[Please, just kill me...]

 

You might say that this thread Forces that Feedback

[Flight speed needs a buff]

I'm neither pious nor posturing; I clearly think you're mistaken and blowing the issue well out of proportion.  Your rhetoric is escalating to a place I don't feel comfortable following.

 

"Let's agree to disagree, but not before I characterize your position as dumb and incoherent," isn't exactly diplomatic.  I actually agree with you that this Fly issue isn't a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but your tone needs a lot of work if you're truly interested in avoiding escalation.

[Flight speed needs a buff]

 

I wouldn't put it quite like that... I think to warrant a pick even for a concept build, it would have to be at least as fast as Sprint along with the vertical movement.  But to the larger sentiment... we'll have to agree to disagree on that.  To me, it sounds like you're contorting into knots to illustrate whatever it is you're trying to illustrate.  We're at a point where we have the flying Super Strength melee concept build who can't use Hover and doesn't want to rely on temp powers to fly and doesn't have the picks available for Afterburner and...

 

Cute.

 

 

I'd prefer to assume that you're arguing in good faith, but this line of attack, "you're tying yourself in knots to illustrate whatever it is you're trying it illustrate," seems like a transparent attempt to dismiss my position, which is really pretty simple, out of hand.  Your suggestion that super strength characters are some sort of bizarre niche build rings hollow too.  Is it really so hard to accept that a whole bunch of builds don't get much mechanical benefit out of Hover or Air Superiority?  Do I really have to spell out why power and pool picks are valuable?  Do I have to comment, again, on the relative appeal of Hasten?  I might as well save my breath, based on your prior record of engaging on that subject. 

 

You've simply resorted to baseless mockery, pretending that you have no idea why I would bring up build investment costs - when it was you who originally tried to argue that Fly had an advantage in that regard.  "SS has to spend more power picks on travel than Fly, because it has to supplement its 2d movement."  Care to revise that position now, or are we just gonna go with pretending that that post never existed?

 

But hey, I guess you admitted that Fly is a concept tax now.  That's something.

 

This whole discussion reads as farce when you look at that screenshot - all of the pious posturing about how Fly has enormous mobility advantages, about how Fly should only get better inherent (or slottable) speed when SS gets commensurate vertical movement, all of it, reduced to a lame joke.  It turns out that Afterburner is the only thing that makes Fly the power even the slightest bit worth taking, given that an infinitely refillable temp power costing 5k INF does exactly the same thing that Fly does, by itself.

 

It's fine if you genuinely believe that maxed Fly should cost 3 powers; I'm all for good-faith disagreement, but your tone suggests that everyone who disagrees with you is a babbling moron.  "Heh heh, we should have the devs reduce Fly's speed to I-18 levels so that these idiots can slot it to get back to their current level of speed, heh, what a good troll."  It's not I-18 anymore, in case you hadn't noticed.  Issue 18 was what?  A decade ago now?

[Flight speed needs a buff]

I have to object to the notion that hover is bad for melee builds. I think that's true at low levels or if you have a power that requires being on the ground, which affects some but not all melee builds; that's about it. Prestige Jump Jets allow you full speed in hover for a button press, are affected by global recharge, and you get two of them. That's faster and more convenient movement than anything else. Afterburner itself is a useful panic button.

 

While their usages vary in different builds, all of the opening powers in flight are good.

 

Well, in fairness, I have to admit that I was talking about a prior age, when I designed that tank build.  Back then, you needed to ED-cap Hover's enhancement to get it to move at more than a crawl.  These days, IIRC, it moves at a fairly decent 25 mph or so even with no slotting.  So I'd have less objection to using Hover on a melee build now, but it's still not exactly what I'd call super well suited to melee, certainly inferior to CJ in the general case.  (The auto-follow thing can be really jarring if you're used to pressing F to close with the nearest foe on a melee build, for example.)

 

I am a big fan of Hover on ranged builds though, so don't think that I'm bagging on the power.  I'm something of a Hover evangelist in many contexts, in fact; Hover's just not anywhere near as generally appealing as Hasten.

 

Air Superiority I could take or leave.  I know some people have always sung its praises because of its control utility (guaranteed knockdown and -fly debuff), but it's still a filler melee attack.  Generally the builds that need that sort of control most are going to be concentrated on ranged attacks - and the builds that focus on melee will generally have to sacrifice DPS to use Air Superiority.

 

That said, and based on my experience in game, just now, I have to say that Fly itself appears to be the big loser here.  What's funny is that this whole time I've been arguing that Pool choice matters, and that comparing the travel powers themselves on a 1-to-1 basis is therefore misleading.  But Fly (by itself) is apparently rendered completely redundant by an infinitely rebuyable temp power that costs 5k INF (Jet Pack).  I'm actually laughing about this as I type.  The whole discussion seems silly in retrospect.

 

The jet pack even works with Afterburner.  That combo doesn't go quite as fast as Fly + AB, but it still gets you over the customary Fly cap.  New Flight meta:  Skip Fly.  :P

 

People were getting all exercised about how Fly even without afterburner has massive advantages:

 

 

If I have a complaint about afterburner, it's that it's not an auto power, because toggling it on can be clunky; I wouldn't mind an added autopower version of afterburner that you could choose to take instead of the toggle that grants Fly its benefits natively.

 

This would be very cool.

 

I agree that it's counterintuitive that you need another power to improve the speed of fly, but it's a difficult problem to alleviate, and I don't think it's worth the effort to alleviate it when I just don't agree at all that it's unbalanced. Flight + AB practically reaches the same straight line speed as Super Speed and Hover is better than SS and rivals CJ for in-combat maneuvering. This is a strong pool.

