UberGuy

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On the other hand, my Fiery Assault NPCs like to open with Blazing Bolt, but then will close in to melee.

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Heh. Brutal.

Agreed, though, it seems SS has a specific problem. Dual Blades mobs toss knives then run into melee. They only seem to toss knives again if you fall back away from them once it's recharged. That seems pretty sensible behavior to me.

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How would this work in a power like Drain Psyche?

Would I only get one use for the power or would it tick for each enemy effected?

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If it works like Performance Shifter, it may not do what you want at all in that power. It might give end and health to your targets.

It's best in a power that's always on. It's a "chance of", so the power needs to activate for it to work.

I assume, perhaps incorrectly, that team drops work like they do with regular PvE drops. That is, when a target is defeated, a drop chance is checked. If that drop check is successful in generating a drop, another random determination is made of who gets the drop. So the odds of a drop would be the same, but your odds of getting the drop would scale down linearly with team size.

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Oh, and I'll mention something else. All my minions were intended to have Assault Rifle and a melee power set. The Japanese got Martial Arts. There was nothing for me to give the Germans or Americans! Martial Arts was inappropriate, and things like Dark Melee had inappropriate powers or effects (darkness, Hurl and so on). How about a basic Brawling power set?

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I would really like to see some "generic" mob powersets that aren't clones of PC powersets. There are tons of (fairly) reasonable examples out there,especially among low-level mobs who combine some sort of pistol or assault rifle with some kind of punching or pistol whipping.

I find it limiting that all custom NPCs have to be "PCs-lite" in the case of minions, or near or trans-PC power for LTs and up.

Uh, where is that statistic from?

Also, a 1% chance does not mean you're guaranteed one drop every 100 kills.

There's nothing wrong with DA. It's actually one of the toughest sets out there. However, I think it's mostly scrolled off the bottom of the "what's hot" list, as it's not as new and shiny as WP and Shield. It's not as enduranace frienldy or as fire and forget as WP (which also has an easier "soft capping" potential). SR, of course, is also popular on these boards these days for ease of soft-capped defense.

DA has rather incredible survival potential, but it takes good timing and strong endurance management. These days IOs make the latter quite accessable, but not everyone wants to deal with clicks (and Dark Regen has quite the animation time).

Expect neither nerfs nor buffs to this set any time soon, IMO.

Not in the Arena. Not unless you set it up that way.

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My understanding is they've got about the same drop rate as purples. And they only drop off players. =/

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It's actually far, far higher a drop rate than that.

I think mob rares drop less often, per kill.

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Geting my first toon to lvl 45, I decided to respec to set up set enhancements. Looking them over with Midi, I found that simple invention enhancements gave better bonuses than set enhancements

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This is incorrect.

Lets say you have three things you can enhance, Acc, Dam and End.

You can get enhancers in formats like Dam, Dam/End and Acc/Dam/End.

If you use same level IOs, in two slots you could do something like this.

Acc and Dam
or
Acc/Dam and Acc/Dam (if you use two sets)

In the 2nd case, you get more of both Acc and Dam enhancement.

You could also do this.

Acc/Dam/End and Acc/Dam/End (if you use two sets)

In this case, you get the equivalent of slotting a same-level common Acc, a Dam and an End enhancer, but you only used two slots instead of the three that would have needed.

Consider a set like Crushing Impact and slot 5 pieces of it like so in Mid's

Acc/Dam
Dam/End OR Dam/Rech
Acc/Dam/End
Acc/Dam/Rech
Dam/End/Rech

Now try to match that level of Acc, Dam, End and Recharge enhancement with same-level common IOs. Simply put, you can't. Those 5 slots are offering about 10 slots worth of SO-level enhancement.

Finally, common IOs provide no set bonuses. Set bonuses can be extremely powerful if you stack sufficient numbers of them, especially if you stack them on benefits already present in your powersets.

(Seriously, did you think people spend all this money on things that don't actually do anything better?)

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Exploits do NOT EQUAL Farming.
Get your terms right, and the confusion mostly falls away.


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There is a big chunk of people who believe that farming is always an exploit.

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i noticed a good chunk of the chat bugs are gone.
Like the missing of global channel chats when zoning, and the one where when you have a key bind for a certain channel to chat in, that letter shows up, that no longer is occuring either.

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Neither of those is gone. I expereinced both today, and I saw other people getting the character spam in their chats.

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Would you be okay with NO XP in Arcs?

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Well, I'd never use it. I guess I'd be OK with that, but it seems like a big waste to me.

