PleaseRecycle

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  1. PleaseRecycle

    ???/energy aura

    DA is one of the only things in the game that gives lethal defense without also giving smashing. On a positional or defenseless set this doesn't matter but on a typed defense set this leaves you wide open to a large array of smashing attacks. Thus, EA does not benefit from DA once its other defenses are in place.
  2. PleaseRecycle

    Whats new?

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Nightchill_EU View Post
    I just went through the tutorial, its cute, makes me think of a low-cost version of CO's one.
    A low cost version of CO's tutorial would begin as follows:

    You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded
    front door.
    There is a small mailbox here.


    Fortunately the new CoX tutorial has one-upped that considerably.
    Quote:
    Atlas seems to be slightly different. I loged off after the contact asked me for 5 Hellions.
    Is there a real overhaul of the leveling process or is it just really the same pathes? I mean, like Cataclysm on WoW really made it worth leveling all again from level 1.
    Well let's see, you logged off after completing less than one mission on the first arc. Why don't you tell us whether it's different or not?
  3. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
    The devs know what my position is on that one. But I won't derail a general discussion of the topic by repeating it.
    Care to fill the rest of us in? I left my bird guts back at the haruspeciarium, rookie mistake.

    Seems like regen could still use some resistance to me.
  4. Yeah the in-game real numbers include disintegration spreads in the damage values of the single target attacks. This is very optimistic on its part. To get the real value, only pay attention to the non-DoT chunk as well as the "only applies to a disintegrating target" piece for the conditional bonus damage.

    Piercing shot isn't exactly a cone in the same way ... the actual cone, whatever it's name is, is. I like to think of it more like a tier 3 blast that happens to be able to catch additional targets. It becomes a sort of mini-game, spotting places where you can hit three targets with it and firing it before you miss the window. Some people probably won't find that as amusing as I do. If it doesn't sound fun to you that power is very skippable.

    Aim? Meh. Depends on your secondary. If you don't have any other way of reducing defense or increasing your own tohit, aim can be useful. Even for a blaster it's an awfully meager damage buff so I wouldn't worry too much about that side of it, more of a bonus really.

    Necro, if you're going to skip anything in BR, disintegrate is probably the last thing you should choose. It's a high damage attack and it enables you to use the set's main gimmick. If you skip it you can't apply any of the bonus effects your attacks are capable of, nor will your single target damage be nearly as good as with disintegrate. It also contributes some aoe. If you're torn between lancer shot and disintegrate, know that disintegrate is vastly superior. If you're just searching for attacks to drop, definitely drop lancer, piercing, the snipe or aim before you drop disintegrate.
  5. Quote:
    Originally Posted by rsclark View Post
    They need some better stuff on the market so I can spend these piles of points.
    Log onto a 50, fill your insp tray with large team duals, and see if anyone on Death From Below notices that the sewers are feeling a little easier than normal.
  6. Beam/Time for Bonzo.

    The Zapper.

    The Great Disintegrator.
  7. That's often true in other microtransaction systems, Seldom, but clearly less so in the paragon market. Most such systems do not have a conversion rate as easy as "cents are 125% of points," and this is the first microtransaction system I have ever seen that sells virtually everything for multiples of twenty five cents. You'd have to go out of your way to end up with an unusable quantity of "change" in the paragon market.
  8. Quote:
    Originally Posted by rsclark View Post
    I think what people are missing is that the enhancement slots are being priced as a way to pull more enhancements out on a respec.
    Ta-da. One used to be able to pull a few billion out of a build per respec, stripping a character over six respecs. Now you can pull many billions out of a build per respec over two respecs. Not just more convenient but faster and less likely to cost you either the inf for a respec recipe or the ten bucks for another respec.
  9. I like to think of I21 as a robust collection of those super boosters that they hadn't been releasing lately. There's the "Conan with a laser gun" booster, the "hoverboard with hidden storage compartments" booster, and the eagerly anticipated "so much inspiration you spontaneously sprout glowing armor and energy wings" booster. They really fleshed out these iconic comic book concepts better than I personally had expected so I had no trouble paying slightly more for them than boosters had been in the past.
  10. Lancer shot is sadly not at all comparable to blaze. It is directly comparable to cosmic burst, and is nearly identical apart from its lack of defense debuff in exchange for bonus damage on a disintegrating target. The thing is, if you want to take advantage of the stun you probably want to open with it on a sapper or something and in that case it is a lot less likely he'll already be disintegrating. In my opinion, disintegrate itself neatly fills the position of beam's tier 3 attack; an additional attack with comparable dpa, shorter range, and a much less valuable position in your chain seems unnecessary.