 

Well, given that our dev team works entirely for free, I'd say just about nothing's really worth the effort to change.  I'm just happy to have the game back, whatever its flaws.  And sure, changing the Flight pool would be a low priority even if we did have a paid dev team - but in principle, I think all of the arguments working from the premise that Fly must be slow or must require massive investment to increase its speed fall a little flat these days.

[Flight speed needs a buff]

 

But really, your point about travel qua travel isn't well taken to begin with; that's entirely what the anti-Afterburner comments in thread have been about, and it absolutely was the basis of my comparison.  I don't understand what very specific world you're angling for here -- it's not 2007 but it's also not really today, because we're discussing travel powers as concept-necessary picks when you yourself have given a list of reasons they aren't.  It's not a world without temp powers but it's also not a world with all of them.  At the beginning you said we were essentially in agreement, but you're clearly at issue with something and I don't think I understand exactly what.

 

At the beginning - by which I mean the first post of yours to which I replied - you acted as if the position contrary to yours was self-evidently dumb.  Or at least that's how it read to me.  I believe that was unfair.

 

But let's back up, because clearly we have a miscommunication.  When I say "concept builds," I'm referring to thematic or aesthetic concerns, not mechanical ones.  Y'know, a character concept, as in, "this guy is super strong, shoots lasers from his eyes, and flies really fast."  Based on the above-quoted paragraph I have no idea what you thought I meant by that term, or why you think that the term somehow contradicts everything else I've said.  Quite frankly, the above-quoted paragraph doesn't parse at all, to me.

 

Yes, ok, you can farm 30 minutes worth of stealth suit at a time by going to a specific Mayhem mission; that's a little different from being able to buy 5 hours worth of Jetpack for a piddly 50k INF from the P2W vendor - not least because you're likely to spend more time in Stealth than you are to spend using a jetpack.  I maintain that spending one pick on SS, when you already likely have Hasten, to complement a +stealth IO and achieve effective invisibility in most missions is a worthwhile investment, irrespective of SS's travel utility (which isn't nothing). 

 

Do you disagree with that?

 

It's pretty simple:  no one needs travel powers anymore.  Given that fact, the main reasons to take a travel power are for a tiny bit of extra convenience and/or because of aesthetic/thematic preferences, or in the case of SS, for a relatively cost-efficient stealth supplement (and some travel utility).  You seem to think it's blindingly obvious that people who want a flying character concept should have to pay 3 power picks and several slots (not to mention a pool pick that may or may not suit their build, mechanically) in return for the privilege of maxing fly speed.  I don't agree with that premise, even though I'm not unsympathetic to the notion that Fly is an inherently superior mode of travel.

 

You might ask, "But if you're only taking Fly for your character concept, then what do you care about its speed?"  And on the surface, I suppose that might sound like a rhetorical kill shot to you, but to me it sounds like willful blindness - because it's perfectly natural for someone who invested in Fly to want to max it out, or at least have an option to improve its speed beyond what anyone can get from a temp power at the P2W Vendor. 

 

In other words, investing in Fly on certain builds is a bit of a catch-22; you either take the one power and feel stifled because you wasted a precious pool and power pick on a slow mode of travel that you could have more-or-less equaled with a temp/prestige power, or you chase bad "money" with good by going whole hog and grabbing up two more powers.  This is basically a build-resource tax for wanting your character to look a certain way.

 

Some people in this thread have suggested that Fly's speed should be improvable via slotting; I don't see anything wrong with that.  In principle, that solution would even satisfy your objection, because SS doesn't require slotting.  Others have suggested that SS's speed should also be enhanceable; I don't have a problem with that either, though I believe that the original devs said that SS already moves as fast as the server allows.

 

Ha, you know what?  I just checked in-game, and it's actually worse than I thought:  The jetpack gives me the same (capped) fly speed as Fly, sans Afterburner (58.63 MPH @ level 50).  And the Rocket Board?  That gives me 69.64 MPH.  Of course, the Rocket Board turns off your toggles, so most people would probably consider it unusable, but still.  Crazy.

[Flight speed needs a buff]

Speed absolutely is the most attractive pool in the game... but that doesn't transitively make Super Speed the most attractive travel power in the game.

 

I never said it did.  Is your position that power-pool choices don't affect the opportunity cost of selecting a given travel power?

 

And all of the powers you show exchange SS's speed for vertical mobility

 

Correct, but you can run really really fast most of the time and use the temp powers to get over unusually inconvenient obstacles.

 

If you're making the argument that travel powers are entirely obsolete in this stage of the game, fine; but it applies equally to every one of them (except i guess Teleport?), not selectively to one particular mode of speed.

 

I'm making the argument that travel powers are largely a concept tax on high-end builds - except for Super Speed, which has a great deal of utility inside missions.  By extension, I'm also making the argument that you can't compare travel powers on a 1-to-1 mechanical basis as if it were 2007.  Super Speed was actually given its stealth as a result of this sort of comparison, way back when; the stealth was designed to facilitate safer travel, but of course now it's turned into an end in itself.  Things have changed, a lot.

 

Anyway, no, it doesn't follow that if all travel powers qua travel powers are obsolete, they're all equally bad.  That's why I keep talking about the appeal of the Speed pool and SS's stealth.

[Flight speed needs a buff]

You've managed to flip the build-investment calculus on its head - actually arguing that SS is less build efficient than Fly, which strikes me as a bizarre claim in the general case.

 

Let me give you a tangible example:  years ago, when I originally mocked up my proof-of-concept INV/SS Tanker with soft-capped Psi Defense, I used the Flight pool, because Fly was an important part of my Tanker's character concept.  But it was abundantly obvious to me from the beginning that the build was only a curiosity in that state; very few, if any, players would actually want to play it.

