it be slightly less than perma. What have you really lost there? Just as one example off the top of my head.
  11. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex View Post
    Very few builds "need" Recharge but finding one that doesn't "benefit" is IMO very difficult. TBH post inherent Stamina I can't think of a high end build that could skip Hasten and actually end up better for it unless the person just hates the Hasten graphic or animation time or something. I'm not saying there aren't builds that don't have it, but I would certainly never skip it, may the ugly graphics be damned.
    I didn't need it because I was able to get MA's optimal attack chain down to a one frame gap or so without it. Doing this on a MA/DA is so ludicrously endurance draining that without conserve power and cardiac my only recourse was ageless, which only just keeps me from bottoming out in a protracted single target scenario. So in addition to being unnecessary, hasten would cause my build to be unsustainable. I'd also have had to have skipped an additional power to take it and the only thing I could drop without either losing the s/l softcap or the fluidity of my chain was oppressive gloom. I almost never use OG but it's great to have for MA/DA because you can so easily stack stun mag on bosses that you don't want firing a specific power.

    So, that's an approximation of my thought process during the building process, right down to the rambliness of it.
  12. One more thing I'll say about this is that if you want to play a psychic blaster, you should just make a fortunata. Yeah, the first twenty three levels kind of suck and yes you end up with one costume that's unavoidably arachnos-branded, but aside from that it's better in every conceivable way. Not only does it get more aoe, the aoes do more damage than their respective blaster versions. In fact, so do the single target attacks. And scramble thoughts is mag 4, and instead of piece-of-junk will domination you get dominate, an excellent attack and control. And your nuke is identical but crashless. And you have status protection and powerful defense buffs that extend to the entire team. Fortunatas are really good in general, but compared to psi blasters there's really no contest at all.
  13. Not on your player model but it's certainly visible in the extended team information that shows all of the effects active on everyone. Alpha and interface are always visible (at level 45+) while judgement, destiny and lore are visible while active. So yep, it isn't too hard to see what other people have chosen during highbie content. However that obnoxious bug that makes the icons disappear sometimes may occasionally interfere until they fix it.
  14. Lots of builds don't need lotgs. WP or SR meleers with primaries that don't need tons of rech to have a good chain, for example. Part of the reason lotgs are popular though is that using them is not typically a sacrifice: they fit perfectly into powers that don't need slotting such as invisibility or vengeance, and the set has good bonuses for just a few slots so why not use the globals to get there?

    I skip hasten whenever possible. My fanciest character forwent hasten in favor of global bonuses, and for my blasters I often find that it isn't necessary since they have easy access to global recharge and blaster single target chains barely even require any recharge at all.

    Spiritual is nice for making up for shortcomings on a struggling character, but then again cardiac can fill that same role. My own ideal is using musculature on every character but sometimes I don't feel like making the investment in the build that makes that possible, and sometimes I like to take advantage of the silly slottings that cardiac and spiritual allow you to get away with. Another point in favor of spiritual is that its secondary healing enhancement is a stellar bonus that not only works with many sets but also enhances rebirth destiny to tremendous proportions.

    So yeah, there are many ways to build. The things you mention are popular because they are widely applicable, but that doesn't mean nobody uses anything else. Run some trials and pay close attention to the teams' buff icons and you might be surprised at how many people use nerve, gravitic, and everything else.
  15. That was my approximate recollection of the enhancement values I got from frankenslotting his attacks, i.e. using pieces from different invention sets without regard for bonuses. I got all of the attacks I'm using five slotted and then chose triple and quad enhancements and I believe a dam/end and acc/dam per attack. Off the top of my head I don't exactly remember what I used because one of my goals when frankenslotting is to do it rapidly so I pretty much will buy the best available level 25 enhancements when doing it at level 22.

    I like to do it at 22 because level 25 enhancements are where the values really start to become appealing, and it also just feels traditional to expect a character to be kind of weak until level 22 since that used to be the first time SOs were available.

