Unthing

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Ive a lvl 47 ICE/DEV blaster which i loved playing before ED. I went solo on inv. most of the time and lvled pretty fast. Since ED i can still do this only a bit slower. I seem to run outta end quicker.

Before ED i had
3 attacks =6 damage
TD =4 TOHITT buffs 2 recharge
6 slotted hasten and stamina

I now have

3 attacks = 3 damage 3 recharge
TD = 3 TOHIT buffs 2 end buffs and 1 recharge
3 slotted stamina and i have dropped hasten.
Assuult = 3 end red
tacttics = 3 TOHIT buffs 3 end red

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I don't know how you managed in I5 with perma-hasten as Ice. I ran out of end too quickly when I activated it.

I currently have 3 dam, 2 recharge and 1 end reduction in most attacks I think one has 2 ends in it, the weakest one I think. I have 1 end reducers in TD and run Combat Jumping and Cloaking device all the time.

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Im thinking of going with 3dam 2 recharge 1 end red in my attacks. what way are you guys slotting your attacks now.(if you use TD)Also i seem to miss a lot more which i cant understand. And hover now sucks

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To Hit buffs were reduced but I6 tactics + targetting drone = 4 slotted I5 targetting drone. I suspect you are just seeing the increased streaks of misses that we all are getting. Over time it averages out, but streaks are far worse than the occasional miss ( both for perceived accuracy and survivability ).

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Assassin's Impale includes everything I can/have assassinate(d). These include a gate! and... 'shifty eyes' even a filing cabinet :P.

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Good job!
I hear they're very dangerous if they're only wounded.

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They can be dangerous in groups too ( like any enemy for a stalker).

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i gave it a whirl for a half day running perma whirlwind, i found that as it bounced people so high into the air that my dps was really low as i only got a chance to hit them once every bounce, so while i wasnt getting hit much i wasnt hitting much either.

I tried it when they first click powered IH as the endurance costs were similar. but i found with that additional cost per baddy my endurance really went thru the floor fast.

certainly its a cool looking idea but i couldnt get it working either.

minus points i really found:
the whirl radius was too small
the end use per hit was too much
it seemed to effect my jumping rather badly so i couldnt manouver as well as before.
vastly lowered dps

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For the reasons you said perma is over the top.

They have reduced the end per second and per hit so that it is more reasonable. However I wouldn't suggest it unless you have stamina and quick recovery or perhaps conserve power.

I found that with 3 knockbacks and 3 end reds, I can keep endurance usage heavy ( as opposed to unmanageable ) by moving around. DPS is reduced, but with spines as my secondary I have 2 good ranged attacks so it isn't as badly reduced as it could be. The knockbacks are important as the end cost is per fling and knockback delays the time until you next get the end cost.

It works to counter groups who are slightly too large for sustained dps and gives you another tactical choice. As far as the radius is concerned you have to move around a lot. Luckily as you are never rooted with whirlwind it isn't as much of a probably as it could be. This is probably the best tactics anyway as the enemies take a while to get up after landing, so they don't attack you for a while.

Also because it reduces the DPS you are receiving it works as a oh I'm going to die power if you are regen.

I quite like it as a situational power.

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Stalkers might work reasonably well in a duo, taking out the boss/lieutenant while the pets take care of the minions, but I gather they're not too hot in big groups because they tend to draw a lot of aggro on themselves after the initial strike.

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Well to turn the question round a mastermind is a Stalker's best pal. 1 masteminds worth of pets tend to take most of the aggro from the stalkers. Levelling a stalker you tend to work out how to deal with the aggro system. 1 on 1 a stalker is probably one of the most dangerous opponents, so anything that can get aggro off the stalker ( like pets ) is really welcome.

Also stalkers are reasonable scrappers, usually after an AS I get 2 or 3 minions on me at most in a team situation. I will have to scrap one of them, the others will usually get distracted by pets or someone else. At lower levels when attacks are not as effective this can be a problem.

One thing that may be a downside with teaming with a stalker is that occasionally he will use placate and the placated enemy will latch on to someone else. Sometimes this will be the mastermind. Normally a Placate comes just before a Assassin's Strike but not always.

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You got 2 rooms and some furnishings? That's it? How big were the rooms?

My character is very Batman-based, so I want a big, underground Lair for him, something with different rooms for different purposes, an infirmary, technical laboratory, central control room, library (all non-functional), with lots of space to move around.

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The smallest rooms in bases are very big. The basic square entrance room you start with is something in the region of about 15-20m along each size. It's certainly enough to get a large number of 4 seater sofas along each wall. How big does it have to be?

Basic non-functional items cost about 100 each for most ( furniture, bookcases etc ). I imagine you could get most of the equipment you need just from the base Prestige you get for a single member joining.

I designed a base for my Monday night only SG with 3 rooms ( entrance, workshop and control room ) from the Prestige from 14 members ( mostly alt padding ) and the Prestige from one evening's play from 4 people. It isn't functional yet, but it certainly is big enough to have some character.

Personally I do think that the bases are too expensive, but for non functional bases you should be alright unless you have grand designs.

The thing I've noticed is that prestige isn't balanced for existing Supergroups, it's balanced for new ones.

