Redlynne

My base seems to ... inspire people to do that (for some reason).

There's only two objective reasons why you'd want to take Greater Ice Sword instead of other options ...

1. Style

The Greater Ice Sword is Big and Bad. If you're looking for a Fashion Statement, this alone is a reason to take Greater Ice Sword.

2. Gauntlet Radius

Both Greater Ice Sword and Frozen Touch have a Gauntlet Radius of 9 ft. Only Frost (10 ft cone) and Frozen Aura (10 ft sphere) have a larger radius among the damaging attacks. Taunt of course is a 15 ft AoE. This helps you retain aggro via Gauntlet when dogpiled.

... and that's pretty much it. Note that neither of these reasons includes advantages to Damage (either per attack or per second), nor Animation Speed (only Ice Patch is slower to cast), nor Recharge, nor Endurance Cost, nor degree of Recharge Debuff applied to slow the target. You know ... all the important reasons for choosing an attack power for doing damage.

Sadly enough, Greater Ice Sword is quite possibly the easiest power to skip over in the entire Ice Melee powerset. Everything else is either unique or too damn useful to not have. Greater Ice Sword struggles to achieve redundancy ... and even then it doesn't come off well in comparison to other choices.

Once upon a time... back in Issue 4... I used Phase Shift rather than Aid Self to recover from damage taken. That build relied on regeneration to deal with damage recovery, rather than self-healing or green skittles. Going with Stealth, Grant Invisibility and Phase Shift would be costly in terms of power slots, but also remarkably cheap in terms of added enhancement slots (which could be quite minimal) ... and gives you more slots for LotG recharge enhancements.

That's actually a pretty good idea ... but you'll really be wanting to slot Gravitic Emanation pretty well if you want to be making use of that enough for the return on investment to be consistent enough to sidestep your other limitations. Consistency is going to be key here with this, and you get that by using Grav Em A LOT on lots of targets, rather than onesy-twosy picky-choosey. And if you're going to be doing THAT, then you're going to need to be slotting up Grav Em, so that you can use it about every 15+ seconds or so ... since any faster and you start running into the self-suppression of the Force Feedback, limiting your returns on investment.

There is something to be said for your point, and it is well taken. I was just looking at the problem and choosing the path with the least number of technical hurdles/work with regards to the legacy base editing system. After all, you are at some point going to want to be able to "wipe" the old base once you're done moving ... although I suppose a UI element to do that could easily be added to the SG Registrar so as to cleanse the database of any legacy base building elements en masse and in total, rather than doing it by hand via the editor.

But this also brings up an important point ... and an unusual opportunity which could be exploited by the Devs ... should they so choose.

The very basic notion I've got is that a single SG would be capable of supporting more than one Base simultaneously ... both Legacy and All New.

If you examine that very basic premise, you should see inherent within it the opportunity for something we've all wanted since people got the feature in Ultima Online ... Personalized Housing. Because when you're able to support more than one player built environment at a time there's no reason in the world to design your system to limit players to just a single instance of the environment to edit.



What would essentially happen is that SGs would have, as they always have before, a Prestige Pool from which to pay for rooms and the functional items to populate them with. BUT ... there would be an added feature in which individual players within an SG could be granted their own purely decorative "base" (as far as the game engine and database is concerned) which would be in coalition with the "main" functional SG base.

The way it would work out is that the individual, purely decorative "base" ... or "personal floor" if you prefer ... would simply be something like an 8x8 Entry Room (using the current terminology of the legacy base editing system). When you click the entry portal/elevator, you are given the option to go to any other "floor" in your SG's base (including the "functional" floor that has telepads and workshops and power and control and medical and so on) ... or go return to the outside zone you came in from. Each of the players granted a "personal floor" for their base receives an "allowance" of Prestige from the SG Base Editor(s) with which they can use to decorate their room/floor however they want. Individual members are allowed to only edit their own personal rooms, unless they are granted full SG Base Editing priviledges, in which case they can edit any of the "floors" associated with the SG (including individual members' personal rooms).

