ABlueThingy

Force Bubble + Fold Space? Pull' em in like loading a slingshot

Just tried this. Can't stop laughing.

So what you're saying is the playstyle I want, which is being able to render my life force down into stupid amounts of damage, doesn't require really any changes and Powerhouse already accounted for this. It's just on Stalkers/Scrappers. My-Hero-Academiaing themselves by cheesing some crits and using the bonus focus in a BU window to squeeze off too many ETs ...It kind of makes sense that Tanks/Brutes can't kill themselves as easily but Scrappers/Stalkers can. But now it means I wasted my time with that post because Captain Powerhouse was already one step ahead of me. FOILED AGAIN. (Thank you capt'n)

...What if the damage stayed the same but after one stack of "Wavering Focus" it did stacking -10% max HP? That would hit everyone pretty equally I think. "You can have your Fast ET... but we're taking off one inch every time you use it"

EDIT: SO WHILE I WAS TYPING Y'ALL THOUGHT YOU'D DROP THAT YOU CAN ALREADY PULL OFF A 3 ET COMBO INSIDE A BU WINDOW. That that's basically what I was-- That kinda renders all this moot. But for posterity's sake... So the big threat is people getting an easy way to pull off the easy and clean and strong rotation and finally getting those Pylon numbers down to single digit? Why not increase the cost? Let people do it but pile on more cost. Remove the slow animation. It's always fast now. Give players 2 stacks of Perfect Focus from TF. If you spend a Focus stack you get "Wavering Focus." If you use ET for ANY reason you get "Wavering Focus" If you use ET while you have "Wavering Focus" you take double self-damage. Triple damage if you have 2 Wavering Focus. Four times at 3 stack. Total Focus restores you, removes "Wavering Focus" and gives you back two stacks of "Perfect Focus." You can either play it safe with the low damage rotation. Or go bananas with the high damage one and chew up your own life for it. That was always kind of the deal EM offered thematically. And it sorta plays into the theme I think. Your fists hold the power of the sun, you need to pay attention or your wings melt off. But there IS a smooth, fast, clean rotation. At a cost. Though if you did that... to be fair, I'd say maybe let Barrage, Whirling Hands and Energy Punch spend Perfect Focus to give you a small heal/HoT/+regen or something. So there's a recovery rotation. It technically means there's like... a dozen possible rotations of varying level of safety. But you wouldn't be locked into them. You could mix and match on the fly as needed. Yes it's an extra mechanic, technically. But it mostly serves as a "u sure u wanna do that?" warning light when you decide to go ham and convert your lifeforce into painforce. It's also not far off from what we have now. It just makes the extremes more extreme. Right now you can elect to spam ET and chew up your life. It's just kind of awkward and not super effective. You could also not use ET to avoid the damage and recover for a rotation or two. These changes just make those two options more extreme. You can lean into the ET and take it on the chin and risk death or you can regain your focus and recover. Personally that would push EM over into my top three power sets. (with the CURRENT changes it's in my top 10) ...n-no this isn't just me trying to sneak /Regen back into the meta--SHUT UP

They do, I'm just saying that if you use it to TP/Fly with your pets then you risk sucking your teamates along. A lot of teams don't like the sudden flight or being bounced around so you have to stop using it if you team. I'd like the ability to use it for JUST my pets somehow. I bet some Traps folks would like that too

Maybe just have TP group and Group Fly give you two powers. One works on everything and one works on pets/self only. I'd use them both a lot more on masterminds that way.

