roleki

Toxic Dart is sneaky good; I can't fit it into a lot of builds but those that it can fit in use it quite often. It's especially good at getting runners to turn around and come back. Corrosive Vial has a tiny AoE (8') and can only hit 5 targets, but it's an auto-hit on a long recharge and has access to 9 procs: 4 damage, two -Res, two KD, and an Immob. For a one- or two-slot investment, you get some decent ROI. Speed of Sound is my favorite always-on travel power, perfect for popping from mob to mob on melee/PBAoE types, and just as useful for instantly appearing next to teammates who could use a hand. Or, if you're hopelessly lost on a map, just target the nearest person who doesn't appear to be lost and blorp in next to them. Adrenal Booster offers some nice buffs, seems tailor-made for Corruptors and Dominators but I can never fit it into one of those. I have fit it on some Claws and Spines characters and it definitely amps up the damage output, especially when used in conjunction with Corrosive Vial. Experimental Injection is a modern take on Sir Not Appearing In This Film.

Sheesh. How's the power tray arranged on THAT?

I dunno, I'd kind of like to see that applied to a level 1 minion and see if I can coax a gib out of the graphics engine.

@Hedgefund2, any chance your team composition changed during the MSR, and/or both players got credit on all Pylons? 9 is a suspicious number.

That makes sense, but there are actual Masterminds in comics along the lines of CoH - characters like the Red Ghost and his Super Apes, or the Golden (née Yellow) Claw and the Atlas Foundation. Sure, the Red Ghost had powers (he could Dimension Shift himself and wallhack) but without the Apes, he was just kind of feeble. Golden Claw's secret power was that he was really old, and could use the Dragon Corridor to move around from place to place; any action taken against his antagonists was done via minions, associates, or subtle plans that percolated for decades before bearing results. Mole Man is another one; he's got a stick and can see in the dark... not very formidable, until you factor in he has all of the extras from Fury Road doing his dirty work for him. I feel like Doctor Doom is another character along the lines of Superman who couldn't be pinned to one AT or even multiples... he's a Sentinel (En/WP?) but also a Mastermind (Bots/FF) and some kind of Dominator, but like, if Dominators had access to Illusion and Time powers. He's a bit of a freak.

Oh, so you have no idea what happens in a farm. Hint: I click the same powers you do, just more often with less time wasted. I get less rewards per click than you do, but I make up for it by sheer volume.

I think the animus felt towards PvPers and PvP in general boils down to that right there... when you get used to just waltzing through NPCs, getting your ass handed to you in an instant by some random character is going to bruise your feels a little, even moreso if you're not there for the PvP but for some other reason, like collecting badges. There are probably people shitting on PvP who have never even been in a PvP zone, just because of the carryover stigma of PvP from other games.

Don't get me wrong, Superior Unrelenting Fury% is a very nice proc, but if I somehow dropped SUF from one of my Brutes, it might feel 'off' but I'm still doing what I do; if you removed Superior Critical Strikes from a Scrapper or Superior Might of The Tanker from a Tank, it would drastically change how those characters operate, full stop. Just in terms of relative value of the benefits, think how many slots you would have to burn, or how many enhancements and boosters you would need to pay for, to get an extra 13-20 Res(All) on a given character. Tanks get that with one slot. On the Scrapper side, the SCS proc stops just short of guaranteeing that the next attack will crit, whether that's an AoE that will evaporate everything below a Boss or your ST/T9 that will get rid of the Boss in a second... how many damage enhancements/boosters/procs would you have to jam into a Scrapper to make up the difference in damage output provided by the SCS proc? Meanwhile, the SUF% is by and large the Panacea proc that anyone can drop in Health and be done with. It's nice if you already have the Panacea proc but it's not nearly as impactful as the Tank/Scrapper procs. Old-school Defiance! Onliest thing is, it would be more useful from 1-40 than it would be 41-49, and almost of no use past 50. I mean, in most situations.

