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The beauty of digital goods is that since the initial costs are fixed and the per-unit cost is precisely nil, you can afford to sell all the units you can at $8, and then sell all the units you can at $4, and then sell all the units you can at $2, and so on. What do you get for $8 that you don't get for $2? The chance to have the items now instead of when the price goes down to $2 (which may be a long wait). The point is that there's no need to discuss a fixed price point when talking about earnings; you can hit all price points in the fullness of time. The trick is knowing what the initial price point should be, and when and how much to decrease it.
This is how Steam works, and it works great. -
I ran this last week. Fully agreed with the above. Definitely a high HSQ (Holy Moly Quotient). Particularly impressive was the way several maps were sewn together in each mission. And, love him or hate him, you have to respect Castillo's commitment to drama.
I'm looking forward to running the new villain arc now. Enough that I'm pushing through my Power and Crusader Praetorians double quick. -
I am that Ill/Rad, and I approve this message. Though, to be entirely honest, I had heard that blue fire is bad. I never felt that any of my deaths were forced, but rather that they were due to my own mistakes, and I'm thinking about ways to do it better next time.
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Sig.
Less pithily: the rating and sorting system is terrible. A better system would put good fresh content at the top of the list. Such systems exist, but the devs didn't pay attention to work done elsewhere and instead ran with systems that have already failed in other places. How they thought a five star system was a good idea after having observed the old forums' thread rating system for years is beyond me. -
Having run this on my Ill/Rad, I've been thinking about how I'm going to handle it on my Tanker. I have a couple questions for those who've run it more:
- When a character is flying, I know the targeting flame will appear in midair, and the sword will explode in midair. Does the resulting patch do damage underneath the flame?
- Has anyone tried having one character be the "movement leader", whose job is to move out of the way of patches when they appear, with everyone else on /follow to that person? In particular, has anyone tried this in conjunction with Group Fly?
- Does anyone know the trigger for Battle Maiden's cohorts spawning, and if so, how many waves are there?
- How many flying swords spawn? Is it possible for one tanker to keep all of their aggro? If one is destroyed, where will its replacement appear from?
Depending on the answers to these, I think I might have a strategy to try on our next run, where a Tanker or two will be extremely useful. When my support character died, it tended to be in one of three ways:
1. Sword burst patch, usually either due to bad timing, too many patches spread around the area, or failing to realize that I couldn't dodge in a direction due to the zone wall.
2. Flying sword aggro.
3. Cohort aggro.
Battle Maiden herself rarely did any damage to me, in part due to good tanking and in part because I was staying well away and tossing Phantom Armies in her face. (Incidentally, Phantom Army ignores sword bursts, so there's a minor blessing). I am currently thinking of a strategy that goes like this:
- One tank pulls the flying swords, and only the flying swords. Their job is to keep sword aggro, not kill any swords, keep the swords away from Battle Maiden, and not die in a fire.
- The other tank pulls Battle Maiden and her cohorts when they spawn. Their job is to keep BM and cohort aggro, kill cohorts, and not die in a fire.
- The movement leader is, ideally, a ranged fighter with Group Fly. The movement leader's job is to float above and to the side of Battle Maiden and attack/debuff/etc from range. When the movement leader sees a blue patch under them, they detoggle Group Fly (which can be done in the middle of an animation!) and drop below the sword burst. Then they run to a different spot, retoggle Group Fly, and fly back up into the air and continue attacking.
- The rest of the team is either ranged attackers, who put the movement leader on follow and attack BM from range (thus keeping sword bursts clustered so they can be more easily dodged), or melee attackers, who follow the BM tank, kill cohorts, and attack BM.
Of course, if sword bursts do damage below their drop point, or if swords can't be taunted by a single tank, or if BM + cohorts is too much for one tank, there might be issues.
Incidentally, this is one encounter where heals actually help a lot. If a tank gets clipped by a sword burst, a quick HP top-up can make a big difference. -
Quote:I can vouch for Elec/Earth Dom. I was really surprised by the strength of this combo - the sleep, end drain, single-target damage and multi-target knockdown make for safe and effective crowd control from a very early level. I got through Praetoria with few difficulties before inherent Stamina, and it's even better with SOs and more power picks.I have become enamored lately with dominators again. I haven't tried it, but buzzing around in my altitis inflicted brain was an EC/earth assault. It just seems... different. On my list of sets to try.
