Seroster01

Not... particularly. Even my English nerd self doesn't really get it. AFAIK Ms. is just the abbreviation for Miss. If you didn't write them out & instead just said it outloud, there'd be no difference. This might fly as just some copyright shenanigans, and obviously it works for CoX because there's no voice overs for dialogue, but in everyday conversations it'd be incredibly confusing. You can't copyright a name, but you can trademark it. And there is no similar trademark for Miss Liberty (I just checked...). I think it was just the creative juices of Cryptic. Maiden Justice was a hero in the 30's? and later became Statesman's wife. Their daughter became a hero, Miss Liberty. She married and their daughter took both parent's last names (Cole-Duncan). She later became Ms. Liberty. As for Ms., IIRC, everyone back in the long day ago (17th/18th century??) was either a Mister or Mistress. This only constituted gender not marital status...At some point (after 17th/18th century??) women were going by Miss or Mrs. to denote marital status. In the last century, due to the rise of divorce and changes in cultural mores about the "evils" of divorce...many women chose to take up Ms. to say - "It doesn't matter whether I am married or not" Probably not a wikipedia level definition... My point was more that in every day spoken conversations there would be 0 difference between Ms. Liberty & Miss Liberty. As such there's very little reason to "spell" them differently instead of just having "Miss Liberty" be an inherited name, except that it works as a useful differentiation in a text-only game like CoH.

I'm not Kaeladin, but I managed to get 45.03% S/L and that ST chain with a 0.072s gap while hasten is up (10s downtime though :( ) with Musculature. I'm sure it'd be easier with Agility, but didn't want to loose the DPS bump. I also haven't played enough WM to know which set should go in which ST attack, but this should be a decent starting point! Looking at the build you gave I think the disparity was due to something I never would've thought about; splitting the 3 pieces of the Scrapper ATO into 2 different powers for a total of +10 S/L defense instead of 5. I had been using it in a single power for the 6-slot bonus, I had never thought of splitting it. Often times, my brain thinks to linearly. ;) Edit: A couple of things I had questions about, is there a reason you took Whirling at 32 instead of Crowd Control? That'd usually be the opposite. Probably doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, since I can just switch the order in the actual build. A more important question I think is why you picked the Mako's proc instead of one of the other damage procs. The damage type on it is certainly the least useful of the options, does it proc more or have a higher base damage? IDK much about how the procs are balanced against each other for any sets. Edit 2: I noticed another part of the issue that I brought up & this build doesn't solve, WM wants a -res proc in Shatter & using the ATO as a 6-slot means you can't put one in there. I'll try playing around with where the groups are slotted... Edit 3: Trying to fit a -res proc into Shatter created a series of issues that resulted in my taking Bash (the WM T1 attack) really late in the build just to use as a set mule for 5 slots of Blistering Cold, and actually ended up with a tad bit more +rech I think. Feels kinda wasteful to spend 5 slots on something I will never use, but the resulting #s look pretty decent, so it's probably worth it. I'd still like to see Kael's version to compare & contrast.

Not... particularly. Even my English nerd self doesn't really get it. AFAIK Ms. is just the abbreviation for Miss. If you didn't write them out & instead just said it outloud, there'd be no difference. This might fly as just some copyright shenanigans, and obviously it works for CoX because there's no voice overs for dialogue, but in everyday conversations it'd be incredibly confusing.

I tried playing around in Pine's myself & I cannot for the life of me figure out how you got to 45% S/L defense & 150+ global recharge. Best I can squeeze out is 38.6% S/L & 153% recharge, and that's without having a -res proc in Shatter. Perhaps you're accounting for more of the incarnates than I am? (I don't like relying on Incarnates very much for core parts like this cause I like to do a lot of content that isn't at level cap...) IDK how else to account for that sizable difference in S/L defense. Certainly curious now.

