-
Posts
1653 -
Joined
-
I just beat First Ward with my SJ/EA scrapper. I seem to recall being told on this very forum a few days ago that EA was terrible in First Ward due to the psi damage. I didn't die once. What's my secret? Kill stuff quickly, frankenslot inventions so I don't end up going ravingly mad about my endurance issues, and use inspirations when trouble is a-brewin'. You know, inspirations, those astonishingly powerful potions that you receive in a constant, endless torrent? They're not just there to look pretty. I was playing on 0x1 as that's what First Ward is plainly designed for.
Awesome zone, best one they've made by a large margin. -
If you're married to the idea of using your melee attacks, beam rifle isn't a great choice. If, on the other hand, you can accept the idea of being a long range weapons platform, beam is quite good for blasters. The secondaries that work best for this approach are EM and MM. Both of them get build up and other useful self buffs, MM also gets aoes if you want 'em and world of confusion. World of confusion is crap, but it's one of the highlights of MM because it accepts coercive persuasion, in turn granting you 10% recharge and 5% ranged defense. EM gets boost range which similarly helps you out on the avoiding being smooshed front.
-
The first thing you need to do is whip out your nearest plastic source of finances and purchase enough paragon points to then purchase Street Justice. You will instinctively know what to do next.
-
It isn't the strongest set in most cases but it's different and it's fun both conceptually and clicktacularly. It does soak mad debuffz, yo, but if you build it for defense it can be just about as sturdy as anything. The fact that it doesn't really do anything for your offense (besides endurance alleviation early on) is in my view its weakest trait, but it's not unique in that.
However, one of my two justices of the street peace thus far is also my first brute, using regen. Why? Well the brute version has a taunt aura and in general benefits from regen's tools of sturdiness more than most secondaries do, and also it's a set I hadn't played in ages. It's kind of self-inflicted hard mode but in an easy game you need to take matters into your own hands at some point. Plus it makes you extremely glowy.
As a note on its overall strongitude, I made an Elec/Regen scrapper when electric melee was proliferated and built for melee defense for some freaking reason. That character can solo most things on 2x8. -
I can confirm that the taunt component in EA does indeed work as intended. It's kind of weird, though. It makes things stick to you, but it doesn't make things pursue you if you brush past them while stealthing a mission, say. Not that I'm complaining about this, it's just odd. Handy though that EA's stealth power graphics suppress along with its stealth effects, much more informative than cloak of darkness. And cooler looking. Captain, a scrapper has decloaked off the starb-*gets roundhouse kicked*
SJ/EA is a great combination, though. Just got done with First Ward with only two slots added to secondary powers so far. Psi? Pfff, I guess that would be dangerous if anything lived for longer than five seconds. Going back to Paragon City is going to be akin to swimming over to the shallow end of the pool and wading around a bit of course. -
Well anyway, I wish I hadn't brought that up because my more meaningful contribution to the thread was the concept for broadsword. What do you think the devs are more likely to do with a legacy set, add a completely new mechanic to it or give it something that is new to melee but easy to add such as -res on the aoes?
-
Heeeere we goooo! - Mario
To exactly quote you, from memory, "It is never a good idea to use moment of glory." That is false because the instant you use the word "never" you become wrong. As you say, you won that battle so it doesn't really matter anymore, I just thought I would comment on something that annoyed me, what, five years ago? Kudos. -
The second. It would turn broadsword into the de facto melee debuff set without also making it the strongest damage set by any metric. I am thinking of sonic blast for this suggestion.
-
All right, here's an example. Rather than improving the damage of whirling sword and slice, perhaps a ten (or less) second -6.25% res buff for each of them. Thematically this could be attributed to the relative brutality of such an attack compared to katana's surgical equivalents. Mechanically it would give broadsword a unique advantage among melee sets - aoe -res, in reasonable proportion. At the same time, broadsword would still by itself do worse aoe damage than the other weapon sets, requiring the player to take advantage of the debuff either with their single target attacks or with teammates. More interesting, no?
-
Not that I ever posted about it, but I always thought your analysis of Moment of Glory back in the day was pretty poor, EvilGeko. You were absolutely exaggerating its badness to lobby for a buff. However, in this case you are totally correct that broadsword is laughably inferior to katana in every situation apart from /sd, and those look like reasonable demands.
Still, is their being reasonable enough to impress the devs? Wouldn't it make more sense to come up with an improvement that not only makes the set more competitive, but also more distinct? Look at, oh, I don't know, Moment of Glory. Instead of making it a better god mode, they made it into a totally new type of power. When the devs themselves are the ones who threw the cottage rule out the window, perhaps a more ambitious request is in order. -
My SJ guy was having terrible endurance issues before 22, at which point I began frankenslotting his attacks for all of the relevant values. Once I got there, problem solved. This is SJ/EA incidentally, and for scrappers EA gets its first endurance management power at 28. It can be done. I'd already had end redux slotted in the toggles but they're totally insignificant compared to the attacks, as innocuous as each one seems.
