UberGuy

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I used to be a lot more forgiving about insps, and back before ED, I was soloing all AVs w/my Fire/Rad using a tray full of blues. Nowadays w/high def builds being far more common, I think even allowing for T1 insps makes the job far, far easier. Consider a single small purp gives you 12.5% defense for 60 sec. At 50, that's 16 min worth of insps, plenty of time considering you can focus on more DPS w/the rest of your build since you now only need to hit 32.5% def to cap against most things.

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The trick is if you can't necessarily afford to try it with a tray of nothing but Lucks. If you need blues, reds or greens, that cuts down on how many Lucks you can chain.

I'm not saying insps don't make it a lot easier, but I do think whether they actually make it possilbe or not it depends on the baseline quality (primarily meaning IOs) of your build and what AV you're fighting.

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Your opinion may vary, but soloing AVs with temps (Shivans, Nukes) and insps (T3's) isn't exactly an accomplishment.

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In general, I agree.

I'm a little forgiving on the insps thing, because (especially for a melee soloer), even a full level 50 tray of T3s may not last you though the fight. It depends on the AV some.

In general, though, Shivans are an absolutely incredible addition to your capability to solo a lot of AVs. It's not so much that you aren't still soloing them, but using one lowers the bar on the achievment a lot. It's a little like the difference in saying you won a solo fistfight fight against 10 navy seals, and then revealing that you actualy brought a tank. I find that Shivans alongside a buffer/debuffer are easy mode for the majority of AVs.

WB Nukes I put somewhere in between. A Bio nuke especially is like a suped up bonus tray of red and green inspirations with a side course of Hasten. It's not a sure win against an AV, but it sure helps a ton.

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Uh... That would have still greased you. It may be a DoT but unless you change your resistance before the ticks apply, they are still going to do the damage, intangible or not.

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SR's scaling resistances will increase as the DoTs progress. That might be sufficient to survive it, but I haven't checked the math. (It's not especially hard, I'm just at work.)

I agree with TopDoc. It's worth noting on LotGs that there's something like a 3% difference in the defense enhancement granted by the global recharge IO at levels 25 and 50. On its own, that's not a difference I find worth worrying about, especially when it's slotted in places where +defense enhancement isn't a priority. Places like Combat Jumping or Hover.

Yeah. The "if" was only in regards to the fact that sometimes it won't do it. I'm not sure why. It's like if too much time passes it stops checking existing slots or something. It's odd.

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Sorry, this is simply not true. When I play a good arc in MA, I like to send comments and compliments to the writer.

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You send mail to people's globals?

Honest question: you realize that mail is not global, right? It goes to one character. I can edit my arcs on any character on that account. If you send a mail to one of my characters, I might not see it for weeks, and that's assuming that I even look at my mail when I switch to that character. Some of my old characters have mails that I've kept for posterity, so they have perpetual red "Email" labels.

I can't imagine not prefering global messages. I know I would vastly prefer to receive that.

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Haxx0r!

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No, selling it crafted for 70M was haxx0r.

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Doy ou have any stories to go with the pics?

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Not really. I did this for two reasons.

1) I like to solo content on +level challenge settings, and 30+ that means I get AVs.
2) I wanted to be able to solo AVs with my NW, the 1st character I'd tried it seriously on. My very 1st character was an /SR Scrapper, and back in the day, "pure" Defense powersets sucked compared to the alternatives. Even knowing that had changed, it took me a long time to come back to play one again, so I figured this was the one I'd go for broke on.

This character wasn't especially IOd until the mid 40s. The build in the screenshots was mostly common IOs in the attacks and clicks. The exceptions were that I had a Miracle and a Numina unique for recovery, a Performance Shifter proc for more, and a couple of LotGs (all bought with merits earned with other characters). I also frankenslotted Mind Link with Def/Rech set IOs to get it closer to perma.

There really wasn't a lot special about the fights. Mostly it was toe-to-toe, occasional fall back for Aid Self, and probably 4-5 defeats per, almost all, it seemed at times, when I had the AV at like 5% health. That was aggravating.

Minx was probably the coolest fight, but only because I actually defeated her without dying - the only time that happened.

My worst experience was with BaB. It seems like nearly every attack he has can one-shot you, which got pretty ridiculous after a while. I mean, his Handclap was taking me to the redline. Oh, and his Energy Transfer? It's an AoE. With knockback, IIRC.

After 6-7 deaths I decided that such a degree of dependance on good luck to win wasn't worth the notch on the belt and I used nukes and Shivans on him. I still had trouble with him, because his KB kept sending the Shivans flying (and they stand up slow) and he was killing them with the AoEs on top of it. It took at least 3 to finish him off, and I had two out at once for a while.

So yeah, I think BaB the AV-class entitiy is pretty ridiculous.

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tremor takes 3 seconds to cast, and most of us dont bother to take the power at all

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I would love to see you make a poll for that. Seriously, I'd find it fascinating, regardless of how it's presented.

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I've never taken a poll, but I don't know anyone who builds for performance over concept that keeps it.

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You all must not spam attacks as fast as I do then. I can run a regen out of end. With Stamina.

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How do you do that?! My DM/Regen never runs out of endurance. Well, almost never. My DM/Dark though can if the fight is too protracted.

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I can do it too, and that's with some decent end reduction in the attacks.

