Silas
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Posts
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Joined
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KM/SD is a very powerful and synergistic combo.
PS+AAO can give you massive damage buffs and Shield Charge helps out with additional AoE.
The -damage from AAO stacks nicely with the KM -damage and works well with a defense based secondary since the hits that get through won't hit nearly as hard.
Crit-recharge PS is really, really good. There is nothing quite like hitting PS, building up a 5-stack of the buff, hitting Concentrated Strike and having PS instantly recharge.
I was able to take out a Pylon with my KM/SD in 5 mins and 15 sec, which put him at about 249DPS. And my build still needs a lot of finetuning and tweaking
As for general build stuff: get softcapped first and foremost. You want to be able to stand in the middle of big spawns so you've got a big AAO buff. After that, recharge and recovery are the biggest priorities.
You want as much recharge as you can get for several reasons. Most importantly, to bring PS up as fast as possible. The better uptime you have on PS, the more damage you do. Straightforward and effective. Secondly, to bring your other key powers back up ASAP. Concentrated Strike, because of how hard it hits and the fact that it can crit-recharge PS. Burst and Shield Charge, because they're your AoEs.
While neither KM nor SD are particularly end heavy, +rec tends to come hand in hand with high recharge. If you've got high recharge, you're using your end-heavier attacks more, so you need more recovery to sustain it.
Skip the cone KB. It is butts.
I'm really enjoying my KM/SD, Ectenic. Idea is not so much kinetic melee as telekinetic melee The combo of high damage and good aggro control is making me actually enjoy a melee character for once, heh.
Here he is:
linky -
I'm not Myriad, but my advice would be to go s/l defense with the Scorpion pool. While as a Stormy you're mostly at range, softcapping your s/l will mitigate orders of magnitude more damage than medium ranged defense.
Given the huge chunk of s/l defense the Scorpion Shield gives you, it also affords a lot more build flexibility to get other stuff important for Stormies like +rech and +recovery. -
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Quote:Weren't you contesting the original assertion that Sonic is very ST based? I never made any assertion to the effect of Sonic not having other significant merits like force multiplication.Originally Posted by Deacon_NA
Some contributors to this thread seem to be missing out on a little concept called "force multiplication".
Nowhere am I suggesting that Sonic Attack will let the player see their own orange numbers be bigger than some other blast set would.
I'm not suggesting, but flat-out unequivocally stating, that your teammates' numbers will be substantially higher.
Does Irradiate do more damage than Howl? Yup. I won't even consider that Howl stacking on Howl makes them almost equivalent, I'll just grant that Irradiate (and all those other aoe attacks, hopefully I don't really have to list them without being called out for excluding any, like a prior poster did) is harder hitting than Howl.
So, damage capped Irradiate would do 145 damage, Howl 117. Let's add say, a Spines Scrapper to the team. Let's damage cap him so that Spine Burst does 405 damage. With the /Sonic, that goes up to 486 (just with 1 -20 res debuff). That's a difference of 80. That pretty much trivializes the 28 point difference in blasts. That's just for one teammate (and 1 attack). The discrepancy grows substantially wider with each additional teammate and each stacking of either another Howl or any of the ST blasts.
Let me be clear, this Kin/Sonic I have is not anyone I would solo with, it can be ponderous at times because yes, its ability to pump out its own damage is not that great. On a team though, it's a whole different ball game. My Kin/Sonic does more to improve team DPS than any other character I have. Oh yeah, that includes a Kin/Rad 50. My Fire/Kin Corruptor may compete, I'll crunch the numbers on that another time.
You can probably ditch the "some contributors" stuff too. There's no need to talk past one another on purpose. -
Quote:This. To me, a min/maxed character doesn't mean any one thing. I don't consider a character min/maxed because it can solo an AV or clear +4x8 spawns.Originally Posted by Werner
[...]It also feels like your putting min/max in a smaller box than I'd put it in. You seem to be saying that a min/max toon is an optimized AoE machine designed for destroying large spawns. Then there are AV soloers. Then there's everything else. That seems a bit too restrictive to me.
I do STRONGLY support what you say about DPS being only one measure, and a typically overused measure of damage output. In regular play (whatever that is), DPS is not what matters. AoE is king, and burst is queen.