-
Gavin was lying for humorous effect. Real numbers are not always accurate. When in doubt, test.
-
I was having major endurance problems on my sj/ea scrapper, but then I got to 22 and frankenslotted and now it's so, so beautiful. I wouldn't say the issue is that sj uses lots of end as much as it attacks really fast so you don't have to fill any space with end-free brawls. Whatever combination you choose, I can guarantee that you will love it at least twice as much once you have a decent amount of endurance reduction slotted in your attacks.
-
That doesn't go nearly far enough. Whenever rib cracker connects, the rib crackee should groan, "Ooh! Right in the family jewels!" in a thick Bostonian accent.
-
-
Because doing the exact same thing over and over is boring, not to mention pointless when you can run arc 2 nearly as fast if you feel like it?
-
Seriously though, speed runs are the one true way to TF. Just think of the comic books you loved when you were younger. Who can forget Superman deciding not to punch any of the poorly armed thugs who stand before him like a sea of kittens, instead flying directly to Lex Luthor and punching his face? I loved the way he spent the last ten pages of the book building the the device whose blueprint fell out of Luthor's pocket and then listing it on eBay.
-
I strongly agree on all counts!
To the grooooooiiiiin! -
Quote:In hindsight I think we can see that Praetoria was always intended to be its own thing, and that they never had any illusions of being able to apply 100% of the new tech to the rest of the game. I don't really understand whether you're saying that the game being fractured into sub-games is a bad thing or not. In my own view the more diverse the experiences they can deliver, the better. Sure, if you hold up game systems side by side some of them might clash, but what could be more in keeping with a game that lets you create as godawful a costume as your heart desires?That's kind of my point. The more the game becomes fractured into sub-games, the more redundancy new content needs, lest some people feel forced into other people's experience. Going Rogue took the tough call and made four whole paths through the game, and to the writers' credit, they present fairly unique experiences. I had a sneaking suspicion that this would be unsustainable in the long run, and it looks like it was.
Quote:I don't think you're taking into account that this is a paid-for zone. "New players" in the days post Freedom means something quite different than it did back in the day. "New players" typically means "Free players" because now that the game has that option, it's only natural that's what people would try first. New player VIPs are going to be extremely rare in the future, that much I can bet money on. So you have new players trying to game for free, and their purported new player experience is in a paid zone that's not exactly cheap. Of all the things they could buy, "more content" when they have mountains of FREE content they haven't run yet just isn't going to fly.
Quote:Which would work, if I couldn't just walk back through the door I originally came in from and screw the lot of 'em. There is nothing in the slightest to be gained by being in First Ward. There's no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, as it were: No large treasure, not hidden knowledge, no secret weapon, no favour with anyone at all. Saving First Ward is its own reward, and if just saving things isn't an appropriate reward for your character - which it rarely is for villains, then the whole place is not appropriate.
Quote:This is my whole point. At its core, First Ward is a hero's journey, which is dressed up in shades of grey only after the fact. It's like taking a Carebears movie and trying to inject moral ambiguity into it - sure, you can, and I'm sure you can make it pretty damn depressing, but it won't really make it any more "realistic" and will simply end up ruining the mood for everybody. Which is what First Ward does. It's not right for heroes, it's not right for villains and it ignores Praetorians.
It seems like one of the persistent complaints about Praetoria and now First Ward is that the setting is more clearly defined than the original content, but I don't think that means you have to mold your own characters completely around it. You might have to pay slightly more attention to "canon" than you previously would have but is that so much to ask?
Quote:City of Heroes is exactly the wrong kind of game for that sort of plot. Being a survivor requires several conditions that City of Heroes cannot meet. It requires seclusion and being cut off from lines of supply and support, which can't happen because you can't trap people in first ward without having players throwing a fit. It requires constant, unavoidable danger, which First Ward cannot deliver because the game's combat is still subject to game balance and because no-one likes overpowered enemies in this game. It also requires a degree of attachment between the player and the world, which the apathy and melancholy of the narrative's attempt at moral ambiguity simply don't permit.
A survival story is only meaningful when survival is actually meaningful, and when you can turn around and head back to town, there's no "survival" to be had. In fact, I often wondered why I couldn't just lead the lot from the Gumbo back through the door and out into the sewers of Imeperial City. A level 25 Noble Savage would have eaten anything in there for breakfast and asked for seconds.
What you can fairly say is that First Ward is not an effective tale of survival without a modicum of cooperation on the part of the player. It's also true that your SG mates can email you powerful inspirations, temp powers and inventions while you're in First Ward, giving you advantages not accounted for by the story. Why can't you distribute them to the refugee camp and solve their supply problems? Because the game doesn't work that way and it would be silly for them to produce content that factored in that eventuality. Suspend your disbelief just an inch off the ground, though, and many of these concerns vanish.
