Rigel_Kent

The one prediction I'm willing to make at this early point is:

Certain pool power / blaster power combinations are going to look very pretty in issue 24.

I imagined once that Hybrid and Genesis might be made mutually exclusive toggles, to solve the dilemma of the dev vision of a sometimes-up toggle not matching the game reality of Too Awesome to Use.

At this point, I doubt that's going to happen, but I've seen equally interesting ideas.

Sigh. Another round of proliferation hysteria, so soon?

Phantom Army is not overpowered because it comes with a price. The price you pay for having Phantom Army is being stuck with an otherwise Roll tier primary, and not being a brute.

Now, if the devs decide they don't like Illusion Control being 1 great power, a couple decent powers, and everything else garbage, that's fine. But that's not a proliferation problem, and it's not a dominator problem. It's a set problem, and PA should be evenly dealt with across both archetypes.

And, as long as the devs remember that modest reductions in the great power must be matched by much larger increases in the poor powers, to account for substitution effects, I'd be okay with that.

I suggest a message channel similar to the "combat spam" message channels, except it displays only user-defined output, as passed through an /echo slash command. An example use would be:

/bind f "powexecname Fortitude$$echo My last Fortitude target was $target."

With this bind, when the user presses F, he uses Fortitude, and the following message outputs to the user's Echo channel:

"My last Fortitude target was Rigel Kent."

So do you get the big budget action films down under during your summer?

Or do you get the crummy post-Oscars January films that studios quietly send to theaters when they hope nobody's looking?

Sure it wasn't Caltrops?

If Acid Mortar is causing the AI to freak out like this, that sounds like a bug in the AI. Acid Mortar does not inflict afraid or avoid status. The DoT from each acid blast taking 20 seconds to deal all its ticks could be the trigger, 20 seconds is a very long time and may be causing unintended AI weirdness.

It's not a proliferation problem, it's a Kheldian problem. SoA share powers with other archetypes, they're doing fine.

Luminous Blast proliferation?

1. Gleaming Bolt
2. Glinting Eye
3. Gleaming Blast
4. Proton Scatter
5. Aim
6. Luminous Detonation
7. Solar Flare
8. Photon Seekers
9. Dawn Strike

Heck, they could even charge 400 points for that on the market.

Even though I don't like Water, that's only because the buggy Tidal Power stacking annoys me. It's perfectly good at what it does, which is AoE, crowd control, and great damage typing. If I could hypnotize myself into not seeing any of the Tidal Power fluff and just play it as a straight non-combo set, I'd probably play it.

Bit of an old thread, just thought I'd add:

AVs cheat. Especially where debuffs and mezzes are concerned. This shakes things up a bit, changes the tactical flavor of your secondary powers.

Fight against typical random goons:
- Radiation Infection is your defense, removes all serious threat of taking damage
- Enervating Field is your offense support, makes everything take extra damage from the team
- Lingering Radiation is your CC, keeps them from running out of your fiery death zone (encouraging your team to stay inside the RI cloud also helps, see below)

AVs bring ridonkadonkulous slow and tohit resists, so fight against typical random AV:
- Radiation Infection does next to nothing without Achilles' Heel; even with the proc, it's hit and miss, and probably getting worse with upcoming PPM changes
- Enervating Field is your defense, removes some damage from the AV, as well as helping your offense a bit
- Lingering Radiation is your offense support, removes a large part of the AV's considerable regen so the team can wear them down faster
- You'll have to rely on immobs from APP or teammates for CC

The devs have a mania for 25' radius "team" buffs (sarcasm quotes are mine). Be realistic; playing buffer in City of Heroes is already herding cats, herding them into a 25' circle is out of the question. Consider Radiant Aura and Accelerate Metabolism as strictly for yourself and the 1 other teammate who most needs them. Radiant Aura on the one person disintegrating in Keyes instead of blindly following the tanker with it on auto is perfectly played. AM priority is the teammate who brings awesome but extreme long cooldown clicks, such as an empath if they don't suck, or the teammate who dishes out decent AoE damage but sucks at endurance management, such as me.

If you want to be nice about your buffs and heals, encourage your teammates to stay within the protection of your Radiation Infection field. Range be damned; RI's debuff is huge, and that's usually the safest place to be. If they naturally tend to gather inside the debuff field, that means more AM to go around.

One thing that's overlooked: the devs have buffed electric blast quite a bit. Just, not for us. We could take some cues from how the devs buff electric blasting enemies to make them more appropriately challenging.

For instance, plenty of electric blasting and electric meleeing enemies get a 100% chance to debuff recovery on every single attack. (Fair is fair, nice tier 9 aside, electric melee's side effect is crummy, and besides, we want electric manipulation buffed too, right?) Players only get that sweet 100% chance to debuff recovery in Short Circuit, Tesla Cage, and the freakin' nuke, meaning all our other recovery debuffs, even Power Sink, are unreliable at best.

There's also a built-in PC vs NPC inequality in the value on those recovery debuffs. -100% recovery is awesome for enemies because it's exactly what they need to kill our recovery. Well, okay, there's Stamina, but close enough. On the other hand, -100% recovery has unrealized potential for PCs, because enhancement slotting and power boosting can't meaningfully improve that except against a small slice of NPC targets that are resistant but not immune. PCs pay a heavy price for the privilege of enhancement slotting (namely, rather low base damage values, among other things), but in the case of recovery debuffing, get little benefit out of it.

