Siolfir

...

*waits for "slap in the face" comment*

Totally expected it - it's Monday. I didn't even try to get on.

I have an Elec/Elec/Mu, I took (in order) Mu Lightning, Ball Lightning, and Electric Fences.

Mu Lightning is a decent ranged attack and can be used to tag runners or just throw in your single target chain - it's faster animating than Havoc Punch and does the same damage, just all energy.

Ball Lightning is a good damage, fast animating AoE. If you want to get things gathered up (for a Lightning Rod, Thunder Strike, or Jacob's Ladder) it's good for getting a spawn's attention without locking them into place.

Electric Fences... eh. It's a smaller AoE than Ball Lightning (10' vs 15') and the -KB can be helpful, or it can hurt you (mobs that are flopping around aren't attacking). The damage isn't horrible, the animation is the same as the one for Mu Lightning, and it keeps things gathered up - which is useful for Energy Aura since there's no taunt cycling every 1-2 seconds to keep things interested.

All of them have a -end and chance for -recovery, which helps my Elec/Elec/Mu with keeping mobs drained (and therefor helping survival) - that's how she gets away without Tough for more S/L or having any form of healing or +regen outside of inspirations and Health.

[ QUOTE ]
Either go Elec/* stalker (resistance sets are subpar for stalkers because of their low hitpoint cap) or go */Elec brute since SS/ is superior to Elec/ in everyway.

Choose the stalker if you want strong nuking powers like Lightning Rod and Assassin's Strike or go with the brute if you want to literally become lightning.

For Stalkers I like Elec/Nin and for Brutes SM/Elec sounds like it would do well.

[/ QUOTE ]
I'll echo this advice - my first Brute is a (currently 50) Elec/Elec/Mu, and I was underwhelmed with the single target damage in Electric Melee for Brutes. To top it off, it's not even the best AoE damage, it just happens to have the most AoEs. The fix to Chain Induction helped somewhat, but it's still not great and IMO costs too much endurance on too long a recharge for the damage dealt.

When Electric Melee was ported to Stalkers, the addition of Assassin's Shock added some much-needed single target damage (it's the hardest hitting single target attack whether it criticals or not), Lightning Rod not dropping you out of hidden status and Thunder Strike having a 100% critical on the smashing portion (instead of 50% like the energy portion) allows for some fun combat tactics - do you open with AS to take out one troublesome mob, AS something that will live just for the demoralize effect, or try to nuke the whole spawn with LR + TS critical?

But if you're going to supplement the single target damage with Assassin's Shock in a meaningful way, you want a defensive set. You can't even rely on Placate, since the random -recovery on the attacks breaks it and causes the mob to remain aggressive on you. You need to be missed for 2 seconds because of the interrupt, and that means defense.

Electric Armor on Stalkers (besides the joke link in my sig) isn't great. Lightning Field on Brutes can help keep a group of mobs surrounding you out of endurance when combined with Power Sink, causing them to use lower damage, lower cost attacks. On top of that, Stalkers have fewer hit points and lower resistance caps, meaning they're going to take more damage (2.5x) even in the best case scenario with energy damage or under Power Surge and can't afford to even take as much as Brutes, let alone more.

Of course if you're solo, Stalkers generally have enough damage that it's not an issue - one mob dies right away, and you're only ever likely to have 3 on you at once. AS one, placate the second (if you haven't hit it yet, there's no -recovery to break it), kill the third with a critical, and go back to the one you placated.

It's not that it can't work, either way (ElM Brutes, ElA Stalkers). It's that it's not optimal and requires more effort to make it work.

[ QUOTE ]
Elec/Storm can be brutal, especially at Elite Boss (or is she an Archvillain, and would've scaled down to it?) levels.

[/ QUOTE ]
She's an AV that scales down to EB in Sharkhead. There's another arc where she shows up in Cap, but it's been a while since I ran it and I forget if she was a Boss or EB there (I think only a Boss).