If you have a copy of this build saved could you post it here? I'm curious how you got S/L capped and still had enough +rech to pull off an ideal combo. In other words, I'd like to steal your build. ;D

This is probably bad luck, cause I've never heard of a whole set having lowered base accuracy compared to other sets of the same type. I also don't remember feeling particularly prone to missing on the DB Sentinels I've made...

Did they ever fix Double Vengeance? The whole shebang is only really effective in organized/pre-planned teams, but at the the time I quit playing you could get 2 stacks of Vengeance by having 2 people target the dead guy, Q the Vengeance cast, and then have a 3rd party member use Teleport Team mate or w/e it's called. Ideally you'd also have a res for the dead guy, but a wakey works too. Apparently you used to be able to do it with the whole team, but they limited it to 2 stacks last I was playing. It was pretty useful when utilized properly. Gets a lot of potential use when a group is doing hard-ish high level content with low-level Sidekicks. It was also very useful as a pre-buff for hard AV fights, just have someone die before the fight on purpose & bam, free defense, to-hit, and damage... but this was back before most the Incarnate powers we have now were all there, so it's probably a waste to worry about most of the time. Still, the buffs from it are pretty solid & IIRC are relatively long-lasting. Something to keep in mind.

Fair warning: it's been a fairly long time (even in the CoH scope of timeframes) since I played a /Fire anything, so my input may be outdated. But for my 2c: My experiences at the time would weigh in that /Fire's survivability is decent. Not great, not terrible... just decent. Bear in mind that there was a round of IO balancing after I quit playing mine that made resistance set bonuses actually useful, & the Winter IOs are also pretty strong for adding survivability, so this part could be the most outdated. Something you'll kinda run into as a /fire Scrapper is that one of the main advantages for the other classes with /fire, Burn, isn't usually super useful for you without something to keep the mobs in the patch (the other 2 get Punchvoke). As a second note, a lot of /fires survivability comes from the self-heal, so make sure you devote some slots to that early. You may already know all about this but I'll go over it anyway cause it's important: you'll need to devote some build space to knockback (and probably immobilize) protection. Used to be this was working Combat Jumping & Acrobatics into the build. CJ is probably still worth it, cause it's a pretty good power by itself, but nowadays KB resistance is usually more optimally gained by setting aside a few enhancement slots for KB resistance IOs/set bonuses. Each unique is worth 4 magnitude of protection, though nowadays there's also some set bonuses with different #s from these. Usually you want either 4 or 12 mag worth of protection, which would be either 1 OR 3 uniques worth of resistance. Lots of folks say 1 (mag 4 protection) is plenty, and it will certainly prevent the vast majority of KB/KD from mobs. Personally I like to slot 3 IOs worth (mag 12), cause I don't want to be getting ragdolled when I need to pop a self-heal. In any event, there's no real reason to stop at 2, because there's not much that 2 would stop that 1 wouldn't. On the other hand, if you get to 3 that'll prevent almost any KB in the game. Other than that, trying to stack some defense from set bonuses/uniques/powers is about the best advice I can think to give. Since /Fire is almost purely a resistance set & includes a solid self-heal, building at least a moderate level of defense into the build will be the best way to get your survivability up. That's about all I can think to say this time of night. Some of it may have come out wrong cause I'm getting sleepy... Anyway, I hope it helps, & GL.

So this isn't terribly relevant to anything given that the thread has died out, but WM/Bio is one of my favorite characters I've ever played. He's not in any way as supporty as most of the other characters I've liked this much, but he does SO MUCH DAMAGE! Both AOE & ST he chunks mobs HP with a nice hearty smash. And every piece of his primary has CC! He seems much more survivable than I expected, can't really put a finger on why (unless it's just all the CC). He hasn't really fought many of the TRUE nasties though, so this may be false confidence. Closing in on 50, he already feels exceptionally strong compared to basically any character I had on live. In quasi-related news, I've come to the opinion that Offensive Adaptation is OP as shit. A permanent 30% bonus damage, 7.5% to-hit, additional-res for the PBAOE, AND bonus toxic damage on every hit. That's a hell of a lot to gain for 1 power slot & -7.5% to all resistances. Made me decide to make a /bio Sentinel. Last general thought: I still don't think I'd make a TW/Bio, but if WM/Bio is this strong I can scarcely imagine what that monster is like...

