PrincessDarkstar

If you just take the bit you quoted then even I disgree with it, but it makes more sense in the context of my last few posts.

Mitigation of course matters, or you will die too fast. But once you are on a team with even 1 survivability buffing defender (Such as a bubbler), or a good controller then your self brought mitigation such as KB, -dam, -rech etc matter a lot less than they do solo (And some mitigation effects such as -recovery, -end hardly even matter in the first place, but still seem to cause attacks to do less damage).

In those situations it is usually better to just cause more damage.

There isn't such a thing as too much damage really, but there is a thing as too much mitigation. And I think too much mitigation is a level that can easily be reached on teams.

The point of saying that though, was that I believe the devs are over-valuing the secondary effects on many blaster powersets and giving them too much of a damage penalty in return.

When you attack or use the build-up equivalent power you get a 5s? 10s? buff called Momentum.

That makes most of your other attacks animate MUCH faster, and allows you to use Follow Through which you can't normally use.

When Momentum runs out you have to spend the full standard animation, and if you hit you get the buff back again.

So the animations times you see in Mids or in real-numbers will only apply when not under momentum, and ideally you will be under momentum a lot.

Freedom and Virtue aren't any more populated than they once were though, or they would be red all the time considering the amount of people Union and other servers seem to have lost.

Edit: I also don't know a single person who has moved servers, but I do know at least 50-60 people that have left or severely cut down on game time.

The only unique trick regeneration has is not being stunned after using a wakie.

It is the movement penalty that I think is the worst thing though. I don't want to have to spend all my build efforts trying to run at the pace of someone who is only using sprint. You still can't even jump and they are the worst penalties.

And I never said making people want to play it was bad, I said I don't think any animation changes need to happen to make people want to play it. Just changes to the powers themselves.

If they just removed the movement penalties from Granite I would imagine you would see loads more than you do now, removing the -dam and -rech would probably see it the most played set, and anything else would be a bonus.

Except that Union was the most populated EU server and stayed that way until incarnates. It probably still is the most populated one, but only because the others are on their last legs.

Whenever I log on I only see 2 servers with more than 1 dot, and it was never like that before. Especially considering the other weekend there was a new release, and it still didn't attract many people.

But I don't think it is anything to do with the game being too easy or you being too powerful, I honestly think that was the draw for many.

I think slow and weak puts people off far more than looking like a lump of rock in all honesty.

And revamping the powers in any way that the survivability is kept up without the penalties will see stone being the top played tank set even if the animations don't change imho.

Hell it will probably become 2nd only to /Fire on brutes and scrappers will be clamouring for it as well!

Nothing like a tank that only works 50% of the time ...

It only closed this year. So it limped on for quite a while with a lot of hardcore fans.

I see CoX being in a very similar situation, but it was never popular enough to see the kind of rage or publicity SW:G ever got.

I hardly see anyone doing anything that isn't a trial anymore, the game certainly feels as dead as NGO SW:G did. With just the hardcore fans still clinging on and saying everything is better than ever. Very similar.

I agree about the slowly dying, but I think in CoX people have always enjoyed powercreep more than in other games.

When we became too powerful instead of reigning us in they let us run on x8 so we could kill more stuff, and people rejoiced.

I think the sudden power creep the NPC's have had is what is killing the game, not the other way around (IE: Suddenly needing a full league to run content rather than small team or solo).

Yeah for me I always tend to chase down that last runner, so when you are running on a sliver of momentum and you finally reach that last mob, wind up to kill it and then have a blaster kill it while you spend the next few seconds stuck in animation it is really awful. Especially on a fast team where you feel like you are missing an entire mob while playing catch up.

And if you are ahead of the pack your first attack is so slow they catch up.

I think by the numbers TW is an awesome set (And looks amazing), and would never tell anyone not to play it, but you have to love Momentum.

When I was deciding what secondary to play with TW it was going to be Elec or Energy and since I had picked Elec I wanted to play Energy.

So I retired my DB/WP and rerolled him as DB/Elec. I got him to 50 last weekend but haven't really logged on since because I know the next step is incarnate content which I don't really enjoy.

I have tried most combo's and I definitely think Elec/SD has spoiled me.

I am probably now going to hold off making any more until I see Super Strength of Energy Melee ported over. Depending on Bio Armor I might go for Kinetic/Bio but not sure.

Don't thank me yet, I have to find some good information on KM first. I would hate to make you a good build but miss out a key power!

I am willing to concede that mitigation matters a bit more than I suggested, but I still think the situations where it matters are rarer than the situations where more damage is being helpful, to the point that soft or hard to leverage mitigation is often over valued. Controllers/dominators have an awful lot more mitigation than blasters and don't do all that much less damage despite that.