It takes a while, but I can do it.

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We don't know if (TauntDurationRemaining * 1,000) floors at one, or a much lower value, in order to keep aggro values low for anyone without a Taunt effect.

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Yeah, that could do it. If the taunt floor is .001 it would work out.

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http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Threat

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Hm. There seems to be something off about that formula they give. If you have no taunt effects, then your final threat calculation would be zero. We know that's not the case.

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orly? So you're saying they don't combine for effective invisibility?

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No. They're saying the fact that they combine for effective invisibility has nothing to do with -threat. Only +stealth.

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Giant Monsters are probably different.

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In this particular regard, it's not. They end up with the same resistances.

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How are they messed up? Patch notes on the EU boards says that new sounds in these areas are intentionally updated.

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They may be by design, but I dislike them myself. I'll be planning to try and preseve the old sounds.

Frankly, it irritates me when they "improve" cosmetic things like this after years and years.

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It was pointed out during the i14 beta that the MA would be heaven for PLing and farming and all the devs said was "don't do it." They never fixed the known Comm Officers exploit before it went live either.

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Yes, I'm well aware of what was said with regard to the MA. The post above specifically claims that PL was explicitly forbidden before Issue 14. That's what I'm asking for a reference on.

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Being able to level 1-50 in MA has nothing to do with PLing, which was listed as a no-no *before* MA went live. The devs did not promote PLing or exploiting; they expressing forbid it from day one.

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While I agree that the "level to 50 in the MA" thing was never an endorsement of PLing, I'm interested in where they expressly forbade it before.

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...constant Broadcast announcements of the formation of farm teams...

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Let me guess. Freedom? Virtue? I don't experience this problem. Of course, I am also hidden from search, because I find blind invites to team irritating. I use a network of global channels and global friends to find teams.

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...incessent spamming with PL and inf offers to the point that in-game e-mail has no value whatsoever...

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In-game email stopped having any value when they introduced global channels. I don't want spam any more than you do, but don't couch it in terms that suggest that there's some meaningful value that's being lost in the noise. There's not.

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...and general dumbing-down of the game...

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PLing does not directly contribute in any way to the dumbing down of the game. As long as the devs continue to enforce that PLing is not the primary way the playerbase reaches 50, continue to produce content like TFs and the occasional good story arc, people will continue to play those and strive to defeat new and tougher challenges. People who short cut to the "end" do nothing to that. What the devs have to look out for is that too many people find the game too easy, get bored and leave. At least that's the theory of why PL is bad.

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should be of any interest to any other player, as though we all operated in little asocial bubbles where "do as you will" is the whole of the law. We don't, and PLers prove this when they spam me with offers to PL my characters. We have to get along with one another somehow. And aggressive farmers/PLers make that very difficult.


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Look, I don't enjoy that stuff either, but don't claim that they're harming your ability to play the game. Show me where spam mails reduce your XP or your ability to enjoy a well written arc (Dev- or player- produced) and I'll buy it. Until then, even as someone who also dislikes these things, I write this off as hyperbole for the sake of winning points in the argument.

I think you misread me. You can't get them with merits either. Merit rolls and Gold ticket rolls are effectively the same thing.

As a result, there's no special value in farming TFs. What you do if you want purple drops is to defeat lots and lots of level 47+ mobs.

A TF is a reasonable place to do that, but you usually run TFs on a team, and every time there's a mob drop, it's randomly assigned among the people on the team. Thus, teaming is potentially bad for getting purples. The analysis of that is complex - teams usually fight more mobs more quickly, but do they do so at least N times as fast for a team of N players? This depends on the team and what they're fighting, and whether you could take on what the team is by your self.

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I've wondered if its latency itself or a result of the game's design to respond to latency. Eh, maybe thats an academic distinction but I seem to have an easy enough time to force its appearance with my normally-solid connection at home or even at my awesome connection at the university workplace. I actually have more problem forcing it to appear on larger teams where I'd expect more lag than when soloing.

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What we call "lag" is often a superset of high network latency. The "lag" on a large team is more often a result of stress on the client or even the server than of large delays in delivery (or processing of) of network traffic.

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No, it's not a demo, it's a video. Which could be easily made from a demo. Seeing isn't necessarily believing when to comes to game play footage, which is what makes machinima possible.

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There's no UI in a demo playback.

Whee!

I did a serious double take on that. That name stands out pretty well scrolling by in the chat window, but it scrolled out quickly due to lots of defeating and machine gun DoT messages.

The screenshot is of the window after scrolled back.

The guy who defeated the Fake and I were discussing how very karmic this was, because I got a Numi from a Gold Ticket roll the other day and gave it to him on that character.

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So there is no chance on getting a purple from a gold AE recipe roll then?

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None. Just like you can't get them from the random rolls at Merit Vendors. Gold rolls give you recipies from the combined TF/Trial drop pool.

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Actually what I was always wondering is why custom enemies got WAY more exp than regular ones in the first place?

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They don't and never did.

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I could massacre Warrior mobs from above, and I'm thinking to myself: why can't they just knock me out of the sky?

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Because what would be the bloody point of Hover if they could?

The power is supposed to offer that protection. That's why it's slow enough that people are always complaining about it, and why it costs about 3.3x as much endurance to run as Combat Jumping.