skoryy

"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.

So, Cow Mastermind, huh? Better save that Ghost Riders In The Sky name now. XD And hey, thank you for keeping the dream and the game alive! I had hoped I'd see this day and I'm glad I'm here for it!

If you're going to be teaming a lot with your friends, you'll want to lean less into damage to start than being a controller and support. I've been re-learning my Elec/Time and I have to say its still a really fun combination and can be quite the credit to a newbie team. Generally, though, find what looks fun and give that a try. Anything and everything works in this game, especially if you're in a team, so go with what's fun for you!

Well, holy smokers, it actually happened. We're not only back but we're legal now! This is great news to start the year with!

You're not even arguing the idea. You're reacting as if I was about to flush your cocaine stash down the toilet. Again, that's not a me problem.

The funny part is I offered a solution to reduce the impact of farming without even needing to nerf farming, and you jumped on me like I just stole your security blanket.

I'm not a dev, I don't have the data. But the ancedotal data matches up to what I see when I check in on Everlasting or read on these here forums. If you don't want to believe the ancedotal evidence, that's fine but that's not a me problem.

I feel like you're both right and wrong: Veterans that have been through leveling content plenty enough already shouldn't have to grind their way through that. New players that haven't been through leveling content should not be discouraged from doing it. The problem is the current solution to the first problem, farming, is notably impacting the second problem. Here's a possible solution: Guild Wars 2 showers players in leveling tomes for doing dailies. The equivalent here, I would think, is cash in X number of Notice of the Wells for a free 50 level up and Y number of reward merits to start a build with.

I've got Starwave right here to provide the music!

Adding: Would Batman think of himself as too OP to bust some low-rent den of thugs? Also adding: Use the Quantum stuff to throw in random Malta if you are running this stuff at 50. That way there's still an element of surprise.

Since we have tons of legacy content, I think its a noble idea in theory. Honestly, my idea would be removing the level caps from missions. Why do I have to do timey wimey exemplaring shenanigans to fight Skulls? They're still a problem now!