macskull

EDIT, and as a disclaimer: Stone/Ice isn't a bad combination, per se. It's just godawful slow for the first 37 levels (38, really, until you have FA slotted). I'm perfectly aware of what that combination can do, but the combination of the turd shoes of Rooted and the low-ish damage of Ice Melee until 38 would be enough to drive most people crazy.

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If you rolled that tank back before Ice Melee got buffed, you're dispensing some bad advice out of ignorance. If you deleted that tank after the buff, you made some bad power choices and never got to see the crown jewel at 38, so you're still dispensing bad advice from lack of experience.

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1. Rolled after the buffs. Wouldn't've dreamed of rolling up an Ice Melee character before then.
2. Lol @ telling me I can't build a character.
3. I've seen enough Ice Tankers (and played a friends' for a good deal of time) to know what Frozen Aura is like. It's essentially the same thing as Footstomp without Rage (incidentally, I know exactly what that's like).

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My Stone/Ice has better AoE damage output than my Fire/EM, though maybe that says more about EM's AoE damage.

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Y'think?

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It's comparable to my WP/SS too, though not quite as good. Then again, I don't spend all day in Granite, and with Ice Melee, I don't need to.

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Yes, Ice's AoE damage is probably better than SS's (due to Frost), but that's before factoring in Rage. I spent very little time in Granite on my Stone/Ice because between all the slows, Mud Pots, and Ice Patch, I didn't need it.

Cold. Screw Therm, Corruptors can keep it - I want moar AoE debuffage.

You'd be better off slotting a damage proc instead of the Deci proc on almost all accounts, just like you're better off slotting the Gaussian proc in Aim/BU instead of a toggle. It might fire off more often during a 10-minute match if placed into a toggle, but for all you know every one of those procs will happen while you're enemy's phased, or Hibernated, or running, or as you're just respawning - whereas if you placed it in Aim or Build Up, you'd get the full benefit of the proc at the exact moment you intended to do a damage burst (I don't know about anyone else, but I won't waste Aim or BU unless I know I can get in some shots before it wears off).

Fun story - I was doing an ITF on my Bane but because no one else was in the zone yet, I hopped over to the wall to kill a few mobs. First kill got me an Unbreakable Constraint. That's my second purple since I14, and the first was under equally lucky circumstances - my Stalker had gone 1-50 almost entirely in MA missions, and when I was doing Mako's patron arc, the first Longbow I killed dropped the Hecatomb proc.

Been doing 40-44 gold with the occasionally 35-39 bronze or silver.

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Youll see it after combat, after sitting in wentworths for a while, or if youre standing around looking around and then try to type anything.

Consistent chatting isnt interrupted, but the first statement of any conversation or reply after a small silence usually is afflicted by the bug.

At least thats what Ive noticed.

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That's the thing, I think. The stuff you input into the chat box (i.e. just standing around and talking) doesn't get hit by that buffer bug. Input not related to the chat box is the stuff that does (bids at Wentworth's, hitting movement keys, hitting power keys). Been lots of times in RV when I've gone to do a /whoall and had the game spit out a line of spaces and WASD's at me.

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I'm trying to get it to go off, but so far all my chat entries have been clear of wwwwaaaaasssstrash.

110020000110001000000Can anyone verify that this bug is gone?

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I hate this bug. It's a minor issue ultimately since it isn't crashing servers or corrupting data, but it is highly visible, distracting and annoying.

What's broken and why is it taking so long to fix? The key problem here is way back when, someone decided it would be a good idea to have three separate keyboard input interpreters and any changes done have to play "house of cards" game with the three. The current set of bugs began appearing a while back when we started making changes to implement the mission editor, which morphed into the Mission Architect.

I've no doubt that it will be fixed at some point; I just wanted to basically point out that, yes, we're aware of it and yes, we are trying to fix it. It's just an enormously more complicated task that it "should" be.

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It's pretty fun to wander over into programmer land and causally ask, "So what's up with the chat bug?"

They have said that not having reliable repro steps makes this particular bug nigh-impossible to track down, so if anyone can figure out a way of making this happen 100% of the time, I'm sure those guys would name children after you or something.

I'd even push for Posi to hand out the vaunted 'badge-which-must-not-be-named"

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It's simple, really - you see, if you train up at Ms. Liberty while holding a newspaper in your hand...

I lol'd.

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Much as I love to wreck zoners, I don't have anything PvP worthy on Freedom.

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Make macskull pl you.

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Is he still my padawan?

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My Fire/SS is gimp, I can't farm without my stacked +recovery and +regen glowies.

Hm, it seems to have fixed itself. The game ended up downloading about 300MB of pigg files and then did a checksum/verify. I haven't had a chance to see if the install on my Windows desktop is borked because I haven't had access to it for about 3 weeks now (hasn't been patched since before I15).

