Sailboat

My forum index shows the thread title in a sans-serif font, so it looks like a thread about Weird Al Yankovich singing "My Bots Ain't Smart and They Ain't Fast..."

Despite a lot of real-life interruptions, I pushed my new Scrapper from 7 to 22 running real contact missions with friends and some random people we picked up (who weren't too bad, actually). I like to do the regular contact mishes during double exp so that at least some of the contacts have a history with me and will sell inspirations if I'm in their zone later on. 22 is a good level to reach.

Another Scrapper went form 26 to 27. Insignificant leveling, but it did enable me to slot up Soul Drain and experience that for the first time -- very nice.

Ragdoll physics. One of the older additions to the game that really made it look and feel better.

I've Crane-Kicked people who slid to the edge of a dropoff and rolled as they tumbled over it, so that one arm rose up as they disappeared and it looked like they were waving bye-bye. That was really hysterical. Recently I've been running a Spines Scrapper and enemies break and run from me while suffering the toxic damage-over-time secondary effect (stacked from several attacks, sometimes) -- I'll see 3-4 guys running away from me and fanning out, then all at once they crumple, tumble, and roll to the ground.

Area knockdown is another effect that fills me with the kind of glee that I hope isn't showing on my face when anybody's looking.

If the player is wearing a golf shirt instead of a tie, and cross trainers instead of black polished wingtips, he's a casual player.

I feel silly asking this because I'm a vet player, but this kind of surprised me last night.

When I can't find enough of a given common IO recipe for sale at the particular level I want, I sometimes go to my base's invention worktable and directly buy the recipe(s).

All 74,017 other Beyeajuses will be soooo jealous.

Well, I bugged it.

I crafted the Lost curing wand, went and cured ONE Lost and it disappeared from the power tray.

Checked mission and I had forgotten to talk to contact after crafting the wand, so I did not have the "cure 20 Lost" mission active, and had had NO credited Lost cured. Took mission...but then did not have the wand in power list.

Is the Lost curing wand a one-shot item if you don't take the "Cure 20 Lost" mission?

This is kind of a silly bug. The wand has something like 50 charges normally and you only need 20; but apparently if you forget to click the contact it'll erase the wand on the first use. Either too many charges or too few.

I was able to droip the mision successfully, and got the credit for curing 20 Lost, but wanted to report this one in case no one else had.

This weekend, as usual, I am taking anyone and everyone, whatever they're playing, giving preference to nonidiotic character names if the team is filling up.

This weekend, that means a crapload of pistol blasters (I think we had 5 at one point), but I can play with any mix of powersets, as long as the players don't turn out to be twits.

I made a SD/Axe as one of my first shield characters. My thought was to experiment with knockdown, since Axe does so much KD and Shield Charge also does KD.

I liked it so much I ran him right up to 50. I bought just enough defense from set IOs to soft-cap him, which wasn't really necessary, since he does enough knockdown to really help a non-softcapped defense. The rest of his slots are frankenslotted with cheap IOs around the levels the powers became available -- I haven't bothered to plan out set bonuses beyond the little bit of defense.

He's quite a lot of fun. WHOOM, and everything falls down.

Mace has better area than Axe (wider cones, and notably, Pendulum from Axe only hits 5 targets, Mace's equivalent hits 10) , but Axe has more consistent knockdown and I get the impression it does just marginally more damage on a few of the heavy hitters. (For example, Axe's Cleave is 122 base damage at lvl 50, vs 101 for Mace's Shatter, although Shatter has a wider cone.)

Either set will be keen.

Weirdly, Axe lets you get up to 10 enemies with Cleave. It's a tiny narrow cone, so that seems all but impossible. But with a little kiting, I occasionally have gotten six with one blow, which I guess technically means I'm taking advantage of its ability to hit more than five. :P

I find these pages particularly helpful:

Invention Origin Enhancement Sets

and, when looking for sets with specific properties,

Invention sets that improve...

While people are correct that Claws is fine, although differently-oriented than other sets, I can think of one effect that might have contributed to the OP's impression.

As stated, Claws does many medium-damage attacks (and a lot of them area attacks) rapidly. Solo, it melts enemies evenly.

On a team, it might interact a bit differently with the team dynamics.

Fast-animating Claws area attacks quickly take a big chunk of life from many foes, but kill none of them. Then Broadsword and Martial Arts Scrappers pound one or two or three targets to death with their big hitters -- targets already wounded by the Claws Scrapper. Then the Claws Scrapper nearly finishes off the remaining foes with another AoE. Then the other Scrappers actually finish off several of the foes with their (less effective) AoEs.

End result -- although a lot of the damage from the high-damage attacks from the other Scrappers was "wasted" (doing a 335-point hit to someone the Claws Scrapper left with only 50 life, for example), none of that "wasted" damage appears in the combat results text. And although the Claws Scrapper contributed buckets of damage against many foes that wore them down for anyone to defeat, none of that appears in the spammed text either.

Instead, the text reads:

Broadsword has defeated Freakshow X
Broadsword has defeated Freakshow X
Broadsword has defeated Freakshow X
Martial Arts has defeated Freakshow X
Broadsword has defeated Freakshow X
Martial Arts has defeated Freakshow X
Martial Arts has defeated Freakshow X
Claws has defeated Freakshow X
Broadsword has defeated Freakshow X
Martial Arts has defeated Freakshow X
Broadsword has defeated Freakshow X

I can see where that could lead to mistaken impressions of the effectiveness of Claws.

Rescue and adoption is holy work. You will be rewarded many times over.

There's a girl in our development who has a retired greyhound named Charlie and she fosters a second one on a regular basis, so every few months she has a new dog #2 to keep Charlie company. They're sweet and gentle things (if you're not a rabbit).