 

Why?  Because, among other things, perma-Hover isn't workable for a Super Strength build (Footstomp), and arguably isn't really workable for melee builds generally (among other things, auto-follow does weird things when you're in Hover).  So you lose a crucial amount of DEF, and a significant amount of melee-relevant combat maneuverability, by picking the Flying pool instead of Combat Jumping (or you take Jumping too, and skip Hasten).  You also lose a couple of power picks, basically a concept-build tax.  Therefore for my own Tanker, I compromised, bringing the Psi DEF down to 32% to make room for Hasten, more attacks, etc.

 

When I quickly threw together the updated version for Call Me Awesome's guide, I just ditched Fly for the jumping pool.  Voila, it works.  These days, if I didn't care about concept, it'd be a no-brainer for most builds - either skip travel entirely, or pick up Super Speed for the stealth, treating the speed as a bonus. 

 

Of course I recognize that not everyone cares about the min/max perspective, and that's fine, but it does seem a little anachronistic to argue as if travel powers must be mechanically balanced against each other as if in a vacuum, when travel qua travel is at its lowest value ever, easy to arrange with zero power picks at all.  Even if we didn't have temp/prestige powers raining from the sky, I think it'd be inappropriate to measure travel powers against each other on a one-to-one basis, because pool choices matter too.  You only get four of them.  The existence of Hasten therefore gives SS an enormous advantage before you even start talking about vertical movement or MPH.

 

Take a page from Long Range Teleport.

 

Fly - works like long range teleport, with an animation of zooming up into the sky, then the loading screen, then zooming down to a hard stop fifty feet up over whatever point is chosen for arrivals.

 

SJ and SS - works only in-zone, you get to choose between the Trainer and any exits/transit points in the zone you're currently in.  (IOW, no, it won't let you go directly to a new zone, BUT, you get to pick "my current zone's trainer" as an option, in compensation.)

 

This is a very cool idea.

[Flight speed needs a buff]

 

One man's "little bit" being given up "in exchange for speed" is mobility when SS is taken instead of Fly.  In that case, it's not a second speed power that needs to be taken to make the power usable; it's a pick from entire second power pool, Leaping, to provide a measure of the 3d mobility Fly has innately.  (I suppose a more literal parity would be giving Fly speeds like SS's ground speed on the vertical axis, and speeds like SS's vertical mobility on the horizontal plane.  Glad we don't have that.)

 

It seems like all of the anti-Afterburner arguments in this thread would be resolved just as well by returning the Fly pool to its i17 state (as base Fly speeds were buffed in i18 and Afterburner was added in i20): at that point, Fly needed enhancements to reach its speed cap and did not need (could not take) a second power to improve its effectiveness.  It'd be a great April Fool's prank from the HC devs but I think it mostly just suggests that the argument is weak and a different approach is needed.

 

 

I don't think the substance of your position is entirely unreasonable, but acting like Super Speed has oh-so-major downsides seems a little out of place at this stage of the game.  SS provides stealth; it's in the most attractive power pool in the entire game, and vertical movement is cheap.  You've managed to flip the build-investment calculus on its head - actually arguing that SS is less build efficient than Fly, which strikes me as a bizarre claim in the general case.

 

Fly, by contrast, is an easier travel power to use.  That's its advantage, which was super relevant back before temp powers started raining from the sky, but seems far less so now.

[What does World of Warcraft do better than Cox?]

Will we see its like again?  Maybe we already have.  Candy Crush, Clash of Clans, DOTA, Fortnite.  The game that I think most closely resembles World of Warcraft in terms of both its commercial success and its popular culture success?  Minecraft.

 

All of those are extremely successful games, but none of them is a subscription MMO.  Candy Crush, as far as I know, makes its billions (!!!) through semi-exploitative microtransactions, aimed at about 10% of their userbase.  Candy Crush is also another Blizzard game, IIRC.

 

And of course your point is well-taken about WoW not being the first MMO, nor the only MMO to come out at around 2005.  Blizzard clearly did something right to get the momentum going, and perhaps most importantly to avoid screwing up the momentum once it got going - though I think Blizzard also had some name recognition and industry buzz on their side.  My position isn't so much that they succeeded due to dumb luck; rather I'd say that they succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams, because the culture was sort of primed for a product like WoW, in that particular moment.

 

CoH and the no-name Cryptic Studios certainly couldn't have ever grabbed 10 million subscribers, no matter how well timed their release, even leaving aside the genre issue, which I genuinely believe to be a handicap, for whatever reason.  Or at least it was a handicap in the MMO space.  With the outrageous success of the Marvel movie franchise, one wonders whether CoH's ideal cultural moment just came 4-5 years too late.

 

But however much credit you want to give Blizzard for making their own luck, once the momentum kicked in it kicked in hard, and every subsequent attempt to recreate their success on a traditional MMO subscription based model has failed, in some cases spectacularly.  I don't think it's selling Blizzard/WoW short to argue that the cultural moment has passed, for games like that.  Perhaps more to the point, the cultural moment for that sort of business model appears to have passed.  Now we live in what some call "the attention economy," where publishers have more or less given up on trying to cultivate a solid base of loyal customers.

 

Instead, they go for a whale-milking F2P model: you create a wide-but-shallow userbase by releasing your game for free, and then you bombard your players with overpriced microtransactions to exploit the much smaller segment of compulsive spenders among them.  This is appealing because it basically sidesteps the stunning amount of competition out there today; you don't have to spend wildly on marketing because the game itself is an advertisement - and your product doesn't need to shine particularly bright because you only need to addict a small percentage of your players.