I honestly cannot recall a time when I thought 'I wish we had more mitigation', but I have thought 'We need more damage' an awful lot. I also always aim for end game, and would happily see sets get a little extra help through mitigation in the mid game to prevent them lagging behind in the more damage focussed end game.

Then there are inspirations, where a small purple is very good mitigation, so it is easy for a +damage set to catch the +mitigation set up, but a small red doesn't do much to help a +mitigation set catch a +damage set.

Actually a 'change secondary effect' toggle might be good, where all sets have a +mitigation effect and a +damage effect so you can pick and choose which you need/prefer. The way the damage is mitigated would still give large differences in the sets, but the damage gap wouldn't be so wide.

Edit: This isn't restricted to just blasters either, I think secondary effects are often very over-valued by the devs.

I am missing something then lol.

Ah that is a good start

I don't know anything about KM, so if I can find some info about it I will have a look at a build. I know you can softcap /Energy pretty easily, and can probably i-cap and still get some good recharge on your budget.

Actually I wasn't bothered about end game content at all (I wanted it, but only so far as I wanted new level 50 TF's, even if they were harder or had new mechanics). I loved the way things were where outside of the level locked TF's I could log on any toon I wanted and join my friends to do almost anything and I wouldn't be locked out of any rewards for doing so. I almost exclusively play one character at a time.

I play for end game rewards, I won't pretend otherwise and I have a maxed out build planned well before I create a character, and I really hate how I can no longer reach that goal while doing activities that I enjoy because the new rewards have been locked behind such a small portion of content that is also so different to everything else (I think locking IO's behind TF's for example would never have gone down well, even though it could have been called end game content in the same way as incarnates is).

If the trials were just there as difficult TF's with rewards based on time like the rest of the game I think they would still get played (And if they were 8 man they would have been played just as often) without having to gate progression in such a way. In fact I know my SG would have loved such a thing because we always preferred to run content on high difficulty anyway, rather than becoming the ghost town it is now.

The setup of CoX before incarnates was revolusionary and was the one thing I felt the devs should have been proud of and other MMO's should have copied (I played SWToR when it first came out and aside from the game being poor the thing I missed most was just being able to team when I wanted with who I wanted. And the first problem I noticed was how as soon as you hit max level the game changed to be something it wasn't for the entire 1-50 journey).

For me if you are going to release new content you have to ask 'will people play this without being coerced?' and if the answer is 'no' you should adjust the content rather than coerce people. I feel the dev team wanted some huge trials and then decided they needed to give us a reason to run them.

Lol at the solo incarnate path, anything that involes spending your whole life in the ozone is as much a path as the AE.

But I am sure you would be ok if we forced you to do an activity you didn't like several times a year just because we felt like it?

Newer MMO's are moving away from the forced teaming model, CoX never really got as far as forcing it, and the missions it was forced have mostly been changed; this is a(nother) backwards step.

Is the help channel cross server? All I ever saw was random annoying chatter, so I turned it off.

I haven't checked out the build but one of the problems with TW is that the endurance is based on the long recharge version of the powers, and then expended in a very short space of time when you have Momentum.

I am fairly sure that Endurance Reduction will be MUCH better than Endurance Modification, because it affects all attacks, as well as all toggles. I would suggest looking at Cardiac and you might even be able to drop the Body Mastery pool altogether.

Actually depending on how Cardiac and Energise stack, it might work amazingly well.

I see very few people running about without vet badges these days (And yes I am nosy and check everyone I team with, and pretty much anyone who runs past while I am idle - not checking for badges as much as to see what sets they are etc, but noobs do stick out in my head because I try and be nice to them where I can).

From my in game experience there are less and less people playing, which is a combination of poor marketting and poor recent gameplay decisions.

Aside from the stand in the comic book store in the Big Bang Theory (Which I am not sure had much to do with those who run the game in all honesty) I have never seen this advertised anywhere.

I also find trailers a really strange way to advertise a game with not exactly state of the art graphics. Though will not complain at anything they do, as long as they are doing 'something'.

Feedback is only acted on when it matches with what the devs want in the first place. The feedback threads are just an illusion.

Isn't the logical room for maneuver to not focus on snipes?

This is the equivalent of putting a scrapper buff in Confront. No matter what the buff is, it isn't really the right place for doing anything more than making the power useful.

And not having enough time to get something right (IE: Changing lots of powers) isn't really an excuse for making a bodge of something (And I take your comment about there not being enough time to make changes to loads of powers as admittence you don't think this is the best solution). Not enough time to do something important means it either isn't important, or someone is managing something wrong.