If we're even still bothering with rent at all under a new system, charge 100 Prestige per month per SG Member Personal Room (functionally, an 8x8 Entry Room that is its own "base" in coalition with the SG "main" functional base), and call it a day.

If looking to make things PvP workable, it would help to be able to make SG Bases have either 1 or 2 (or more?) Functional floors ... allowing for the necessary "levels" of redundancy. Only thing you'd need to do then is to create a way to "pool" the generated levels of power and control between more than a single instance of a base "floor" so as to be able to keep everything running even when they aren't all on the same floors.

Via use of this "more than one base per SG" notion, we not only can achieve personalized housing, where every member of the SG gets to have their own "room" without compromising the security of the entire base environment ... we can also achieve multi-story "building" bases with more than a single floor like we have now. AND ... by enabling multi-floor instances of SG bases, where all the floors are "networked" together via an Entry Portal of some kind (which could include actual elevators, since there's plenty of art for THAT already in the game!) we don't need to have single floors that are both incredibly huge and incredibly database demanding and render engine lag inducing.





Odds of this sort of thing happening?

Let me break out my old calculus textbook so that I can compute Limit --> 0 problems.

Force Fields. Turns them all into */SR Scrappers with enough DEFense to LIVE.
Pain Domination has an AoE Heal Field ... but it's going to be nowhere NEAR strong enough to keep them alive against the amount of damage they'll typically take.

That's a function of debuffing (mainly), as far as secondaries are concerned. Dark, Trick Arrow and Thermal will all be good choices for debuffing. Fair warning if you take Trick Arrow though ... it doesn't do a "great" deal to help YOUR Ninjas out, but it can absolutely turn the tide of battle when on teams, with Glue Arrow and Disruption Arrow and Oil Slick in the mix (among other things).

I've got a Ninja/TA myself, and it's damn hard to keep the ADHD children from killing themselves due to their miserable DEFenses. I usually have to leave them in Bodyguard mode and draw aggro onto myself ... so as to spread the incoming damage around enough so that no one ninja is eating all the damage by themselves.

You're asking for too much.

SG Bases launched with Issue 7. Now 10 Issues and plenty of years later, Bases have only been touched, on Live, ONCE.

The problem is that the legacy base editor is a piece of numblecrunk created by someone who doesn't even work there anymore, and hasn't for a long time. It's not even fully documented. It "works" but it's creaky and clunky, and it's not anything that anyone in their right mind would want to invest time or resources in extending development for.

That means that any Base Editor worth releasing onto Live Servers is going to have to be something made new from whole cloth. And if you do THAT then it's extremely likely that anything developed will not be backwards compatible with the numblecrunk Base System we're putting up with right now. I'd like to argue that people wouldn't have a problem with going from what we've already got to something clearly superior and easier to use with greater functionality than the existing system ... but that would be speculation on my part. I very much want to believe that people would be willing to sacrifice what they've GOT for what they could GET, provided that what would be OFFERED would be clearly better than what we already HAVE ... but that's still a pretty tall order.

What about all that salvage and all those inspirations and all those enhancements that people have got "banked" in their storage racks in their bases? Some people still have nearly 2500 items crammed into their salvage racks from before the last Base "Love" update. What are they going to do? Are they just going to be SOL? Is everyone going to be SOL?

Urban Renewal on this scale is NOT pretty.

Personally, I think the best possible thing would be to launch a SECOND base editing system concurrent with the first in one Issue ... with the explicit declaration and knowledge that the old base editing system will be discontinued and deactivated in the following Issue. That way, you'd have access to "both" bases an SG could have concurrently and people would have months of time in which to "move" from one base system over to another. The game engine would only need to support the legacy and new base building systems for a single issue, after which the old system gets dumped and removed and its claim on both the servers and the databases cleansed and reclaimed. That gives everyone (still subscribed) MONTHS in which to complete the transition from one system to the other, at their own pace.