    Zen, unless you care about pulling things from far away you are very correct to skip the snipe. That's true for any blast set, but beam rifle even more so due to the sheer number of other good attacks it gets. Piercing beam does not have the long range but if you hit two targets it does way more damage than the snipe and if you hit three it's twice as much.
  11. I wish I could offer anecdote rather than conjecture but my beamer is still pretty low level. That said, it seems like with judicious target selection beam should have aoe at least as good as ice. Not equally consistent aoe, mind, but while the lows are a bit lower the highs are a lot higher.

    Between their cones beam's is easily my favorite. Shorter animation, much shorter recharge and longer range are all awfully nice. It does do less damage, with a footnote that reads simply "disintegrate."

    It's difficult to directly compare the rest of the powers but a moderate damage rain plus a devastating but endurance crashing rain do not add up to more than a slow recharging crashless nuke, a three target "cone snipe," and the shiny new spreading toy in my opinion.

    As for disintegrate specifically, it isn't that big of a challenge to start a fight by targeting a boss or lieutenant and if you do that you can be fairly confident you'll get four or five tier 1 or tier 2 attacks off on them. In a medium to large sized spawn, each of those attacks should spit out a couple disintegrate spreads. Sometimes less, sometimes more. Lasting ten seconds a pop, as soon as you have a comfortable numbers just drop the cone and do very solid aoe damage.

    The obvious issue is your team killing your dudes before this process can play out. Even in that case you're still doing good single target damage and average aoe with a dash of explosive armageddon whenever overcharge is up. As soon as team steamroller hits a snag, disintegrate's effect will naturally express itself more and contribute more aoe. Content where you face large groups of sturdy foes also plays to your strengths.
  12. I'm with Tenzhi. It's odd to say it's an advantage for fenders and corrs that they will be getting more disintegrates since what that really means is they'll be taking more time to kill the same number of targets. The number of procs you get has a linear relation to the number of attacks you perform. If you're getting more procs, it's because you're being forced to attack more. At the same time, both of these ATs have competing pressures from their primary or secondary to attack less and buff or debuff more.

    Both of these ATs also quickly bump up against the recharge limitations of disintegrate, or more accurately the lack thereof. If you could only disintegrate once per fight, killing your target would be a huge bummer. In reality, though, disintegrate is itself a high damage attack that is a part of your chain. The blaster will be throwing it down either every three and a half seconds or every four and a half seconds on a finished build, depending on whether you consider lancer shot worth it versus the extra recharge to simply chain the tier 1 and tier 2. In that sense, the blaster has as many "procportunities," if you will (please do), as the others but is chewing through her targets faster.

    Seems like it's a pretty good blaster set to me. Its aoe potential should definitely manifest itself more completely when the difficulty jumps up to x4+, either by teaming or by IOed soloing.
  13. DoTs are not especially good for scourge as they only check once to scourge, when the initial hit roll is made. I wouldn't say they're worse than all at once attacks, either, but it isn't an advantage for corruptors.

    A case could be made that blasters kill stuff too fast to get their full bang per buck out of disintegrate. On the other hand, that's kind of an odd thing to say. Kill slower or you'll not be able to kill stuff fast! Wait, what? Still, it is true that defs and corrs will be proccing more disintegrate spreads, though their disintegrate-buffed attacks will be doing less damage to all of those enemies in the first place. This is getting confusing.

    My beam blaster is level 10 right now. Maybe a third of spawns so far let me take advantage of spreading but that's due both to my burning down the disintegree and also the fact that I'm still on x1 because I'm not a lowbie blaster masochist. Even when you don't get spreads, you still take disintegrating targets out really fast. I've also had remarkable success against multi-boss spawns in the hollows considering single digit levels: they melt very quickly and are very likely to spread disintegration to their peers.

    Even when disintegrate misses and you get caught with your blasting pants down the set does completely average damage. If energy and radiation are playable, so is disintegrateless beam rifle. Its cone is one of the quickest recharging among any blaster set so the fact that it only has one normal aoe, two pseudo-aoes and a mini-nuke isn't worrisome.