I've had some characters that had an incredibly hard time against her in Sharkhead, and I've had some characters that just destroyed her in seconds (on Vicious, I just popped a few reds and killed her with around 2 runs through my attack chain on my ElM/Nin Stalker - I didn't try her as an AV there but others have taken her down as an AV fairly easily, including the EM/ElA Brute).

[ QUOTE ]
I'm really enjoying my EM/Nin stalker.

[/ QUOTE ]
I actually deleted mine after my ElM/Nin passed her in levels to free up the spot on the server.

I've since made an EM/WP Stalker on a different server, though.

It's okay, yes - but I'd still work Stamina in.

There really are a lot of skippable primary and secondary powers, but if you really want all of them feel free to make a DM/SR Stalker.

That doesn't address the point that it never should have happened in the first place, nor does it provide any assurance that the same thing won't happen again later on.

"Sorry I shot out your leg, but we'll pay for your medical bills until the next time we shoot you" doesn't cut it.

Edit to add:
It's not because I hate the devs or hate the game that I'm upset and posting about this - there are lots of things I still like about the game and I enjoy teaming with a lot of the people I run into. But the situation is being handled poorly, and it shouldn't have ever come to that point - the devs are human and make mistakes. It'd be nice if they owned up to them instead of blaming it all on "those ebil farmers" and enforcing silence about any mistake that they made so they're free to do it again in the future because of all of the other people who will also just believe "oh, it's just those ebil farmers".

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
/stupidity

[/ QUOTE ]
Now if only the devs would do this... sadly, my "joke post", made to seem utterly ridiculous, is how they've handled things this past week.

[/ QUOTE ]except they haven't, its a purposely inaccurate straw man for a much more serious case and you know it.

[/ QUOTE ]
The fact that they've been deleting posts and threads that point out that they're not hitting farmer accounts, but are hitting accounts for people who simply had a level pact character that they hadn't logged on in a bit (when neither they nor their pactmate had ever stepped foot into MA) indicates to me that there's a far larger issue than you'd like to believe.

Sure, they probably actually hit some people that were "egregiously abusing" a bug. They also hit several people who weren't, but instead were using a specifically added feature (level pacts) in the manner in which it was intended (keeping an offline pactmate at the same level as one that had more playtime availability)... when neither of the characters ever entered the Mission Architect buildings and the issue they were trying to deal with was "MA abuse".

That sort of thing should bring about a public acknowledgement, apology, and reassurance it won't happen again. Not a cover up.

Since everyone seems to want to turn MA exploits into some sort of crime, here's a real-world crime example. If a cop turned a fully automatic weapon on a storefront that was being held up and hit 4 robbers and 2 innocent customers, you're damned sure that if they just said "oh well" about the civilians and then tried to bury that it ever happened there would be repercussions - whether the people were killed or not (people have posted that after days of dealing with CS they've gotten their accounts reactivated and characters undeleted). It's gross negligence on the part of the devs that it happened and they should own up to it.

Oh, I still keep RI; I just don't use it much. It's still useful solo, when the pace is slower and I'm the only one they'll be shooting at anyway (see the "I'm expected to take the alpha" clause). In that case, what I open with depends on the spawn, though - since my level 50 /Rad is an Ice/Rad Corruptor, it's often Freeze Ray (for single-lt spawns) or Bitter Freeze Ray then Freeze Ray (for lt + minion spawns). With Sonic/ it'd be Siren's Song.

I find the mez-them-before-they-mez-you approach to work better than simply reducing their chance to hit by a bit once you get into the 30s; my Fire/Kin Corruptor doesn't have that luxury and tends to rely on mobility, line of sight, and tricking the stupid AI to reduce the incoming attacks.

As for RI over EF on a high damage/high damres team... -resistance will make the high damage stick better, and if they're high enough damage that the -resistance doesn't matter then the spawn will be dead before RI finishes animating. I may as well throw out a couple of blasts in that time and try to pick something off via Scourge.

