Riverdusk

Would agree with getting scream. The skippable attack in sonic is shout if anything. It's already been proven that with its horrible animation time, if you can get enough recharge, you are better off just using shriek and scream. And I'd hate to be stuck in shout's animation while a teammate is dying. Not to mention the horrendous over the top sound effect shout has, but that's my own personal peeve.

As to travel, on my own emp/sonic I plan on getting hasten, SS, and hover, which is one of my favorite combo's. When I can fit it in, no stamina means I can.

I'd also suggest slotting the chance for smashing damage proc from the explosive strike IO set at least in your faster recharging attacks. They are cheap (or were when I used them a while ago) and for defenders with their low damage, I think damage procs help a lot in the quicker attacks. I'm not a dps cruncher though, so maybe I'm wrong.

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With my other, higher-level characters (4 50s and growing) I find that post-30 a dedicated Healer becomes less and less desirable as a teammate.

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Ayup.

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So my question is, what's the endgame for Empath Defenders?

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On the whole, buff/debuff sets are very good to have, but comparatively with other buff/debuff sets, Empathy is near the bottom. Still good to have; just not as good as, oh, say, OMGSTORMGASM. So an empathy defender's endgame depends a lot on the secondary set, which very well may be the stronger of her two sets.



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I find that a funny example. Storm may be great and highly desirable for knowledgable players, but for your average PuG, nothing is considered "less desirable" lvl 1-50 than a storm. I hear calls for empathy all the time, even for high level teams, never once heard a call for a storm. Even on something like the hero respec task force where a storm would rule, an average PuG will not think of it.

Empathy is one of what I consider the "big three" for defenders. Empathy, Kinetics, and Rad. I just don't see what the original poster sees, those three are by far the most desired even at level 50. Empathy desirability wanes a bit at higher levels maybe and they slide from most popular to third place, but they are definitely still top 3, hardly "the bottom".

But maybe that's just because I play on Freedom and love PuGs.

Others have already answered what to do, concentrate on the buffs and your attacks when healing isn't needed. Actually, make that concentrate on your buffs even when healing is needed.

Strange, haven't noticed any difference in mine. Logged in with several different characters including ones its been a while on. At 134 on the counter for the badge past writer, last I checked the other day it was 132. And I've played my own arcs probably at least 50 times.

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annoying powers?

Hasten is the most annoying power to me. The noise it makes on activation is strange and kinda painful and the hand-glows don't go with many characters.

... OH! You mean annoying to _others_. i see. I vote for that kin power that flings dumpsters at enemies, thereby altering line of sight and blocking smaller hallways occasionally.

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Not to mention the hasten sound effect going off again everytime you use a power with a pet or pet effect. Drove me crazy on my illusion controller since blinds worthless 3' radius sleep counts as a "pet". Got to hear hasten's sound effect go off every 5 seconds.

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Flash arrow & smoke grenade seriously need to be switched to Extreme settings only or coded to work like the player versions, where it breaks after taking damage.

Having it in the Hard range means sacrificing a lot of legitimate power choices for custom critters for the sake of making your mishes less annoying.

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Add smoke from fire control as well.

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But, OMG, someone might say something mean!

The whole thing baffles me.

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To me it is more the case of you trying to be constructive and the risk of them searching out all of your arcs and rating them 1 star out of spite.

From what I can tell so far, the second you fall below 5 stars, people stop playing your arc. On my Chillion mission I was getting a couple of nice comments, 10 ratings, and about 30 people playing without rating from watching my badge count. Around that 9th or 10th rating I fell to 4 stars and haven't had a nibble since in 2 days.

Not that I think that simple little mission deserves more, but for future reference, I could see just 1 bad rating wiping you off the majority of the population's play lists. Or I could just be making false assumptions at this point, who knows...

I too have run into EB's in almost every mission I've tried. Had a feeling this would be a problem so my one and only real mission so far is specifically made to be reasonably easy and short. It is a custom group as that is the story (The Chillions, basically a cold version of Hellions).

But no AV's, no EB's and I inserted a sonic/empathy defender and an earth/kinetic controller as allies. Those kind of buffing helpers definitely make things nice, not to mention earth's -def help at that level! And they don't tend to...usually...steal too many of the kills.

Already got one comment from a lvl 12 scrapper specifically that he was so glad to finally find a mission he could solo at that level.

Arc ID 37574. Not saying it's a masterpiece as it's my first effort, but it's getting 4 stars so far, I'm happy.

I'll have to try some of the others mentioned here, great thread.