    My complaint about the set is that the animations are boring. The particle effects are great, but all your character does is stand there gripping an occasionally vibrating rifle. People who think DP is too flashy should be all over BR!
  14. Oooh, can you buy extra market slots? If so, picking up a few of those would no doubt handily net me the rest of Celestial!
  15. PleaseRecycle

    Night Fall

    Even if night fall's AT mod were fixed, it would still be an amazingly poor power for scrappers. Currently it's more than five times weaker than the other two twenty degree scrapper cones by either straight up damage or DPA. If they were to triple that you'd still have to be insane to use it. Simply removing it from the set and replacing it with tenebrous tentacles, and then replacing tenebrous tentacles with dark obliteration as the tier 5, might upset the current users of night fall for a while, but I bet he'd get over it.
  16. I successfully claimed every single name I attempted to. Maybe that speaks more of my bad taste than the naming situation, but they were all one-actual-word, super hero sounding things. That was this morning just before maintenance, not last night during the insane, unplayable rush, too!
  17. PleaseRecycle

    ???/energy aura

    SJ/EA is going to be soooo coooool... Why must Beam Rifle be the first new set in the store? Cruel Fate, thou doth torment me so.

    Failing that, I bet Kat/EA would be great. You don't really need divine avalanche in your finished build and can thus focus on attacking. While leveling up DA would be a godsend in the pre-energize period.
  18. A_F, seriously? I don't understand how you took a look at this thread and thought "I know what this needs, an insulting tangent and a dose of 'blasters suck' for good measure." Have you ever considered that good attention is more enjoyable than bad attention?

    Let's try this meditative exercise: Pretend Arcanaville just posted two numbers. Any numbers at all. Now, take the anger you're feeling and put it into a box. Lock this box and put the key in the attic. If you find yourself going up to that attic, just take a deep breath and count to ten.
  19. Well I'm happy do agree to disagree with you on most of this stuff, Sam. A fine discussion! I still haven't beaten Human Revolution after like 35+ hours because I have to know what every single dystopianly futuristic email says. Oh Jensen, you're the only kleptomaniac murderous detective with a place in my heart.

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow View Post
    To each their own here. For my part, NONE of my characters make sense to start in Praetoria, because to start there, they have to CARE about Praetoria, and they don't. They don't because I don't. I don't care about the in-game canon enough to write it in my own bios, because I like what I come up with far better. In Paragon City or the Rogue Isles, my past never comes up. I could be in it for the money, in it for the fame, in it for the evulz, in it to destroy all humans, in it to be a stooge for Arachnos or in it for reasons my characters can't comprehend and the game still works. If you're in Praetoria without actually caring enough to make decisions about Praetoria's future, though, you may as well not even be there in the first place.
    You're spot on that it's more fun to come up with your own material out of whole cloth than try to place your character within the game lore. I think you can still do that in Praetoria. Sure, it's a little weird to imagine a character who grew up in a tiny, hyper-advanced slave city, but if you're willing to make comic book style fudges just about anything is possible. They don't necessarily have to care, maybe they just want to leave and always had a hunch that that guy the president doesn't like has been sitting on a portal to another dimension.
  20. Of the two graphical effects, snowstorm is certainly the "noisier," but that isn't always a bad thing. I find it can be difficult for people to notice that you've thrown down quicksand, the effect is just kind of there, whereas there is no doubt as to what's going on when a snowstorm is active. Quicksand's slow is actually quite a lot stronger than snowstorm's, but at the same time you can't always as easily kite something with quicksand.

    Snowstorm is probably going to bring you more varied utility than quicksand since sleet can always be used as a QS stand-in. If you do enjoy toggle pulling as a squishy I'd say snowstorm is the clear winner but if you don't, quicksand would be yet another targetable patch in your already brimming arsenal.
  21. It's not like Earth or Cold have trouble mustering -def so that isn't really a big advantage for quicksand, but one nice thing about it is that it lets you make your own chokepoints. You can easily have loads of them out, too, and they're fantastic for applying impeded swiftness procs. Quicksand has a slightly stronger slow effect than snowstorm.

    Snowstorm is nice for dropping flying enemies and for pulling large groups to a corner or into your VG or earthquake. It's also good at applying impeded swiftness procs but it costs more endurance per proc opportunity. If you need to blind your team, snowstorm is one of the best powers available.

    It would be very silly to drop sleet for quicksand, sleet is a far better power, but quicksand still has its uses. So does snowstorm. They're really pretty different though. This has been an inconclusive post.
  22. They also get a token on the 14th like they were going to anyway, and if that makes a year they receive an additional token for that, no? I happen to be in exactly this situation but I'm not too stressed about it because I'm pretty sure they didn't create a special exception just for me that will deny me my future tokens after the conversion. We're also getting thrice as many tokens as we ever got vet badges and we get tokens for buying points. I'm going to have tokens coming out of my ears.
  23. Good to know about multi-quote. I actually remove the spaces around quotes intentionally because I find it more aesthetically pleasing, it hadn't occurred to me that quoters had to look at it too. I'll try to avoid the giant blocks.