[ QUOTE ]
QR
I'm currently fiddling around with tankers(mmm fire blast) but can't find a proper recharge formula.
Werner posted a chart with the =ROUND.UP(100*Recharge/Req.Rech;0)/100-1
but it's not working for me the numbers are way off when i check in mids and sometimes there negatives.
What am i doing wrong?

[/ QUOTE ]
The recharge formula the game uses is:

Final Recharge Time = Base Recharge Time / (1 + Recharge Buffs)

Now, for some math, using R(f) for final recharge, R(b) for base recharge, and Buffs for recharge buffs:

R(f) * (1 + Buff) = R(b)

R(f) - (R(f) * Buff)) = R(b)

R(f) * Buff = R(b) - R(f)

And, substituting things back in with the full name:

Recharge Buff (needed) = (Base Recharge Time - Final Recharge Time) / Final Recharge Time


So, for example, if you needed to know the recharge needed to get Bone Smasher (base of 8 seconds recharge) to a 2.9 second recharge (so you can squeeze it around an Energy Transfer) it would be:

(8 - 2.9) / 2.9, or 1.75862...

That's +176% recharge, counting slotting and any global recharge buffs such as set bonuses, specific power buffs, or Hasten. As per the original post, the chains were just set with +250% recharge in each power, so the recharge time on each would be (base recharge / 3.5).

[ QUOTE ]
/stupidity

[/ QUOTE ]
Now if only the devs would do this... sadly, my "joke post", made to seem utterly ridiculous, is how they've handled things this past week.

[ QUOTE ]
Regarding debuffing toggles:
Radiation Emission's and Storm Summoning's debuff toggles also draw aggro. Do you skip Snow Storm and Hurricane on Storm Summoners or also avoid taking Radiation Infection and Enervating Field on Rads, or do you just not play the sets?

[/ QUOTE ]
This wasn't directed at me, but...

I don't ever open with Snow Storm - slowing their rate of attacks doesn't help me when the response from the mobs is going to either mez or kill me and turn it off anyway. I typically open with either Freezing Rain or Sleet, so I at least have the knockdown and mob panic mode to break up the alpha.

As for Radiation Infection... no, I don't use it much on teams past the 20s unless I'm the one expected to be taking the alpha. By those levels I expect you to have your defenses and accuracy mostly covered so that I'm not wasting 3+ seconds every encounter with a -def -tohit power instead of just using less than 2 for EF to make everything die faster.

[ QUOTE ]
You are getting an advantage by abusing a game mechanic in a manner clearly not intended by the devs: EXPLOIT!


[/ QUOTE ]
zomg!

Delete the character and ban the account!

Generally speaking, attacks with animations of 2 seconds or higher are a break-even or loss of Fury at values under 80 - you lose 2 points of Fury per second and gain 4 for attacking (general case - it goes up against AVs, players, and in theory bosses but I haven't paid that much attention).

Since the only attack DM really loses Fury on is Shadow Maul (SL and MG are essentially break-even) you need to include some shorter animation attacks between if you're going to maintain it with just attacking. Smite, Brawl, Shadow Punch, Boxing, Gloom... these are the Fury builders, as is simply being attacked (ie, turn off OG and/or CoF until you've got a good level of Fury).

I find it extremely silly that the devs took away Ice Armor from Brutes and gave them Energy Aura ostensibly because "slowing the mobs attacking you hurt Fury" and left them with a powerset with an unsuppressed stealth and no continuous taunting mechanism so that it's harder to keep things attacking you in the first place (EA) and a set that has unsuppressed stealth with a minion-level permastun and lt-level fear to prevent them from attacking by stunning and reducing the frequency of those attacks through fear (DA).

Edit: and since you asked, AoE powers only increase Fury once, not once per target.

Electric Armor doesn't need Dark Consumption; Power Sink recharges faster and will keep your endurance topped off. You lose a long recharge AoE that requires a good deal of slotting, but considering how much it actually contributes to AoE damage due to that recharge...

