Erydanus

No see my problem is we'll split up to the zones and still it will take FOREVER. I'm not sure what's gone on in the pug ones I've done but at least a couple times things were getting killed so slowly that 2-3 other people went to the assigned person's zone and had the time to get there and do the kills. Not even like a clear case of someone went AFK like apparently someone either didn't know where to find mobs or was like, a defender with 2 attacks... it just made no sense but it happens over and over.

Just as an FYI, when you put something in a storage item, it actually becomes part of the base itself. So that is actually what feeds into the 18 storage item limit, apparently it's a significant strain on the system.

There's some really good candidates for worst TF right here. It's actually pretty hard to rank them for me but I'll try. Numina's time waster missions are just dull and dumb even if you have no problems. It's just filler of the worst kind. I don't agree that event spawns are a problem but remember when we didn't have any base portals to travel to zones, or Oro, and the trams were on two different loops segregating the zone levels? The travel time was awful. And probably the idea was to keep the teams together so the ambushes could be heroically fought. Honestly, this whole TF is just not well written. It'd be better to just get the shard from Azuria and then do like 3 door missions in Eden and then finish it. Or somehow combine all the defeats into objectives of 1 mission so everyone could do the street sweeping simultaneously. Synapse is quite a slog but at least you get the very cool and creepy final map, plus you get a giant monsters spawn. It is too long, and it is tedious, but at least the rewards are beefy. I ran a couple of these when it was the featured TF of the week a while back and honestly the new "keep powers to +5 levels when exemped" thing made it a lot more do-able. Plus for the last one I was on an at-level fire/kin and I was really appreciated. Citadel. Just boring!! I love punching Nazis but with Citadel, Moonfire, and Hess all mostly featuring Council and all in the same level range, one of them stands out as dullest and too long and that's Citadel. I'd have to say Numina's edges out Citadel's though because there's so much time right there in the middle where you literally just do nothing but wait for it to be your turn to kill like 20 guys. Even if Citadel is repetitive at least you're doing something.

I'd actually like to see a "conjured weapons" ala Skyrim/Elder Scrolls weapon style, but not as a powerset. Just as a skin for the existing weapon sets, since having the conjured weapons appear and fade out as the combat moves on would be explained by the weapons being turned off and on again. It would look cool and replace suddenly appearing and disappearing physical weapons with appropriate effects. Plus, you can explain that style of weapon as spells, or telekinetic energy focused into a solid enough form, or force field energy focused into a solid form; so easy to pass off as magic, tech, mutant, etc. Anyway I did want to chime in that I enjoyed the feel of street fighting so much from the new low level Skulls storyline where you disguise yourself as a Bone Daddy candidate that I rolled a character to play it. I haven't gotten up to far but I really like the feel. Back on live I had characters who used kinetic melee and electric melee and thought they were fun sets. Weirdly the one that never did it for me quite as much as I expected it to was super strength. Somehow I get this vague sense of not feeling it's that particularly impactful; but then I've never been at a level to rip up ground and chuck it at someone.

I once complained that all mission doors in Boomtown were back in the area Babbage spawns in and the next mission I got had one in the front of the zone at a door I didn't know was active. O_o;; I have a couple times gotten a radio mission to go to a bank being robbed in Talos. The bank was in a cave up on Scylla Isle. Most importantly, let us thank War Witch for having turned off a whole bunch of really annoying doors in the depths of the forest maze of Perez Park.