    Quote:
    Furthermore, AT mods scale with level until level 20. At level 1, almost all ATs have almost the same mods for almost everything. Designing level 1 to level 5 content, therefore, isn't as much a magical science as most characters are basically the same. And even up to level 20, most characters don't have most of their powers, so they can't be expected to be very strong. The need for "challenge" comes towards the end of the game where specialists excel at what they specialise at, and then are able to excel at a few other fields, as well.
    Clearly we're not in agreement on this but I find that they balanced the challenge of Praetoria very well over the ten archetypes that can be exposed to it. There is no AT that can call Praetorian villains easy mode and neither is there an AT that cannot solo through it. It may well be too hard for some players but consider that the total novice who starts in Praetoria and decides it's too difficult for him can then immediately create a primal character, having already completed the requirement to start his first character there.

    I think we have a basic philosophical difference over the appropriateness of challenge in the game. I don't think it's something that should only arise at high level and I don't think it's a good thing, though it is inevitable, that specialization trivializes certain types of content, which specialists proceed to exclusively run. The game would benefit from players who sought ever-harder obstacles with no regard for the reward. This would require a fundamental alteration of human behavior, so it is unlikely to happen Soon.

    Quote:
    Here, you are simple wrong. Aside from the Vahzilok, what low-level minions and, hell, what low-level lieutenants have "three to five attacks?"
    I didn't say attacks, I said powers. I also didn't say minions, I said enemies. An example that you and others kept bringing up was the mez protection that Praetorian NPCs have. I assume you're mainly thinking of Destroyers? The bosses, the ones with integration, don't actually have many or especially deadly attacks, they just get one little toggle that makes them very different from most other NPCs. Of course, you mention trolls. You are aware that not only do troll bosses get status protection and powerful defense and resistance powers, but their lieutenants get integration? By your own standard they are worse cheaters than Destroyers, yet you hold them up as an example of low level content done right and Destroyers as the opposite.

    Quote:
    The game has a sum total of ONE "long" control power - the Stun Grenade that's shared between Malta TacOps and Knives of Artemis bosses, I forget they're called. Possibly the Chief Mesmerist sleep could count, but this is "long" in the sense that Mesmerists will chain-hold you, not that their controls are long on their own.
    Circle of Thorns have Dark Pit and Char, Longbow have an entire pinata full of dangerous mezzes but most comically Spectral Terror, Family have Consiglieres that cast Singularity, I could go on but you get the idea. I can name two mid to high level groups that do not have potent status effects and they are Sky Raiders and Cimerorans. Cims actually do, too, but since it's baked into elite bosses I'll let it slide.

    My point is that Praetorians use neither numerous nor onerous status effects. I think that quite clearly sets them apart from high level enemies.

    Quote:
    I love large maps, I love defeat all missions since that's what I do in my instances every time, and I love simple objective designs.
    This isn't going to surprise you very much but my feelings are diametrically opposed to yours on this. I hate kill alls and love stealthing missions. Something I really like about Praetoria is that not only does it favor stealthing over sweeping, it contains a whole lot of missions that fall into neither category and are totally new. Meeting Reese in the warehouse. Stealing information on the Syndicate before the security alarm goes off. Most of the missions involving signature characters such as Noble Savage. They really turned the old notions of CoX gameplay on their head and produced something new. It's easy to see how not everyone will enjoy that much change but it's probably the main reason why some of us are still playing at this point.

    It's also worth noting that this new approach to mission design is not at all confined to Praetoria. It's in the new lowbie content and it's in the new mid level content. Tips and morality missions are slightly more conventional but they too make use of the new scripting abilities to a significant degree. As I said earlier in the thread, this makes the new content actually stand out among MMORPGs as the rare example of gameplay that can compare in any way to their non-MMO cousins. I don't see how that could be a bad thing.

    This post is really long.

    Quote:
    At the end of the day, though, I'm not interested in conspiracy theories, invisible wars and politics.
    Would you believe that this is one of the things I also quite enjoy? For a game whose lore has always been steeped in politics (the Might for Right act et cetera), you've never been able to get involved with it at all. It was always window dressing. The closest CoH or CoV ever got to it in the past was squabbles between mad Arachnos scientists and Indigo and Crimson arcs. Indigo and Crimson's arcs are some of the most tortured, forced writing in the entire game so as someone who exclusively plays blue side I had no way to play any content of this type before Praetoria.