Chances of something like this happening? Nil ... until the Devs invest in better Development tools for Bases and other User Generated Content (I'm looking at YOU, Architect Entertainment).

Taking the above to heart I have searched high and low for an optimal Frankenslotting of Fistful which would allow for Accuracy, Damage, Endurance, Recharge and Range Enhancement. So far, this is the best I've been able to find which balances all five of those parameters at the expense of Global Set Bonuses ... and that includes trying to use Hami-O enhancements in the mix.

Fistful of Arrows

• Detonation - Accuracy/Damage/Endurance: Level 50
• Detonation - Damage/Endurance/Range: Level 50
• Positron's Blast - Damage/Range: Level 50
• Positron's Blast - Accuracy/Damage/Endurance: Level 50
• Range IO: Level 50
• Recharge Reduction IO: Level 50

Detonation @ 50: Fistful of Arrows
MezResist(Sleep) 1.65%

Positron's Blast @ 50: Fistful of Arrows
2.5% (0.04 End/sec) Recovery

Enhancement Totals

• Accuracy: 42.40%
• Damage: 88.07% (Pre-ED: 90.10%)
• Endurance Reduction: 63.60%
• Range: 51.93% (Pre-ED: 54.19%)
• Recharge: 42.40%

Defender Performance in absence of Global Set Bonus modifiers:

• Endurance Cost: 5.21 (8.53)
• Accuracy: 123.4% (86.6)
• Recharge: 5.62 (8)
• Range: 60.8 (40)
• Arc: 30 degrees
• Cast: 1.17 seconds
• Damage: 61.9 Lethal (32.9)

Width of Cone @ 40 ft downrange: ~20 ft wide, covers 418 sq ft total
Width of Cone @ 60 ft downrange: ~30 ft wide, covers 942 sq ft total

Increased Cone Range increases area of effect held at risk by more than double.
Increased Width of Cone At Range means more targets can be attacked simultaneously, increasing damage throughput of Fistful of Arrows.

Being able to hit even a single extra target beyond 45 ft range approximately equals the amount of additional damage gained from a Positron Proc, particularly when adding Leadership: Assault into the mix.

I always slot for the best possible balance of performance when Exemplar. That means slotting level 27 or 31 IOs for anything taken at levels 30 and down. Everything 32+ gets Power Level -2 on the IOs for best Exemplar compatibility with those powers.

Procs are the exception. I slot them at the lowest possible level ... so as to preserve options in case I need to respec and have to unslot the proc in favor of something else.

Best thing to plan for, your first time out, is for a Tri-form Build.
Human = Controller
Nova = Blaster
Dwarf = Tanker

Going for a Tri-former first will give you a good grounding in how the Warshade "plays" and also in how that meshes with the demands of your preferred playstyle. Once you've taken your Warshade to 50 ... THEN you can plan on using your Alternate 2nd Build to go for something much more specialized, such as a Bi-form or Human Only build.

It's also possible to go for Hasten-less builds, and they work quite well ... but anything without Hasten won't have perma-Eclipse (which is a damn expensive build to be aiming for to begin with).

So is Shadow Cloak + Stealth IO in Sprint (or Prestige Sprint, if you prefer). No need to spend a power slot when you've got inherent powers that can take a unique Stealth IO. Furthermore, by putting the Stealth IO into Sprint (or equivalent), you get Stealth On Demand simply by quickly toggling on and off. The Stealth IO effect lasts for 2 minutes without refresh.

Slotted up Orbiting Death is ridiculously effective, efficient and deadly to your opponents ... especially if someone else can grab (and hold) aggro. Orbiting Death is also strongly enhanced by Mire(s) and in large groups can easily reach towards 200+ DPS for literally less than 1 End/sec.