macskull

I noticed that WP's Recon was not suppressing, but it was suppressing on my Regen Scrapper. Did they fix the Stalker version of Regen but not the Scrapper version?

EDIT: Or worse yet, did they suddenly decide melee self-heals suppressing was working as intended and WP's Recon is now bugged?

The set is still good, but it's most certainly not Rad Blast anymore. I loved it in closed beta before they messed with the recharge times, now I'll stick with Fire, Psi, or Sonic. Having a nice fluid attack chain right at the beginning was nice, and the promise of sticking tons of damage procs into Neutrino Bolt was just icing on the cake. I requested several times to have the recharge times adjusted to 3 and 6 seconds once they were upped, but nothing ever came of that.

Random and very rare drops off hard-to-kill opponents aren't going to get more people PvPing. Proof of this is simply the existing PvP population: the number of PvPers was far higher pre-I13 when there were no rewards (no inf, no salvage, no inspirations, no prestige, nothing). PvP IOs might be a carrot on a stick for a few people, but the majority of players who try PvP on the off chance of getting an IO go away disappointed and probably don't come back.

I think the changes made to the way they dropped were a knee-jerk reaction to stop people from farming for them with little to no regard for anything other than that (seems to happen a lot around here, unfortunately). On one side, prices for PvP IOs went from really high to crazy high; on the other side, PvP IO farming pre-I15 made some people rich, post-I15 farming is making those who are still capable of it insanely rich - and if you're not using the inf gained to buy those expensive recipes you suddenly have a lot more inf to drop into your "everyday" builds.

Because there is almost no way to get 64 PvPers together in one place at one time other than on test (I wish I were joking, I really do). The 5-minute timer on rep means you need to be careful about who you kill when, and the biggest thing: stuff that drops off PvE mobs is plentiful because the mobs don't actively try to stay alive in any other way than their AI tells them to (doesn't work well when they're mezzed and AoEd in large quantities though). A player opponent, whether in zone or an arena match, will be actively trying to deny you that kill and therefore that chance at a drop.

Don't forget that killing the same person only counts once every 5 minutes, which means over the course of a one-hour period you'll have at most 12 chances for a recipe. If the drop rate is 1:60 (I found something similar to that during arena farms in I14) that means it'll take you about 5 hours on average to get a single drop, and that's not guaranteed to be a "good" one.

The simple solution is to avoid the NPCs. Since they come in clumps, that usually isn't too hard, though most people will notice that the I13 changes (which didn't apply to NPCs in the zones) made them a bit more dangerous for someone who happens to wander into them during a fight.

You can reset mayhem missions to farm them for badge credit, believe it or not, but there are a few catches:

* If the mission holder enters the mission, the side missions do not reset when the main mission is reset
* The timer inside the mission and the timer outside the mission don't always line up once you reset, which is more a cosmetic issue than anything

The first point can be dealt with easily enough - have a friend get the mission for you, and then go in, kill stuff to rack up the clock, and then do the arson mission. Jump out, reset the mission, and head back in until you've got credit for the Firebug badge. A bit convoluted but much faster than trying to get credit for one arson every go.

Placate proc is only supposed to fire 33% of the time but right now it's firing 100% of the time or something like that. It's been bugged since at least I13 and possibly even since it was introduced in I11. Stalker/Bane/Night Widow Placate is still busted as well, though that's been that way since I6 so the odds of it ever getting fixed are slim to none.

People don't seem to have buffers as often because Kins and Sonics were quite popular and those two sets got gutted into near uselessness. Every other buff set is a shadow of what it once was, and with PvP focused on damage spam these days there's not as much need for defensive support (offensive support and disruption are still nice, yes, but again there's that "shadow of its former self" thing). People changed to damage-focused builds because that's what works best under the current ruleset.