I've played a fair amount of MMOs and how much money is needed as you level vs how much you make and how much effort it takes to make money has varied. But I have learned one lesson which I think is applicable here: While playing an MMO, if you make no effort to make money as you play you will probably not have any money. If you want to have money you will need to designate some % of your play efforts to making money instead of just leveling. In Final Fantasy XI I literally could not level my character because I could not afford cornerstone spells and equipment. I was playing a white mage, could not even farm for casual drops off monsters 20 levels lower than me, and resorted to cooking (crafting) fishing bait to make a few thousand at a time. In comparison in the game Rift, the need for money as leveling was minimal and caused a lot of people to reach level 50 while doing nothing other than selling trash drops and be shocked that fast mounts at 50 cost 50 gold. However the economic reality of that game was that you could literally pick up shiny collectibles ("artifacts") off the ground and sell them for cash; you could learn the mining and woodcutting skills and in 10 minutes wandering the newbie zone pick up enough ore and wood to sell on the auction house for up to 5 gold depending on the day. Literally you could make the 50 gold for that level 50 mount in approximately an hour to an hour and a half even if you hadn't spent any time making a few coins each time you played. So upon reading the first post of this thread my entire thought sums up as: so, some people want to fast grind out leveling content and spend 0 effort making money. That's their choice and it's not a problem. Realistically even if you primarily grind radio missions, if you just do a task force now and then and use the merits to buy converters and boosters and sell them, you will have all the money necessary to finance your basic gear and a few perks like steadfast protection knockback protection. This has been shared over and over on the forums, and on the help channel. The water has been carried to the horse; if it doesn't drink, it can just die of dehydration.

I have a scrapper with Dual Blades and Rad and he's … insanely overpowered, now as he's hit 41 or so. But I also threw a lot of money at him and he has all the survivability IOs you can get including a couple that grant 3% defense, the scaling damage resist, a miracle and a panacea, etc. He is the opposite of someone having end problems, I can run around with ninja run on (most of the time). I'd also like to note that it was effective for me to slot Radiation Therapy with the performance shifter proc instead of sticking it in stamina because when I actually use the power it typically proccs on 4 or 5 guys and gives me a big chunk of instant recovery (like 30-40 points of end) which is more useful to me than having it in stamina and steadily giving me small single activations. I also took Tough & Weave (which I normally do not) because Rad trades off a measure of smash/lethal resistance to have more of other resists including toxic. Taking tough and slotting it roughly hits the cap without me going into fiddly IO builds to achieve S/L resist cap. The defense in weave is also pretty helpful though I'm not looking at capping my defense or anything like that; but the layering of 15% defense on top of nearly capped resists with self heals and regen boosts is amazing. Literally the only thing that's killed me in many levels was being double-tagged by a pair of sappers I didn't see and who doesn't die when that happens? I bought a lot of winter sets as well because the tier 6 buff is cold & fire and 1 positional defense. (Also Lady Winter was the last thing to kill me before those sappers but that was about 10 levels before.) I don't know TW at all. I always look askance at any advice to put end reduction in regular cost personal shields (.21 to .26 end/sec) anymore because there's MUCH more benefit to putting the end reduction in attacks. That said I also have seen a lot of people go with attack slotting that is accuracy then end and it was ALSO a misstep because what costs you more end: 1 attack with no end slotting or 2 attacks with 1 end slotted in them? Of course, it's the second! By making sure your attacks hit and do damage you save more end than you would just randomly putting end reducers in all your attacks. I'm not saying you should never put end reducers in attacks - especially costly attacks and bread & butter attacks you spam - but I wouldn't put that in first. Another gameplay technique to minimize endurance problems (especially up to the mid 20s) is to make sure you are constantly buffed with inspirations. If you have a full tray of candy you're cutting yourself off from drops of free buffs. If you don't have some inspiration running on you whether it's a gratuitous red, yellow, purple, or orange, WHY NOT? My usual default is to simply eat every small inspiration that drops as soon as it drops unless I'm saving up (I do like to have a couple blues or greens). Even eating small blues and greens after a fight ends can often top you up so you're at 100%/100% when you charge into the next group of foes. The taunt aura in /rad is sick. I've never experienced anything like it. My scrapper plays more like a brute or a tank. I literally run through rooms and aggro everything, whip around a corner and start laying down AoE death as 14+ mobs come charging at me. After maybe 10 guys and a couple warwolves I'll be down to 66% health and I'll hit rad therapy and particle shielding and look I'm 100% health and 90% endurance again ahahaha. Kinda thinking of trying a mace/rad armor brute next tbh.

You mean shadows & reflections? As candidate servers they're going to not have level up commands either, right?

