Warlawk

The most important part of the transition from +3 to +4 is going to be your alpha level shift. I'm sure it can be done without that, but I'm not sure it would be efficient. I haven't really done any testing on builds below level 50 or running only basic IOs, if you decide to share your experience and opinions in the thread that would be great!

I really feel like I'm missing something with all the hubbub on this combo. It's very thematic, very cool and looks like a solid single target DPS machine. Yet... it seems like a fair number of sets have attacks that are both higher raw damage as well as higher DPA and would fill this niche better than BS does. Disembowel 119 dmg 66.61 DPA Headsplitter 159 dmg 68.26 DPA Cremate 122.6 dmg 81.71 DPA Greater Fire Sword 179.2 dmg 76.9 DPA Ice melee only has one, but gets special mention for having a good cone, an aoe and the STUPID DPA on Freezing Touch Freezing Touch 178.3 dmg 178.3 DPA Crippling Axe Kick 129.7 dmg 81.05 DPA Cobra Strike 119.9 dmg 71.79 DPA Crane Kick 119.9 dmg 71.79 DPA Eagles Claw 178.6 dmg 70.6 DPA Telekinetic Blow 133.7 dmg 90.98 DPA Greater Psi Blade 239.6 dmg 95.83 DPA Radiation Siphon 141.7 dmg 63.54 DPA Devastating Blow 222.7 dmg 83.39 DPA I'm not saying people shouldn't play BS or that it's a bad set, but that's a fair number of sets putting out bigger hits, bigger crits and better DPA. In addition, many of those sets will offer AoE that BS just can't offer. Aside from the thematic awesomeness of a sword and shield combo, I really feel like there's something that I'm missing about why bs/sd has gotten this kind of attention. If anyone could shed any light on this for me I'd be most appreciative!

Well, I had been told by many people that it's better with bosses on and it always felt that way to me, but I had never tested it. So I did. After about 10 minutes (on Spines/Fire) with the number firmly settled around 1.5 mil per minute I didn't see much point in doing a full length test. So it went from 2.214m/minute with bosses on to 1.514 with bosses off. So earnings are roughly 2/3 with bosses off. EDIT: As an aside, if anyone has any broot s/l farming builds they would like to submit I would love to take a look. I was tinkering with it a bit but was having a hard time getting s/l def cap, resists and still getting to perma hasten. Trying to avoid Fiery Aura because a lot of people seem to want to avoid jumping on that train even for s/l farming but would be happy to look over anything.

Also a great ease of use function is to use the binds as is and then if you have a gaming mouse with multiple buttons you can program just assign the numpad keystrokes to a couple of the buttons. I keep All attack and all all follow on my mouse and then for those times when I want to really finesse something it's all available right there at the numpad. Most of the time I don't need the full set of controls, but I like having them right there at my fingertips for when I do want them.

Usually it's 4 minutes and change for a fast clearing build. Closer to 5 minutes if you have bad patrol placement and such. So including zone in time etc it would not be enough to fully clear the map. Additionally, by the time you have a build completed enough to push that kind of a clear time, you would have no need for a FF buff bot. I don't mean to discourage, if you want to try it, then try it. I would be greatly surprised to see it pull more than 5-10% increase in inf gains/clear speed but I would LOVE to be proven wrong, I mean the whole point of this thread is to find and refine farming information! 🙂

Respecced the elec to clean it up a little and ran more testing, slight improvement but nothing drastic. Because the build can do it solo without sacrificing any significant amount of damage. If you're double boxing you need to keep the defender alive, you need to keep the defender close enough to rebuff or in a place where you can drive by for rebuffing, you will waste more time between each mission trying to get two toons out and back in, then getting the defender to your safe spot etc. If you don't have the influence yet to do a full build, leveling them in tandem is an option, but for a completed build with incarnates it's really not needed and will just reduce your efficiency.

Cool, will add it to the submitted number soontm, as soon a I can overcome Statement #1 and get back to doing it. I've got some numbers for the Spines/Bio scrapper running the s/l but they aren't terribly impressive, I'm much more interested in doing it with a brute. I'm actually typing this as I Powerlevel both a Claws/Elec and Claws/Bio brutes to get a good baseline of which will be the better secondary for s/l farmers. Claws seems like the primary that was contributing the heaviest in the fire farmers (spin does WORK!) so I figured that would be a good place to start when we aren't falling back on Fiery Embrace and Burn for damage. Going to have to take stock of my funding though, I just poured around 1.8 billion into the claws and elec farmers a couple days ago and I have two new regular play characters I want to work on! I'm not used to feeling broke damnit! lol. And I agree, the costume work by Brigg in comicon arcs is nothing short of amazing. Looks like we're pushing at least one more mission up over 900 5 star ratings so hopefully we will see a s/l comicon clamped to 49 soon. The two linked earlier in the thread felt like they were not as efficient as the comicon stuff is in regards to patrols and such.

