Sardan

Check out her arc and non arc missions here:
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Maria_Jenkins

We have had a number of truly new combat mechanics introduced in the game over the years. The brute's scaling damage bonus from Fury was novel and remains a lot of fun. Scrappers' chance to crit, Stalkers and Widows' crit from stealth, Controllers' containment, and Corruptors' scourge all add flavor to their ATs. Dual Blades' combo system is novel, and unique to that powerset. All these have been welcome improvements, and a nice change from the "same old, same old."

Currently all powers are either clicks or toggles. I'd love for a new type of power to be introduced that varied its strength by how long a key was pressed to trigger the power. This would use the classic videogame "charge up" meter. This is apparently used in Cryptic's new MMO but it has been a feature of console fighting games for many years, so it couldn't be claimed to be stolen from CO.

With the upcoming ability of the engine to do alternate animations, it'd be so cool to hold down an attack button for an extra couple of seconds and launch a SUPER ATTACK version of a power instead of the normal attack animation, at the cost of the longer activation time and extra endurance. This could lead to more interesting tactical decisions during combat.

It'd be awesome to have a powerset that could dynamically switch between having fast, fluid, end-efficient attacks and slower harder-hitting attacks.

Some careful thought would have to go into the design of such a powerset of course. Not great for game balance if you could have a tray full of powers that could all turn into Knock Out Blow or Footstomp on demand!

Search by user seems to be completely broken. As a test, I tried searching for Arcanaville's posts, because I know she's a prolific poster. The list comes up, but when you click on any of the links it takes you to the first post, not the post by the user you searched for.

This is minor but super quick to implement: make the pop up "Recipe Found!" text color match the rarity class of the recipe you got. Currently it's always yellow. The message should be white for commons, yellow for uncommons, etc. This is already the way salvage popups work.

I've been fortunate enough to get a few purple drops. I don't carefully monitor combat spam so every single time it's been a total surprise to me at the end of a TF to check my recipe inventory and go "holy crap!"

I'd like to share my holy crap moments with the team right when the drop happens, and I guarantee seeing a purple "Recipe Found!" message would cause squees of epic proportions. I'm an adult but I'm pretty sure I'd emit a man-squee if I saw a purple popup on screen.

I want to formally lodge a complaint that the tags "pk wants attention" and "silly" that have been attached to this thread are redundant since they'll have to be attached to every single post by PK and thus rendered meaningless.

Actually I know the chief difference between UK English and American English. After watching many episodes of Gordon Ramsay in his various shows, I can conclusively say that the F-word is used roughly 10,000x more frequently there than here.

In fact, I'm pretty sure if he keeps it up at the current rate he will exhaust the global supply of the F-word by 2012, at which point Gordon will simply be rendered mute.

Try http://www.gifninja.com

What Widow powers offer Defense Debuff Resists (DDR) and is the DDR enhanceable?

Also, is the scaling damage resistance from Foresight enhanceable?

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Tough and Weave, part of the Fighting pool, you can start building towards at level 6

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Naturally you're right. Seeing as how my latest character started working on Fighting pool in the 20s, that was a rather embarassing error to make. Post edited.

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I gotta say I am always shocked to see pictures of game devs.

I seriously thought Positron looked like this.


Will the Real Positron please stand up.

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Well, armor is very slimming. Like vertical stripes.

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what would be the best build for a brute.

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There's no "best", but as others have said, /Stone isn't for everyone. On the one hand, it's almost absurdly survivable. Once you get Granite slotted up, add in Tough and Weave (these are "pool powers" available to everyone separately from primary/secondary), you'll be able to laugh off huge hordes of enemies that'd kill the rest of your team with ease.

If you're considering alternatives, the one I recommend to new players is Willpower (referred to as "WP"). WP is tough and doesn't require expensive enhancements to be really solid. It's a popular set even among experienced players.

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Ok, another question then. I have a build for my SD/SS/Pyre Tank that would give me perma hasten at the expense of having taunt. Would I still be viable as a lead tank without taunt?