The issue you're discussing basically stems from a change that was made post-launch, among the "i25" changes. In the original game you still had to assign the slots "in order" during a respec. In theory, a toggle or something for this could be implemented with a bit of coding, but I'm not clear on how much access "we" have to the base code to change stuff like that in Pine's, so I'm not sure it's possible in reality. You might try asking about this in the main Pine's thread?

This is basically what I was discussing. If my crab had better ST attacks he would've been really OP even by CoH standards. As he was, he was definitely the most impactful character I ever brought to a group. (Well, maybe my fire/kin core was more impactful, but he spent so much time dead or CCd I labelled him a Professional Floor Inspector...)

For a bit of a follow-up, Soldiers can easily be really good at AoE OR really good at ST. From my experience it's hard-to-impossible to make an optimised character that's strong at both from the soldier chassis, mostly because the good AOE skills are mostly ranged & the good ST skills are mostly melee. As such, there's a problem with general positioning to make proper use of the AoEs (in addition to just not having enough power slots to go around). My personal experience is mostly with Crabbers, as my favorite toon on live was a relatively well IOd crab. What inspired me to make him was when I was playing around in Mids & realized he was relatively easy to get soft-capped to all the positionals, had solid resists, AND had a ginormous health pool (with Serum). Then I delved into it more & realized he could ALSO be a huge force multiplier for a team because the kit is full of AoE -def & -res Debuffs (especially with Leviathan Mastery), and he could run double leadership pools for very sizable group buffs as well. In the end he was a smorgasbord of group support & AoE DPS, usually capable of wiping out all the minions & LTs in a pack by himself with a single AOE cycle. His major weakness was that he wasn't very good at killing bosses & such by himself (the Debuffs still worked on em, so even then he helped group members' DPS quite a bit.) To give a frame of reference, he could very easily solo most missions on +2/x8 (going over +2 whole solo almost never efficient because of level disparity shenanigans) but only if I turned solo bosses off. With bosses on he could still survive easily, but it was very time consuming to kill them. I eventually decided it was more efficient to keep the bosses off, so as to complete missions in a timely manner. Made for good salvage & recipe farming, if nothing else. ANYWAY, both of the VEATs have a general problem with being relatively late bloomers, but if you can stick with one into the mid 20s their performance will quickly start to ascend towards being some of the most powerful characters available.

Man I know the last line is a paraphrase of something I've read before but I can't remember what. Was this something on the original CoH forums? It seems like it was some forums, but it makes me think of the ooooooold WoW boards so IDK.

I managed to get some leveling in on my WM/Bio & now that I've got more experience I have more refined questions: 1.) Offensive Adaptation's bonuses have me a bit flummoxed. Near as I can tell it's both a 30% damage bonus & an effect that causes a 2nd hit of Toxic damage for 10% of damage dealt and THEN has a boosted effect on the -res aura. Is all of that right? Cause thus far my damage feels pretty freaking OP. 2.) Can someone explain how Ablative Carapace works? I got it pretty late into my session today so maybe more playtime with it will clear it up, but I couldn't tell that it was doing anything ither than boosting my regen when I used it at full health out of combat. This is partially a question about how Absorb works in general, but a secondary question is whether the +regen of the power is linked to the absorb shield still being in effect or just a normal 30 sec regeneration buff. 3.) What do folks usually try to accomplish with sets for Bio? It looks like reaching the DEF soft cap for F/C is relatively simple so long as you can throw money at WIOs, and there's quite a bit of resistance to F/C floating around as well. Getting close to or at the Scrapper S/L RES cap also seems pretty doable, but I'm not sure there's much hope for capping S/L defense, unless someone has a trick for this. Marcus mentioned E/N being a major hole & I'd have to agree at this point. I can't find pretty much any E/N resistance to speak of, and E/N def is in pretty short supply as well. Global RECH bonuses also seem a bit hard to fit in since there's not that many places for LOTGs. How much of any of this is worth pursuing in y'alls opinion? Thanks folks.