Ine a different thread @Riverdusk had suggested the possibility of adding a Minimal SoundFX option to powersets just as we have a Minimal FX option for some of the more egregious visual sets. Personally, I play with the sound off, but if this would certainly make me at least consider playing with sound on. For it to be a viable option though, I think it would need to be an option in the menus, not specific power sets (although that might be cool for people who have like 1 power in their set they cant stand). Being able to have a separate power FX sound slider apart from normal sound FX would be great.

I will be doing some testing this evening with some S/L to see how that goes, so expect some updates there soon! Yes that absolutely will reduce your inf earnings by a substantial margin. Just using rough estimate math 49 farming should put you in the 1.9 mil inf/minute ballpark.

Now that I've done a little digging on the actual mechanics of the interface, yeah I think core is the better choice for interface. Mathematically the secondary effect (damage proc) will have a 18.75% chance to trigger for both core and radial so there is no reason not to choose core for the 75% chance of primary effect. The intent and the function of these two are disconnected by the way they implemented the mechanics. This would imply that I manage my Frenzy Stacks, see Statement #1! I'm fairly sure that not using Rending Flurry to hold stacks will result in a DPS loss but I haven't specifically tested or done the math. This is part of the reason in the OP I stated that a well played Savage with a player who has expertise doing so has potential to go higher. On a brain dead simple rotation of just pressing the numbers in order it competes with the top sets. For someone who took the time to learn the ins and outs and really put themselves into playing it, I'm sure it could do better.

It has far less to do with the fact that I won't get any use out of it and more do with the fact that I think PvP is a dumpster fire that's beyond redemption. As I stated somewhere earlier in the thread, slapping bandaids on a disemboweled system is just wasting bandaids. Happy for the players who will get enjoyment out of it regardless though. Cheers.

Well, according to the Justin channel is discord the next testing patch will have a bunch of pvp changes. While I personally would advocate against that allocation of resources I am happy for all the people behind the keyboards who will be made happy by these changes. No sarcasm, I hope it brings good things your way!

Thank you for those arc #s! I have some Claws/Fire numbers to put up tonight and I'll have to get busy running the s/l arcs and see how they compare! Insomnia strikes hard, haven't slept in a few days now so I will be updating and checking back on the couple of questions once I'm a bit more coherent.

You can, it just takes a small investment of effort to do so. I feel that way about the sound for the entire game so I play with it off unless I'm having an issue finding a clickie so this concern was never even on my radar lol.

You are being civil, and kudos for that, but you are also either deliberately misrepresenting the situation or coming from a mindset that is completely alien to my understanding. PvP had a number of very expensive IOs. Glad Armor was the most expensive but Panacia and I believe several others were worth far more than the top selling pve IOs. This created a tiny supply with high demand. The people controlling that supply were also consumers of, and dealers in, the high end IO market which was required to be functional in PvP. If you believe that situation has no effect on the remaining aspects of the economy you're either being willfully ignorant or misrepresenting something. Prior to this you hadn't shown tendencies toward either of those so I'm not really sure which it is, but I think we will just have to agree that there is not going to be any common ground here.

So just because it's hard that justifies what was clearly, blatantly exploitative behavior? Really? And I consider AFK PvE farming distasteful. It's not the same degree, but I'm not a fan. Multibox and stay active in the farming windows even if you're not pressing keys 100% of the time... sure, but true afk farming, nah. The fact that you consider what is clearly abusive and exploitative behavior to obtain pvp ios back when it was difficult to be justified simply because they were difficult to obtain really speaks volumes. Once again being deliberately obtuse. You know exactly the intent of that statement was that the only source of supply of said IOs was through pvp, which people did not want to play. Trying to spin it otherwise is just misrepresenting the case to try and misdirect attention from the fact that there's no underlying argument to support your position. The rest of the content of your response shows that you perfectly understood the effect this had on the economy as evidenced by this statement. So demand was so high that people otherwise uninterested in pvp, who you knew, started abusing exploitative mechanics and yet you tried to present with your original question that you didn't believe PvP ios had a notable effect on the economy. You're tripping over yourself here and trying to misrepresent things to strengthen your position and it just makes you look bad where you had previously been one of the only reasonable and rational pvp advocates in the thread.

