Redlynne

As the title suggests ... what is the "state of the art" in building Tri-form Peacebringers? I'm seeing plenty of Human form PB builds getting posted (all loaded with perma-Hasten, perma-Inner Light and perma-Light Form), but pretty much nothing that involves Tri-Forming for Peacebringers of late. To make things even more ... "interesting" ... I'm seeing plenty of suggestions that being able to achieve over +45% S/L Defense *and* over +100% Global Recharge is somehow not only doable, but relatively simple. Even just using cursory examinations of build strategies in Mids' I'm having a hard time seeing how that combination is supposed to "work" in terms of slotting choices, since +Defense (specifically, Melee/Smash/Lethal) and +Recharge tend to NOT be grouped together in the same IO Sets.

So I'm wondering ... even though a whole lot of people are abandoning Nova and Dwarf form(s) for Peacebringers ... if we set aside the desire for "Human Only" what happens to be some serious Non-Purple IO recommendations for Tri-Form Peacebringer build strategies? Mids' data chunks will be excessively useful for talking about this sort of thing, since there's far to many "moving parts" in a holistic build strategy to NOT be able to look at everything together.

I for one feel no compelling reason to visit Civilian NPC Earth which lacks even street crimes (let alone game mechanics that even permit such to occur).

Golden Blond





Sidhe Bang





Leggs
Because nothing beats a great pair of ...





Autumn Turning





I don't need "acres of skin" to make my women look beautiful ... or attractive ... or sexy ... or dangerous as all get out. I prefer costumes that LOOK practical, and aren't something that would make (normal) people point and stare in public, and whisper behind their hands about the "weirdos" in this town.

And just in case anyone is wondering what Boots I've got Sidhe Bang wearing in her suits ... those are, of all things, Boxing Boots underneath those Slacks Pants. Nothing else in the inventory has quite that same Leather Wing Tip Shoes look ... unfortunately.

One zone that I would LOVE to see an Echo of, but which has never been produced (and thus would take a huge amount of development work to create) is ... Baumton ... which we know today as the ruined Boomtown. I just look around Boomtown and am constantly wondering, "what did this place look like BEFORE it was destroyed?"

I kinda sorta ... but not really ... get that same feeling with Eden too, but nowhere near to the same degree as with Boomtown. I get the feeling that a lot of people would be simply AMAZED by seeing Boomtown with pristine/clean streets and people and cars everywhere (navigating the Maze Of Twisty Passages, All Different).

Moonbeam (the Ghost Widow Pool Snipe) is *not* a terrible power ... for what it does. Everyone here likes to slag on it for its long animation time and then claim that the damage it does output isn't made up for ... as if Moonbeam were something you could just drop into your normal attack chain rotation and expect it to be the #1 Damage per Animation per Second per Game power (or something equally ridiculous). Stop thinking about it as "a regular attack" you use to scrap-it-out with and you'll start seeing Moonbeam in a different light.

Moonbeam is an excellent tool to use when you really wish you could perform an Assassin Strike from over 150 ft away. It's a "reach out and TOUCH YOU" power, rather than a Toe Bomb power (and anyone who tries to use it as a Toe Bomb needs to have their head(s) examined). There are plenty of situations where you just don't want to be right next to something in the middle of melee or PBAoE range, and Moonbeam gives you an excellent standoff range/distance for SNIPING targets (from Hide). 6-slot it with Extreme Measures (+Recovery, +HP, +Damage, +DEF (lots!)) or Sting of the Manticore (+Regen, +DEF, +Damage, +Recharge) and watch what happens to the Interrupt Time (nicely reduced) along with the (Negative!) damage throughput From Hide, which isn't all that heavily resisted too often (unlike S/L). And because Moonbeam is a "projectile" attack power that involves a travel time from you to target, at long ranges it is actually quite EASY to use Moonbeam for Corner Pulling where you fire off the power and duck behind a corner while the projectile carrying the damage is still in flight to the target. That means that when the damage "arrives" and alerts the mob that they've been hit, you will have already broken LoS and they'll have to Leave Their Position to come after you where you (and your team?) are lying in ambush, ready to Assassin Strike the first idiot to round the corner. You can even use Moonbeam ... from Hide ... against Rikti Drones and Nemesis Snipers ... to one shot them (or very nearly, depending on your settings), and break LoS to not be (immediately) vulnerable to return fire.