I suppose I was comparing Sentinel damage to the #s from melee ATs (specifically Scrapper WM & Widow Claws). The AE those sets were all over 170+ according to Pine's (except maybe Whirling Mace, can't remember that one for sure) & most of the ST attacks were significantly higher as well (sometimes 2x as much). Having said that, the #s reported in Pines for Widows seem exceptionally large, so it could be that some of the #s are wrong. Or perhaps I just happened to pick a couple of sets that are large outliers in the AoE department, IDK.

Having played both CoH & WoW more individually than any game that isn't either of those, my opinions are a bit mixed. CoX is my favorite MMO to this day, and while I certainly don't have that level of fondness for WoW I can certainly say it does a few things better than CoH simply because the games have an almost completely different primary focus. WoW is a game completely based around overcoming increasingly difficult group content. Unless your group is exceptionally skilled, it's unlikely that your group will be able to clear the hardest difficulty of the most recent content as soon as it's launched. These days it usually even takes the world first groups a few weeks of gearing to clear new raids. Instead, it is expected that you will slowly acquire gear (and in modern wow, other secondary powerups) to make up the gap between the performance requirements and the player's general skill level. As such, even 2 endgame characters of the same class & spec can have significantly different performance based on the combination of gear luck & gated progression they've put into the characters (all builds are basically identical these days, so there's no real variation for that). The difference in performance of a freshly level-capped character in modern wow and someone fully geared at the end of an xpac is truly silly. This is all the basic whys of the following statement: WoW has better single-character progression at level cap, allowing you to feel like your character has grown exponentially from the start of an xpac to the end. Of course this all gets reset every xpac so that's not very fun & ruins a lot of this... A side effect of the first point, combined with general differences in combat mechanics and a whole gamut of design choices/focus means that WoW has much more demanding group content. As such, there's a bigger sense of accomplishment when you complete a goal. I can't imagine any group fight I've been in in CoX that was tuned such that the group was expected to spend several nights dying horribly before your gear & experience with the fight would allow your group to overcome it. I'm not even sure I'd want such a fight in CoX, as I don't think it'd work out very well. But killing a raid boss me & my buddies had been struggling with for weeks was always extremely satisfying. It was also extremely satisfying to see such fights go from "BY THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH!" to "Well, that was quick." So for me the basics of things WoW does better than CoH comes down to "WoWs group content is (or at least has the potential to be) much more complex & difficult, and is more rewarding of a long-term focus on a single character." Does this make it a better game? That's largely subjective, but my personal answer to this is a resounding "No." I would much rather be able to scrape together a team of any 8 dudebros I could find on the street & do any content I wanted to in-game than WoW's group setup of having to find exactly the right mix of group size, class comp, proper #s of each role, & enough gear to make it all function. But not everyone is like that, and TBH I think it's relatively telling that the games that aren't focused on that type of "holy trinity" group dynamic are almost always less popular.

I haven't played around with sentinels in Pine's much, but the one I have messed with, Dark Blast, seems to have pretty low damage per cast compared to other "DPS" characters I've built up. I particularly say damage per cast because I'm not familiar enough with the min-max routines to know how the set stacks up in a fully optimised attack rotation. Thus, my whole premise could be wrong & the rest is pointless, but I'll write out the rest anyway. The ST damage abilities aren't completely awful but I'd describe them as "meh". The particular thing that seems really poor is that their AOE options seem comically low damage, doing 100-150 damage per cast when fully IOd. This lead me to a general inquiry: is this issue an AT-wide problem, or is Dark Blast's damage tuned lower due to the strong benefits of spamming - to-hit abilities with every attack? I know Sents are considered by many to be underperforming because they give up too much in different basic combat parameters & gain too little in return, so I wasn't sure if this was the case here or the solid debuff from DB was reflected in lower damage tuning. Any input on this front?

