PleaseRecycle

No offense to the devs but you've attended dev events before, yes? If you've beaten up a hundred giant monsters in an hour once, you've beaten up a hundred giant monsters in an hour enough times.

The value of the VIP server is the voluntary self-segregation of players who are too good to play with just anyone, and their replacement with scads of new players who have yet to develop such personality defects.

New EA has some unique strengths and it also has this one unique weakness. What happened to decrying homogenization? You should be all over this.

If you don't like the challenge, you still have two other options for starting areas. Players who did want an interesting challenge had no options before Praetoria. The difficulty slider is a lame option because it admits that there is no challenge to the legacy groups and that the only recourse is more and more of them.

Tell us, what would you have had the devs do to come up with new lowbie groups for praetoria? Two pistol attacks and a brawl for every minion, and lieutenants with a submachine gun attack? I think they've well exhausted the possibilities of that strategy in the hero and villain content. A great way to make the expansion instantly unappealing would have been to simply port over existing lowbie groups with new skins on them! Instead they broadened the tools available to them and came up with some genuinely novel challenges that sadly do force you, the player, to use your noodle now and then. It's almost like they wanted there to be a credible threat of defeat and failure! Fitting for the overall atmosphere of Praetoria, no?

Edit: The only way to claim that the lowbie groups are clearly jury-rigged highbie groups is to have little experience fighting the high level IDF, clockwork, et cetera, by the way. They're radically, hugely stronger than their lower level stand-ins.

Oh, and on a point that was brought up earlier, I don't see how they could have made the plot much more accessible to novices. There's a difference between being able to follow the plot and being able to instantly know everything there is to know about the universe. Yes, it has a lot of references to primal earth stuff, but nothing that would keep a new player from being able to understand the subplots happening there.

The reason I love Praetoria is that unlike the other lowbie content, and indeed most of the other content in the game, it feels very much like a recent, well-made non-MMO RPG. You can't sleepwalk your way through it. It has a story that engages you mechanically as well as through the writing. The scripting is radically better than anything that came before it.

The difficult enemies are excellent because they mean you get some modicum of challenge even running on 0x1, which you should do because even on that setting you'll need to turn experience off to hit even half of the arcs playing entirely solo. It may bespeak a different sensibility than the legacy content's "quantity equals challenge" method, but keep in mind that the developers never intended that to be how the game worked. Emmert was committed to the end to the three minions = one hero concept. Was it ever true? Of course not, and due to player demand they grudgingly added the difficulty system and then finally expanded it to where you could opt to fight small armies by yourself. That doesn't mean that that should be the only way to get any challenge in the game.

My only complaint about Praetoria is that it's over so soon, but First Ward is a very large step in the right direction. I hope in issue 23 or 24 we see another expansion to 30-39. This would eject characters from Praetoria just in time to get into the high-gear primal content that culminates with the invasion itself.

To play mauk2's advocate for a moment, the taunt aura thing does stand to become a more egregious issue if the new dev stance is "no taunt auras for scrappers in any new secondaries, precedent be damned," as we seem to be seeing with the EA port. It's rather silly to add a scaling aura to the set and not have it taunt for scrappers. That certainly would be a compelling advantage for brute EA! A shame none of the pay-for powersets so far have been defensive so we don't have any other evidence as to whether that approach will continue.

Ah ha, happened upon a Synapse post that corrected my misconception that the lack of it for scrappers was either intentional or still the case. Well, happy to be wrong about that.

What exactly do your criteria mean when generalized over an archetype? Brutes may have worse "movement" because one brute set includes movement debuffs? Does that mean someone who plays a different brute set will feel part of that debuff for being in the same archetype?

The "dev rankings" as you call them on the character creation screen mean nothing. They're an attempt to throw together a slightly more accurate set of descriptions than existed before. They are purely descriptive, not at all prescriptive. The only way to compare brutes and scrappers is to compare specific power sets or combinations thereof. When one does that, a more complex picture emerges than when one simply makes up a bunch of generalized rankings that more closely resemble an internet top 10 list than any attempt at qualitative analysis.

I think this is where people disagree with you.

Then take EM and don't use power thrust? Or do use it and chalk it up to your powerful hands, a trait that would actually be quite useful for an archer. You could exercise some level of imagination and say that instead of doing the little power thrust shunt move, your character is doing some kind of throw. The engine will never support an actual throw animation so it's basically as close as you're going to get anyway. I'd also point out that if you set it to bright em and use a very dark color, or set it to dark em and use a very light color, the effects will be at least as minimal as those of either martial arts or street justice given the same treatment.