As soon as you STOP thinking about Moonbeam being used "just like any other attack power" you've got, and instead START thinking about the kinds of strategies and tactics you can achieve and perform with it that you can't accomplish with anything else ... THEN you'll start to see that for what it's good at there's really nothing else quite like Moonbeam for Stalkers. It's basically an "edge of visual range" Assassin Strike ... so of course you can't use it as part of a regular attack chain for mainline combat. Use it situationally and you'll have an extremely powerful tool at your disposal that works to your advantage.

And besides ... you've already got enough single target melee(ish) range powers in your Primary, don't you?

Haven't been following the thread up to now, so I don't know if this has been offered up yet, but ...

Staff Melee ... Flag Pole (with or without flag)

Ironically enough ... Ice/Ice doesn't get all THAT much return on investment from picking up Hasten (let alone Burnout) in my personal opinion. And a lot of people will tell you to grab Tough and Weave, but my personal preference is to go for the Leadership Pool (team oriented) rather than the Fighting Pool (selfish sufficiency oriented). That's because if even TWO people on the team have Maneuvers ... then EVERYONE on the team effectively has Weave (ie. 2 Maneuvers = 1 Weave) ... and if you're 1 of those 2, then you only need 1 more rather than 2 more people with Maneuvers, which actually happens more often than you'd think.

My objection is ever so slightly different from where people have been taking this. My objection is that the entirely Boolean nature of Mez Effects means that there's practically no gradiations of impairment between No Effect and Total Effect. Combat performance doesn't "degrade" in a meaningful way as damage gets racked up, or Mez Effects stacked on. Every single power and capability you have works exactly the same, and is just exactly as accurate and damaging, whether you're at 1% or 100% HP.

CoH has no real proper concept of Fighting While Wounded ... where you're not running at 100% effectiveness. There's no "stacking up of impairments" which degrades your combat performance on a sliding scale ... there's basically just On/Off. You're either Mezzed, or you're Not. You're either Alive and fighting, or Defeated and not fighting back. Everything and everyone is just a big Bucket O' Hit Points, and you're just fighting at Maximum Effectiveness until you ... aren't.

Granted, there are some Debuffs that work (kinda) like this ... such as -Recharge or -Regen or -Recovery (sorta), and a few others ... but they are often limited and very difficult to stack into "useful" quantities without succumbing to the "All or Nothing" level of effectiveness.

This is my Praetorian "gunslinger" ...



The only difference is that Sidhe Bang is ... Irish ... and didn't just ride behind Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford in Cowboys vs Aliens.

Something that's been causing me some amount of mental "grief" of late is how the last round of updates to Peacebringers has made it far too advantageous to make a pair of Alternate Builds for Peacebringers ... namely a 1-32 Tri-form Build versus a 33-50 Human Only Build. The breakpoint here is (of course) ... Level 33 ... because +5 Levels up from there is Level 38 and Light Form, which kinda sorta "revolutionizes" the entire Peacebringer build strategy in such a way as to make Nova and Dwarf forms all but superfluous (excepting, maybe, as Set Mules).

This then brings up a very interesting question (for me) ... which is how to build a "decent" (if not necessarily optimal) Peacebringer Build which is a Tri-Former intended to operate only in the Level 1-32 Exemplar range, in which *NO* Enhancements are expended on powers gained after Level 32 (and are thus Exemplar Inaccessible) other than for Set Mule purposes (so you can still have One Slot Wonders that take LotG: +Recharge, for example). The counterpoint to this, of course, would then be a Human Only PB Build specifically designed to operate in the Level 33-50 Exemplar range, which then completely dispenses with the Forms so as to reclaim all of those slots for Human Powers once Light Form is available and Nova and Dwarf Forms become effectively "obsolete" (thanks to Light Form).



