Sailboat

Fiery Aura?

My favorite was the guy who definitively declared COH dead because he couldn't find easy Architect teams the second night after the new issue with its emphasis on changing the look of your powers. Since most people only get to play in the evenings, we're talking only a few prime-time hours elapsed since the changes. I was in Icon, which was slammed with players changing stuff.

In general, the Devs have tended to give slightly more AoE potential to Tanker sets than to Scrapper sets. Proliferation caused them to have to assess whether they intended that as a pattern, and conbustion's removal from Scrapper Fiery Melee says, "Yes, that's intended" to me.

I hope you mean x8, not +8.

You could reduce your end consumption, dramatically cutting the need to increase recovery. You can get ED-capped damage and recharge (95%) enhancement in every attack and decent accuracy (50-60%) -- essentially giving up nothing -- and drop your end costs with 70-80% end reduction enhancement (or even better!) with a little creative frankenslotting. I do slightly better than that at around levels 40-45 but you should be able to do nearly as well using (cheaper) lvl 35 IOs.

I'm a huge fan of frankenslotting your main attacks. Set bonuses are nice but they usually impose some compromises in enhancement values. I put them in minor attacks, fast-recharging attacks, defense powers and occasionally "mule" powers (powers I took and slotted solely for the set bonus and not for real use) so I can frankenslot my main attacks, using them as often as possible for maximum damage and tremendous endurance discount with good-to-excellent accuracy. (I slight accuracy in the frankenslotting if I have to give up something, because I can get global accuracy bonuses from sets to make up for it, but there is no global endurance reduction available in set bonuses, only what's slotted in the power itself.)

I stand corrected. I've only been looking at Defense sets for Tanks and Scrappers, to be honest.

No question. But still LESS game changing than 5 x 10% Defense would be.

D'oh! Forgot about nthe F/C res. Never considered the Toxic res as worth thinking about because (outside of buying a lot of purples) it's so hard to accumulate meaningful levels of it, so I've never tried to stack it up on a character.

Not a Scrapper, but I have a Tanker named The Sewer Knight. :P

For me, I like different things about different Scrappers. The elegance and (frankly) hard-hitting nature of Martial Arts against single targets is something I miss when I'm on other Scrappers, for example, and someone I would have already wasted with Crane Kick is still standing there while I Lunge again. But when I'm on the Martial Arts characters, I miss the unbelievable field of death that Spines/Dark is.

But mostly, as with other ATs, I find that there's a moment of fusion when name, concept, powersets, description, and costume come together. Those characters are more interesting and entertaining than any number of high-performance and exotic character designs without good names and concepts.

The conclusion I draw from this is that I do not have enough Scrappers. I made another Scrapper this week.

That would be the reputation that causes people to question whether Storm and Dark Miasma are any good? :P

Well, there are some set bonuses you cannot find in Purples currently. Not many of them offer +damage, and none offer defense or resistance set bonuses.

There also aren't Purple sets that go into defense or resistance powers, for that matter.

Note to the OP: no set gives any global end reduction bonus, so you won't find it on Purples either.

My guess is that the reason Purples offer large number set bonuses for a few categories and small or no bonuses for other categories is that someone has decided that that does the least distortion to the game. They don't want purple sets to break the game, and they don't want to give you huge values of every conceivable set bonus...IMHO they're limiting the damage to game balance that adding these IOs can do.

Giving a global 10% defense or 20% resistance bonus to a set would be gigantically broken, you know. Because of the way recharge works, large recharge bonuses don't hurt the game quite so much.

That last 10% defense makes a huge difference in your survivability (triples it, in fact), and getting it globally from 5 or 6 slots is simply too cheap. You can still GET that kind of defense, but you have to commit more power picks, slots, and IO recipes to do so, which is probably proper.

That last 10% recharge moves your attacks down from recharging in 7 seconds to somethng like 6.91 seconds (to pull numbers out of thin air). That's not tripling your attack rate, is it?

Ah, here's the heart of your whole thread. Some player DO tend to regard buffers and debuffers as "support classes" (a term I dislike) and treat them like subservient followers witnessing that player's greatness. That probably peaked during the "herd a million" days for Tankers.

But here's the thing. That's not an AT copping that attitude -- it's a player copping that attitude. You are not "subservient" as a Defender or Controller buffing and debuffing any more than a Tanker or Scrapper are "subservient" because they have to get their hands dirty like common laborers. That whole concept that has you unhappy is a product of mindset, not game rules.

Here's how you fix it. You don't even have to wait for the devs! Whenever you encounter someone who thinks you're subservient, open the "player note" feature on that player, and type "Bozo", and one-star him.

Now that you can tell who they are, just don't team with the bozos.

Also worth mentioning is that partnering with a Kin or two at higher levels, while rendering Quickness less useful by swamping you with +recharge, will often render Shields' damage boost moot with Fulcrum Shift.

I'm of the opinion that it may turn out that that use of HOs isn't "intended" and this may get changed at some point.

Frankly, without the HOs for DDR, it'd still be pretty strong.

Brilliant! I think this theory hasn't gotten enough attention. Maybe you're right -- it would make sense that people who complain a lot and want AE teams "to level their alts" for them would get a lot of player notes added invisibly over their heads ("it's this guy again -- run away!"), and over time, would find fewer and fewer people to team with...and thus be driven to post this sort of thread.

And I keep reading, looking for this:

but I don't find it. People who won't go out and MAKE teams, and expect teams to come find them, are like people who won't go out and MAKE money, but expect it to come find them. How's that working out?

None of the Epic ATs hero- or villain-side can change colors. Yet. I thik they're working to add this eventually.