Quote:The First Ward story is good in concept, and it's definitely good in terms of writing, but it's trying to tell a story a way that the game really doesn't support because basic game architecture hamstrings what writers can do. And you're right - they could have just delayed and accounted for everything, or they could have ignored those limitations and just made a good story. They kind of did it half-and-half. -
Quote:If that's how you want to play, you're welcome to do so. Meanwhile those of us who don't care about the maximum reward/time ratio are free to run any one of seven arcs for the same reward, depending on which one we feel like at the time. I'd call that a major advancement for a game that historically railroaded players nearly as badly as contemporaneous MMOs did. If nothing else, run the quickest one for the hero merit and then run the longest one for the 4x merit rewards. Presto, even by your own standard there's value in longer ones.Why would I run seven sets of three missions of varying difficulties, when I can pick the quickest of those three and just run that one?
Which was my point, giving us seven fun little arcs is fine, I'll play through them each once. But when it comes to the rewards? It'll be quickest first, and forget the rest because there will be no reward for doing them.
I don't think you quite got that, as long as the Signature Storyarcs, share the same cool down on rewards, in the long run whats the point in having seven of them? People will only repeat the easiest/quickest one and leave them to rot the rest of the week.
Have they? How big of a drop did you predict in the average value of lotgs? How big of a drop have you actually seen? -
Dark armor gets a damage aura, the strongest heal in the game, arguably the strongest self rez in the game, fear protection, psi resistance, toxic resistance, endurance protection, two different control auras, stealth and defense, and just overall high resistance numbers. All it sacrifices for all of this is KB protection, which the other damage aura sets also lack to one degree or another, and high endurance usage. I'd call that a bargain at twice the price.
You could say it's a late blooming set, in that it benefits greatly from incarnate powers to mitigate its endurance problems, but it isn't as though there's nothing you can do about them earlier on. Pair it with certain primaries, use certain IOs, just slot your toggles and attacks for end reduction...
Let's put it this way: if the devs take another look at dark armor, it won't be to increase its power. -
I saw the cave boss heal himself once at the start of the fight. After that he went down so fast (to a level 33 solo beam/mm) that I didn't get a chance to see any of his other powers. The EB at the end was the same story. Lead with overcharge to vaporize his helpers and then hop around blasting him. He hit me a single time for almost all of my health but that was the only chance he got. I imagine he'd be tough in melee, and to that I say "good!"
Now I just need to make a dang villain so I can actually see the other half of the SSA content. -
Nov 2005
Jun 2007
I'd say you guys have amply demonstrated that you're willing to replay content that's a lot worse than the SSAs for rewards a lot worse than one hero merit and 20 reward merits and 10 threads and one astral merit per week. Maybe you'll somehow get by? Besides, now you can run first ward in ouro, run the trials, run the new tfs, all this stuff that definitely did not exist for the first several years that you kept playing through. -
I just don't agree with your assessment of First Ward, Sam. To get the obvious out of the way, had they made it a hero-only zone anyone who favors villains would have been rightly livid that heroes just got an amazingly detailed zone loaded with content and villains got... Either they would have gotten nothing, or Freedom would have taken twice as long to release since they would have needed two zones of the quality of First Ward. It was designed to extend the new, improved starting experience even further into the game to impress new players, not just new players who want to go hero.
As to its trappings of morality, or the lack thereof, you certainly don't have to agree that they succeeded but the impression I got was that it certainly wasn't meant to be a heroic experience. Rather, your character helps people because the zone is itself a hostile entity and only through collaboration can anyone survive it. That theme is explored in almost every arc in the zone, not to mention the entire look of the place, the zone event, the shadow paths, and so on. I think that's also why it's placed as a mid-level zone; level 50 characters are, since Positron and War Witch have been in charge, meant to be ***-kicking demigods to an almost annoying degree of player-ego-stroking. First Ward is the opposite of that. You might be the zone's eventual savior, sort of, but only by making the best of a terrible situation. -
I can see why First Ward doesn't have as much choice as Praetoria: it has two factions instead of four, and they can't assume that your character came there from Praetoria because it's highly likely that it did not. Praetoria was specially designed to support player choice scripting that had never existed in the engine before. It's not like they can now just take that and apply it to other content as if it's some easy template. Given that, First Ward does an admirable job of of being way more interesting than any previous content outside of Praetoria, and in my opinion most of that as well.
The one thing I didn't enjoy about First Ward was the goofiness of Master Midnight's arc. Before and after that it's pretty much played completely straight, but for one arc you're bombarded with hilarious meta-humor. Oh well, that means I enjoy 87.5% of the zone's arcs. I'd call that a "hit."
Everything else they just knocked out of the park. The difficulty, the graphics, the writing, the ambiance... I love it.
Oh, and let me point out that First Ward is compatible with Ouroboros. Praetoria is not, and it never will be because its mechanics cannot work in that way. Had they released a new zone that highbies had no way to access, mein gott imagine the outcry. What a slap in the face!