Silencer7

It's frankly much easier to softcap s/l/energy than it is to do ranged, and you'll be covered for most of the ranged attacks ever directed at you (and a bunch of the melee ones.) The reason for this is that like zemb said, capping typed defenses lets you take advantage of the mace APP, which gives you not only scorpion shield but an aoe immob you can slot enfeebled operation in.

Probably, but the cheaper purple sets help a lot.

ed: yeah, it's pretty easy. Just take the ice APP for the shield, get weave/CJ slotted up, and sprinkle in kinetic combats as needed.

hey guys somebody told me you we were putting people down for playing the game differently than us and I came running

If I saw that bio "in the wild," I'd probably interpret it as a fairly shallow metacommentary on the MMO genre.

I like it when people riff on the game universe in their bios; the ones that make me think about some aspect of the IP that I'd never thought about before are usually the most interesting ones, even if they aren't quite 'canon' or whatever. It's not as though something is somehow taken away from your story just because someone else wrote a contradictory one. Comic book continuity, QED.

My biggest issue with it is that it's an easy, played-out concept. The existential dilemma is territory well covered and there's not much you can do with it in 1024 characters. The autism thing feels like it's being done for shock value.

Some builds don't need them, certainly.

For the builds that do, is it worth shelling out a few a-merits to play the character the way I want to play it?

Yeah, it usually is.

Something to pay attention to with fire/rad is how quickly you burn end if you actually want to use any abilities other than toggles. I'm pretty happy with my build, but it'd be pretty costly these days.

man why wouldn't you just do a couple of safeguards?

Tough pretty much as important as weave, since it gives you a place to put a res/def IO. 3% global defense for one unslotted power selection is a pretty good deal.

Which assault secondary do folks like to pair with plant? Thinking about rolling a new one, can't decide on an assault set (not fire, I already have a couple of those.)

You can solve the issue with burst by just splitting the six slot thunderstrike in slug into two three-slot sets. You're already over the soft cap in s/l and energy, so ranged defense shouldn't be a big deal.

I don't think removing the -rec penalty and reducing the end cost to 75% of your bar would make them overpowered at all.

Revmoing the penalties wouldn't impact team performance that much. For a team, there's essentially no penalty for using a nuke. The blaster's out of comission for a little while (maybe), but the team isn't likely to really notice, since they still have 7 players ready to go.

If a blaster's using a nuke to solo I guess it represents a slight buff, since you won't have quite as much downtime after you nuke. Even in a high recharge build nukes are up pretty infrequently, though, so I don't really think this is a big deal.

I actually think war walls make a certain amount of sense, even in the present context of the lore.

Sure, stuff can fly over them, teleport past them, whatever. But paragon is essentially still a militarized zone; under constant rikti threat, inhabited by various military/terrorist/criminal groups, host to daily running battles between them and the police/heroes. In that environment it makes sense to cordon off the city so that you can at least contain any crazy stuff that goes down.

That way, when the hollows/faultline/boomtown (or generic rikti invasion) happen, you have ready-made chokepoints you can use to keep the madness from spreading all over the place.

Couldn't you approximate the "pull-in" effect with a pseudopet that cast teleport foe?

Like, locational aoe style field that tries to port mobs inside to the center of it?

you know, I'm not actually sure how useful that would be

From Diviner Maros' cult of the shaper arc:

I assume a lot of the hero TFs will never be the weekly strike target. They'll probably restrict it to coop TFs and the six that have direct hero/villain equivalents in terms of level range.

We'll just pretend the shard TFs don't exist

somebody twist your arm and tell you you can't roll another alt or something?

I also think it's interesting that, in a quick perusal of the thread, the folks who don't like speed runs largely focus on how good the rewards are for killing enemies and how the folks who prefer speed runs are misguided. Who's the farmer again?

I posted this in the 'things I don't like about alpha strike' thread, but it seems more appropriate here.

The level 50 TFs that've been in the game for years don't present any kind of challenge anymore. If you turn the difficulty up to +4 and run it that way, the TF isn't really any more challenging; it just takes longer to complete than it would if you plowed through at even level. Nothing qualitative about the experience changes other than how long the mobs take to die. As far as I'm concerned, that isn't very much fun.

On the other hand, seeing how quickly you can blow through an ITF is kind of an enjoyable challenge. It encourages your group to think of new strategies for completing the content and about how the different members of the team work together. If the group figures out a new way to do something that speeds up the run, that's gratifying.

My personal record for the ITF is a little over 19 minutes, by the way (this is with a semi-regular group of folks.) I haven't bettered that number in a while (and we aren't really trying anymore either), but it's somethign more interesting than clearing the same spawns of romans the same ways for the millionth time.

There seems to be this impression that speed runs are the domain of powergamefarmers or whatever the term of art is these days, and I guess that's true as far as it goes, but they're also one of the last ways to make old content fun. The idea that "min-max play" is the least interesting way to play kind of makes me laugh. Min-maxing's about pushing limits and finding new ways to do things; the preferred alternative, apparently, is to run stuff the same way over and over.

Anyway. I also think it's dumb to render judgment on the effects of the WST when it's only been going on for three weeks and hasn't included a TF below 45-50 yet. A week of folks blowing through sister psyche over and over again should provide a bunch of low-level stuff to buy.

For my DP/MM (softcapped S/L/E) the issue isn't so much how long the mez lasts, it's getting hit with one at all. If I dive into a group of enemies and catch a bad stun or hold before HoB goes, unless I hit break free immediately I'm probably dead anyway. The difference between being mezzed for five seconds and ten seconds is pretty much academic.

I like your build otherwise, though.

Oh, why HoB is awesome.

The animation is cool. Screw the haters, Equilibrium was awesome. Also, it doesn't activate quickly at all. It does have a knockdown and kind of a pseudo stun while it's going off though, and it gives you 10% positionals while the animation is playing.

The biggest 'pro' in favor of HoB is that you can chain straight into FSC, psishockwave or whatever other pbaoe ability you have and immediately kill anything HoB didn't quite finish off. I would definitely go either /fire or /psi if you decide on MM.

In terms of performance it's rain of arrows and it's not that close. Does a bunch of damage, recharges fast, and you can do fun stuff like fire it around corners.

I love HoB and full auto is fun (and has a great sound/animation), but RoA is just ridiculous.

They're both good, but my god fire/earth sucks down blue bar. Also, mud pots has a much smaller radius than hot feet, which was kind of disheartening.