Erydanus

And as an addendum I finally DID take the time to look up Dual Blades and as I thought, Stalkers have an alternate scheme for their combos that reflect that we mostly sneak up behind 1 dude and shank him. It ALSO incorporates Build Up and Placate making taking them earlier more important in one sense. As someone who just played a low level stalker I found I simply didn't need those tools at low levels because nothing was surviving an unbuffed Assassin's blade. It may be that just stabbing things without combos until level 14 is fine too. But maybe not! https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Dual_Blades The first combo a stalker can do is at level 8 and is the knockdown combo: Build UP, Assassin's Blades, Ablating Strike. Therefore, I'd prioritize getting Build Up earlier than I expected. At least it's logical, all you have to do is your usual build up + strike and if the dude's not dead make Ablating Strike your extra hit to knock him down. If he did die, great, finish on his buddy and knock him down instead. The second combo is at 12 and also starts with Build up, moves on to Assassin's Blades, but finishes with Placate instead of Ablating strike; that's the empower combo to buff yourself. So at that point after doing the assassin's strike you can either buff yourself or knock down a guy. Power Slice isn't actually needed until you take Vengeful Slice at 18 and can do the Attack Vitals combo. So just skip it at level 4 and take High Pain Tolerance there, Build up at 8, and Power Slice at 14. Everything else can stay the same, and if you level with a sewer team you'd probably never even notice the problem in the first place.

That's just it, a lot of people are in the mindset of "get to max level and actually start playing." COH is an anomaly in that it really is about the getting to 50; the stuff at 50 with the Incarnate system is a heck of a lot newer.

Emphasis mine in the quote: You're missing an important point. We're talking about people who skip the "and use a couple of attacks that have a debuff attached" part of playing an Empath. I just sat here with a build planner and if you take everything in Empathy; recall friend; maneouvers, assault, tactics and one of venge or victory; and injection, aid self, and field medic; you still have enough slots for FIVE attacks. If you take dark for instance you could take Dark Blast and slot for -tohit turning it into a -14% tohit debuff tool; dark pit which is a stun; tenebrous tentacles which is an AoE immobilize and you can also slot it for -tohit and get it up to about -14%; take torrent for moving mobs away from people; and take Blackstar because it's a -62.5% to hit nuke and that's before slotting. As far as tapping into the medicine pool it's not an invalid choice! Injection can be used as a debuff attack applying -12.5% tohit, damage, and recharge to a foe. USEFUL. Aid Self gives you 48% stun resistance (that is reduces the time you're stunned by that %). Since you can't clear mind yourself and stun attacks are common why not get that?. If you have Field medic it's also an end buff. And finally Field Medic is like Healer Build Up: 25% bonus to heal power. SURE! Fine, stack Field Medic and Power Build Up and use Absorb Pain. That will be HILARIOUS OVERKILL. There's so many options too. The original defender blast powersets were restricted to powers that had a debuff or comparable component: -tohit in dark, -end in lighting, knockback in energy blast, etc. Some of the latest proliferated ones just do damage - and that's ok too!

Oh actually making a suggestion for your dev tracker here: Don't use Times Roman as your font. It and other serif fonts are hard to read on web pages structured like this. For various reasons that I, a technical writer, will spare boring you with, sans serif fonts are better for this kind of application. You could still use a serif font for the line with the Dev name as a heading if you really want to ... I personally would just bold a nice sans serif but it's reasonable to use a serif font there. However, Times is still scrunched and a bad choice for it. (Times Roman was literally invented to scrunch as much print onto a sheet of newspaper as possible.) Here's a nice repository of fonts: https://fonts.google.com/ Look at Open Sans paired with Roboto! https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans That is the kind of easy to read look I'm suggesting for a dev info box. Also, pad the entries a little bit either at the top or bottom to provide visual separation from the various lines.

This is honestly one of the best QoL changes I have ever seen.

Well ... I'd argue that it IS a bug. It's just an old one that hadn't been quashed previously. There's no reason that Praetoria's transit systems wouldn't award commuter in-lore is there?

It's been this way for me for many days!

I'd like to know people's thoughts on the /rad secondary on scrappers - as far as they've experienced so far. I went to help a friend with his low level Skulls mission and my new DB/Rad scrapper was ... well, not as effective as I expected him to be. It's pretty sad when the EB kills you first and the blaster hangs on a lot longer...

Pyron and Philotec, thanks for chiming in and making my point!

Exactly. The servers had a bonus XP setting going for a while until recently that coincided with game re-launch and also the 15th anniversary of the game; those are now off. The only other things that this incarnation of the game has tweaked are as follows: - since there's no veteran subscriber rewards or pay store, all the items formerly dispensed from that system have been moved to the ingame P2W Vendor. A selection of typical veteran rewards such as Nemesis Staff and Ninja run are claimable for free by speaking to the vendor. Additional items can unlocked with in-game currency as you like. The P2W vendor also allows you to tweak your personal XP rate at a cost of influence. - costume unlocks that were premium outfits and certain earned rewards are all unlocked at the start - respecs are free every 10 levels Additionally the current version has some powers that were not released in live plus some powerset proliferation that was done by the fan developers. So some of the newer powersets are not as 100% refined and balanced as classic ones.