Out of the box I think Wormhole should be able to nail higher level enemy types just because it's a primary power after all For the TP pool... I'd like to float the idea that the more you invest in the pool the more effective the powers in it get. Like the Fighting pool. If it would be unbalanced for Combat Teleport to have more then 3 charges or instant recharge as a base... ok. But maybe every time you pick up another power it adds another charge? Being able to jump 3 times before it cools down at a base and 7 times if you picked up the whole teleport pool. Or having Teleport Target's interrupt time go down as you pick up more powers. Or it's teleport magnitude go up. I'd like to be able to specialize as a teleporter and feel like my character is better at teleporting than someone who just dipped to pick up one or two powers. If dumping five powers into TP gets me the ability to jaunt 7 times and yank foes to me mid-combat with ease... that's as big a change to play-style as Hover Blasting. If not more. And worth five whole powers. (I also think think this is how all the big four travel pools should be made different from the origin pools, broadly. But that's a topic for another day.)

I was investigating the powers and I saw this: ...What is with the extra 5% on there? For comparison: ...anyway that aside. EM has one ok AoE and meh cone that goes up to "ok" if you combo it with a ST power. That's just not going to compare to any set with halfway decent AoEs. I'm pretty sure even Axe can pull off better AoE than EM just by virtue of having Pendulum and Cleave. Even if Cleave only manages 1-3 targets per shot it's still doing very high damage. And Axe should be better able to leverage Build Up for bonus damage. But if it's even close that kind of is what I'm getting at. Axe sucks. If you compare it to any set that just has "Ok" AoE it falls apart quick. I know Kat back to front. BS and Katana are basically better versions of Axe. And they're not exactly what you call "AoE Heavy." My Kat would leave any EM scrapper in the dust... AoE wise. If all EM can do is be almost as good as Axe in the AoE dept... it has bad AoE.

Frankly after playing with this for a bit I think the Devs should absolutely extend this power out so you can get even more use out of it. The cost will prevent people from using it to travel cross zone I imagine. But being able to use a bind set up like this makes me want to be able to zip-zap up and down locations and across gaps freely. Also I should note that with enough practice... powexec_location camera:max "Combat Teleport" should let you make pin-point teleports exactly where you're looking. So you could bind that to W instead or something.

Try: /macro 1 "powexeclocation target combat teleport$$powexecauto brawl" If I could somehow get /pow_exec_abort to execute after... maybe bind it to the movement keys? ...if this proliferates out to the PVPers it's gonna look like dragon ball Z in ther-- wait ... ... Ok, try making a bind file cal-- WAIT BACK UP YOUR BINDS FIRST OK so first we do /bind_save_file "C:\coh binds\bdz.txt" which should back up your existing stuff. Use whatever file path you want of course. Then make a macro /macro ZBD bind_load_file "C:\coh binds\bdz.txt" Now go into there and make a new bind file called dbz.txt and paste this info W "powexec_location 0:max "Combat Teleport"" A "powexec_location 270:max "Combat Teleport"" S "powexec_location 180:max "Combat Teleport"" D "powexec_location 90:max "Combat Teleport"" Q "powexec_location 315:max "Combat Teleport"" E "powexec_location 45:max "Combat Teleport"" space "powexec_location up:max Combat Teleport" Now we do another macro like before /macro dbz bind_load_file "C:\coh binds\dbz.txt" Now you can switch between the two bindfiles/control schemes by using the macro. Now pick up Conserve Power, 40 Blue insp, and max out your global recharge.

When people say EM doesn't have much AoE they're not talking about the actual number of targets they can hit. It's mostly talking about how much damage they can put out to multiple foes. While total number of targets does have to be taken into account there's more to it. For the cone, Power Crush, you only hit 10 targets if you first use TF, a long animation ST power. That cuts into your rotation, time spent not doing AoE damage is AoE damage lost. It also just... does less damage. Compare it's damage and you'll find that it has a very fast recharge but very low damage. You'd have to spam it to get decent AoE. In this game multiple low damage attacks are generally worse then a few high damage ones. But you can't even spam it at full power because it needs TF for the full AoE range. Having to cast it multiple times to get the same amount of damage as other sets along with needing to use ET every time to take advantage of the AoE size means you can't use Build Up as effectively as the other sets. Whirling hands has similar if not exactly the same end cost/rech/activation of similar 8ft/10 target AoE powers but it just flatly does less damage. Compared to virtually every other set it does very low AoE damage. ie. "it doesn't have much AoE" I only say "Virtually" because I don't know how the Martial Arts and Dark Melee changes are going. Everything else is at least "As good as" Energy Melee. I also don't want all this to imply that I think it's a bad set. It's AoE is now "Crap" but not "functionally non-existent" which is where it was. It now has "ok" AoE damage. And cartoonishly high ST damage. This seems like a fair trade