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Depends how seriously you take the role of controlling aggro. You can certainly get initial aggro by telling your team to hold off a few seconds while you run into a spawn and brush by them with AAO, the taunt aura, running. You *might* be able to peel aggro from a teammate by using Fire Blast or Fire Ball.

Personally while I'm not especially bothered by my brute not having Taunt, even when he's acting as a pseudo Tank, I can't stand not having Taunt on my actual Tankers just because I feel like my main job is aggro control and Taunt is invaluable when you see the blaster across the room getting pounded on.

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Someone's a pyromaniac.

From what I hear, Shields benefits a lot from large injections of cash.

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I know my SS/Sheild brute did. But I've heard that on Tanks it's significantly less costly to hit the softcap.

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I registered to the old CoH boards in september of 2001, and I don't think they were already 3 year old.
In fact, the very first time I saw a two liner about CoH in a magazine was in Wizard at the end of 2001 summer.

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My grandfather trudged to these forums through the snow back when they were coal-powered and you couldn't use them after dark. My father used these forums back when they hadn't made the switch to color yet. Don't lecture me about your ignorant 2001 revisionist history, youngster.

On my SR scrapper, I usually leave it off. Only turn it on in unusual circumstances like if I anticipate a lot of defense debuffing or an AV fight. Other than that, the occasional lucky blow will generally not be enough to warrant turning it on.

Thanks for the feedback, folks. I haven't experimented with Soul Mastery. I'll try doing a respec on Test and see how that plays. And I would love adding a Membrane or two to Active Defense.... I'll have to see how big a hit to my blue bar it'll be to eliminate the Mako from Haymaker.

Really excellent guide. I especially like that you mentioned that Transfusion debuffs regen. That's something that even many veteran Kin players don't know.

A couple of very minor points: in Fight Positioning, if you have a Tank/Brute/Scrapper who is gathering aggro and doesn't look like they're in imminent danger of faceplanting, it's good to hold off on AoE controls and immobs until the mobs are clustered around that melee teammate. All subsequent AoEs will be much more effective. It's usually only a matter of delaying by a few seconds.

I'd reverse the order of suggested buffing. I know this is personal preference but if you get in the habit of buffing during cleanup, you'll virtually always be ready for solid offensive action at the start of the next fight. When you try to buff between fights you'll all too frequently find out the next fight starts before you're done rebuffing. Then you have to make the choice of missing out on the start of the fight or pausing the buffs.

However, these are all nits. Overall this is a solid guide that will benefit all but the most experienced Kin players. Well done!

It's not exactly what you asked for but see my SS/SD build I just posted in another thread. That at least covers your secondary.

For your primary, make sure to slot a Force Feedback Chance for Recharge in Thunder Strike--that's mandatory. Don't bother slotting one in Lightning Rod or Shield Charge; due to the way those powers work the proc will never go off. I recommend 5 Obliterations in Thunder Strike, and 6 in LR and Shield Charge, 5 Crushing Impacts in Havoc Punch, and 4 Kinetic Combats in Chain Induction.

Thanks, Scin. Let me know if you see any areas you think can be tweaked. I know the easy answer is "use purples" but realistically at current prices purples aren't in my future.

Drew, get Mids. You'll see that using 2 Acc for slotting is very sub-optimal. Just using 2 of any single enhancement SO or IO is generally sub-optimal For example, let's say you slotted 2 Acc/2 Dam/1 Rech/1 EndReduc. If you're using lvl 35 IOs, that gives you 73% Acc, 73% Dam, 37% Recharge and 37% EndReduc.

The key to remember is that an IO that enhances 2 aspects gives you more than half a single IO's value. So for example if we slotted (still using lvl 35s) an Acc/Dam, Acc/Dam, Dam/Rech, Dam/End/Rech, Acc/End/Rech, Acc/Dam/End/Rech you get: 79% Acc, 95% Dam, 53% EndReduc, 75% Recharge. Much better in every way, using the same number of slots and the same level enhancements. BTW, my personal preference would be less Acc and more Recharge, but I wanted to use an example that addressed the recommendation for 2 Accs given previously.

Unless you are a math whiz, you're not going to be able to accurately preduct the ED limits of enhancements yourself, that's why Mids is invaluable.