I think it's fair to point this out! In the first week of the game being up a lot of people were doing conventional teams going into the actual sewers to grind levels. In the second and third weeks the info about Death from Below got out and the mix shifted. At the same time there were a lot of actually new players who genuinely thought that was the expected path to play through. That of course is not great. I totally appreciate many people want to kick start their leveling process and get a big handful of powers available and I think it's great there's a way to do that. I just want new players to know it's an option! Those Hollows missions are MERIT LOADED guys. Doing the full set of 4 arcs yields about 95 merits. That's not a mistake they painted a big ole dollar sign on them to induce players to do them.

Patron stuff was lowered to 35th level as epic pools now unclock then! (Got a clunker in one of the last 2 spots of your secondary? You can start your epic pool early!)

I agree with your point. Say I have powerset A that I'm not customizing and I want powerset B to match the other set's colors, I have to guess. Normally if you're just doing custom colors for both you can hit the use color across all sets button -- but you can't do that with a stock set. But you should be able to!

That does sound like what I've been seeing too, in general. I think it's possible that it needs some animation corrections still. It wasn't a released powerset at the end of the game's life, I think it was on the test server for i24? If that's the case we'll just have to live with it being a little flaky. Honestly I'd rather have a set that's 5% wonky that's a lot of fun than not have the set. Then again it's possible there will be refinement development work on it at some point in the future.

Hi all, before opening a topic in the bug forum I thought I'd feel out other people. I've seen a few odd things happen while playing a Stalker with psionic melee and I'm unsure if I saw animation bugs, or if the heavy lag which Excelsior was been experiencing before the move was just fooling me. I'm primarily concerned about the assassin's strike power but was also curious if anyone saw anything similar. Of course the other versions of this powerset have a different attack than Assassin's Psi Blade. I played a martial arts stalker back in the day and while I know there's an interrupt component to AS, I find in psi melee it's super duper touchy. Numerous times I've thought I had come to a complete stop, clicked it, my camera view pivots to center on the character, and then it doesn't go off and I have to click again and the foe has moved so I have to move and build up just wore off damnit and now I'm clicking and there it goes finally. Additionally I've seen the power just conk out. Like I clicked the attack and the icon goes dark but my character does not DO anything. No animation executes and I so far have not seen a combat message like I missed (though usually I'm fighting furiously when this happens and I can't really stop and parse the combat log). So it could be that I missed and the game just blew off the animation but I really am not getting the impression that happened. Again though this could be server wonkiness, which is why I'm surveying other players first.

I'm really not sure, I'm just clocking something I thought I saw in another thread. I don't think it's ok to say "anything will do" in this kind of situation where we're trying to run older software. I just didn't want this guy to blow $600 and get a system that actually is kind of meh on this game. Just post the stats before you buy and the real experts can chime in.

Note that this is not a SCORE change, this was actually put into the game while live in Issue 21. Conveniently this is documented in the new Guide To When Things Changed! https://forums.homecomingservers.com/index.php/topic,2044.0.html

And people say Beast Mastery Masterminds aren't good and make us Outcasts.

By the way I think you can put that Zephyr into the swift or hurdle - I think it might be nice to jam it into Hurdle so you can actually put at least 1 flight speed IO into mystic flight.

Nonononono. You guys don't understand. When you watch a TV show they always end with the most important senior actor. Like in Buffy the final credit was "and Anthony Stewart Head as Giles." That's us! We're Giles. They saved the best for last.

Yeah I have to tell you a thing. I'm pretty sure that Excelsior = Virtue. I know Virtue was an unofficial RP server and for us that's Everlasting, but the sophistication I see in Help, broadcast, LFG just gives it more of a mature vibe. In comparison I was on Everlasting while working on screencaps for a thing I'm doing (nebulous hint), I was seriously underwhelmed by the community in that time. In the help chat a fight broke out whether tankers or brutes were better tanks, and did not stop even after someone asked them to not talk over help requests and then a GM ALSO asked that people drop it so actual help requests weren't overlooked. I did see some RP chat going on too, especially in broadcast and LFG -- but overall I get the feeling Everlasting is pretty similar to uh... which server was Merdedes Lackey and her RP group playing on? - was it Pinnacle or Liberty? It's got that vibe, kinda. (And a bit of Freedumb to be honest). So anyway welcome to our server. And our server is best server. :P

Great work. It's extremely handy to have a reference list to figure out when a thing happened, so it's easier to look it up and read about it in detail. It's also a nice trip down memory lane.

My recollection is that you can't completely shut down attacking mobs, but you can at least stop them from using high endurance cost abilities; for instance you may be able to prevent a lt from buffing their teammates or shut down a Tsoo sorcerer's hurricane or doing a nova. How useful that is? I'm totally unsure, and I had an electric blaster who I slotted for -end. I remember that character struggling, not owning his opponents.

Actually this is a great reminder. I wanted a certain heal set piece last night and there were none on the market but I had a redundant recipe from the set. I should have made the IO and done an in-set.

Yeah and the windows options were in a separate file too (which I thankfully found). Welcome, Chuckers!