    Quote:
    I like Praetoria's story as a story, and would probably watch a movie about it. However, it ties my hands behind my back when it comes to writing for my characters, and this I simply don't like.
    This is true to some extent and it's why I don't start all of my characters in Praetoria. Some of them make sense there, some of them do not.
  24. Okay forgive me if I'm less than 100% thorough as I am replying to two giant posts. I'm quoting Venture more because I'm not aware of a good way to quote both at once, heh.
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Venture View Post
    A lame option is still an option, so you've managed to contradict yourself in the space of only two sentences.
    I used the word "interesting" for a reason.
    Quote:
    The truth is the sub-SO game doesn't need a difficulty increase because it's the only part of the game that works ... I would not have made "lowbie groups" for Praetoria. Of course, I wouldn't have made Praetoria, either.
    If this is your premise then you should agree with me that Praetoria is an optional extra starting location for people who have tastes that are utterly different from your own. As for its failure to put butts in seats, I haven't seen any specific evidence for that and I really don't think your average MMO expansion pack is targeted at growing the player-base in this day and age.
    Quote:
    The Hollows mobs Sam mentions had nothing on these guys. (I and others argued vehemently to keep them, actually.)
    Quote:
    Yes. There are standards for low-level enemies.
    Here alone we see completely different answers to the question of what makes a fitting low level enemy. Is it that there's an existing method that should be conformed to, or is it that creativity should be expressed but within certain limits of power? I'm glad the devs didn't start from either of these positions; if I had to guess, which I do, I'd say their actual thought was more along the lines of "How can we introduce novel groups that don't repeat what has come before?" As others have noted, the developers haven't been making the game in some ideal vacuum. They've produced a lot of content over the years and it merely happens that this is the first time in a long time that it has been low level.
    Quote:
    Praetorian mobs are not some deep tactical challenge requiring the strategic acumen of Sun Tzu to overcome ... Praetorian mobs didn't challenge me, they annoyed me.
    Quote:
    "Genuinely novel challenges" my ***. They stuck stats, status effects and debuffs on low-level characters and put in a lot of ambushes. Neither of those were novel. I've fought Malta before, I've fought Cimerorans before, I've fought Arachnos before. Nothing about the Praetorians is new, it's just the old stuff dumped into low-level enemies. All it does is skew the difficulty curve all over the place, and make the low-level game unnecessarily difficult.

    If you're looking for challenge in the low-level game, you're barking up the wrong tree. The existing low-level game is already plenty challenging. The weaker critters are offset by our weaker characters and by the fact that player power doesn't actually outstrip game balance until SOs and later on. The 1-20 game is and has always been soundly balanced because players simply never had the opportunity to break it.
    If you look at the powers that Praetorian enemies actually have individually, they're not much better equipped than other low level NPCs. They still have three to five powers that are toned down in damage scale. The difference is that rather than simply giving them "lethal ranged attack, smashing melee attack, smashing melee attack, lethal ranged attack" in many cases they got something more like "psychic ranged attack, lethal melee attack, siphon power, temporary invulnerability." This, coupled with the diversity of some of the factions, is of course what makes them more dangerous. At the same time, it in no way makes them comparable to mid or high level factions, one of the hallmarks of which is long control powers and extreme damage attacks.

    I simply disagree with the both of you: I find it fun and infinitely more interesting than the legacy content. There are missions in Praetoria that are annoying, but there are more missions in the old stuff that are annoying. Would you rather enter a mission and quickly encounter a difficult set of ambushes, or enter a mission and discover that it's a six layer lab tileset and the objective is kill all? I think I know what both of you would say to that and I reiterate my disagreement.
    Quote:
    And at the end of the day, the devs abandoned the idea for F2P. The new starting experience is the old starting experience. Overpowered newbie mobs failed; you lose.
    I didn't realize this was a competition, but the fact that Praetoria is not only still there but being added to indicates to me that the devs do not consider it a failure. If I were you, I would have pointed out that recently they nerfed a couple powers on syndicate and clockwork enemies! Of course, that tacitly acknowledges that the rest of the groups were untouched.

    Sam, I agree that there were weak points in the story lines that could have been improved, but surely on the whole you must agree that the writing is furlongs ahead of what City of Heroes and City of Villains shipped with.
  25. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Swift_Frost View Post
    "scrapper or brute?"
    To be fair, it is one of the more endearing enduring questions of the X vs Y format on this forum. Scrappers and brutes are really freaking similar in some ways, yet highly dimorphic in so many others. This allows not only genuine discussion but also hasty disagreement and lingering animosity. All the makings of a good reality show.

    What I find interesting is that virtually all of these threads appear in the scrapper forum or the AT&P general forum, rarely the brute forum. Does this demonstrate a singular self confidence among brute forum regulars? Does it demonstrate the plucky, never-say-die attitude of the scrapper self-identifiers? Does it elegantly unify QED and gravitation theories? We just don't know.