We've been seeing a lot of Human Only PB Builds cropping up of late here in the Kheldian Forum ... but we haven't seen all that many Tri-form Builds being presented, and I'm of the opinion that most people only think of Level 50 Builds in terms of the Level 50+ Game, while forgetting about Levels 1-32 ... during which Nova and Dwarf forms remain not only "relevant" but also advantageous to survival and utility for teams, particularly on TFs and SFs. For this reason, I think we need to be (as a Kheldian Community) thinking in broader terms for our build strategies for Peacebringers, where we present dual build plans for the 1-32 (Tri-form) and the 33-50 (Human Only) regions of gameplay, with an eye towards how to make the former "line up with" the latter in ways which make transitioning back and forth across the 32-to-33 divide as "painless" as possible with regards to having similar power picks on both sides of the spectrum so that it doesn't feel like you're playing a RADICALLY (if not COMPLETELY) different character when switching from one alternate build to another at the Trainer.

This will no doubt require an *even more* in depth appreciation for synergizing build strategies across the many available options for How To Peacebringer, and the Mids' Jockeys who can achieve that kind of depth of build commonality. Being able to PICK 17 Powers (Incandescence is mandatory) and spend 2 of those 17 Power Picks on Nova and Dwarf to gain an additional +10 Powers ... and Inherent Fitness (another 4 powers) and the Energy Flight/Combat Flight powers ... plus Brawl, Sprint and Rest ... yields a grand total of 37 Powers to spend all of your 66 Additional Slots by Level 50 on that are Level 32 and below when going Tri-former. By contrast, dropping Nova and Dwarf yields 23 Power Picks (Incandescence is still mandatory) ... plus Inherent Fitness (4 powers), Energy Flight/Combat Flight ... plus Brawl, Sprint and Rest ... for a grand total of 33 Powers to spend all of your 66 Additional Slots by Level 50 on, for powers that go from Levels 1-50.



I just get the ... feeling ... that if we, as a Community, concede the point that for Peacebringers anyway, the Nova and Dwarf Forms have "relevance" in the 1-32 Game, but are obsolete thereafter (thanks to Light Form) in the 33-50 Game, that this would help to "focus" any and all remaining Tri-form PB Build strategies which people put forward from now on, so as to advantage those builds "maximally" for the portion of the game in which they remain advantageous and unreplaceable.



So ... is anyone out there feeling up to the Peacebringer Bifurcation Build Challenge? I ask this because I'm noticing that a lot of the Human Only Builds that have been getting posted lately take a tremendous hit to their survival potential whenever you "turn off" Light Form in Mids' ... which would (of course) happen whenever Exemplaring down into the 1-32 Game. Also, a lot of these "never exemp" builds save a lot of "finishing touches" power goodies for the 41+ Levels which obviously "won't fly" in many ways when deliberately building for the 1-32 Game (things like Hasten or Superspeed at Level 49, for example).

Anyone?

SUPER REFLEXES.

There's a reason why after the Global Defense Nerf combined with Enhancement Dysfunction (thanks Jack!) that I left the game for 2 years to go play WoW and never looked back ... until Issue 9 and Inventions made it possible for me to remake NO GET HITSU!!

My big problem with the Forms is that they're so slot hungry. Take Nova Form, and you get not only Nova but four more additional powers to slot. Take Dwarf Form and you get six more powers to slot, over and above Dwarf itself. If you're going to get ANYWHERE with the forms, you just about have to dedicate something like 15 additional enhancement slots to EACH FORM just to make them viable options relative to Human form, and combined they devour HALF THE SLOTS you have available by Level 50. That's completely non-trivial.

Sounds like the simplest thing to do is to increase the Tanker's "Threat Multiplier" on everything they do. If it's currently 200% ... increase it to 300%. That sort of thing. If it's a Global Setting, adjust the Global.

Rularuu Wisp Overlords have floating rings around their arms. With the new "off body overlay skin" used for the Victorian Aura, it should be totally possible to create something akin to these spinning rings for players.