Melee isn't particularly "good" in an arena environment (it's essentially the same as it used to be if you turn off travel suppression and heal decay), it's in the zones you find them. Between TS, DR, HD, and the mez changes a melee character (especially Tankers and Regens of course) is often very difficult to kill solo unless they're played by a complete tard, and sometimes not even then. Adding an autohit 75% range debuff to Taunt helped as well. Melee characters are considered "good" or "powerful" in a zone environment because the I13 rule changes directly favor characters with lots of HP and powerful one-shot healing abilities (i.e. Dull Pain) because they're able to last longer with multiple attackers on them, plus some melees are capable of putting out Blaster-level damage at range. Yeah, nothing quite like that 3000 HP Tanker over there doing 1000 points of damage without ever needing to get into melee (I wish I were exaggerating, I really do).

DR hits recharge pretty badly once you get past 30-50% or so (again, everything's all messed up and no one is entirely sure what works anymore). Whereas under the old rules (and in PvE) you can have permadom with about 75% global recharge + Hasten and have it stack infinitely, you'd need about 120% global recharge + Hasten for permadom under DR, and even then it would only stack two or three times (not sure on that exactly, someone with more experience might know). After I13 the biggest reason to use Domination was for the damage buff, but as you may or may not have noticed Dominators got changed in I15 - the damage buff was removed from Domination and added to the damage modifiers and some assault sets had their damage/recharge/endurance tweaked (Elec is not quite as good as it was, and Energy is really good now). With the way mez works in PvP now Domination doesn't add any mag or duration, it just ignores mez resistance. These days Domination is good for an end refill when fighting Therms, and that's about it.

Confuses, sleeps, and fears had the same changes to them as all the other mezzes, so sleeps are largely worthless except as a place to slot the placate proc (currently broken to fire almost 100% of the time so you'll see a lot of Mind Doms/Trollers and Psi Blasters using it). Confuse is still on a different timer than other mez and it's still very useful. Fear is still all kinds of weird but it's not really common - biggest advantage for Fear used to be most melee sets had no protection against that and you could burn someone out of Break Frees during a match, but with a 2-4 second duration that's not the case anymore.

Pool-wise on a Dom I'd do Fitness/Leaping/Speed/Leadership and then take Leviathan for Hibernate. Some people do Medicine and Mace instead of Leadership/Leviathan but I've found that's not as common. Very rare to see a Dom using Mu anymore (Mez was the last one I remember seeing after I13) and I don't think anyone uses Soul. Power Surge looks nice on paper but it's mostly only good for the recovery these days because of diminishing returns on resistance (40% base free PvP resistance to everything + another 30% resistance to everything from your patron armor will DR at somewhere around 35% and Power Surge would add less than 10% on top of that).

If you plan on playing team support, keep all the Therm powers you would've had pre-I13. Thaw doesn't give mez protection anymore but keeping it applied to someone is the difference between a 1/2-second mez and a 2-second mez and can make a difference during a mez/damage spike. Forge is still useful for the tohit if your ally doesn't have too much +tohit on their own, and even then it's good for damage since that's basically what PvP is balanced around these days. The shields will only add a few percentage points of resistance to squishies who are running resist-based patron/epic shields but there are still villains who use Mace Mastery, Blasters who use Frozen Armor, and the occasional melee character that can benefit from a bit more +res. Many Therms don't have the shields or Thaw anymore though and I suppose I can't fault them for it as they're relatively useless compared to how they once were.

People seem to use CJ as an IO mule these days (LotG, Zephyr -KB, Karma -KB) and just run SS and SJ, but I'll often toggle on CJ when I've been hit by an immob just because it makes it last less time. Speaking of -KB, you may have noticed that knockback has become a lot more common (due to a combination of the Acro nerf from a few years ago and then the I13 PvP changes, especially to mez) and you'll find yourself getting tossed around a lot unless you built for it before I13 or are on a melee. You'll usually want to shoot for 41 points of KB protection in any squishy build, more if you can fit it in.

Yeah, I get that. My only concern with testing under the GMA 950 is that if I find an issue that's obviously graphics-related, I'll have no way of testing it on a supported Mac system to find out whether it's an actual bug.

I dunno, you can only have two different aura colors and your teammates can't pick them.