Sounds like a lot of effort for something that should be remembered by anyone who was active in the forums at the time. I certainly remember the jokes about "Is it Monday already? Time for the pvp thread already?" The frequency of astoundingly terrible pvp suggestions was, if anything, higher than Pax has represented and of lower quality as well. EDIT: Ok, that's probably hyperbole, but it was pretty silly in regularity.

So players were using multiple accounts to afk farm and obtain rewards that were only supposed to be available from defeating another player and you somehow see that as not being exploitative behavior and try to compare it to pve inf farming. Just... wow. We're apparently coming from such fundamentally different mindsets I don't think there's any common ground to be had on this subject. Top end pve IOs were selling for what... 150 million? Top end pvp recipes were selling for what... 3-4 billion? Up to double the influence cap for a single item that is only available through content most people do not want to play. This had a huge impact on the market and anyone trying to pretend otherwise is either being deliberately obtuse or using it as a piece to promote their own agenda through creative representation of information. This supply and demand situation is what led to the aforementioned exploitative behavior.

My mistake, I had dismissed this as feel good rhetoric. Happy players is good, giving things away that are relatively easy to earn is not. I'm actually in the middle of grinding out accolades right now so I'm not going on a google crusade to find studies but it has been studied and found that when players are given the important parts of their character development for little to no effort, there is a lower level of engagement and investment in said character. This results in lower long term retention of said player. Same as if you go to Justin and just create your character from scratch. I wanted to see if anyone would go here or not but it didn't happen. Part of the reason people are not interested in doing so is because it creates no investment, no bond and no engagement with your character when it's just a pile of free loot you stacked onto a level 50. It's how the human brain works, release of dopamine, reward chemicals yadda yadda yadda. As a character is leveled and things like accolades are earned your brain releases those things because you've met a goal. Regardless if you enjoyed the gameplay or not, chemically it is now imprinted on your brain as a Good Thing. Removing that aspect of a character lessens the investment so we would likely see less long term retention and growth, not more. And let's not present things that are completely unreasonable as if they were fact. A change like this is not going to bring any appreciable number of new players to pvp, it's just going to mean the existing pvp players don't have to invest the same time into a character that everyone else does to earn that reward. And just for the record, on a fresh 50 I was able to solo grind through Portal Jockey, Atlas Medallion and Invader in just a couple hours last night and a couple hours today. This is literally the first time I've ever bothered to grind out these accolades and it's not exactly demanding or an oppressively large time investment.

Yes, they can drop anywhere including AE farms. Them dropping only in PvP while being powerful for pve was a prime example of the negative effects that brings. It caused exploitative behavior (AFK farming pvp kills etc) and had devastating effects on the economy. It had a very detrimental effect on the game.

A change that requires investment of resources should be judged on its own merit, not because you feel people should pity the target demographic for said change and give them free stuff because they've had a hard knock life.

Translation "I'm a minority and I'm being oppressed!" Are you able to present a reason other than simply not wanting to do the content for why this change should be implemented?

Aside from "I don't want to do the content" why is this change needed? I need incarnates slotted for many of the later iTrials or else I suffer a massive debuff. Should I get those for free just because I don't want to grind content for incarnate mats?

I guess I don't get why PvP should be sacrosanct and exempt from criticism? Everyone including the PvP players will gladly tell you how flawed the pvp is in CoH. It has its appeal for certain people but the whole system is fundamentally flawed and broken. Indicating that people shouldn't criticize it won't change that. Slapping band-aids on a system that's been completely disemboweled is a waste of band-aids. People should not be straight up trolling, but there is no reason that the community shouldn't be free to make their views and preferences known on the directions the game should take. We're all part of the community, our voice is just as valid as the pvp players right?

Once again, unable or unwilling to address the discussion in question. Eh, I can argue a position without being emotionally invested in it, his response doesn't bother me but I'm happy to provide him with continuing interaction since it offers an excellent opportunity for him to completely invalidate his own credibility in ways that no one else could possibly manage. And I have no issues with Mac, I just strongly disagree with him and have not yet seen any argument in support of the change aside from "I don't want to play my character to earn rewards that are important to the function of that character." I would note however, that you did not address my specific question. ... In that you wanted to indicate it was not a personal increase of power. This is being requested by pvp players for pvp characters. In every way that matters, it is an increase the the power of all of their characters that applies equally and would be rewarded with no investment of effort by said character.