By the way, I think you meant "Poll", not "Pole".

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Do they really think that slowing down our play by taking away farming makes us want to stay?

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No, but they think that leveling really, really fast makes people leave.

One does not imply the other.

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So what exactly constitutes as 5 of the same bonus? Are there several categories?

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Five of the same name in your "Set Bonuses" list in your powers info window is the rule of thumb that seems to work.

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I believe that was fixed. IO's work at all lvls. You loose bonuses if you exep below the lvl of the power it's slotted in.

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Not correct. You may be thinking of "for 120s" IOs like Numina's and Kismets, or procs like Performance Shifter, which stop working when the power they are slotted in is unavailable (since unavailable powers can't be activated, and these IOs depend on activation).

Yes. The IO only stops working if you exemplar more than three levels below the IO's own level. Active/inactive status of the power it is slotted in is irrelevant.

To get the total chance of something going off you have to tally the odds of every possibility. Let's say you have three procs, A, B and C with chances to proc of Pa, Pb and Pc, respectively.

Odds of something activating is the sum of the odds of:
[*] A activating and (B and C not activating) OR[*] B activating and (A and C not activating) OR [*] C activating and (A and B not activating) OR[*] (A and B activating) and C not activating OR[*] (A and C activating) and B not activating OR[*] (B and C activating) and A not activatng OR[*] A, B and C activating

"AND" operations above mean you multiply the probabilities. "OR" operations mean you add them. The chance of something not happening is 100% minus the probability it does happen.

So that works out to:
[*] Pa * ((1-Pb)*(1-Pc)) +[*] Pb * ((1-Pa)*(1-Pc)) +[*] Pc * ((1-Pa)*(1-Pb)) +[*] (Pa * Pb) * (1-Pc) +[*] (Pa * Pc) * (1-Pb) +[*] (Pb * Pc) * (1-Pa) +[*] Pa * Pb * Pc

So if all these procs have a 20% chance of going off...
[*] 12.8% +[*] 12.8% +[*] 12.8% +[*] 3.2% +[*] 3.2% +[*] 3.2% +[*] 0.8*

That adds up to a 48.8% chance of some combination of procs going off on each activation.

Sorry, I know you asked about four, but three was a lot easier to illustrate.

That's understood. However, I am more interested in it having a high probability of being especially useful than I am of higher frequency of aribtrary activation. I only ever activate powers like BU or Aim when I know I am about to hit something worth hitting very hard or hitting a lot of foes at once. I have no interest in something that might every now and then go off on something I don't really care about doing extra damage. I'd rather know that when it goes off, it's going to be on something I really wanted to hit hard anyway. If I'm going to spend a slot somewhere, that's how I want it spent.

Frankly I find this proc not worth my time in either. The only power I've found it especially beneficial in is a fast-recharging click power like Follow Up.

I wouldn't recommend replacing recharge with it. After all, you not only slowed down how often BU comes back, but how often the new proc gets to check for activation. Definitely not worth it in my opinion.

It helps with both.

Well, individually. A Nightwidow can do both, and if she's +3 or higher, you'll lose sight of her if she does.

Still, that's a pretty edge case, and I find the IO very handy.

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Haven't tested this, but isn't it like the Confuse code, where the damage they do is weighted less? I.e., if they do 50% of the damage, they only steal (making numbers up) 25% of the xp?

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No, it's significantly a stronger effect than that.

One hit from X-Ray Beam from an AV onto a boss, accounting for something like 10% of the bosses life took off around 20% of his net worth in XP/inf. Those were estimates, but it looks like it's around a 2:1 ratio of reward lost to percentage damage dealt by the ally.

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I've been levelling a ninja blade/willpower stalker the past couple of weeks. He's 23 now and never had any problems with endurance. I slotted for end and he needed to burn blues exactly once, during a protracted fight with an EB.

Never played any of my previous stalkers past 10th level, maybe they're some sort of end-light AT. But mine was smooth sailing, endurance wise.

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Stalkers are sort of endurance efficient in normal solo missions. I'm not sure if you're soloing or not, but being able to obliterate one foe every spawn does wonders for your endurance needs.

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Anyone who says it HASNT affected their PuGing is Lying.

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I'm not lying. I haven't PuG'd in this game in about four years.

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The latest patch even included something to improve validation of hand-modified MA files.

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"Improve" as in "It was letting through illegal hand-edits, now it shouldn't"

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I'm not sure what your point is. I said "improve validation". The word "validation" is important.