 

By that I don't mean to condemn all F2P games as egregiously exploitative.  Some F2P games are much better than others, and to the extent that good games, run by a reasonably fair regime, can only survive via F2P, I'm all for it.  Still, the essential premise of the business model remains.

 

I could be wrong.  The worm might turn eventually.  Conventional wisdom, particularly in young industries like online video games, tends to change suddenly and completely.  Maybe some lucky studio in the future will choose exactly the right moment, to release exactly the right product, to cash in on players' growing discontent with the F2P model, but I'm not holding my breath.

 

Speaking of cultural moments, it's pleasantly surreal to be back on a CoH forum debating Arcanaville in 2019 :D

[Flight speed needs a buff]

A lot of not thinking of the bigger picture in this thread by a few posters.

 

[...]

 

The idea Hasten is a universal must isa  real myth. Since IO sets. if you can just build in 70% global via set bonuses you have old school perma hasten levels of recharge. more then enough fro those with toggle heavy builds who dont need to focus on global recharge as much as click heavy builds.

 

Some powers will always be meh on a great many of options but on a few niches shine through as the above mentioned masterminds with group fly and group teleport. being able to scout around with your whole group of minions then teleport into the middle of a group as a team is so damn effective it nearly breaks the game. yet because MM are more often then not used as a solo AT by a great many MM players most who dont play MM have no clue how effective those fringe powers become.

 

Of course Hasten isn't absolutely 100% necessary.  No one argued otherwise.  It is beyond question, though, that Hasten has about ten times more general appeal/utility - that is, appeal across the whole spectrum of builds and situations - than most of the powers in the teleport pool.  That you would criticize other people's lack of perspective, and then go on to downplay Hasten's benefits, while playing up the highly situational utility of other, much more marginal powers, mystifies me.

 

I'm glad you're enjoying Team Teleport on your MM.  It's unquestionably useful to MM builds.  MMs are 1/15th of the available ATs in this game.  You said it yourself; group fly and e.g. team teleport are "fringe powers."

[Flight speed needs a buff]

I love the Teleportation Power Pool...Recall Friend is awesome when you regularly do PUG's...there is always some one getting lost or lagging behind.  TP Foe, is a great Pull Power, and Long Range Teleport Rocks...Team Teleport is worthless, unless you have Pets, in which case I am told it's great...

 

No one's saying that the Teleport pool has zero appeal to absolutely everyone, everywhere.  It should go without saying that we're discussing generalities.  And in general terms, it's hard to justify most of the powers in the teleport pool now:

 

 

You might say, "But Obi, Assemble the Team has a half-hour recharge timer," and that's a valid point, except that everyone on the team could have it.  I submit that if you find yourself wanting to teleport wayward teammates more than 8 times per half hour, then your team likely has problems too big for the TP pool to fix.

 

Likewise, pulling with TP Foe can be somewhat useful in the lower levels, but you shouldn't feel the need/desire to do it beyond a certain point - again, generally speaking.  If you like teleport, then more power to you.  I like it too, quite a bit.  You can obviously make an effective character with teleport, but power picks, slots, and pools are limited.  Thus, Teleport is sub-optimal.  The pool's strengths are extremely, extremely situational.

[Leadership]

<snip>

 

In my experience rare enough that if I am soloing, or on a team where no one has decided that they like Tactics, I can pop a yellow and hit Build Up and destroy whatever is hurting my accuracy, and go back about my life.

 

I'm not saying people shouldn't take tactics, I've just had too many people basically trying to tell me that tactics is like the best power in the game and everyone should take it and... yeah, it's got it's place, and when it's useful it's amazingly useful. I just find that for most builds, the situations where it's needed are rare enough that you can get away with just popping a yellow insp. instead.

 

Agreed.  Konru gave us a great write-up on the benefits of +ToHit.  Everything he said is valid, but there are very few builds that don't have access to Aim and/or Build Up and/or some sort of DEF debuff.  All builds have access to Yellow Inspirations, and anyone with a few million INF has access to the Kismet unique.

 

And IO builds tend to give loads of accuracy to multiply all of the above.

 

I'm actually gonna go against the grain here, and say that Assault is more generally useful than Tactics.  Sure, it costs a fair bit of endurance for what it does (in a vacuum), and sure, Tactics offers a lot more in niche situations - but Assault's benefit, humble though it may be, is context-independent.  On support toons especially, it's a good pick if you already took Maneuvers and want access to Vengeance for the extra LoTG mule.  I have yet to design a non-melee build that doesn't take Assault in our beautiful 2019 version of City of Heroes.

 

Eight Defenders running Assault will have a staggering 18.75 * 8 = 150% global damage buff, passively, for the whole team.  (For eight Corruptors/Controllers, this drops to a piddly 120%.)  Eight Defenders running Tactics will have ... just about the same practical performance as if they only had one.

 

These days, with the PPM change to procs, Tactics isn't even a particularly good Gaussian's mule.  Aim/BU blow it out of the water in that regard.

[Flight speed needs a buff]

The travel power itself is fast but expensive and clunky to use unless you combine it with Fly/Hover.

... or use a keybind (mine is "Shift + Left-click").  As long as I don't run out of END, I can cross a zone at about the height of the 10th to 15th floor in perfect safety.

 

Going END-o does mean going splat, though.  :D

 

Yeah, that's a great bind, arguably required on a Teleport build, and yeah you can get by without Hover/Fly on a Teleport toon - but even with the bind there's still the risk of lagging out or getting distracted and then falling.