    Aha, here: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Frankenslotting is a better explanation of what I was groping for above.
  16. Your SJ/SD is exactly what you're asking for. At least give it a chance until 22 so you can begin slotting SOs or effectively frankenslotting. At 22 I filled out my SJ/EA scrapper's attacks for damage/accuracy/recharge/endurance of approximately 90/30/40/50 and it made all the difference in the world. He went from being exhausted after every spawn to being able to tear through half a mission before having to slow down a bit.
  17. Oh also, to anyone who feels that dark has something to be envious of ice over, keep in mind that there are virtually no cold attacks in the game. Once a year you can fight enemies that use cold in the form of the winter horde, that's about it. Moderate negative energy resistance is a heck of a lot nicer than capped cold resistance.
  18. It's funny that you go to such lengths to assure we the readers that First Ward is definitely, absolutely, categorically not a challenge for a couple of reasons. The first is that you seem to be strongly implying, amid your accusations of mere tedium, that you do in fact find parts of it annoyingly hard but don't want us to think that you do. The second and more interesting point is that if you think First Ward is so pathetically easy, you appear to be basically alone in your beliefs. I and others have argued that it isn't too hard in the face of many, many posters who feel that it is. But now you're here to tell us that we're all wrong, it's ludicrously easy and we're literally all stupid because we can't see how easy it is. That's an interesting claim.

    I have to ask, is there anything that you like about City of Heroes at all? It really seems like there is not. The gameplay is for simpletons, the story is dreck, I'm sure you find the graphics repugnant both for how antiquated they are and for the fact that ultra mode has made the system requirements marginally higher. Do you just pay your sub because you like the forum so much?
  19. It's certainly viable in the sense that any set can be used to solo virtually any normal content in the game on some difficulty level higher than 0x1. Occasionally it might even shine, for example when fighting enemies that are especially susceptible to psi damage such as Marauder during his unstoppable phase.

    What makes it probably the single weakest blaster primary is that it only has one fairly poor aoe aside from its fairly poor crashing nuke, it doesn't do better single target DPS than average to make up for this, it doesn't have a useful secondary effect since -recharge is basically useless unless applied in massive quantities all at once, and the salt in the wound is that psi damage is actually resisted quite heavily by a diverse array of enemies spread across almost every villain group in the game.

    That may have sounded a little harsh. Even the worst blaster set is still going to be able to kill things, you just can do a lot better.
  20. Many will tell you that cross-stitch is the most potent secondary skill for brutes. It's true, everyone will find themselves needing some embroidery sooner or later and it's a proven way to earn a lot of gold pieces at the market. If you ask me, though, the smart money is on macramé. The brute's thuggish demeanor belies the nimbleness of his fingers. If you want to earn some serious coin, we're talking platinum pieces here, it's macramé skill or bust. I believe it was former lead designer Sexy "Jay" Jacobsen who coined the popular phrase, "You can-knot go wrong with the macramé skill!"
  21. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Venture View Post
    Do not assume. Difficulty adjustment was pitched as a way of keeping challenge in the game for more powerful builds. Some, myself among them, argue this means anything that forces players to lower difficulty is too hard.
    All right, but in that case the remedy for their difficulty in the zone is close at hand indeed. There is at least one difficulty adjuster in First Ward itself. If you're being frustrated by giant ambushes on x2+, surely the sensible thing to do would be to lower the difficulty rather than simply trying again over and over while becoming progressively ornerier and ornerier?
    Quote:
    This is another reason why people argue that anything that requires lowering difficutly is too hard. The game is profoundly uninteresting at default difficulty. You can take a Man Build through FW on default difficulty. Turning the game down that low removes any value in the gameplay. The only reasons to do it are either, as alluded above, to blow through missions as quickly as possible to obtain mission-based rewards or to experience the story. FW offers no noteworthy rewards and its story is not worth experiencing at all.
    Here again, the same issue. If the game is too easy to be interesting on the default level, it makes no sense to complain about its difficulty having cranked it up. Likewise, if they add new content that is more challenging at the default level, it becomes less uninteresting in terms of difficulty. I think you and I both know, though, that most people who are reporting frustration with soloing the new content here on the forum are likely to be running on 0x1. Those who care to turn up the difficulty on a neonatal build know what they're in for.
    Quote:
    Melees with different protective sets might not have it so easy and I expect squishies to have issues thanks to everything and its dog throwing status effects.
    I actually don't recall getting confused and I don't believe EA has confuse protection. My first run through was on a beam blaster and that definitely doesn't have confuse protection. I did get feared a few times which is always obnoxious but at that level it isn't a very credible threat.
    Quote:
    ambush ambush ambush ambush MUSHROOM MUSHROOM ambush ambush ambush....