That said, I abide by my DPS chain in actual play. My recharge rates are generally carefully tailored, and I've trimmed out all other single-target attacks. If I'm attacking a group, I'll use any AoEs I have, assuming I even have AoEs, as frequently as possible. But other than that, it's the DPS chain, because to do otherwise is to simply skip attacks, wait for preferred attacks to recharge, and simply do damage more slowly. This may not be the case with most people's builds, as most people take more attacks than I do (such as Arcanaville in this example). But I'm a minimalist when it comes to attacks, so the resulting toon is "stuck" using the DPS chain only. Another thing to note is that I rarely fight whites on a mature toon. I'm often fighting as much uplevel as I can, quite often +4x8. I'm not going to burst my way through anything. The time it takes is well into the DPS realm, and I'm going to be using my DPS chain, and for quite a while.
That said, if all I'm after is kill speed, I'll drag out my Fire/Shield with massive recharge and go to town with AoEs. It's what he was designed for. But I don't consider him any more or less min/maxed than my single-target specialists, or my general-purpose-with-AoE-but-not-AoE-focused Scrapper.
If I feel like doing AoE to plow through spawns as quickly as possible, I'll dig out an AoE toon. What I WON'T do is try to optimize EVERY toon for AoE, even if AoE is king. Not every toon is suited for that role. If I feel like playing them anyway, like my DM/SR, I don't think that means I'm not min/maxing the toon. A DM/SR min/maxed for AoE in regular team play would probably be a pretty retarded build, beaten by a huge number of alternatives.
Bah, late for work.
I consider a character min/maxed if you, you know, minimize or negate your weaknesses and maximise your strengths for whatever goal you're aiming for.
The ability to solo AVs, have a maximised DPS attack chain or whatever are good benchmarks, but they're just that. Benchmarks. -
Quote:While as an Englishman I can appreciate the condescension this post is dripping with, that wasn't my point.Originally Posted by Deacon_NA
I provide base numbers for Howl and base numbers for the others. There is nothing whatsoever misleading about how this was presented.
Back up to use Howl? Sure, if it's advanced gameplay to reposition yourself, perhaps it's not for everyone. It's a hassle to you, so be it. It's not a hassle to me, to anyone else, ymmv.
The point is that Sonic is a bottom-tier AoE set. The fact of the matter is, Fireball and Irradiate both animate faster and don't require you to waste any time moving in and out of spawns and lining up a cone. Fireball does more damage, Irradiate has a much bigger area.
If you're going to pop out of a spawn to line up a cone, it should at least be one that does boatloads of damage like Fire Breath.
Kinetics is a fast and busy set. It's also a set where you can trivially cap your damage. If there's a spawn big enough to get an awesome FS (which there almost always is on a team), I want AoEs that do justice to the damage buff I'm riding. Howl does not. -
Sonic is very single target based. The 'standard' blast set template is tier 1 blast, tier 2 blast, a cone, Aim, some kind of utility power, short range tier 3 attack, targeted AoE, snipe and a nuke.
Sonic's utility power is a ST stun. It may not have a snipe but it's still a very ST-geared set. The TAoE is replaced with an AoE KB cone with minimal damage. That is a significant loss to your AoE damage output.
Yes, you can spam Howl every 5-6 seconds. You've also got to back up to use it effectively since its a cone.
It's misleading to point out how often you can use Howl using recharge enhanced numbers, but then post just the unenhanced recharge numbers of Ice Storm, Irradiate and Fireball. Granted, Ice Storm and RoF will still take 30 seconds or so to recharge, but they do a lot more damage and over a much larger area.
I find myself in melee almost all the time on my Kins. Even if you've got unsuppressed fast movement due to Siphon Speed, it's a hassle to move in and out every time you want to use your AoE.
Fireball and the Rains do not have this limitation. Irradiate is melee range anyway though to be fair, the radius on it is huge enough that you don't have to be right in mobs faces. -
Fire/Kin or Ice/Kin Corr.
If you've got the stupidly huge spawns that are part-and-parcel of big teams the weaker Corr FS isn't going to be noticeable, especially with a Brute. With a couple Siphon Speeds you can easily pump out enough FS to easily cap a Brute, the Defender FS would be overkill.
Ice because Ice Storm and Blizzard are insane damage. Ice may lack a good TAoE like Fireball, but a lot of AE missions have mobs that rez and you're probably way over the target caps with your AoEs anyway. In those situations, Rain powers do huge amounts of damage.