 

(My Ice/Storm Corruptor uses ctrl+click for Freezing Rain, shift+click for Ice Storm, Button4+click for Tornado, and 5+click for Blizzard.  Believe me, I find that bind indispensable in more ways than one.  It'd be challenge to find another convenient modifier key for Teleport if I had it. :P  Don't even remember what I ended up using on my teleporting Ice/Storm Controller back on live.  I will say this: TP is useful for people who want to herd stuff around with Hurricane.)

 

Anyway, the point is that teleport isn't a great travel power all by itself, and it's in a pool filled with powers that are more or less obsolete nowadays.

[Flight speed needs a buff]

I feel like ShardWarrior got dogpiled in this thread, so I'll toss him a little support here:  Flight's convenience advantage over Superspeed is borderline irrelevant in a game where anyone can buy vertical movement at the P2W vendor.  This isn't the old CoH, where we all couldn't wait to get to level 14, so we could pick the mode of travel that would largely define our characters.  These days, lots of min/maxers don't even take a "real" travel power, and most that do take one take SS, for the stealth. 

 

And just about everyone takes the Speed pool, because Hasten is the most generally valuable pool power in existence.  Nothing in the Flight pool comes close, and I say that as an avowed Hover fetishist.  Hover is spectacularly useful for ranged builds, but you have to commit to a pretty major play-style/concept/thematic concession to make it shine.  At least Hover no longer requires three slots to move at more than a crawl.

 

Jumping, likewise, is just-ok, as a power pool.  Combat Jumping adds a great deal of combat-relevant maneuverability (pairs well with SS, too, of course); it costs almost zero End; it provides Immobilize protection, and it's a nice little Defense boost that has more general appeal than Hover, because there's no downside for any character in leaving it on.  Other than that, you have Superjump itself, which is what I'd call a solidly middle-class travel power, and you have Acrobatics, which has some utility in niche scenarios, but which has largely been rendered moot by the IO system.  There's little else to the pool.  Mostly gimmicks.  Don't get me wrong; I love me some gimmicks, and things like Spring Attack can be enormously fun, but you really have to squint to find character builds/concepts that derive more than a for-funsies benefit from things like Spring Attack.

 

Teleport is just a bad pool.  Sure, there's some utility in Recall Friend, but most of the pool's utility has been subsumed by temp powers.  The travel power itself is fast but expensive and clunky to use unless you combine it with Fly/Hover.  Mystic Flight combines both in one power pick, and it comes in a much more interesting pool, to boot.  Though it's true that nothing beats an enhanced TP for pure travel speed, pure travel speed isn't enough of an advantage these days to bother, or if you prefer, the investment is nowhere near worthwhile.

 

So, to bring this rambling post to something approaching an on-topic finish, I don't necessarily agree that Fly, in and of itself, needs a buff - but I do think that Fly requires too much investment to increase its speed beyond what anyone can achieve by visiting the P2W vendor.  By the same token, I also agree with ShardWarrior's implicit argument that Fly in particular and travel powers in general have become more-or-less just a power/slot tax on concept builds.  That is, except for Super Speed, which has huge utility as a stealth power.

 

It'd be nice if you could slot Fly to reach Afterburner-levels of speed.  It'd also be very cool if, as someone suggested, Super Speed unlocked the flight-speed cap.  More interactions between travel powers, in the spirit of Hover+Teleport (or Mystic Flight and itself :P ), would be very neat.

[Invulnerability Tankers - Soft Cap Defense]

You can even soft-cap to Psi:

 

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• 90% S/L RES, 49.8% F/C RES, 35.9% E/N, 31.8% Toxic RES
  
• 45.2% S/L DEF (1 foe in range of Invincibility), 45.2% E/N DEF, 45.9% Psi DEF, 39.2% F/C DEF, ~24% M/R/AoE
  
• Capped HP, ~38 HP/sec Regeneration
  
• 73.75% global rechage (143.75% with Hasten active)
  
• Perma Rage (for what that's worth, these days.)
  
• This is all with Cardiac Alpha active.  No other Incarnates used.
  

 

This is a very casual update to a build I mocked up years ago, long before we had ATOs or the various +RES IO bonuses.  I'm sure it could be improved, but I think it's an interesting proof of concept.

 

Also, for what it's worth, when it came down to building my own tank, I found that leaving Psi DEF at ~32% (one inspiration from the soft-cap) made for a more fun build.

 

Great to see this old guide again, and its author.  o7

[Storm Summoning/]

[*]If I had the extra slot, I'd've probably considered doing the KB/KD in Lightning Storm, but I'm willing to trial it without given how tight slots got.

[*]So far I've trialed the FF +Rech on other toons in areas that it was supposed to be "significant," and been underwhelmed. At the moment those short 5/s bursts aren't anything that will significantly improve any one thing across the build (IMO) so I'm not making massive expectations to include it unless convenient anymore.

[*]I have every intention of making this capable of ST performance, but as it stands there's going to be a gap in Bitter Ice Blast. Bolt vs. Blast, there's very little damage difference to them per second at max slotting (~4 pts), and ...

[*]If I use Mid's as my basic estimator (plugging the set with and without the proc into each power), it's only a 5pt difference. In-Game maybe this reflects as a different potential but... yeah that seems inconsequential to me. Easy swap of the sets though considering, so not a big deal. :)

[*]Freezing Rain and Sleet are identical powers, and I'm going to go out on a limb as assume the Devs just cloned one for the other. Given such, a friend and I did some excessive testing on procs in Sleet trying to see if/how/what would happen with that power given how many procs it can take. We plugged everything into it that we could (KD, -Res, Dam), nothing came back consistent...

[*]I had actually forgotten about Intuition having a Damage boosting component, so definitely swapped that.