    Mobs with aggravating powers that made many fights feel like kicking dead whales down the beach.
    Isn't this an aspect of the difficulty of the zone? I'm not saying you have to like it, but if they present such new challenges well, again, it isn't that the zone is too easy.
    Quote:
    Too many cutscences/talkies breaking the action.

    Wretched, miserable storyline that took everything that was wrong with Praetoria and dialed it up to 11.
    Heh, I quite enjoy both of these things.
  22. Honestly it is better as a brute. Regen was simply meant to be a brute set, to the extent that anything that was nerfed exactly one million times can be said to be meant to be anything. The thing is, regen is better on brutes and street justice is not especially worse on brutes. In addition to the additional punches, stabs and groin pulls you can take as a brute over a scrapper, brute regen also has a taunt component to integration. How unfair is that? Devs obviously hate heroes.

    This isn't to say that a SJ/Regen scrapper is going to be bad, and if you're doing fine as is and prefer the tauntless lifestyle then I can personally guarantee you will enjoy that character at high level. I find it to be better in brute form, YMMV.
  23. It isn't just about being able to reach the "survival line," either. Upon further consideration, my favorite thing about regen is that unlike most sets, which have cascade failure of one sort or another, regen has cascade success. Can you just coast through most fights on your passives and toggle alone? Well, actually, yes. Often you can't, though, and so you begin to hit your clicks.

    Oh, nice alpha strike, *recon* I think I'll have another. Oh really? You had another, did you? *DP* You were saying something about damage?

    Throw in IH and MoG and you kind of have to work to find situations you can't somehow survive. Giant regen debuffs are one, yes, but that pretty much ruins anyone's day aside from SR and SD, since they tend to avoid them. Defense debuffs? Again, regen is hardly alone in its vulnerability there.

    In addition to the fact that it doesn't boost your offense, its other main weakness is that so many clicks equals a lot of redraw on weapon sets. Play a weaponless set with regen and you are good to go. It's certainly worth a shot if you haven't before.
  24. Gosh Sam, it's like I'm stalking you or something. But anyway!

    If you're going to be comparing the SSAs to legacy content, you need to factor in the diversity of the missions, not simply their quantity. Sure, WWD2 only has three missions, yet in those three missions that take less than fifteen minutes to beat if you aren't reading the dialogue there is more variety than existed in all four of the level 45+ hero arcs which represented the entire extent of highbie hero content from issue 1 until issue, uhhhh, the one that introduced super sidekick so highbies could run TFs and stuff without having four appropriately leveled lowbies.

    Does World Wide Red take a while to beat? Yes. Does it suck? Wowie, does it ever. I'll take a concise, creative arc over that any day of the week. AND the SSAs give better rewards, as if the old arcs needed any more nails in their coffins. At this point it's just nail-based art on the sides.
  25. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Venture View Post
    Did you have Bosses turned off too? Post-SO I would expect anyone but the mythical Pure Empathy Defender to have a fairly easy time with First Ward on base difficulty.

    For the record, I played through it with a SJ/SR Scrapper in beta and more or less tore the zone a new one on +0x2+B-AV, but that's SR for you. I would never touch this zone with a live character because there is absolutely no impetus to. Primal Earth characters have less than zero reason to go to this zone. Praetorian characters might have a ghost of a reason but they've got a far better incentive to go to Primal and never look back. As MrCap says, the zone is pretty to look at, but it's got miserable gameplay and a Shoot The Shaggy Dog story line.
    Obviously anyone who plays the game for any sort of challenge has bosses on from level 2. The reason I mention that I was on 0x1 is because I assume that anyone complaining about the difficulty of the zone is also playing on that level. If they had increased their difficulty, how silly would it be to decry how hard it was? My point is not that I am some sort of uberplayer, but that the zone is very doable on default difficulty with a set that is popularly known to be particularly susceptible to its tricks.

    Surely my getting through it deathless on an /EA scrapper is more impressive than your turning up the difficulty and never playing the zone again.

    Oh, and I'd be curious to hear what about the gameplay you find miserable since you don't find it to be overly difficult?