I still think Superman is *way* more than a Tank; if every T4 Tank was Superman, it'd be like City of Viltrumites around here. He's just too powerful to fit into our sandbox. Even the Hulk and Juggernaut don't REALLY fit, because the Hulk has no damage cap, and Juggernaut literally cannot be stopped. There are plenty of Tank-like beings (Ben Grimm, Rhino, Piledriver, Gargoyle, a billion others) who are largely interchangeable aside from their personalities/ethos/lore: tough, resilient, and possessing superior offensive capabilities. But I do like the idea of so-and-so being a Level 35 Tank, and so and so being a 50. That would explain the wide gaps between a guy like Luke Cage and someone like Namor, then the gap between Namor and Gladiator, and the gap between Gladiator and Silver Surfer. Another thing I need to keep in mind when thinking about these things, is how the lore surrounding well-known characters is very fluid, and so are their capabilities and handicaps. In the thread where I kicked this beehives little too hard, I had mentioned I was looking at the old TSR Marvel Super Heroes stats, which I think the book I was looking at was from 1986 or 1987. They had Iron Man weak as hell (don't recall exactly but they were Aunt May-level stats). I wonder what their ratings for Iron Man would have been in 2016 or so. I bet they'd have him at Tank level 'toughness' and strength, even though I think he's a Sentinel through and through.

I didn't mean to cause that much of a derail, but I dig this sort of navel-gazing as these are the kinds of things I think of while farming instead of saving Positron's ass or whatever it is people do in missions. Well that, and sick basslines. As for Brute ATO changes... would it be a complete fart of an idea to restore Fury to its original state (or whatever state it was when it got redlined) but attach some kind of penalty, either a -Res, -ToHit, or -Endurance% to kind of emulate the consequences of going all-out? It's not my intention to make something bad even worse, just trying to think of a compromise that would let Brutes have their moment but with some element that would at least blunt some of the blowback from all the other ATs.

As in all things, I'm rarely more than 65% serious. That said, this is me being serious: if people think of Superman as an example of a Tank, then that's our problem right there. Superman is singular; he isnt just a pile of hitpoints, some armor, and some mid-level offensive capability that is frequently outclassed by his less-hardy friends. He's got every power in the book, many invented and subsequently retired between panels. The normal rules that apply to everyone else don't apply to Superman, and the rules that DO apply to him are generally discarded whenever it's convenient. If anything, Superman is closer to an AV/GM than a Tank. Ben Grimm, he's a Tank... tough, strong, (almost) no weird mechanics that make him tougher or stronger in combat... no matter when he announces that it is time to clobber, it's the same punch that follows. Along the same vein, Colossus is a Tank. Rhino, a Tank. Hercules, maybe a Tank, except it's established canon that he's got that Brute Fury mechanic going. I went looking for characters who were inherently resilient/tough/strong who also got "stronger" at the height of combat, and that's where Wrecker comes in, moreso than Loki, but Loki does have a tendency to fight at the level of his opponent, plus or minus. Others like Sabertooth, Wolverine, Puma, Lizard, and so on, seem more like Scrappers in function, even though they do have that Fury mechanic written in, in some fashion. Anyway, what I was getting at is that it seems like, when thinking of existing characters in terms of CoH ATs, everything that I thought would be a Brute was actually more like a Scrapper, and everything I thought would be a Tank was more like an AV. Made me think that perhaps the Tank doesn't exist in comics, just Scrappers, Brutes, Stalkers and Gods.

Slight derail, con permiso. I was thinking about the question, what well-known characters would I consider to be Brutes, and it occurred to me that there is a quasi-official quantification of a slew of these folks in the Gamers Handbooks of the Marvel Universe. After being sidetracked for a couple hours with those, I realized that old-school Marvel had a Brute problem as well. I'm not going to get into FASERIP or anything, but it was kind of an interesting experiment to think of a character as a Scrapper or a Tank/Brute/Stalker, then go look at the numbers to see if they thought of them as such, too. Like, say you think of Captain America as a Scrapper; his Strength and Health are 30/150. Spider-Man, another Scrapper right? He's at 40/160. On the other end of the spectrum there's Rhino at 75/175, and the Thing/Thor at 75/200; these would be Tanks in my CoH brain. I figured Luke Cage, not being as strong as Thing or Thor, but tougher than Captain America or Spider-Man, would be the prototypical Brute, but his stats are 40/130 - as strong as Spider-Man, but not as many "HP" as Spider-Man or CA. The closest I could find to what I would classify as a Brute in those rankings (made nearly 40 years ago!) were Loki (50/150) and The Wrecker at 50/160. Everything else that has a huge pile of Health also tends to have an outsized Strength ranking to go with it. In fact, what I did NOT find was a huge pile of Health with mediocre Strength. Closest I came on that front was Machine Man at 30/170. Is it possible that Brutes are actually "Tanks" and Tanks as they exist in CoH just do not have a counterpart in the comic-book world?