[*]Ranged and AoE only represent 30% of the positional damage in the game. Lethal and Smashing represent ~75% of all typed defense, and Energy another ~5%. Of all Incarnate content (where this is most prevalent), nearly all Ranged damage is Energy typed, so having S/L/E at 45% covers 80% of my incoming damage concerns, and gives me an easy pad to eat a t2 purple and get to 59% for Incarnate content. As for the Defender side of that, despite having intentions to be ST capable, I'm likely never to actually solo any content unless for an intentional challenge, so there's absolutely nothing in it for me on going Defender. Although for those wanting earlier access to Storm, or with intention to Solo, it makes sense, but I want my Rains more than I want my Storms :)

[swapped to numerals to make my response easier to read - Obi]

 

1.  Cool.  Worth trying it the default way to see how you like it.

 

2. Yeah, I'm a little tepid on slotting FF as often as possible too, as you'll see from arguments in this thread.  Still, in Tornado, it's basically guaranteed to proc, and if you have the KB-to-KD IO in it, there's no reason not to cast it as often as possible.  If you cast it every ~20 seconds, then that's (0.9 * 100) * (5 / 20 seconds) = 22.5% average global recharge.  I was convinced to slot it in Tornado based on this reasoning, and based on the fact that my only set in the power (Expedient Reinforcement) takes only four slots.  YMMV, but I got a noticeable little bump out of that slotting change. (On the other hand, I found that removing my purple damage proc, and the associated purple set bonus, from Lightning Storm was a net loss.  This is probably due, in part, to the fact that you can't stack FF procs, and at least some of the time you'll want to chase Tornado directly with LS, so there are diminished returns on slotting FF procs, in practice, unless you feel like micromanaging the powers in question to occur in 5-second intervals.)

 

3.  Blast vs Bolt is a little subjective.  If you don't like Blast's animation, then say no more.  Personally, I found Ice Bolt's per-shot weakness irritating.  I can't tell you how many times I'd cast it at a minion with a sliver of health only to find that it didn't do the job.  So qualitatively, I prefer Blast, all else being equal.  Still, I like your reasoning on the slightly slower attack chain.

 

4.  Mid's doesn't do PPM correctly, which is unfortunate because otherwise it's super convenient for estimating damage output.  But you're right; in this case we're talking about a difference of not quite 10 average damage, not at all a biggie.

 

5. Yeah, offensive (i.e. target-affecting) procs in Sleet/Freezing Rain probably aren't that great, because of the area factor attached to the PPM formula.  But much like Force Feedback, the +End proc in the Corruptor ATO set is a buff to the caster, and since Freezing Rain is a pseudo-pet, buff procs in it don't care about the area.  My Corruptor gets his ~8.5 End back pretty much every cast (even with no targets), which diminishes the net cost of FR by something like two thirds.  You're absolutely right, though, that slots in FR would mostly be for set-mule purposes, and since you're planning on Ageless, the End cost of FR might not concern you, ultimately.

 

6.  Awesome :D

 

7.  I'm sure your estimate of the overall distribution of attack types is accurate, but Ranged and AoE could potentially account for close to 100% of the attacks you'd face on a character using Hurricane and Hover judiciously.  I do hear ya, and I'm not trying to tell you that your approach is wrong; just adding a different perspective.  Since I have what you might call a fetish for perma-Hover on ranged characters, I've come to appreciate the ranged-DEF approach for a number of reasons, most obviously because it allows more freedom in your choice of Epic Pool (and allows layering with an Epic +resist shield).  S/L DEF may be more effective across most of the game's content, but when damage types shift it can get really ugly.  Squishies don't take to average-damage-type modeling as well as sturdier classes, particularly if they don't have mez protection.  In your case, this wouldn't likely be a problem, because you also have your other vectors within a single Luck of soft-capping (or near enough) - so this is really just my rambling for the sake of rambling, not an argument specifically aimed at you.  I can say that my various experiments with a Blaster and S/L(/E) DEF on live were very uneven. 

 

Addendum to #7: Anyway, yeah, I spent a few minutes going over Defender builds, and it wasn't quite as easy as I recalled to soft-cap ranged and AoE.  It was doable, and the build would easily be playable, but my best attempts were forced to drop Breath and at least one of Afterburner, Snow Storm, or Aim.  Still, it's pretty remarkable how well Defenders take to soft-capping.

 

I also got a version of my Corruptor build to work with soft-capped Ranged and AOE DEF.

 

Highlights:

• Soft-capped to Ranged/AoE DEF, 42ish% to F/C/E/N, and 25% to melee/S/L/Psi
  
• ~35% S/L/F/C, ~48% Energy RES without running Tough (should be more or less end-sustainable with Conserve Power cycling)
  
• 81.25% in global recharge before Hasten or FF procs
  
• Picked up the Absorb proc in the default slot of O2 Boost
  
• Kept the Corruptor ATO procs in Bitter Ice Blast and Freezing Rain, the Apocalypse proc in LS, and the FF proc in Tornado
  
• basically the same global +damage of ~30%, and basically the same Hover speed

 

Downsides are that I lost ~20% in global recharge, lost Frost Breath, lost Snow Storm, and I also couldn't find a good way to cram in the Kismet IO, so I lost that.  (Actually I could cram it in, but it doesn't seem worth the trade offs, given the build's many DEF debuffs.)

 

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Kind of amazed that this build works at all, but in practice I'm on the fence.  With capped ranged DEF, perma-Hover, Clarion, and so much soft control, there are very few scenarios where you're really in any danger.  Adding AoE coverage would certainly eliminate what few dangers remain, short of auto-hit powers or unlucky cascade failures, though. 

 

Anyway, sorry for turning this into a novel.  You really got me thinking, thanks.

[Sell me a sentinel]

Thanks, Sunsette, always enjoy reading your posts.