Defense Debuff Resistance, any attack that debuffs your defense you character will take the full effect rather than a percentage of the effect. As a follow-up, DDR is important because without it certain mob types will debuff your defenses to the point that they're useless. This is usually referred to as "Cascading Defense Failure" (CDF). Basically if an enemy hits a player with a defense debuff, each hit of such a power lowers the effectiveness of any defense you have & thus each hit becomes more likely than the last. This is frequently a large concern because theres a lot more mobs than players on any mission, so 1-2 lucky hits can quickly escalate to the whole mob group wailing on you unimpeded. Thus vs certain groups with large amounts of defense debuffs it can quickly "cascade" from you being only hit 5% of the time to having such a negative defense that you end up MORE likely to be hit than if you had no defense. This seems an intentional design decision because not getting hit due to your high defense is in itself a defense against CDFs. The trouble basically comes from the fact that once the CDFs start the end result is usually a death, and the only real way to prevent them once they start is to have the aforementioned DDR. The only spec I'm aware of with high DDR is SR, though several other sets have low-to-moderate DDR. Given all of this, CDFs are a major concern for most defense based characters & as a result it's hard for most of the sets that rely on a combination of defense & resistance powers to put much faith in their defensive abilities, because IF they have any DDR at all it's not usually enough to be useful. Bio is such a set.

I haven't done any flying melee characters that I can recall. (I'm the opposite of you, flying ISN'T my thing...) but your talk about ankle-punching made me think about how far melee hitboxes stretch vertically. I'm not positive, but I think the hit boxes are based on the ground & thus trying to attack some of the taller enemies at a more "natural" height may be considered out of range. As mentioned however, I'm not 100% sure on this, and even if true there's not very many mobs this would even be an issue for (basically just Giant Monster mobs & maybe some of the larger robuts.)

The title is the general question. The 2 packs that seemed to have existed prior to the original shutdown are on the market for 10M & the winter is listed for 25M, but from what I can find of them, they all contain mostly the same set of items. As such, I'm very curious as to what could be in the winter packs that would be worth that premium. As such, my true curiosity simplifies to the question "are 2 winter packs actually worth 5 of the other packs?" LMK what y'all think.

I'm in the process of trying to decide if I want to push my WM/Bio Scrapper into higher levels. The biggest hang up I have going on at the moment is basically that I have no familiarity with the set other than looking at it in Mids, where basically every power looks both valuable & needs slots. This leads me into a problem where I end up with far too few enhancement slots for the build compared to the powers that seem to need them. As such, I figured you Friendly Forum Folks could fill me in a bit on what is & is not worth taking from Bio, and where to best invest my slots. A sub-question to that one is basically whether I should slot any of the +regen/+recovery powers for recovery or just focus on the regen for survivability. In a bit of a different vein, is it worth it to try and stack some defense on a /bio character? Putting in the 2 3% def IOs seems easy enough to be worth it, but it seems difficult to find set bonuses for typed defenses AND the bonuses on those sets are so low that it looks kinda pointless to chase them. It seems like it'd be easier & probably more effective to pick 1-2 positional defenses (probably melee & AE?) & work on boosting them instead. I'm mostly concerned with that first bit, but in a slightly different vein I'd like to ask if anyone can give tips on the Adaptation mechanics. I know that they all have unique effects on certain powers, but my lack of familiarity makes it a bit hard to grasp the nuances of all of it. Do people usually just camp Offensive Adaptation? What overall bonuses does that give? Is "stance dancing" a significant part of the set, IE switching bewteen adaptations frequently during combat in order to maximize their benefits? If Offensive is the default, are there specific situations where switching is a good idea? I've said it in my other posts cause I know I write bricks of text: folks don't need to feel like they have to respond to ALL of these questions. Any bits of feedback or advice about Bio is much appreciated. Thanks for any answers y'all can give!