Yeah well rather than dogpiling the interloper, consider that perhaps he just really likes brutes and is trying, against his bruter judgment, to reach out to the scrapper forum. One can be mistaken without being intentionally intransigent. Or at least I hope so, for my own sake.

Primaries that heavily buff their own damage, such as dark melee, dual blades and claws are also universally better on scrappers. Kinetic melee isn't even close. If scrappers got super strength with unchanged numbers adjusted for AT mods, nobody would roll brutes anymore. Street justice looks pretty cool for brutes however.

I've got two words for you: ranged defense. Is it perfect? Hell no! Can you rely on the ranged softcap to see you through an AV soloing attempt without any need for reserve breakfrees? Absolutely not! What it does do is save you from, I estimate, about 65% of the mezzes you'd ordinarily be smacked with and a lot of attacks besides. The other advantage is that ranged damage sets pretty much suck apart from thunderstrike, so blasters have an uncommonly easy avenue to shoring up their numbers.

To put it another way, if you're looking for reliable status immunity, it's clarion or a different AT. However, solo blasting can be enjoyable and "safe" if you're willing to hedge your bets and take a few risks. After all, why else would you even roll a blaster?

Whether musculature is a good choice depends entirely on your preference. It's true that spiritual does a lot of heavy lifting for anything/regen, including MA, but that doesn't mean musculature is useless. One of them contributes more to your defense while helping with your attack chain (if your attack chain needs extra recharge), one of them is purely offensive.

If nothing else, look at it this way. Your crafted musculature won't go stale, feel free to build up a spiritual and use whichever one you prefer for the situation before you. Oh and if you want to take a shortcut on the spiritual boost, run three good trials and convert the merits into threads. That'll get you tier 2 right there. Then run a WTF and a STF, blam, tier 3 core.

I love the 30s. I mainly play characters that get their core powers before level 30, as relying heavily on something that only comes in late bothers me, so my situation at level 30 tends to be most of the powers that I want but few slots between them. This is also where I begin purchasing my final IOs, so the slot levels in the 30s are like a series of little gifts of power strength and set bonuses. The 40s are so much less relaxing, you suddenly have your epic to worry about slotting and the looming incarnate powers trouble your every waking moment. Oh, just me then?

Well since the example you keep coming back to is a pure healer empath, why not just make one of those? You'll be neither the first nor the last.

It kind of seems like you were describing energy manipulation there. Not precisely, but it covers most of the bases. Indeed, what's wrong with EM for a natural blaster? Just minimize the effects on the punches and they're fairly plausible apart from total focus, while any self buff can be explained in the same way an inspiration can. Heck, I'd actually say EM is a better natural set than devices.

Any primary is good but claws is definitely very fun. As for whether you should go red or yellow to start off, if you're not waiting until i21 to make the character that's a no-brainer. Start in Praetoria for sure. The villain lowbie content isn't as outdated as the hero lowbie content, but Praetoria makes both of the older sides look terrible, frankly. It's the difference between playing a modern, well written RPG for the first twenty levels or grinding through a bunch of painful kill alls.

If you're looking for a pacifism-themed character, I'd say mastermind. Come up with some reason why this well meaning fellow who really just wants to heal people, or give them shields or what have you, is continuously pursued by a gang of ruffians who tend to beat the stuffing out of anyone who wanders near. Maybe he's been cursed by a mystical indigent. Maybe he has Alzheimer's syndrome and does not remember what will happen if he summons his special robot friends again today. The only limit is the wide open horizon of your imagination.

Another nice thing about energy torrent is that while it does similar damage to ball lightning and fireball it has shorter recharge. On the other hand, it also has a lower target cap. So mitigation plus frequency versus ease of use and maximum targets. I find energy torrent very easy to use on a scrapper, but that's in conjunction with combat jumping. If hover is required that certainly makes it less convenient. Oh, and you can put a force feedback in it to good effect.

Well this is one of many perspectives of course, but I'd say you ought to focus on using it as an emergency type of power. Are you about to die? Then hitting inferno is a good alternative to that. It is the strongest nuke, but with corr values it isn't going to wipe entire spawns as it occasionally can in blaster form. You correctly note that its opportunity cost is overly severe.

On the other hand, some people just like nuking. Why not? It's fun, it kills things. You should at least run a TF or two where you just fire it off with abandon. Especially once you have it slotted, it does itself some dang damage.