I remember there being a lot of issues with Katana's animations back when they first updated them. It had something to do with the left handed stance Katana uses.. The Katana has to be anchored there because of how the transition animations work to standing/walking. Which leg you lead with and such. Maybe something about how they anchored it is broken? Katana is the only weapon that's locked to only the left hand, as far as I know. Maybe that has something to do with it... But I also recall the Live Devs describing a bug where the trams wouldn't run if too many people had capes on in the zone or some nonsense like that. So who knows.

I just wanted to say that Combat Teleport is REALLY fun. I'm thinking of trying an Elec/Shield with the Super Jump and TP pools. Then I'm going to bind all my basic melee attacks to execute Combat Teleport first. 3 teleport attacks, every melee attack will teleport me too. For good measure I will TP enemy groups onto ME. I'm going to completely disassociate my molecules!

Correct on all counts to the best of my knowledge. For #1 specifically as far as I could tell GBP had the same 5-10% crit chance everything else did. Psi melee can, using a limited mechanic and luck, get up to EM's ST damage for a moment. But EM will leave it in the dust in short order by spamming it's insane DPA rotation. Of course Psi has other tricks, i'm not trying to dump on Psi. It beats out EM's AoE and survivability handily. (Lots nice cones/AoEs, a confuse, KB/KD/KU)

This is an Insighted Greater Psi Blade Strike sloted 2/2/2 acc/dmg/rech lvl50 IOs against a Pylon. I had no set bonuses either. Mind you I was using a Psi/Shield but I had all my damage boost powers turned off. Per my Combat Attributes I had no bonus damage running. Under the same conditions here's a Total Focus, sloted 2/2/2 Acc/Dmg/Rech with no set bonuses and no +dmg powers ET doesn't seem to crit on the Pylons after QUITE A FEW TRIES it never crit'd. I was also unable to get Greater Psi Blade to crit against it. Take 2. Against Quarry. Otherwise same conditions. ET did 522.95 damage total GPB did 759.65 damage total Mind you that Quarry has 45% lethal res. I didn't know GPB did any lethal damage. Still it's obvious it comes out ahead in raw damage. However. It took me FOREVER to get GSB to do it's thing. And EM did way, way more damage over the same period. All Psi had was GSB, which is nice don't get me wrong. But waiting to get insight and spaming my other powers and the insight lockout was costing me about 2-4 GSBs per rotation. On an unlucky streak I managed to take over 45 seconds before getting an insight. On the other hand, I could spam TF on cooldown. And more importantly TF is only the second highest damaging power. TF/ET as a combo out damaged anything Psi could put out easily. The fact that EM didn't rely on crits meant I was always doing maximum damage. Crunching through things. Psi just had a few golden moments when Insight and Crit aligned Maybe that changes with a well built IO set up but from what I can tell just looking EM is the higher single target damage set under anything other then arbitrary restrictions designed to favor Psi. The answer appears to be the same. If TF could crit fully it would be insane. GSB is allowed to crit because you can't control when you get insight and it has a hard-lockout. You can't open with a fully powered GSB like you can with TF or ET(You don't need focus to boost ET's damage, just it's speed)

TF crits. We were talking about ET. ET doesn't crit(for damage) because historically the original Devs didn't let any melee attack crit for more damage then an assassin strike. Speculatively because they were trying to keep Assassin Strikes uniquely damaging as that kind of is all they do. But I'm just reiterating what Capt. Powerhouse said. Like he said, there is one exception and it's Crushing Uppercut and it can't do that trick unconditionally. I guess that leaves room for us to argue that ET could be an exception to the rule too as long as it was conditional? I always liked the idea of spending more HP to do more damage. Proof of TF crits: Side note: What is that other effect? The "Massive bonus to critical hit chance" thing?