Since we're now going to have TWO test servers, Brainstorm and Aeon, could possibly one of them not grant accolades automatically (just patron & Vanguard unlocks)? Or is there some reason to have 2 identical test servers?

I wonder - and this is just off the cuff wondering - if people playing Beasts are not taking the direct attacks in the set and spamming them hard; those generate stacks of pack mentality. Pack mentality is a damage buff on the MM that stacks up to 10 charges and radiates out to the pets nearby, per Summon Wolves. Now, the beasts have a tendency to run far ahead of the MM, that means that up to now they may have been running out of pack mentality buff range and if they were balanced around the expectation of having a certain amount of pack mentality most of the time, then what we might be seeing here is a "brute with no fury" situation. Also as far as the self-mitigation the beasts have, Fortify Pack converts the pack mentality stacks into actual defense and regen (I don't have the numbers). So again, if the MM is not right in the middle of that pet group maybe that's going to waste too. Honestly I've been busy with some phone games and haven't had time to play my beast MM at all since the big update. I'm really curious to see what kind of performance change comes with the new pet AI. Of course maybe beast just needs a damage buff or a rotation change but, this is something I'm curious about.

Wormhole is not just about repositioning (which to be fair does require a knockback to knockdown enhancement for optimal use) it's also about stunning the mobs. Wormhole is no aggro, no notify and it's also a stun. That means you have the time necessary to exploit the super tight clumping for fulcrum shift and then throw the kitchen sink at them (both literally with propel and figuratively with any other attacks you and or your team want to use). Overall gravity is about controlling the battlefield. It has wormhole, it has the difficult to use right dimension shift, it has the amazing pet which can be used as a positioning tool or a damage dealing mini-me, it has the side effect of slow built into many of the powers so that even if you're not holding a mob it's probably running away slowly. Kinetics has a similar mandate, kinetics is quite literally about sucking the energy out of your foes and using it for yourself in various ways. I feel like the two synergize like paint & primer. I don't think either set lets the other do something it can't do (like my personal fave grav/rad is basically about rad adding direct controls and might-as-well-be-held debuffs) but instead it's about making all the same things work but just better. It's also a combo that works exceptionally well for soloing OR for teaming. That's why I describe it as a 'top tier' combo.

Wormhole -> Fulcrum Shift.

Bad? no, it's top tier.

Yeah and I don't know why Dacy said Control+Z won't work on a storage item, I've definitely moved storage items around in a room and even had them go sproing and jump somewhere undesired then undone it.

I disagree that there's any problem with 3. To me the most important thing is ONE point of knockback protection, because that is all that is necessary to cancel out knockdown. Knockdown is just knockback at less than 1 magnitude, most casual knockdown like punches and ice slicks and rifle shots are just 0.67 kb. Now, due to the purple patch and the possibility you get hit with a few things at once, I would prefer to have at least a few points. The 4 you get from Steadfast Protection, or Karma, or Blessing of the Zephyr is great. If I were to get just 3 points through a set bonus that I was using already, I would think that was quite good too. There are some powers that do incidental knockback in the range of 1.6-2.x but not a lot. Then the next typical value jumps very high to the 6-8 range. So, overall 1, 3, 4, it's all decent for a defender because the thing you are really most worried about is being interrupted by knockDown.

I was in Pocket D a couple days ago and the two ramps that lead up to portal-corp like portals have an error. Some of their internal structure have jumped forward and are sticking out of the window into the shadow shard.

Five seems a little low but let me ask did you take any experience boosters? It's so common for people to do that. If you're getting bonus XP then you're leveling ahead of the curve and the drop rate is going to be anemic. (In fact the xp boost proportionately trades off cash drops from foes too...) I'm guessing Outrider meant this forum is typically for technical support but I don't think your question is off topic, you're not asking for general advice you're asking if something is wrong.