So it assumes that you will have members levelling from the low levels to the high ones in SG mode and gaining large amounts of Prestige.

I think some of our SG members in CoV have somewhere in the region of 100k prestige at the mid to high 20s.

I imagine the base is balanced so that a super-team of 8 regular active players would have a small functional base by the mid twenties.

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The influence yes, but if you get 0? think you have a contradiction there......

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You only get 0 if you don't sell your drops. I think a large amount of the increase in influence comes from the increased chance of single origin enhancement being dropped by defeated enemies.

However as other people have said I don't think they expect you to stay in SG mode all the time.

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Id say 3 DMG 3 ACC.
I personally think 1 ACC is far too low.
I discovered today that i miss an orange leut ( it was a dockworker of some kind ) about 25% of the time with 2 ACC solos in AS and im katana as well(supposed to be more accurate).
Thats simply not good enough when AS is your livelyhood. Im gonna slot 3 ACCs and 3 DMGs in it for sure and then use hasten to make it recharge faster but you know, each to there own

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I think 3 ACC SOs should make you capped up to +4s ( purples ). 2 ACCs will give you about a 90% chance of hitting +4s and cap on +3s.

The kind of accuracy you are talking about would be having a training ACC enhancement as I don't think dockworkers have any additional defence. It could be that you were having an unlucky streak, these seem to happen very often. I've noticed that since I6 hit accuracy appears to be worse and this is mainly due to having long strings of misses and long strings of hits that we are now getting. We only notice the misses. Running herostats shows that the average to hit percentages are in the 90% as we would expect them to be.

I haven't slotted 2 ACCs yet in AS, I have a SO and a DO in ACC and 2 SOs and 2 DOs in damage. I doubt that an extra recharge will help that much. I'm not sure what to do about the final slot when I get all SOs. 1 ACC does seem too low to me too.

I think you are meant to sell enhancement drops to get influence/imfamy or to come out of SG mode occasionally.

The amount of influence gained in the 35+ game in CoH is so much that influence becomes irrelevent.

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/bind t "powexec_name Hover$$powexec_name Fly"

You can switch Fly and Hover around, depending on what you want as your first activated power. The last one of them is activated if none of them are.

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Does that bind work? I've never tried activating 2 mutually exclusive powers. Cool. I can use it for combat jumping and super jump.

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Oh, and stop whining already.

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I wasn't whining, I'm Ice and am relatively okay. You should have been replying to Abyys

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anyone got any idea what the base Psi Res this gives is? according to Hero Planner it something like 37.5% which is a really high base value if true.

must test it at some stage ...

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37.5% is also what they say over on the US Brute forums, so that's the number I've been using myself for calculations as well.

But I agree it sounds like a high base value... taking the recent reductions in base values into consideration...

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But it is Psi, a not very common damage type. In exchange for fear protection and Psi resistance, Dark armour doesn't get knockback protection. Strangely Ninjitsu for Stalkers has the same tradeoff. Cryptic don't seem to mind Stalkers and Scrappers having Psi resistance so long as tanks don't.

I'm guessing that the AoE set get hit worst. Fire and AR being the big ones. The difference between being able to take out a spawn of minions in 1 attack cycle and 2 is huge in terms of survivability. For Ice you can take out a minion or sometimes an Lt in an attack cycle. However if you miss only a few enemies attack you, what can be mitagated by Freeze Ray. If you are Fire that failure to kill minions means you get the whole spawn aggro'ing to you.

My Blaster seems to be far more capable of performing under ED than any of my other characters.

Before ED he had 6 Damages in his attacks and six slotted stamina. He had Hasten but ran out of endurance everytime he used it and so I respecced him out of it.

It may be because Ice has shorter animation times than the rest of the blaster sets and so recharge enhancements are better for him.

Oh.

Where do you find out this stuff?

Maybe I was the only villain doing a mission, or just the unlucky one that the game chose.

I just had my first attempt in Siren's Call.

I went to see the contact and chose to do a patrol mission. As far as I was concerned I was fair game, especially as I was soloing. I was under the impression that I was invisible, so I get to the first 2 waypoints and someone starts firing at me. I realise I am being attack by 2 ( or more ) heroes.

The blaster comes down in front of me ( he's an exempted lvl 50 I foundout later ) so I impale, placate and AS him. Whilst I'm in mid strike his DD scrapper friend appears and fails to hit me.

Assassin's Strike ! Woo hoo, moral victory for me! Blaster is on a third hitpoints or so. So am I ( and reconstruction is not recharged ) so I leg it. They corner me and get me, I go to hospital.

I get out of hospital and try and find the next waypoint and they appear right infront of me, did they still have me targetted or was it a coincidence? Luckily I managed to complete my mission without them getting me again but they were looking for me quite seriously. They did attack me again.

The squad of heroes is fine, I don't mind that, however what annoyed me was that I had to go there in the first place.

I have it on my Kinetics defender. It is an entirely single trick power. The only point of it is to avoid a travel power, ie using Siphon Speed before level 18 and use Inertial Reduction afterwards.

For a controller I think it is pretty pointless.

