skoryy

The more I think on it, the more I really should put up a post on how HC has shaken up the S/L/E defense meta. I'm getting a lot more mileage out of other sources of damage mitigation now.

UPDATE: Warwolves HATE this one trick! (It's the stalker ATO procs.) Also, I once again forgot how tanky my elec/elec/mu stalker was.

Rad Armor is very much an offense-friendly set, what with the recharge, recovery, and the crash-free damage boost from the T9. I pair it with Street Justice because crunchy smashy, but I can see it easily working well with Fire too. I can also see Shield and Martial Arts co-existing, less Storm Kick topping off your defense than Shield Charge giving you an extra AoE you'll really need. Take it from me, the WP/MA tanker who relies on a weaker Spring Attack.

The only bad PuG experience I've had so far was hopping on a team running at way too high a difficulty for midlevels. After several faceplants, I noticed that the team leader was a mastermind but I didn't see any pets about. Turns out he was running petless. That's when I headed for the door and his the quit team button.

I did some beta testing to see just how tough the new Council was, I didn't have any problems then. It didn't really hit me until this afternoon when I was slogging through Warwolf bosses during lunch. I thought I could do a quick hero tip and that quite didn't work out.

Shaking up the S/L defense meta and making fights more tactical? Cool, I can dig that. My Rad Armor tank can finally flex at the Invulnerables! Spawning massive bags of HP that can barely touch me? That's just wasting my time face-rolling my rotation until the bad doggo goes plop. There's little strategy involved, he's going to spawn regardless, and almost every spawn as well. That's really not all that fun.

In no particular order: Phantom Lass, Staff/Dark/Energy brute - my best blend of damage and durability, and also the best exemplar-able build thanks to fury and staff forms Relativity Rabbit, Elec/Time/Energy controller - another durable build, though with an eye towards team support while still doing respectable damage, hella fun both team and solo Nightlight, Elec/Elec/Mu stalker - built for resist, defense, heals, and end drain, so he's surprisingly durable, might need to rework a bit to improve his AoE though Agent Trinity, Rad/StJ tanker - slightly behind my WP/MA tanker for survivability but can handle +4/x8 these faster Actionette, Rad/Atom/Mace blaster - when you absolutely positively want it arrested right now, accept no substitutes

Run through the notes to see if I need to update any slotting on my epics. (I didn't think so but it couldn't hurt to check.) Have Blue Gale run through the Storm Blast changes. Give Kilo Four holsters for her pistols. Refill my shakers with all the buff/nerf salt.

It's been five years and several pages. Throw in the brouhaha when Rage was even touched, and it's safe to say that the odds on this happening are slim and none.

Procs are arguably good game design in as much they're a fix for more debatable game design decisions like IOs and incarnates pushing tanks and DPS ahead of support and control. Procs make my elec/time controller into an even more fun little bun of chaos, as well as my upcoming time/DP defender. Neither would be as much fun without them.

"General chat is a sewer because people disagree with me when I make political and moral declarations." That's not a general chat problem, amigo. But at least I do have yet another account to add to my global ignore now.

Not in my experience. Mids has the lightning aura at 25 ft radius, which matches the radius on my rad blaster's Atomic Blast.

Eh, you should be slotting Storm Cell for recharge over damage before you get to IOs. I had mine two slotted for recharge and it was up often enough that I didn't have to worry. Now with a full IO build, it's up every 16.7s, which is plenty fast enough that I can re-summon and re-position if needed.

I would think this would be where a mass manual renaming tool would be handy. Just something for the GM to click all those level 1s and rename them 'No########'.

You're going to pick up all the debt badges on a blaster, regardless, its the nature of being the glass cannon of glass cannons. Though I can offer up some tips for the early blaster game: You're not a tanker or a brute who can just roll through picking fights. You'll need to approach each group tactically. Experience will teach you which targets are the most annoying - not necessarily the one that cons the toughest - and you'll want to prioritize how you take them down. Mr. Build Up and Mr. Snipe aren't just your friends, they're your best friends. Snipes can hit from outside aggro range and they hit hard. Pick that annoying target, hit build up and snipe, wait a couple seconds, and watch them evaporate without even knowing you were ever there. You can even do a really good number on lieutenants with them too. Your secondary is going to give you some melee attacks. I wouldn't prioritize slotting them before your ranged attacks, I wouldn't even recommend using them unless as a last resort, or you're in a good group, or you've reached late into the game enough to rack up enough defenses and IOs to begin your proper life as a blapper. (Late and end game as a blapper is maybe the most fun this game can offer. Just insane amounts of damage and chaos. Its glorious. Highly recommended.) Your mezzes are nice and your starter immobilize can even do decent damage. Use the immob frequently to keep the brawlers from putting an axe in your face.