So Shadow Maul, Touch of Fear, Taunt, Conserve Power, and Dark Consumption. If you'd rather, you can replace Shadow Punch in your chain with Boxing (eww) to save a power choice since you're planning on taking Tough/Weave anyway - once you start getting into high DPA attack chains neither one will end up used that often - you'll want to use Smite and Gloom as frequently as possible, filling with Midnight's Grasp and Siphon Life. Dropping Shadow Punch will give you the option of picking up Taunt for the -range.

[ QUOTE ]
I'm tired of hearing from folks who are leaving the game because the devs are trying to make the game challenging, and fun with limited exploitation. So many people are screaming "No Fair!" because their ability to exploit the game is being curtailed. Other MMO's do pretty much the same thing. They want to reduce the ease at which players exploit the game. Players think it's their right to "play the game the way they want to" even though it hurts others. And, yes, farming excessively does hurt others.... how do you think RMT'ers get their influence/infamy? They exploit the game... getting salvage, recipes, etc.. sell them for lots of influence.. then sell that influence for real money. And there are plenty of players who buy the influence which is against EULA. If there weren't customers for it, they'd soon go out of business. I think those who complain the most should go to another game... and find something to moan about there. So you folks who love to farm... find a game where farming IS the game... and farm to your hearts' content. Or perhaps, stick around here and play the game the way it is intended to play. (What a novel idea.)

[/ QUOTE ]
Echoing the learn to read response, as well as stating (as I did in another thread about this) that I hope people who have nothing better to do with their time than post anti-farming rants into threads about legitimate concerns with the direction the dev team has taken things get banned from the game and forums.

Originally I said 3 days, I'd really just prefer they never post again. If that's all they have to say, it's obvious that they don't care about discussion or dialogue, they just want to pretend they have some false sense of superiority without even bothering to pay attention to what the complaints are. While they're at it, shut down their game accounts, too. After all, the devs are within their rights to do so, and that's what the complaints are about - such a thing happening to people who never did anything wrong.

When people that aren't farming and never did anything wrong are getting characters deleted and accounts banned due to the measures the devs are taking, then the devs are completely in the wrong. Just because customer service has restored the character(s) afterwards, typically after the ban had already expired because they don't respond quickly, is no excuse - it never should have happened in the first place.

Having the right to do something as per the EULA does not mean that it is right to do so, or that it should be done.

[ QUOTE ]
Can you actualy farm decently with Dm/ElA? Meaning Lib. Yes its my new obsession hehe.

[/ QUOTE ]
DM isn't a good farming set because it's too single-target oriented.

You can do okay with /ElA with either Tough, Aid Self, or both; generally I see it farmed with FM or SS, and either /FA, /WP, or /Inv.

Go with /hide, select "Hide from searches" and "Hide from invites."

You can't get invited from a blind invite, and they can't see your name on the search UI to see you in the first place. In the meantime, your SG and friends list can still see you.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
If you like the animation and want the harder hitting, slower recharging attack, then by all means take Barrage.

But...

*** Warning: Personal Preference Ahead ***

Barrage is the lowest DPA of the attacks in EM, even after the damage increase (Stun isn't an attack in my mind). If you're building towards having an attack chain, it's still not worth it.

[/ QUOTE ]

Barrage has been increased to 6s recharge right? Its activation is 1.33s. Is it that bad? Bone Smasher is 1.5s. If DPA matters that much, shouldn't I just take Barrage and Energy Punch and use TF during Hidden?

I think Bone Smasher has better stun chance right?

[/ QUOTE ]
Bone Smasher has the higher stun chance, higher damage, and higher DPA* when compared to either Energy Punch or Barrage.

It's also got the higher recharge (8 seconds).

Personally on my EM Stalker I went with Energy Punch and Bone Smasher, the obvious choice at 6 of Assassin's Strike, then used veteran attacks to fill as needed until level 26. Yes, Energy Transfer is a lot slower, but it's still the best DPA attack in EM.