[Storm Summoning/]

Got pointed this direction from the Pylon thread, and given the idea of sharing the build since it takes a different direction of certain aspects of play style, I figured posting it here was more relevant.

 

Thanks for posting your build, Myshkin.  Your posting here also reminded me that I owe Hjarki and Tex a response, so I'll get to those tomorrow if I'm not too swamped.

 

I like your approach.  As you said in the Pylon thread, it's very different from mine, and I think it's fairly novel overall.  I'll offer a few thoughts about your build, most of them pretty minor in the grand scheme.

 

• You may find that you miss having a KB-to-KD IO in Lightning Storm.  LS's KB can add a fair amount of chaos, but then again it also looks more impressive than the KD version, so it's certainly a valid approach.  The KD IO in LS certainly isn't as important as the one in Tornado, and none of this matters against hard targets, anyway.
  
• You reminded me of the Overwhelming Force unique, which may be a better fit than Sudden Acceleration in Tornado, so I definitely appreciate that.
  
• Tornado's an excellent spot for a Forced Feedback proc, as Hjarki's ably argued earlier in the thread.  Slotting it would crowd out your -RES proc though, so of course it's not an unambiguously superior option, depending on your play style.
  
• Ice Blast is better than Ice Bolt, both qualitatively and quantitatively, IMO.  The ideal single-target chain, afaik, is BiB -> Freeze Ray -> Blast, which requires BiB to get down to ~3.03s of recharge, which is very very difficult, but small gaps work too.  It's not like Storm will spend a great deal of its time spamming a single-target attack chain.
  
• Procs are better in longer-recharge powers, so I'd switch the sets in BiB and Freeze Ray.  Your Malice of the Corruptor proc adds 49.7 in average extra damage to FR; it would add an extra ~58.8 in BiB.  A small difference, to be sure, but I'm nitpicking :P
  
• Frost Breath really craves range.  At 44ft it's pretty underwhelming.  I'd consider slotting in some range enhancement, perhaps the whole of a Posi's blast set and swap the three Corruptor ATOs to Freezing Rain.  The added benefit there is that you'll be casting Freezing Rain as often as possible anyway, so you're apt to get more +end procs.  (The end proc is basically guaranteed in Freezing Rain, given its base recharge.  It'll proc a lot in Breath too, of course, but Breath isn't really spammable to quite the same extent that Freezing Rain is.)
  
• And that brings me to the subject of End.  One of the novel things I like about your build is that you really pump survivability stats and then take Ageless Destiny to address Storm's huge End issue.  This leaves you without mez protection (clarion), but with your extra DEF maybe carrying break frees would be a good alternative.  I'll have to give this some thought, as I was more-or-less proceeding from the assumption that I needed to take Conserve Power, based on long experience on the live severs with various Storm toons.  (Cardiac works too, but not slotting a +damage alpha, when Tornado and LS don't benefit from non-slot damage buffs, seems like a crime.)
  
• On the subject of Alphas, Intuition Radial does most of what Musculature does, but it also enhances just about everything else Ice Storm does, besides - slow, hold, defense debuff, range for your frost breath, tohit debuffs for Hurricane and Blizzard.  I don't mean to preach at you here; frankly I hadn't thought of Intuition until the other day myself and it was like a revelation.
  
• Finally, a little musing on the general subject of DEF on these builds:  I found that the Defender version can cap both Ranged and AoE without sacrificing too terribly much.  Given that you have Hurricane, and at least potentially, perma-Hover, a ranged+AoE DEF approach might offer even more practical survivability than a build with Scorpion shield and a high mix of ranged/AoE and resistance bonuses.  Since Defenders get near-equal-to-Corruptor damage when solo, they're definitely a viable and attractive option, more so than I would have initially thought myself.  Hjarki offers a lot of compelling arguments in their favor throughout the thread.
  

 

I very much look forward to hearing of your experiences with Storm.

[Defense VS Resist?]

It's even easier if you solo some of the way as you don't get as much xp but get more salvage and recipe drops.  Now, if you just farm or PL, you'll have fewer things to sell but you'll be in range for more farming/lucrative activities to build strength faster via incarnate.

 

Yep, also you can earn a lot of merits just by soloing story arcs (and picking up some exploration badges, if so inclined).  At ~300k a pop (selling converters), that adds up real quick.

 

Of course if you want real riches, you play the market, but IO prices on Homecoming are reasonable enough that you can earn even a tippy top high-end build through normal game play.  It just takes longer.

[AOE caps testing]

 

...it's done.

 

Damn, great work.  Thanks, Sunsette

[Pylon Damage Thread]

It's crazy how different a single concept can become between how two players build and play them. Looked at your build just to see because I've been planning an Ice/Storm myself and was curious as to how close your experience would relate to what I was anticipating. Pool Powers create a completely different paradigm between your build and mine; it'll be interesting to see what mine ends up being capable of in testing once I can get it completed (rolled and to 50, or whenever the Test Server comes back online).

 

Absolutely.  One of the great things about this game is the near-infinite variety of build options, even within a given AT or powerset combination.  I'd be interested to see how your plan differs from mine, though of course there are obvious guesses - e.g. the Fighting Pool. 

 

My concept/flavor preferences are a little restrictive, too; perma-Hover at a decent speed was a requirement, for example, and I was more or less intent to take Afterburner and max its speed too.  I have no doubt you could wring more performance out of Ice/Storm; I have a few alternate loadouts plotted out.  Hjarki and I discussed at least one of them here:

 

https://forums.homecomingservers.com/index.php/topic,5779.msg57013.html#msg57013

 

[Mid's Reborn: A Hero Designer (formerly Mids/Pines) and whatnot]

Seems to be a strange issue with caculated flight speed in the newest version.  When I start the program, flight speed is highly Inflated (was seeing upwards of 45 MPH for unslotted Hover on a blank slate build).  Only when I switched from MPH to Feet/Sec, and then back again, did it start displaying the correct value.