Fly+Impale = you standing very still on the ground, or even lying face down.

I got my powers in this order
Lunge, Hide, Barb Swipe, Reconstruction, Assassin's Impaler, Hasten, Swift, Placate, Superspeed, Integration, Health, Stamina, Impale.

I believe I went for the minimal secondary choices and even then I had my first real choice at level 22! The next decision ( at level 26, build up is at lvl 24 ) will be a hard one as I have to decide between Ripper or a defensive power, like Dull Pain.

In the run up to 32 I have the following 'must have' powers to pick, Instant Healing, Ripper, Dull Pain, Build Up. All of which need between 3 and 6 slots.

So if you want Stamina, which you will need if you want to do any scrapping with anything but the first 2 primary powers, you have little chocie at all.

One of the Leadership powers, I believe it is Assault, has a resistance to placate and taunt. I don't know of any other powers that do this.

I doubt any enemies have it. But level differences will probably reduce the placate duration.

Resistance is not immunity. It means that the effect lasts for less time, so even with very high resistance a placte then an immediate (fast) attack should still get a critical.

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The best use Ive seen for Whirlwind is in PvP, where it cancels out all the activation animations of powers and ensures that your character is never rooted in place.

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Avoiding rooting is probably very useful in PvP, and may well be useful in PvE too. However I think that it delays actions until every full whirlwind cycle. The other issue is that unless you keep moving you end up losing endurance really quickly. I bet tanks will hate it.
I also suspect that non spines scrappers might have problems with it due to the nasty flinging enemies around and therefore getting them out of melee range, however as half of my attacks are ranged it doesn't matter so much.

Also as an anti stalker measure, I don't think it will be that effective as the knockup range is really close, so enemies attacking you in melee can be out of knockup range.

This is my 3rd attempt at turning Unthing into a Taz style scrapper ( 1st one live in i4, 2nd in test with I5 ). I am seriously hoping it works, even if it may well [censored] all my teammates off. If not then I still have 1 earned respecs and 2 yet to earn.

I tried a strange build out last night for my spines/regen scrapper, taking whirlwind as a PvE damage mitigation power. It seemed to work reasonably well in an unconventional way but seemed to slow my attacks done, has anyone else tried this?

Even PvE the AoE def is really useful.

Who uses AoEs that you might want to assassinate?

Council
Scrapyarders
Sky Raiders
Nemesis
Freaks
AVs
and others.

I have seen the figure 37.5% quoted as the unsupressed AoE defence, it seems a bit high to me 60% with 3 SOs, but I don't think the devs mind about defence based builds having high AoE defence. Look at SR's toggle power Evasion, IIRC that was the only defensive power to get a boost in I5.

It sounds like you aren't having much fun there.

The only thing I can think that you can do to make your tank more defensive is to get Weave and slot it with 3 defences , slot Combating Jumping with 3 defences. You may need to add a end red or two in Tough and Weave as they are more expensive toggles than Fire Shield and Plasma Shield.

Now some may say that 7% extra defensive is too expensive for a power choice. In response to that I would say that there is nothing else you can do to make yourself tougher so you should go for it.

The devs point would be that I5 and I6 changes were made in order to stop Invincible being the default difficulty. Try lowering your difficulty. However I know that other ATs do not need to lower their difficulty with I6, this is what irks me, as it means that the tank can't hold their own in other people's missions of the same level.

Now I have an Inv tank, we didn't get hit as hard as you this time ( although we got mashed last time ) as in I6 we still have the fighting pool to turn to. Our I5 builds didn't include it. Not being able to play the same way you did before is bad but as far as I can see you have 2 choices, abandon your character or adapt. Both of these are depressing.

PS Statesman wants us to be scrankers. How depressing.

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If they can 1 shot you I agree. Can stalker 1 or 2 shot you with your build? A stalker does a 60 brawl index AS with Build Up. A Blaster with Build Up/Aim and a Nova is about 30 brawl index and blaster BI is better than stalker BI. How do you do against Novas?


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Energy Stalkers can, depending on what toggles they knock off. I haven't faced other primary Stalkers as yet, so I'm unsure whether or not they toggledrop.

And remember, Blasters, Controllers and Defenders don't have resists (Well, depending on Primary/Secondary...) so the resistance point is moot.

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My view would be a scrapper v stalker fight should go, stalker AS, scrapper is at low hitpoints, after a short time one of them dies, but they should be pretty even, assuming no complicated mez powers like yours. This also assumes that both are running equally good builds.

A stalker should be able to take out a squishy pretty easily.

After all a controller can take anyone out pretty easily.

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But no amount of +Perception will get around stealth, accessible at level 8. I have no problem with Stalkers being able to one or two shot me as long as I have a chance to spot them. Currently, unless they have a bad build, I don't.

Thats not fun.

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If they can 1 shot you I agree. Can stalker 1 or 2 shot you with your build? A stalker does a 60 brawl index AS with Build Up. A Blaster with Build Up/Aim and a Nova is about 30 brawl index and blaster BI is better than stalker BI. How do you do against Novas?

I just remembered that AS is partly unresistable. So my point isn't valid but I'd like the answer anyway.