Just to clarify the differences between Real Superheroes and Dirty Farmers, allow me to introduce this handy Goofus and Gallant table: REAL SUPERHEROES DIRTY FARMERS Log in Log in Choose Character Choose Character Recruit/Join Team Recruit/Join Team Travel To/Call Contact Travel to AE Ignore/Read Mission Description Ignore/Read Mission Description Select Mission Select Mission Make Mission Active Make Mission Active Travel to Mission Entrance Travel to Mission Entrance Ignore/Read Mission Text Ignore/Read Mission Text Defeat Enemies/Meet Objective Defeat Enemies/Meet Objective Exit Mission Exit Mission Shore-up Team (if necessary) Shore-up Team (if necessary) Clear Inventory (if necessary) Clear Inventory (if necessary) Level Up (if necessary) Level Up (if necessary) Repeat to Taste Repeat to Taste Geez, it's almost like we're playing the same game.

Uh. What do you think happens in a farm?

Yeah, guys, farming just gets shittier and shittier every time the devs release an update, nothing to worry about! You can still do it! Why all the complaints? Ingrates!

Thing is, you can absolutely just craft what you need without it turning into a full-time job utterly replacing any other in-game activity. Yes, it's faster to just pay retail, and it's more lucrative to just play market PvP, but there IS a middle ground where you spend a few minutes, get what you need, and go about your business. Literally a couple minutes a night, if that.

That does make me wonder how this game would survive at all if the billionaires all decided they'd had enough and the rest of us had to craft our own shit. What a nightmare scenario THAT would be.

Maybe it's different with Beam/Rad, but I've a Beam/TA Corruptor and it usually kills things too fast for there to be much Scourging going on. On the one hand, great, but on the other hand, I feel like I'm getting cheated out of something.

Get where you're coming from, but you're also talking about mobs that somehow get stronger if one of them takes half a step back and casually says "yowl."

Far as I understand it, pullers sacrifice some VMs but still pick up off their teammates. If you were on a team with multiple pullers, you'd probably get even less than usual.

Call me crazy, but I like my Rad/Fire even outside of Farms. Staff/Regen... not so much. ETA: forgot about Rad/Bio, also fun. Oh, and SS/Energy. And TW/Fire is still a roller, even after every update gets done kicking it square in the bundle.

I would be fine with a better class of rewards, but they could have used whatever rickety machinery is behind accolades to achieve that. A little bit of a tangent, but I think the game needs more accolades that you can only get by doing content, maybe even specific to ATs or some crap. It's kind of poop that if you do EVERYTHING, you get a ray gun and a couple of click powers that have 25m recharge, and a little bump to health/endurance. "Real world" experience should shit out markedly better characters than the AE, and I say that as someone who goes to great lengths to avoid doing content. But anyway, I suspect that the underpinnings of the accolade system are either bonkers and/or there's no way to 'grandfather' characters who've already done tasks X, Y, and Z so assigning new accolades would cause consternation and much gnashing of teeth. But a new currency tied to new content... now you have something people can sink their time into, and a much cleaner way to distribute whatever rewards the devs dream up. And if that is the direction they are going, I hope the rewards are more enticing than some costumes!

It's possible (likely) that costume unlocks are just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, and there will be more stuff that people DO care about tied to doing specific stuff over and over. Which is fine by me, I'm not the kind of person that starts pounding my shoe on the table when someone else gets something I don't as a reward for their doing something that I don't do. I just hope that whatever else may come out of that pipe doesn't force people into running THAT content just to avoid being left behind.