EB/AV's definitely have to be placed. I too noticed way too many in arcs I've tried. Probably why my first try at an arc contains no EB/AV's and I state such in the description. The end boss in mine will actually scale down to a Lt. if you are solo.

An automatic text appearing would be nice, but in the meantime people will learn they need to be more descriptive if they don't want low ratings is my opinion on it. Rate away. Would be nice to leave them feedback as to why, but I know some are scared they'll be retaliated against if they leave a negative comment.

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As I said, enemies can only be assigned specific animations to play while waiting to be aggroed when they're in those goal spawns. Ordinary loitering-around spawns, just generic ones that fill up 90% of the mission, do not have custom animations.

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Which is a shame as from what I've noticed my custom critters change animations every second and look really jerky due to it. They'll half complete one animation, cycle to another, half complete that one, cycle to another, etc.

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I'm not too sure about this. I could build a mission that could eat a soft-capped /SR brute/scrapper alive, and I wouldn't even be trying.

I can see sets with lots of -recharge or confuse/fear being quite popular as most of the armor sets for custom critters won't have access to resistance.

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Yep, my high defense shield scrapper got a good workout even from a +2 boss level critter. Get radiation infection thrown on you and suddenly your defense isn't so great. A mind control using EB was also nasty. They are the ones with the non-positional attacks iirc.

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[Admin] Ghost Falcon: Update : Freedom is still updating....my previous announcement was based on positive (and now incorrect) information.
[Admin] Ghost Falcon: we may spin up Freedom laser

about 10 seconds ago
( I can only assume laser means later)

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Oh no, not the Freedom Laser, we're all doomed!

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well when saying its going to be down for 5 hours and people rearranged their schedules around the 5 hour...i think a post from the devs is the least we deserve.

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From the original annoucement: [ QUOTE ]
We expect the downtime to last the entire 5 hours but please allow for early release or an extension as necessary.

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Be thankful this wasn't the PSO system of banning words. XD
Let's ban three words that are used as names of items in the game XD.

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Close, at one time the badge title "safecracker" was banned.

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Poor ice

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Not sure that's a fair test for ice considering freak tanks have 30% cold resistance. Cold being rarely resisted is one of ice's few advantages, so kind of a reverse cherry picking there.

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QR-

I was reading one of the other MA threads and they were talking about worrying about finding teams and getting "No thanks, I'm making mishes" kind of responses, and it made me think of a question I don't think has been asked yet:



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I'm a big PuG person myself and I'm not worried about finding teams. The big question is will I find teams interested in doing anything but farming once this arrives. I remember when 90% of the villain PuG's were doing nothing but farming that one Cuda mission until they "tweaked" it. Makes it harder to find random people that play the game similar to how I like to play (which is the answer I always give to the question defenders of PL/farming always ask of "why do you care? How does PL/farming, etc. affect you?) But, guess we'll see.

Then again, at least the solo game has the potential to get a lot more interesting.

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What happens to arcs if the player who created them goes inactive?

Can trial accounts use the MA? ( Better not... )

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I'm still on my first cup of coffee, and haven't been able to kindle the CT reactor yet this morning, so apologies if it's obvious to everyone but me, but what am I missing? What's the problem with letting trial accounts use the MA?

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Freak Slicer: Oh no! It's Captain Dynamic!
Tank Smasher: Don't worry! We'll mop the floor with him! He can't afford all the best enhancements like he could if he'd only bought 10 million influence from www.stupidgoldsellingwebsite.com for only $10!

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OMG it's diabolical, I never even thought of that...

I'm torn between amusement at the idea and horror...

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There is a horrific relevance to this that must be address!

[/ QUOTE ]You know, if it's an entertaining enough plug, the arc might not be such a terrible inconvenience. If it's annoyingly stupid, the arc will get reported into oblivion so fast tachyons would be required to perceive its published duration.

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Perhaps, but I think the point was if trial accounts can create missions, they'll be another 1,000 clones of it uploaded by the time the one is taken down. Trial accounts just have the potential to upload way too much garbage, I can't imagine them being allowed to create content. Or rate it for the obvious reasons others have already mentioned.

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That should easily shave off a few seconds for fire as would having them out before the fight starts (but that could be said for all the pet sets)



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Wouldn't surprise me if having the plant pet out before the fight starts actually increases its time. For the rest I think you are right, but the plant pet is unique now in its stupidity since Frosty was fixed.

Interesting. I thought you were going to say after defeating the boss and guards, you only need to click one of the glowies for the mission to complete, not all 5. That's the one I notice everytime. Not that I particularly want them to fix that, I hate searching for glowies.