A potential improvement would be to reduce the value of the recovery debuffs, while making the chance of the debuff landing 100%, and the duration of the debuff a decent length, stackable. This makes endmod enhancements in electric attacks, should you choose to go that route, pay off.

The good news is, /Poison did get tweaked recently, so the devs were aware of the problem.

The bad news is, the tweaks to /Poison were ineffective, and some of the specific tweaks (half the effect, tiny 8' radius, still tohit checked, still unstackable) didn't even pass the laugh test. Since when is this some trinity MMO where we're afraid of good debuffs?

But I'll echo the "build to concept" advice. Worst case scenario, you can load up on primary powers and pool powers, your secondary is nerf-proof, and may even get a proper buff in the future.

With 12.5% base on defender tactics, and 6% from kismet on top, Time isn't the only primary invited to this party.

Thermal and Empathy might even get invites to the party over on the blaster board. Start thinking about your slotting on Fortitude, though.

I'm not a fan of random bonus damage. I never planned on nukes doing more than the minimum 3.0. 4.0 is a buff as far as I'm concerned. Defenders, who have less of an overkill issue than blasters or corruptors, might disagree, but as a blaster I count just guaranteed damage on a hit.

And am I okay with faster recharge, no crash, and a damage buff too? Yes.

I just hope Full Auto, Overcharge, Hail of Bullets, and Geyser aren't overlooked. I'm pretty sure they won't be. (Oh, and if the PvP values could be made less of a joke, that'd be nice, too.)

The only criticism I really have is that the nukes now just become AoE attacks, plus. Not really anything special, just more of something you already have -- especially if you have a Judgement. Not an argument against this change, mind you; they're hardly more than AoE attacks, plus, today. But if would've been nice if the devs came up with some other way for the nukes to communicate, in game terms, "this is my final ultimate attack", other than a harshly punitive self debuff.

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Re: recharge time specifics

Doubled recharges are really freakin' common. Would've expected something around 233 seconds (formula, then doubled) for a 4.0 damage, 25' radius nuke. Less is fine, though.

Re: customization

My "light blaster" gets good results out of psi blast.

Re: lore police

Angel peacebringers don't break the lore. Kheldians are angels, in the same way midi-chlorians are the force. Take a perfectly good mythology and trash it with bad, unnecessary sci-fi. The fact that half of Kheldians are fallen into darkness and possess people is a clue-by-four. Angel peacebringers simply omit the bad, unnecessary sci-fi part of the lore; they're still metaphysical entities from a faraway place, with an involvement in an ongoing struggle of cosmic scale, and powers of transfiguration.

Re: copyright police

Can't copyright ideas in the U.S. Can't infringe a copyright that doesn't exist. Besides, the idea of supernatural wind powers predates every person here and every work so far discussed. Indeed, for much of human history, supernatural explanations were the only explanations for the wind.

I hate to be bring more bad news to an already miserable thread, but there's a real possibility of a surprise nerf here.

The last change to Bonfire, to prevent continuous autohit knockdown of high level enemies, was considered an "exploit" fix (sarcasm quotes are mine, not the devs') and therefore went live without any prior announcement.

Likewise, the devs today might believe super duper, level 3 secrecy on any Overwhelming Force proc change is necessary, lest more players find out about clever uses of the proc. We may not find out the devs don't intend the proc to work with Bonfire until the day they patch it to stop the proc working in Bonfire.

In other words, I think the dev silence on this issue may be meaningful.

Water Blast's niche is not its single target DPS. I'm highly skeptical that a change that increases other blast sets' single target DPS threatens Water Blast's niche in any way.

Here's a related example: Archery's Ranged Shot is on track to be the slowest animating instasniper blast in the game. But I don't see anyone saying a sniper change is going to make Archery obsolete.

I don't see this as a game breaker in PvE. Plenty of critters are knock immune. And it's not like Fire Control doesn't have other options for neutralizing a mob.

That said, I'd hate to see an extreme change hit Bonfire for lack of suggestions of more reasonable fixes. So here's one: Just make Bonfire non autohit, and accept accuracy enhancements. Then, just like Freezing/Sleet, Ice Slick, and Earthquake, a Bonfire user might get shot at. Technically, Freezing/Sleet's not autohit either, so it's only fair.

One permanent volty would be cool, but as far as I can tell, permanency and summoning limits in this game are more appropriate for targetable pets that can tank for you.

In my mind, Volty has more in common with things like Rain of Fire. You're allowed to Rain of Fire, Burnout, Rain of Fire, because it's basically the same advantage as Fire Ball, Burnout, Fire Ball (just spread out over time).

Similarly, the first (and, after seeing how it goes, possibly only) fix I'd like to see to Volty is let us have multiples. Volty, Burnout, Volty is basically the same advantage as InstaZapp, Burnout, InstaZapp (just spread out over time).

This means electric blasters/corruptors/defenders could easily be running around with two or three voltaic sentinels at all times. Would that fix the electric blast set as a whole? Probably not. Would it increase the set's fun or cool factor? I think so, as long as Volty's long summon animation time isn't too much of a party pooper (at 3.1 seconds, that's a serious possibility). And from the devs' point of view, it's an extremely easy change.

On one hand, you don't have to be picky, because storm is just that good. It does great with any blast set.

On the other hand, you might want to be picky, because there are only four or five defender blast sets that won't leave you wondering, at some point, "why didn't I roll corruptor instead"?

If you pick anything other than /Dark, /DP, /Psy, /Sonic, or maybe /Ice (this includes Water Blast, which is a dev love letter to the corruptor archetype), take a hard look at your archetype choice before committing.