I don't know, I don't think it crits for damage. In my testings it just pops up "Critical transfer" and you get healed EDIT: Just to double check I also tried with the fast version with the same results:

If you want an answer you might try working out what the ideal rotation would be if ET wasn't locked behind TF for what an absolutely maxed out IO build could do. You'd be looking at...what? A 3 power rotation with a DPS that required exponents to calculate it? Single digit pylon times? That has never been true. What the Devs on live said was they would never set the baseline of the game's difficulty so high that you would need IOs to compete. That at baseline difficulty you would only need SOs. Using that to argue that the Homecoming team can't consider what high end builds can do when adjusting the strength of powersets is not keeping with the spirit or the letter of the so called "rule"

Not for them. Their feel was based fairly heavily on the freedom to mix things up for freeform combos of fast moving glowing death punches. Personally my feel is based on super charging myself with energy and dumping that into my foes face, which both live and test let me do. Test more so because the set isn't garbo. Also because I can more easily kill myself on test now which I really love. But if I'm satisfied either way then my personal opinion is kinda moot. I just want to see if there's a way we can make all parties happy. If the set is going to have a combo system then I'd like to see it made so the old fans of EM can enjoy it somehow. That's going to take compromise but it should be possible to improve things from where they are.

I don't think anyone is disputing that it's a mechanical gain. People are complaining because it changes the feel of the set for them in a way that negatively impacts their play experience. Everyone knows EM is shit on live. But people play it anyway because they like the FEEL of the set. The complaint is that they only wanted the mechanical portion to change, the numbers to be better. They didn't want the set's feel to change for them. If I understand it correctly. That's a fair complaint. Sets live or die by feel. That's why so many people play SS and Empathy still even though they suck. If you made Emp good but changed it to be a shielding/debuffing set... people would hate that. Even if it was now the best set (mechanically) in the game.

If we removed the combo system entirely, no orange rings, no powers buffing other powers in sequence, no "Focus gained"... But the powers were adjusted in such a way that the most optimal rotation in EM was the same as it is now on test. TF/ET was still the most optimal rotation because of how the rech/dmg/animation shakes out. What would people think of that?

Personally I think if the set is buffed in a way that brings it back up to par but also makes all the players who have used it for years dislike it... that sounds like a net loss to me.

I do. And as others have stated, they do too. ...I'm not sure that's changed from live to test. You could always choose a sub-optimal attack. You always had a "Correct" rotation that was the best, specific powers used in a specific order. And you could always deviate from it and do whatever. That is still true on Test. The biggest thing that changed is the order of powers in the optimal chain and that it lights it up for you. You can still choose a sub-optimal attack whenever you want. Now the game just has indicators telling you such. Would it be better if more powers gave you the Focus effect so you'd have more freedom to mix up the rotation without bumping into the slow ET?

To be fair, there was always an optimal attack chain. There was always a "Best" way to play and anyone who deviated from that was playing sub-optimally. The combo system just codifies it, spells out what is most optimal. This game has always had the illusion of choice. You could always choose to play sub-optimally. The game just didn't spell out for you which rotations and combos were more effective. The more modern powersets are doing that. Like StJ and Staff and now EM. By making codifying it into the rules of the set, giving you specific buffs and debuffs depending on how you use it, the game tells you which way is the most effective. But it didn't invent that. If you removed the combo system from StJ or Staff there would still be an invisible "Correct" rotation that put out the best damage. As multiple people have pointed out there is actually a "Correct" rotation for EM on live. That's the secret combo system that already exists. These powers work better then anything else when used in this order. But unless you look up out of game information you wouldn't know what was the best rotation. You'd have to guess because the Live game doesn't spell it out.