It was an issue, at least some time back, that incarnates and IOs made control and support powers not really useful at high level content. No real need for buffs when you can bring your own, and no real need for controls when you have taunts and spawn-obliterating nukes. Mind you, I'm also a controller enthusiast who enjoys running out ahead to see how much chaos I can bring before the team catches up, but I also proc mine out to the gills so...

As a sysadmin quite fluent in the horrors of database administration, you have my sympathies. Especially if it's Interbase. Good Gawd Awmighty, you'd have my prayers.

I'll just say we've had this discussion here before multiple times. Twenty years of combined player experience plus incarnates plus cheap IOs equals players being able to solo or at least soften up anything. Hence the new hard mode TFs. If you really want team play, that's what you should be looking for.

Let me fix that for ya. Excelsior: Indomitable: Torchbearer: Everlasting:

I feel like this is getting ignored. Anecdotal evidence, of course, but last night I was on a Manticore run with one brute, one controller, one scrapper, one sentinel, and four blasters. (Yeah, okay, I was one of the blasters.) We had about thirteen faceplants during an hour and a half run, a couple times because I- er- some of us went the wrong way but often it was a matter of running into two or more spawns at once and not having enough aggro and support to keep everyone upright. You any team can work, sure, but a lot of that is post-50 incarnated experience. An experience that, I will note with the CoT and Council changes, isn't going to stay the standard for too long. Diverse teams can and will work better. Rewarding diversity is a good idea.

Just repeating this from the patch notes. Team composition won't be that big an issue.

And if it gets more controllers and defenders out there, all the better!

I remember when SWTOR launched with Jedi and Sith factions and my mind instantly went to CoH/CoV. "Oh no. Nobody wants to play a bad guy!" And then the Sith became by far the popular faction. So, if we want to start there, we can compare the Sith to redside. The Sith were arguably the devs' favorite, getting better missions, map layouts, etc. That does lend itself to our situation, with the Isles being the red-headed stepchild of development: Fewer maps, less content, 'Flight Or Bust' map design. Though a good part of that can be pinned on CoV development having to compete with CoH for dev resources. HC would need to devote more resources to the Isles than to Paragon to play catch up, and I'm not sure we're in the situation to be able to pull that off. The other important thing, I think, is the lack of the 'cool factor'. Your blueside hero gets to save Superman Statesman. How cool is that! Your redside villain gets to... continue to be a second banana to Lord Recluse. You don't get to be Vader or President Luthor or DOOM. You don't get to pull off crazy hijinks like the Joker. You're the Shocker. Boba Fett at best. A Shocker or Boba Fett with incarnate levels but still the Shocker or Boba Fett taking orders from higher ranking villains. Either that or you're having to help save the world. Not to degrade anyone who likes being in a lesser villainous role, but there's certainly an audience there that wants to be DOOM and finds the Isles not to their liking. Not to mention that while a leveling experience makes for a good hero's journey, the villain's journey is usually either all backstory or done by the end of Act One. Even Anakin took all of one act to make the actual turn into Vader. Stretching that out to fifty levels of content doesn't make for a good narrative and drags down that 'cool' factor. Now for the easier and hopefully doable fix... Rogues and vigilantes shouldn't have to play mustache twirler or goodie two shoes for twenty levels until they unlock their true self. Give players the option to go rogue or vig at start, and with the content to match. Yeah, that'll mean building twenty levels of content. but I think that's more of a doable payoff that would easily increase redside population. And yeah, I also know Null's an option, but there's no rogue or vigilante content until 20 so what alignment are you really?

So, I gave it a quick shot before lunch here, and a couple just as quick observations: If you don't have negative protection of some sort, you're in for a bad time. Even S/L capped isn't going to do it for you, my poor blasters never stood a chance. My Rad/SJ tank broke just a little more of a sweat, they got through her particle shielding a couple times. What I more noticed was that tougher warwolves and galaxy rezzes made it considerably longer for her to chew through spawns. If the goal was to make them more champs than chumps, then mission successful. I'm not sure how I'd rate them yet as endgame difficulty but they're picking themselves off of the floor now.

sighs I'm going to have to dust off the ol' night widow and level her up, huh.