* - once you account for the fact that the game will only let you fire a power every 0.132 seconds, so there's always going to be at least that much dead time between one power ending and the next firing; in-game numbers will show EP having higher DPA than BS.

If you like the animation and want the harder hitting, slower recharging attack, then by all means take Barrage.

But...

*** Warning: Personal Preference Ahead ***

Barrage is the lowest DPA of the attacks in EM, even after the damage increase (Stun isn't an attack in my mind). If you're building towards having an attack chain, it's still not worth it.

[ QUOTE ]
Also, you missed one:
Merit Reward.
I'm not attuned to the natural forces of fate myself, but I'd say this is the mark of a driven person who will go nuts trying to get something done. You DO it, no matter what!

[/ QUOTE ]
Actually, what this says to me is that you are naturally drawn to playing a villain, and yet still play Kalinda and Burke's missions.

At level 3-4 I tend to get my first merit reward, just because I run the first arc to get their phone number so I won't have to come back to Mercy to talk to them for the Cape and Aura missions. Salvage can drop then, but it's not likely to.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Worth noting that an Electric Armor is inferior to an Energy Aura if the enemies are higher level than you - ElA only shines when it can apply it's End Drain.

[/ QUOTE ]
Now, if Energy had a damage aura, I'ld be all over it.

As it is I keep thinking about making an ice tanker just so I can get a defense based set with a damage aura. Oh, the horror.

[/ QUOTE ]
Tanker? What is this "Tanker" if which you speak?

Electric Melee for Stalkers works fairly well also - Thunder Strike hits for a base 193.48 in PvP with a guaranteed critical from Hide of 290.22 and 50% chance for 386.96. Note that an Assassin's Strike critical is 398.28 base in PvP.

Note that ET doesn't critical (it does 228.73) and TF has a lower critical value than the guaranteed TS critical (253.61). TS also has a 50% chance for stun and a 40% chance for a 4-sec -recovery, costs less endurance than TF and the same as ET, and has a 2 second shorter base recharge.

Oh, I'm not saying I don't build with attack chains in mind and I also try to pick the best DPA attacks - just that the order that they're used gets changed based on in-game scenarios. For example, I frequently take at least one AoE simply because if I'm surrounded it's better DPA than any of the single-target attacks. Dark Obliteration is about even in DPA with the old Energy Transfer on the 5th target hit, and it's not hard to get 5 things in the radius of it. With 3 targets it's better than anything else Brutes get*, and near the top with 2.

Single target chains are all well and good, but they don't come into play very often in a meaningful situation (essentially only when trying to solo AVs and/or GMs). I just like the exercise in theory, and it gives me ideas for building - whether I stand toe-to-toe with a mob and continually use the chain or not.


Edited for footnote:
* - On thinking about it more, Ball Lightning is better (32.23 per target vs 31.60), but Gloom (55.64) beats out Mu Lightning (41.70) enough that you're better off with Ghost Widow than Scirocco as a patron. All numbers are base unenhanced at level 50 with 0 Fury.

[ QUOTE ]
The last time I checked Red Tomax's site the Stalker version of EM had lower stun chances on most attacks than other ATs that get EM. Can anyone confirm that's true? In the past I've presumed it was a PvP balance thing, but with EM being nerfed and PvP reworked, I wonder if it wouldn't be worth trying to get Stalker EM brought up to match other versions.

[/ QUOTE ]
It's definately true - EM's stuns were nerfed out of the box for Stalkers and haven't been touched since.

And not that it's common knowledge, but once you account for the frequency of the server ticks (.132 seconds) and the effect it has on when you can activate powers, Bone Smasher is a slightly higher DPA than Energy Punch.

You can have a decent chain with Energy Transfer -> Bone Smasher -> Total Focus -> Bone Smasher with 216% recharge in TF, 191% in ET, and 176% in BS; if you're going to use damage procs to boost it you'll want faster animating attacks but those are the three highest DPA attacks in EM.