Crashing is bad though.

I'm liking these, although I do see TonyV's point about $ for game play advantages. I figure though with a game getting this long in the tooth, I don't mind it like I probably would have in the past. Also the dev team's past history of reinvesting the money they make back into other improvements makes it more palatable.

I laugh as usual at the "greedy" and "money-grubbing" comments because I know the people that tend to throw around those kind of insults are usually the first to act even worse when the shoe is on the other foot.

All those that are saying "why pay for the temp flight pack when you can just run Ouro over and over again for one?" I thought that was only available to do on the villain side? I play almost exclusively hero, so that's why I'd consider it. But maybe I'm missing something. I know that if I relied exclusively on the safeguard temps, which I do know you can get only once, and no other travel power, I'd burn through those in no time. Even used sparingly I never put off a "real" travel power later than level 24 as that's when I find they start to run out for me otherwise.

51 - Don't care about ugly helmets.

54 - Agreed, new power for 54 month please.

Also kind of sad in a way that a lot of my new alts will be natural origin now unless I have a really strong concept for them otherwise. Would rather they fix that. I kind of liked origin being more a flavor choice excepting the rare trick arrow character who doesn't otherwise have fire/energy powers. That double bonus damage is going to be too tempting on many...

Nice that they are back to announcing them in advance at least though, maybe it isn't too late to make a change...

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Ah, how fickle is fandom.

For years we have taken comments like, "Gosh, you know what would make this game better? Voice! Just like that Other Game has." Now that it's coming, we get complaints of doom and assertions that voice is unnecessary and threats to quit.



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Actually there is a solid group that every time this comes up steps up to say it isn't a good idea. Many of those same people are here posting in this thread. Basically I have never had a positive experience in an MMOG using voice with random strangers. My experiences have varied from Meh to downright fleeing and not looking back at the group.

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Yep, everytime I've seen threads in the past brought up about voice there was a good portion that were against the idea. Not sure what you were reading that makes you think the word "fickle" applies.

Now that it has been announced as a reality, even more will come out against it, but that's to be expected. Some people don't get upset about something until it becomes real.

Once again they've announced something with sketchy details. Right now I'm very much against it, but more info would be nice. I've always thought voice might be good some day, but the tech to do it really well wasn't quite here yet and I'd rather not see it in-game until it can be done well. As in lots of control, different voice modulators, text to voice and vs. versa (although the voice to text would be extra hard I'd say so I wouldn't hold them to that). Will take a lot to get me on board, but maybe they'll surprise me.

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Voice chat is quickly becoming a requirement for any MMO.

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Which I really find a shame.

Luckily this is well enough established a game that I don't think introducing a voice chat option at this point will make that big an impact.

If it does, I guess I'll just be soloing more while trying to find "non-voice" teams.

Amazing.

Most important for the game, hopefully word will get out about this to the other MMORPG communities and maybe we'll finally attract a good chunk of new subscribers!

With all this new development, some of this money you guys are making really should be plowed into advertising IMHO.

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... before you go off the deep end, thanks!

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Excuse me?

I'll say this as Discretely as I possibly Can:
You guys are looking like a bunch of Amateurs right now. There were plenty of other Sets way ahead on everyone's wishlists (both PVE and PvP communities)



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Always love people that purport to speak for "everyone". For every set you think should have been something else, I can guarantee you at least a few got exactly what they wished for. Personally I like some, wished for others on some. I also actually knew I wouldn't get everything I specifically wanted. The odds of that were only slightly better than hitting the lottery. Regardless, they have specifically said more Powerset Prolif is to come so all it will take is patience and you'll probably eventually get whatever you were hoping for.

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There's been so many controversial Changes by this team over the years that I fully supported despite so much of the whining from FotM'ers and PL'ers on these boards... The G.D.N, E.D., Controller/Pet nerfs, even "Inventions"(loot). I supported all of those things b/c I knew ahead of time they would make this game more diverse and add more "character" to the metagame.

But this "Brainstorm" being announced today is a huge Step Backwards from that, and if your Company (and Castle especially) continues to dismiss that reality, you'll be digging yourselves into the kind of hole that many people in this fairly upstanding community won't care if you ever dig yourselves back out of.

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How is opening up new sets "going backwards"? I guess some in the small minority PvP community perhaps might think that way (surprise 95% of the whines here are about PvP). PvP'ers are usually the only ones that complain about others getting improvements to their characters I've noticed (really focused for me when people actually complained about ring of fire getting -fly). Which is part of why I hate PvP, but for PvE, more choices can not=going backward.