Fire because it generally does boatloads of AoE damage. RoF double-Scourges. Nothing compares. Especially if you've got rezzer mobs, since they'll rez at 50% health. It's glorious to behold.
If you were going with a Defender, I'd go Kin/Rad of all things. /Rad because it more AoE than the other sets and Kin brings you and the Brute to the damage cap, so the only ways to increase damage are procs and -res. Armageddon and Achilles Heel in Irradiate are glorious. /Sonic has -res but its incredibly ST based which is a drawback in the kind of situations you're aiming for. -
Quote:lol, je_saist is a treasure.Originally Posted by tanstaafl
I dont need to read anymore of the thread to know jesist wont be back.
I don't know if its systematic trolling or what, but its incredibly amusing.
On topic, isn't the 2b cap partially a mechanical restriction too? Or at least, could have been?
As Nethergoat said, given what people were earning way back when I'm sure 2b as a cap seemed almost too much.
I remember running around on a character with like 150-200m and it was MEGABUCKS
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Quote:You're a dreamer, my friendOriginally Posted by Aneko
In the game, virtual traps? I'd like to think it's no more than... 75%.
I'd say its something like this:
70-80% of female chars are traps.
90-95% of catgirls are traps.
I know like, 2 women who have catgirly characters. One I've not seen play since like 2007, the other doesn't so much have catgirl characters as like, characters that have tails and/or ears but none of the rest of the usual catgirl ********.
Of course, YMMV and all that, but I just ate so I'd rather not discuss catgirl mileages. -
Alternative Response:
Ask in BMT, that's where all the best farm and PL teams get formed.
Good luck. -
Quote:If you're using trap the way I think you are, as in, 99% of catgirls are traps...Originally Posted by Aneko
What? It's a reverse trap. <.<
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Quote:Originally Posted by Zeta Orionis
Think you're the toughest PLer/farmer out there? Compete for bragging rights by being the first to get my level 43 blaster to level 50.
YOU WILL RECEIVE A SPECIAL REWARD, worth BILLIONS OF INFLUENCE.
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Quote:It does seem to get them noticedOriginally Posted by Dechs Kaison
Flattery will get you guys nowhere.
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Quote:Actually...Originally Posted by macskull
HEY YOU STOLE MAH AVATARRRRRRRRRRRrRRRRRRRRRR
There is no such thing as the wrong time to post Baleface.Quote:Originally Posted by Mighty
Excellent use of the Baleface. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Felecia_Divine
Hmmm seems that idea wont work, THIS IS THE OFFICIAL DRAMA and PYRAMID THREAD!!!!!!!! WAHOO!!!!!!!
BTW i love the above posts
The point of the game and the forums is to have fun so plz post your bad humour and have fun
Since i am the last poster - I am winning
and as a side note - i have been making ms liberty smack her head for a long time (it's fun, honestly - ms liberty? why are you wearing my skirt again?)
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NewBurn is awesome. Increase to target cap would be nice.
Oh and FPARN or whatever :3 -
I personally am talentless swine, but I know Kahlan has mad musical skills
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Quote:Yes, if you click Window then Sets and Bonuses, in the panel on the right it shows all your bonuses and ones over the cap will be highlighted in red.Originally Posted by Ryltaar
Is there a message in Mids saying "Rule of 5 check ! no good" or something ?
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Quote:Doom.Originally Posted by Fiery-Enforcer
Doom?
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I'd personally rather have a team of 7 Defenders/Corrs and 1 Scrapper than 7 Defenders/Corrs and 1 Tanker.
Survivability won't be an issue with that many support characters and a Scrapper will contribute much more damage. Support characters are force multipliers, Scrapper force > Tanker force.
The advantage a Tanker would have is that with Taunt auras, Gauntlet and Taunt they can gather stuff up real nice for AoEs, but /Inv /WP and /SD Scrappers can do that too.
In the real world, however, very few Scrappers know how to play on a team. Tankers too, but IME less often.
Which reminds me, need to get a move on with my melee guide. Ach. -
Quote:Originally Posted by DaveMebs
K now it's time for pvp changes
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Defender neglecting their primary = bad Defender
Defender neglecting their secondary = bad Defender
I've always thought of Offender as more of a mindset thing, myself.