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Imo, doms are not what they used to be for small team arenas. I'd recommend another AT entirely. Doms do very well in 8v8s or even some 5v5s.

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Disagree mind/** doms can do pretty well in small team arena, even suparsing most ATs once you factor in TK.

For the OP it boil down to what you plan on doing the most, for 2vs2 and 3vs3 I would go PFF for poison ray since chances are you will have a healer/buffer on your team. As for duels PFF can still work but hiber is the better choice.

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Yeah, after I15 a Dom is more like a slightly lower-damage Blaster that can also effectively remove an opponent from a fight for 8+ seconds.

Nanu's got it right regarding the patron pools - PFF is awesome in zones and in team matches but for dueling I'd go Leviathan.

I've been scratching my head at MMs getting KO Blow at all (not just at the pool it's in) since I13 beta.

Yeah, people have been pointing this out since I13 went into closed beta in October of last year. My guess is nothing will change.

<QR>

Save yourself the frustration, and roll as something else. I had a Stone/Ice Tanker way back when, and not only did I fail to come up with a suitable IO build for it, I realized exactly how bad that combo is. I rolled it because I knew it was rare... now I know why it's rare. I ended up deleting mine at level 34 or 35 and never looked back.

Basically your damage is pretty mediocre outside of Granite and downright pitiful while running Granite. You're an aggro-control powerhouse (Mud Pots, Taunt, Ice Patch, and all that jazz) but it comes at the cost of not being able to kill a damn thing.

+HP and +rech (not necessarily in that order as both are pretty important for a Fiery Aura character). I'd probably aim for something around 1800 HP and maybe 30-50% recharge.

In other words, "we're going to nerf slows because people couldn't be bothered to team with a Kin, or get better at avoiding the slows in the first place."

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An interesting fact as well, if you take tough if actually increases all your resistance, you're actually tougher in PvP than you are in PvE.

Most brutes/tanks seem to hover around the 55% damage resistance mark to all anyway thanks to DR and SS with rage, combined with Fires Fiery Embrace notches up your damage quite a bit, especially when combined with the Long animating (and therefore high damage) attack of KO blow and throw_fish.

More experienced PvPers, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Also quick question myself, is Mids borked slightly or does boxing really do the stupidly high damage I'm seeing it (386 on my build) and thats with just Rage.

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With diminishing returns, the additional +res to everything that Tough gives won't even be enough to make up for the resistance that DR lops off (for example, on my Fire/SS, my 90% fire resistance gets DR'd to about 55% in RV).

Regarding Boxing, Mids' numbers are too high - but it does do stupid amounts of damage nonetheless. This is apparently balanced because everyone has access to those powers, and that way if you have a weaker attack set, you'll be able to get more damage out of the pools. No, I don't follow that logic either... I mean, it's like saying "Yeah, we realize your set is bad, but rather than fix the set we'll just tell you to take pool attacks."

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PVP progression is looking better all the time o.o; I'm seeing balance for once, not just a set of uber builds

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Erm... wut?

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If you PvP on a low pop server and the drops are that rare than no one will have the PvP IO on the low pop server and there will not be any balance issues.

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Markets are cross-server.

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I can see the main reason people farmed them in the arena is to sell them for outrageous prices on the market.

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No, the main reason was to have PvP IOs to IO your PvP character with. Given the prices these IOs are fetching now, that's no longer a likely proposition.

Still think there is a better way to go about the PvP IO drop rate, and the drops should not have been turned off until this half-baked "fix" was implemented. Many people have made reasonable suggestions that curb farming the PvP IOs without essentially destroying the drop rate during actual PvP - please read these suggestions and try them out instead of staying with this poorly-designed system.

Anyone else have issues applying today's patch? Downloaded fine but I got errors when I went to apply it, and I think the patcher just ate the game files because it's now trying to download a new copy of the game.

You will want the Concealment pool over the Fighting pool, no questions asked.

Fire/Regen. More damage, because that's all that really matters anymore.

Fire/SS or Inv/SS

I'd leave a more refined build up to those who know more about Scrappers than I do (all I've got is my Spines/Regen, which is old hat now). Only things I'd really change would be some slots and how a few powers are slotted - I found myself very short on slots in that build. Wish I could stick at least one damage proc into every attack but I couldn't make it work (although you could sub some of the set IOs in the lower-tier attacks for Nucleolus Hami-O's and then use the rest for procs).

Regarding ToD vs Makos:

* Mako caps at 50, ToD caps at 40 (Mako has better enhancement values at cap)
* The +dam set bonus from Mako is slightly better than that from the ToD set
* The Mako damage proc has a higher fire rate than the ToD damage proc
* Makos are usually easier to find and are often cheaper