Another one I've been having good luck with that I haven't seen a lot of is Traps/AR Defender. This is another good combo for Praetoria because it eats ambushes for breakfast, and in the later game Web Grenade + Ignite is insane. -
For the purpose of satisfying one's own curiosity, something to test DPS on that isn't quite as tough as a pylon would be interesting. Perhaps one of the target practice dummies, or something like that: open a dialogue to start, get 5 minutes to pour on damage, get a report at the end. Or you could make an AE mission with a Mole Machine to punch and do the math yourself.
As something to have visible on all characters at all times? No. For many reasons. -
The difference between 27% and 37% melee defense is the difference between 23% and 13% admittance: you nearly halved your incoming melee damage, and that's before considering the effect of lowering the chance of debuffs hitting. So, yes, it does make a pretty big difference.
I did not build my SS/Elec for defense, but I did take Tough and slot up Power Sink and Lightning Field for endurance drain. I do all right at x4, can't really manage higher, but that's already well above baseline performance and satisfying for me. -
Assassin's Shock at 47, here. It's really not that important for Elec/.
I'm a little more surprised by Danger Sense at 28, and some of the slotting choices.
Worth noting: Kuji-in Sha provides a Toxic Res bonus, and can be slotted with Resistance sets - including the Steadfast unique. You don't have to activate the power to get the defense bonus, either. -
Pithily: The Alpha Slot is not a power. It is a slot. Specifically, it is an extra enhancement slot on all your other powers. Just like the normal enhancement slots, it does nothing unless you put an enhancement in it. By itself, it is exactly as useful - and exactly as useless - as an enhancement slot you just added to a power.
Incidentally, folks have been saying that with Inherent Fitness, they could use some extra slots. The Alpha Slot is some extra slots. Specifically, it's 31 extra slots - more if you're a Kheld. -
Come to think of it, if you hate the market, why do you want a farming character? You don't want the extra drops and you don't need the extra money.
Of course, I'm happy to offer suggestions for performance tuning your character regardless, but it does puzzle me a bit.
Also, what the moose said. Fire/Dark Corr gives a lot of bang for the buck as a low-budget farming character. -
Frankenslotting, if done carefully, is comparable in price to generic IOs. It takes some care and patience though. Make sure you look at all the sets that a power can take - for instance, you can get a good deal on acc/rech taunt IOs that as a Brute you can slot in your attacks.
Also, if you do not make at least cursory use of the market, your farming is going to produce greatly diminished returns. At the least, it's very much worth your while to check the difference between what you get for a recipe and what you'd get for the crafted enhancement.
One last bit of economic advice: rather than siphon off the earnings of your primary earner to your alts immediately, invest in the character and build up their performance. The dividend is in significantly greater earnings in the future.
In terms of build choices, I think you have a number of slots to play with. Rise to the Challenge can easily get away with just one endredux, as can Indomitable Will, and the psi defense of IW rarely comes into play. Rage provides enough tohit bonus by itself that it doesn't really need more tohit slotting; if you want to invest in a few IOs, then two tohit/rech pieces plus a generic tohit and rech will let you get almost the same benefit in 4 slots. If your generic IOs are in the 45-50 range, then you can also drop two slots from High Pain Threshold and remove a single Heal and a single Resist IO without significantly reducing the benefit.
So, what do you do with all those slots? Four slots in Tough: 3 resist, one endredux. Four slots in Weave: three defense, one endredux. Three slots in Health: three heal. Four slots in PP: two heal, two endredux. All together, this boosts your resistance, defense, and regeneration significantly.
If you're still having trouble with survival, consider switching to Soul Mastery and picking up Gloom and Darkest Night. The first is a hard-hitting ranged ST attack, and the second is a -dam and -tohit toggle debuff.
One last question. What are you fighting? It makes a difference. -
Community-driven content rating systems are not easy to do right. However, I feel the developers somewhat dropped the ball in failing to look at other existing systems - including the forums of their own game! - and how their design contributed to their success or failure. And they really dropped the ball in assigning a low priority to addressing the issues with the content rating system.
The ideal system would bring fresh, interesting content to the top of the heap, encouraging authors to keep innovating and players to keep playing. The current system has strong disincentives for the most prolific and skilled authors to create new content, and no incentives for the players to seek out new content.
Or, see sig. -
If Stoners get dropped by LR, it's probably because they're not running Rooted. You need that drain resist.
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Don't pass over the sleep grenade in Munitions Mastery. For a blaster with decent single-target control and damage, it allows a high degree of safety when soloing.