I feel that all defenses imply that you're "dodgy" regardless of whether it's a vector dodge or a category dodge. It's all avoidance. I think that the idea of some blows glancing off is represented in this power set by the resistance to damage that it has in a few places. I'm certainly not one of the OG Devs but I think they were just being very careful to justify describing the powers they used to stay on this relatively narrow theme. I think this power set was made right around the time that some of the devs were not being consistent in how they defined natural origin, and what the threshold that made something a superpower versus a highly trained ability was a bothersome sticking point. And that is my theory for why they put such flowery flavor text about what this power that we're discussing represented. They wanted to make sure that there was a built-in hand wave to justify someone with natural origin who considered themselves to not have any active superpowers actually having an active superpower.

Really, using converters is fine on ATO's when the supply is choked to nothing Just buy a plentiful low value ATO like a filler piece from the controller, kheldian, or corruptor sets and then use a single converter to convert within rarity (which is all ATOs) and keep doing that until you get to your archetype. Then you use two converters to convert within category (archetype) until you get the set you want, then you use three converters to convert within set until you get the piece you want. It's entirely possible to get lucky on the first one but even if you don't you should still come out ahead compared to spending 100 merits to buy exactly the ATO you want.

The stalker ATO with the buildup chance is a global so you could six slot that set and put it in another power other then telekinetic strike if you'd like. Just FYI. The chance of it triggering is greatly enhanced when you use AOE powers such as mass levitate or your incarnate nuke. I think it's worth taking an epic pool with an AOE attack for that reason... I happen to have a Psi melee stalker with a penchant for using Exploding Shuriken in his attack chain and let me tell you it's great for triggering the buildup reset proc.

I have played two illusion empathy controllers. One I soloed to 50 and the other I played with a team. I will not play that combination again. I think that it is overhyped, and I think that it is a crutch people who want to focus on playing empathy take. It lets them turn themselves invisible and use group invisibility as an extra buff and just throw out some pets that they don't have to manage instead of dealing with an assortment of ranged attacks. To me it is basically not a controller combination it is a backdoor defender. At least when I played it, I actually had the goal of buffing my phantasm pet to insane levels and I was very aggressive with the controlling parts. Overall though I just kept wishing that I had a secondary like radiation that would have given me more control powers. If you want to play a "traditional" controller but benefit from having empathy then my thought is that you want a control set which has multiple pets. The more pets you have, the more you can benefit from your own buffs. So I think my recommendation is dark. You can fortify the Umbral Beast to make it much more powerful and you can also buff the two haunts. In fact, if you get enough recharge or you use Burnout, you can field more than two haunts.

Yeah afterburner is pretty much the only thing you can give up. You know, dark/dark power combinations on all ranged and support ATs always tends to cause people to go nearly nuts because there's so much stuff that's good and so much stuff that's slot hungry. In fact, I've got a dark/dark blaster who I haven't leveled for a while and I'm scared that the next time I play him I may become mad because I'll discover I need more slots for something.

Reading this thread I was almost overwhelmed by a sense of déjà vu. I felt like I had read this entire thread before several months ago. I thought about it and I believe that what actually I am remembering was a very confusing and frustrating conversation on the help channel on Excelsior. Someone kept saying over and over they didn't think they would encounter environmental menaces and they just wouldn't listen when we told them it was just a fancy way of describing the protection against damage types like fire and cold etc. We're playing a game where people have superpowers. The game engine itself can only represent certain things, and sometimes that means that the powers get a description that implies how they work to justify therm. It's important to not get too bogged down in what is essentially flavor text when you have the ability to look up exactly what the power does.

I have to say the Malaise effect works really nicely with other colors as well. It's so nice to have it available.

Just concept wise it sounds really fun. I don't think it's do-able but if there was a full active commercial development team imagine what a shock it would be if suddenly Fire and Ice variants of Peacebringers and Warshades showed up and revealed there was an entire group of them that the Kheldians we knew were unaware of with an involved backstory that expands the lore … it would be very comic-book-y to expand them that way. Another thought I had that would be interesting would be Kheldian epic pools - where the character is a super hero already and they bond with a Kheldian and primarily retain their original super powers, but the Kheldians give them a few powers and that's their epic pool. Again, too much work, but kind of a fun concept. You might be able to pull it off using the existing Energy and Darkness pools and just make it a concept.