Okay Moonlighter, if you actually play that way you do know that you're the only one, right? Perma power boost has the following implications: You're spending about a fourteenth of your time animating a power that neither does damage nor contributes to damage. You have power boost on auto therefore hasten is not on auto. You have to refresh the power so frequently that any time you get momentarily mezzed or simply activate a power, you run the risk of having your defense lose a third of its value. I'd say it's an endurance sink but if you rely this heavily on it I assume you have it slotted for endurance as well as recharge.

What counts is of course that you make it work for your style of play, I just find it hard to relate to accepting those compromises. It'd certainly open up your build if nothing else! All I can say is I once tried a perma boost range build and that drove me insane within a few hours of play, and it's half as annoying as perma power boost.

The way to make the other ammo types worth using would be to give them damage bonuses as well, half as strong as fire's. Probably not going to happen.

Power boost seems like sort of a red herring in general these days, but especially in a blaster secondary. Back when total focus could stun a boss by itself power boost at least had that use. Now it seems like a waste of animation time. None of the primaries do enough debuff for it to be relevant and clearly you won't be using it in conjunction with drain psyche or shiver. Power build up, now there's a good power.

Hey devs, how about fold power boost into build up for blasters and give them a stealth clone in its place? C'mon, that's totally balanced.

Well, that last bit is just the thing, Stryker. I wouldn't have held the weapon sets in such high esteem if they didn't have their mininukes along with their other aoe, but they do. I don't even feel that you need to have it every spawn - if it's even every two spawns that means that half the spawns you'll do slightly slower than fire and the other half will be radically faster. It does take more effort to get hail of bullets up even every two spawns, but rain of arrows and full auto? No big deal. Radiation competes with fire without even having a useful tier 9, in my opinion, which says something about it. You're certainly correct that blaze speeds things up for the fire blaster even in the context of aoe, but it's not an insurmountable advantage.

Ice storm would be a poor example if you're trying to demonstrate that doms get powers that enable them to quickly defeat large quantities of things. Fine power but it ain't fast.

You're right, I haven't played psi, sonic or elec blasters. Psi and elec obviously underperform rather badly, except possibly at pvp for all I know. Sonic is quite good but is much better as a defender set, which is why I have two level 50 /sonic defenders. It is low aoe but then it isn't really a set that's designed for spawn clearing.

All three of these sets, of the ten total blaster primaries, twelve next issue, can make up a substantial amount of aoe if they have one of the three of six secondaries that contain lots of aoe. Your odds of randomly rolling a blaster that actually has bad aoe are right now three in fourteen, and will soon be one in eight.

Looking at the dominator sets, the ones that strike me as "good (for a dominator set) for aoe" are plant/, fire/, /fire, and /thorns. Your chances of randomly producing a dominator with good aoe are about one in two. One of these ATs is better than the other at aoe.

If the dom has soul drain, she doesn't have sleet or fireball. Instead she has dark obliteration. Is it a bad power? Well no, 48 DPA on a taoe is perfectly good. Unfortunately it also has a 32 second timer and hits about three fifths as hard as similar blaster attacks.

If you're fighting ghost widow you're either running the Daedalus arc, which literally no one has ever done, or you're on the STF. Since the STF is what we were talking about, I assume we're still talking about that. So, who said anything about "solo?"

edit: I just noticed that you've now implied that an "average dominator" is going to solo ghost widow, pfffff hahaha.

Uhhh, what? Dom fireball does 68 damage. Not 136! You doubled it somehow. I didn't mention it because obviously the average dom does not take a specific epic, and the clever dom takes sleet and not fireball in the first place. Dom epic aoes also have either long recharges or ludicrous endurance costs. Look at explosive blast and join me in a hearty chuckle. It's true though that if you do take an epic aoe, you will have a much easier time clearing basic spawns than a dom who has chosen to focus only on primary and secondary. My point is that blasters don't have this problem.

Bring up fiery assault if you want, but you haven't made an iron clad case there. Consume is not actually an attack for any practical purposes. Combustion is, yet it is sadly very poor. Blaster combustion may or may not be better but blaster combustion is one of the worst blaster aoes available.

Only two dom secondaries get anything like buildup. A third gets aim. None of them get power boost AND a damage buff, but even if they did, power boost doesn't do anything for damage. It's nice for controls I guess but I don't see a major need for it since the dominator inherent is basically the same thing, but for mag instead of duration.

Ever notice how dangerous ghost widow is when she's gone from full to defeated in twenty seconds? That's what I'd say for each of those examples, in fact. Now, you could say that on a pick up team that isn't likely to be capable of wiping out content so trivially control is far more useful. I would agree. In general, though, the more powerful your team gets the less control matters, but damage never stops being important.