Of course, as you are a tripmine aficionado, it's less useful to you. -
When discussing complementary sets for /Devices, it's worth pointing out the synergy between Assault Rifle.Ignite and Devices.Web Grenade. Ignite creates a small, extremely high damage burn patch with an Afraid effect so enemies will tend to leave it rather than taking damage. Web Grenade prevents enemies from leaving the burn patch. Hilarity ensues. Particularly notable here: AV-class enemies have poor protection from immobilization and can be immobilized with two applications of Web Grenade.
Of course, the synergy is also present for AR and Traps. -
LR does not crit from Hidden. However, it also does not break Hidden status, so you can follow up with a crit from Hidden. Like, say, Thunderstrike.
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Quote:Yes, but there's quite a bit of time investment beforehand. Enough so that it is frequently more efficient time-wise to just go and shoot 'em, especially in any sort of team context. What I'm warning against is the scenario where between +range in TD and -range in Smoke Grenade, you end up in a situation where you can attack continuously from outside the effective range of your enemies. This is significantly more efficient than mine-laying and has virtually zero risk, and that's a no-no.I think "cheap" is precisely the intent of /devices. It's a set built around the intent that, if you take all the powers in it, you can kill a x8 spawn by standing around a corner from them and /em walllean, because they will die trying to get to you after the time bomb goes off.
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I wonder if the aura is missing a "does not stack from same caster" flag...
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Quote:I would just like to note that the number of paths from 1 to 50 vastly outnumber the number of paths from 50 to Incarnate. Especially if you count AE, the explicit purposes of which included creating many new paths from 1 to 50. AE, mission arc merits, Ouroboros, scanners/newspapers, tips and HVAMs, the Faultline and Hollows revamps, RWZ and Cimerora and Praetoria - all of these point to a general goal of diversifying the paths toward rewards, whether they be XP or otherwise.I'd argue that the lower level content will get stale much more quickly than the Incarnate arc because all of those 60 or 100 alts had to do the lower level content first (and that's why I love additions like Going Rogue).
The contrast between this general thrust toward multiple paths of advancement and the single path to opening Incarnate is worth noting, I think. -
Regarding TD.
- I believe Arcanaville once did an analysis of how much of a damage boost Build Up actually is when averaged over its cycle time, and the result was actually somewhat less than Assault. Now, obviously, there's a fair bit of utility in burst damage that this analysis is eliding, but keep this in mind when discussing giving TD a damage boost.
- A +range boost in TD, on the other hand, would be perhaps more useful than one might think. The reason is cones. Boosting the range of a cone increases its coverage area by the square of the increase, because lengthening the cone also makes it broader at its far end. That can translate into a surprisingly large increase in efficacy. This happens to be especially good news for AR/Dev, since AR has three cones, but I believe every blast set has at least one cone. And then there's the general benefit of just being able to fight from longer range, which also benefits /Dev particularly since it has no powers that require being close to the enemy to use, and in fact has a number of tools to help remain at a distance.
You could also add a -range component to Smoke Grenade, but that might start to get a little cheap... -
I don't mind that unlocking Incarnate requires completing an arc.
I do mind a little that unlocking Incarnate requires completing one, particular arc.
It's not a bad arc. It's just going to get old. Like the cape mission, and the aura mission, and Monty. The patron arcs are a somewhat superior model, because there are four of them.
Rather than one four-door arc, it would have been interesting to see four or five arcs: say, one for each origin, or one for each of the four Alpha boost types. They wouldn't have to be wholly unique, even; just one or two unique missions per arc would make a lot of difference. It is stated that there are many paths to the Well. It would have been nice to actually have more than one path to the Well. That would make me excited about unlocking Incarnate multiple times, as it'd be a way to see the multiple paths.
Water under the bridge now, though. -
I have an EM/DA brute. I stun things. They stagger away from me. Then I'm sad.
I use Mu Electric Fences. It has a 10 foot radius. That's kind of small. Also, it doesn't immobilize bosses. I stun bosses. They stagger away from the crowd. Then I'm sad.
What can I do to keep enemies close to me? Will Quicksand do the job? -
If you're seriously interested in survivability analysis, which is what I think you're going for here, you'll want to look up Arcanaville's mitigation analysis spreadsheets. I believe that analysis abstracts "enemies" out entirely and just analyzes ability to cope with damage over time.
Note that this kind of analysis is only really applicable to ATs that accept hits as part of their playstyle. As soon as you throw control or massive frontloaded damage into the mix, this model goes straight out the window.