Sailboat

I have one.

Why complain about knockback when you can do something about it?

It's worth noting you can make almost any Defender primary (and certainly Kin and Empathy) into a Controller secondary, and pair it with earth or Ice control, ending knockback as you know it. Even knockback from other people's powers.

All four holds and immobilizes in Ice (and Earth too, I think) stop knockback for 12 or so seconds (and the AoE immobilizes can be spammed, creating permanently nailed-to-the-ground foes as long as your endurance holds out. If you miss a guy, follow up with the single-target Immob to pin him too.

If you hate knockback, that's one way to go.

It's been noted elsewhere in these forums that right now is an unusually slow time on ALL the servers, relatively speaking.


-- A lot of people have been beta-testing Issue 16 (which might be published TODAY!) on the test server
-- There's always a slump before a new issue anyway
-- Return to school has changed a lot of people's playing habits
-- The very recent release of a competing superhero game has drawn players to check it out, many of whom will possibly be returning here after their flirtation

You can expect to see more people soon (VERY soon if I 16 issues today!).

None of that means that Victory is trending in either direction in the long term, but do realize that right now all the servers "feel" lighter than usual for a combination of reasons. This can create an illusion. Since they all are light, if you only play on one server, it's guaranteed to feel like yours is shrinking.

Agree with Heraclea -- Invulnerability with enough typed defense IO sets is probably the strongest primary that doesn't hurt your damage output. Fire is probably the best AoE Tanker secondary. Not only that, it feels better in long fights because the extra damage ticks from most of the attacks aren't "wasted" -- you're really getting the full potential out of it.

Spines/Fire Scrapper?

Spine Burst, Throw Spines, Quills, Blazing Aura, Ripper, Ten. Tentacles, Burn?

The character who can cast the most AoEs in one chain: Archery/Devices Blaster.

Fistful of Arrows, Explosive Arrow, Rain of Arrows, Time Bomb, Static Discharge, Trip Mine, Trip Mine, Trip Mine, Trip Mine, Trip Mine, Trip Mine, Trip Mine, Trip Mine, Trip Mine.

And Caltrops.

Working on several Tanks on Guardian right now.

I think he/she is using CP as a placeholder for physical Perfection, which is coming in I-16. I can't explain the other issues. :P

I'm at work.

If I was home, I'd be playing with the dogs. It gives them such happiness!

The biggest problem with AE as a storytelling tool is that the contact text is not pushed out to the rest of the team. The team members can open the posted mission text and read it if the team slows down to permit it, but generally that doesn't happen, and as far as I know they can't see all the contact chat before and after accepting a mission. And they usually don't pause to let everyone read it anyway.

Since AE stories can be entirely unlike the rest of the game canon, this has the effect of not knowing what on earth you're seeing while these arbitrary-looking enemies pound on you.

Frankly all mission and contact text should be shared to the team without the option to avoid it (just close it if you don't want to read it). If the game is about stories, tell the stories.

I make a point of trying to play with any weird combination of powersets anyone brings onto my team. There are limits, though; for example, if we have a lot of pre-32 Earth Controllers, I will start looking for Blasters and Scrappers.

But generally it's more interesting to try different combos than the same sort of team all the time.

Went on a "too many forcefielders" Task Force recently and experienced some novel benefits: despite a lot of blasting, and occasionally forgetting to rebubble, the FFers managed to keep enough bubbles on everyone to keep us softcapped because we had spare bubblers overlapping. Also, for once the bubblers themselves were covered, instead of being the weakest link defensively.

I have nothing against a team looking to shore up a weakness by bringing in a particular powerset, but refusing to team with certain sets is, far too often, more a reflex or a fetish than a well-thought-out choice.

I don't have Mids or a lot of time, but I'll take a stab at it.

Using Titanium Coating to go for melee defense is an angle I haven't seen in a build. It's slot-heavy, but I suppose it's cheaper than some routes.

I would find a way to fit in Greater Fire Sword alongside Incinerate. The one thing nicer than having one heavy hitter is having two you can chain.

In general, you're a bit short on enhancement. It's hard to tell without Mids or doing the calculations by hand, but it looks like Build Up is short of the ED cap for recharge, and Hasten and Fiery Embrace certainly are, and Stamina looks like it's short of the cap as well. It seems funny to have the PS recovery proc and the Miracle and Numina uniques that add recovery in Health but suboptimal base slotting in Stamina. I'd squeeze out another slot if you can.

With the Obliteration sets in your attacks (especially Blazing Aura) being notoriously weak in endurance reduction, and Weave appearing not to have any end reduction, I wonder how fast this build would be starving for endurance. Be aware of the possibility, at least.

That's all I can think of at first glance. It seems creative to me to use Enfeebled Operation and Titanium Coatings as the basis for building defense for a Fire Tanker, it will be cool if it works for you.

This is semi-related...I am making a Tanker with sets I haven't used before, and trying to get a feel for how well the mitigation works. It seems like almost everyone I team with wants to cast those Tarot card buffs on me (from the Magic Pack). I'm not opposed to buffs, and for some reason full-strength buffs don't bother me as much. It's like the major buffs are so clearly overwhelming I can just assume my good performance is getting a lot of help from the buffs, but the little buffs confuse me as to what's due to the buff and what's due to my build. So currently I want to avoid the small buffs while learning how well the build works, if that makes any sense.

Sometimes it gets embarassing turning them down, so sometimes I type a long sentence into chat and let the accept/reject countdown expire while I type, rather than verbally turn it down.

Considering shaving a slot or two off my build. How practical is it to be a /Dark Scrapper with only one IO worth of knockback protection?

The burden is on him to show evidence of this claim, since the game's stated rules and the experiences of thousands of other players do not support the claim.

Ask him to put together some logs or data or write it up. If he's willing to put effort into advancing his claim, we'll be willing to waste brainpower on it. Until then, I wouldn't bother. We see lots of assertions about the game that turn out not to be true.

It would also be nice if heal spam was green only when it actually moved your hit points, and gray or some other color when it was superfluous, and split when it was split (like mixed damage type attacks), so that you'd see a green "17" over your head and a gray or purple "423" if most of the heal was wasted.

To the OP -- I love both DM and Storm. Storm has some of the game's most potent debuffs, although one of them, Hurricane, is hard to use right on teams.

One of the (probably unavoidable) reasons Storm's reputation suffers on teams is that one of the things it does best is to neutralize foes by knockback. This is seldom necessary on teams, but when it is, it can save everyone from defeat -- at the cost of scattering the mobs. The problem with that is that players saved from defeat often don't see the "defeat that never was," but they sure do see the scatter and the messy aftermath of getting the spawn rounded up again or defeated where they landed. On the other hand, of course, a Storm player can use incorrect judgment and unleash the scatter to "save" a team that would have done fine without such drastic intervention.

More than most other powersets, Storm imposes a cost for employing its most potent powers (somewhat reminiscent of Stone Armor and Granite's penalties). This means Storm players can't prosper by just hitting all the buttons in their power bars -- they have to think before using several of them, and the decision to not use their full potential is often a hidden contribution to the team's success.