 

By no means is this an important thing, but thought I'd drop a line.  Otherwise the new Hero Designer is absolutely fantastic; thanks for all of your great work.

[Sell me a sentinel]

Blasters played well are no joke. But there's that pesky "played well" requirement...

 

Sentinels allow for more mitigation than barely softcapped S/L + ranged. Which lets less twitchy players have their fun too.

 

It comes down to that age-old pesky question of how to value defense vs offense. 

 

For years and years (and even now, arguably), Blasters paid way too much for their alleged offensive superiority.  It wasn't even a question; Scrappers (for example) could (can) be several times more survivable, in some cases orders of magnitude more survivable, whereas Blasters in the best case were only marginally better at damage output, and even then only really AoE damage output.

 

Single-target damage for Blasters was always weak, and to this day it largely remains so.  We used to see certain flavors of Tanker put up comparable DPS scores in the Pylon thread to the best Blaster powerset combos.  Again, this problem is less pronounced than it used to be, but the basic premise remains that ST damage is the province of melee ATs (or certain debuff builds).

 

Incidentally, all of this points to why I don't agree with people who call for Sentinels to be given Assault-like primary sets, mixing ranged and melee attacks.  Blasters were arguably hobbled by the decision to give them melee attacks, because once you introduce melee as an inherent part of an AT's design, you're left with an inescapable dilemma:  the melee attacks have to be strong enough to make them worth using, which means they must be stronger than ranged attacks (on average), which means that ranged sets have to be (comparatively) weak, lest the whole AT's performance dwarf everyone else's.  In other words, Blasters, who were given zero defenses to pay for their ranged-damage crown, actually had pedestrian DPS from range (a couple of powersets notwithstanding), in part because you could always point to this-or-that WTFPWN melee attack in a Blaster secondary.

 

But that points to a problem that migrated to Sentinels, which is that ranged sets alone tend to be comparatively weak.  Again, this is less true than it used to be, in large part because of crashless nukes (and to an extent fast snipes, which Sentinels don't get), but it's still worth noting.  As Sunsette noted in another thread for example, Energy Blast's (single-target) DPS just isn't at all good, and Energy's certainly closer to the average than, say, Fire or Ice. 

 

(By the way, Ice's single-target DPS was inexplicably nerfed on Sentinels. On the other hand, Sentinel Sonic Blast got a fairly big buff.  There appears to be very little rhyme or reason to the decisions made in porting blast sets to Sentinels.)

 

Of course, you could argue quite reasonably that the bulk of the game's content emphasizes AoE and not single-target damage.  Given the existence of Lore pets and -regen temp powers, this argument is even more compelling now.  And Energy Blast should have competitive AoE output, among Torrent, Explosive Blast, and Nova.  But here again the Sentinel is a bit stymied, because Sentinels have markedly lower AoE target caps.

 

None of this is to say that Sentinels suck.  I agree with Nihilii that they have a refreshing niche as a sort of easygoing soloist option.  Despite all of my above complaints, Sentinels almost certainly handle better than Scrappers in high-end team environments, for example; even if their damage is lower on paper, Sentinels don't have to run from target to target, and they have more AoE damage, on average.  And Sentinels are far easier and cheaper to bring to a high level of solo or self-contained performance than most of the squishy ATs that people compare them to.

 

But if you don't pick one of the better blast sets (e.g. Fire), and if you're in it for the long haul (high-end IO/Incarnate building), then you may find yourself disappointed.  Sentinels could use some tweaks.

 

As for Blasters, yeah, I think they have a high ceiling when played well, and the new Sustain powers certainly shouldn't be under-estimated from a quality-of-life standpoint, but if we're gonna talk ceiling then Blasters are marginalized by VEATs/Corruptors and certain flavors of Controller/Dominator/Defender, and even some Brutes/Scrappers. 

 

Leaving aside the performance ceiling, Blasters' offensive advantage isn't as big as Sentinels' defensive advantage.

[Sell me a sentinel]

((Also, a /WillPower Sentinel is going to have a MUCH easier time of END management than any Blaster alive ... solo and teamed.))

 

Agree with everything else you said, but these days Blasters have great end management, pretty much across the board.  The sustain powers are just that good.

[Primary Powerset resources?]

There are some other changes in the Sentinel powersets.  For instance, I recently rolled an ice/ninjitsu sentinel, and I noticed that I got freeze ray earlier than a blaster would, it does more damage, but it's a sleep now instead of a hold.  Ninjitsu has this power that increases your run speed, jump height, grants some small defense buff, and grants stealth, with a bonus to damage while you are stealthed.

 

Unfortunately, the Sentinel version Freeze Ray (Chilling Ray) is inferior to the Blaster/Corruptor/Defender version.  It does less damage, has a longer activation time, and as you noted, it has a sleep instead of a hold attached to it.  On top of that, the sleep doesn't even appear to be longer than the Blaster version's hold effect.

 

In fact, it seems the first three single target attacks in Ice have all had their recharge lowered (and thus their damage nerfed).  This might be helpful in the lower levels, but in the grand scheme it'll hurt. 

 

(Incidentally, it looks like Pine's underestimates Sentinel Ice attack values by a handful of points in almost every case.)

 

I still think Ice is an excellent choice for Sentinels, because their shorter-nuke gimmick synergizes extremely well with the long(ish) term debuffs that are attached to Blizzard.  But some of the choices made when porting the blast sets over to Sents just feel needless.