OP, have you ever looked at how Widow-Claws perform relative to the Scrapper powersets? I've seen a couple threads where someone claimed Widow has some of the best DPS in the game when focused on claws w/ Follow-up, but IDK how you came to figure out these optimised attack chains, or if it would even be comparing apples to apples. I'd love to hear your feedback on this.

I haven't looked at dart burst much because it seemed like it'd be a pain to position properly, I'll scope it out in Pine's tomorrow. That being said, if you're judging these things off of DPA, wouldn't having to step back for better positioning wipe out some/all of the DPA advantage? I played basically all day today with Eviscerate. My general feedback is it hits pretty hard & it feels satisfying to pull off a good one, but as I feared it's hard to position. Its recharge time also feels really long, but that's probably cause my build isn't close to complete & on top of that it's not very well enhanced currently. Not sure how I'd compare it to Spin, cause Spin seemed a lot easier to hit a lot of targets with, but not nearly as efficient in terms of either AOE DPS (for the ones it managed to hit) or Endurance Costs.

As mentioned I'd like to have at least 1 AOE power. If you had to pick one, would you suggest Spin or Eviscerate? Eviscerate seems to be much more End efficient IIRC. Pines says it has both much higher damage & costs a smidge less End, but I'm not sure how many mobs it can reliably hit. As a more direct follow up to the ST rotation answer, 2 things have me a bit confused: a.) Why did you list different "Optimal" and "Best" chains? Wouldn't a rotation that qualified as one automatically be the other? Obviously one requires a lot better of a build, but if funds aren't a factor what would be a reason for or against either rotation? b.) I've always been confused on the global recharge values given out like this. Does +270% global recharge mean I'd have to get that 270% total from +recharge set bonuses, widow powers & hasten? Cause I've only got 110% bonus recharge from sets in my build. I planned for unlimited funds but skipped Hasten, so IDK how you'd get to 270% total from those sources. Is it supposed to "include" the base 100%, so that I'd need 170% "bonus"? Or perhaps the 270% goal includes the value gained from recharge enhancements slotted into the powers? If so, does every power need the same amount in that scenario, or do the individual powers have different goals? I've had a lot of confusion about this when I see +recharge totals come up on the forums. Thanks for the responses so far!

I voted variety, but that's just the closest thing I could pick to "Arachnos & Longbow are some of the most annoying mob types in the game, and you can barely get anything done if you try to avoid them." In a broader scope, CoX mob groups show a pretty high level of power creep between 1-40 Blue side & just about anything else that came after. As it's been stated elsewhere, the original goal for mib difficulty was something like 1 LT or 3 minions of even level. Trouble was that the dev's early estimates of the potential power of player characters happened to be incredibly off the mark. Thus, the mob groups & content released after launch all started to be much more... I guess "complicated" is a good word for it. What I mean by this is almost all of the mob types added after launch had much more CC, Debuffs, End Drain, to-hit buffs, w/e. Arachnos & Longbow got a particularly heavy dose of this issue. Slowing powers are very common on both, LBs have a lot of long-ish duration stuns & to-hit Debuffs, while Mu are the antithesis of everything good in the world & Widows/Fortunatas are a super common enemy that exploits the very common "Psi Hole". There's worse mob groups in the game for sure (MALTA! /shakesfist), but most of those are end-game mob groups that you fight when your characters are closed to or fully developed. Spideyboys & LB are the most common enemies all the way from 1-50 Red side. I hear Praetoria has similar issues, but I don't think I've done their storyline even a single time. I'm pretty hazy on it, but I think that's because the few times I tried it on Live I ran into this exact issue. I remember something about hating their Clockwork mobs, but that's about it. I still play some Redside content because it's easy to be a Vigilante/rogue here & that just opens up more options for Merit rewards... But if I had to pick one side exclusively it'd definitely be Blue.