Luminara

Squid are friends, not food. Stop eating my friends. 😡

TA's problems are lack of viability in end-game play, and lack of sufficient debuffing/control options to protect teams prior to the end game without blowing their entire arsenal at once, and lack of focus as to what it's supposed to be doing (protecting teams, or increasing the pace of teams). The recharge times across the board are too high. The set is too reliant on +Recharge to keep up with the modern pace of play. The set doesn't even begin to function well until and unless IO sets are used to garner significant amounts of +Recharge. It needs significantly lower recharge times to make it a proper combat set. Durations can be reduced correspondingly, but it should provide better combat effectiveness, which it can't do with long recharge times. A debuffer who can't debuff because all of the debuffs are recharging is dead weight. None of us like to feel like dead weight on a team, and it's worse in solo play. As a mitigation set, it's lacking. In the early game, none of the powers can be used more frequently than once every 3rd to 5th spawn, and some of the powers offer no meaningful mitigation. -Recharge doesn't protect a team, or the player, from the alpha strike. Flash Arrow's debuff is low, not significant on it's own at lower levels, and due to the Unresistable flag, not high enough to be worthwhile in the early to middle game. It's all but useless until PGA, in regard to mitigation, and that's not appropriate for a set without buffs. The set needs something to stack. Another source of -ToHit, or -Damage, or even, failing anything else, another Sleep, to mitigate incoming damage. Glue, Acid and Disruption would all be good candidates for an additional debuff/control effect to stack with an existing debuff/control. A corruptor or defender shouldn't have to wait until levels 28 and/or 32 to have usable damage mitigation options, or be forced to couple the set with a debuffing blast set just to make TA feel less like a failure of design. A mastermind has to wait even longer, and given that the debuffs and controls are critical to the functionality of the mastermind, the lack of mitigation absolutely does not justify the wait. For a set which was designed and intended as a defender primary, it's frustrating to know that it performs best as a controller secondary simply because controllers already have sufficient mitigation to ignore the holes in the set's design. Disruption Arrow is still limping along with a 10 target cap. It should be 16. Acid Arrow is hampered by an 8' radius. That's melee attack range. With a target cap of 16, it should have a radius capable of actually hitting 16 targets, not 4. Increase the radius to 15', minimum. With these changes, TA will be much better positioned in the early and middle game. For late/end game play, it only needs one thing. -Regen. Tack 500% -Regen onto Disruption Arrow, a power the player is going to use in AV/GM fights anyway. And reduce the recharge time on OSA. The mechanics don't justify the recharge time. Neither does the damage. The existing 180 second recharge time isn't balanced, for what the power actually accomplishes, for the set or in the game as a whole. 90-120 seconds would be appropriate.

I don't play any dominators. I've tried to, on the original servers and here, but I've already played the control sets, and they hold little interest for me as they stand (copies of existing controller primaries). They need a flavor of their own. The secondaries are also too spread between melee and ranged. I understand that they enable different approaches, but the existing mixed design does more to restrict than enable. Trying to build toward one goal or the other, melee or ranged combat, effectively cuts your leveling pay-off in half, as you're only acquiring "useful" attacks half as frequently as other archetypes. And while the option to use ranged attacks in melee always exists, it doesn't work the other way around, so building for ranged combat always feels self-defeating. Given that the primaries are almost exclusively composed of ranged powers, there should be more synergy for ranged combat, but it just works out to feeling like a gimped controller. This leaves the choice of playing with melee attacks and mixing in ranged attacks when or where possible (rarely possible with a 40' range cone with a narrow arc, for example), but that involves stopping frequently to use location AoE controls and ranged attacks, and that's especially important when we're discussing controls, because that's the dominator's Resistance and Defense. That's what they have to stay alive. It's too hodge-podge, too unfocused. Yes, I do know there are binds to fire location powers on oneself, at a set range, on a selected target, etc. No archetype should have to depend on binds just to be playable out of the box. We shouldn't have to work around design flaws and oversights just to make a character playable. Things like this should be baked into the powers, not an obscure bind command that isn't documented anywhere outside of a couple of forum posts. I also dislike the way the design of the AT revolves entirely around Domination. I don't find myself building a character, I find myself building a Domination enabler, and the builds, overall, fall short because they so narrowly focused on that single aspect. As an inherent, Domination should work inherently, without the need to design the entire character around making it work. Every other archetype's inherent functions naturally. A controller doesn't have to build a specific way to make Containment work. A brute doesn't click a button and pray he/she has sufficient +Recharge and builds enough Fury to re-enable the button before the timer expires. This is the only inherent that isn't inherently usable. And I say that as a +Recharge junkie. Even my mastermind builds have 100% or more +Recharge, sans Hasten, and they have little use for it. Building a dominator tends to skew around building around that one goal, making Domination permanent, and it's boring, detrimental to creativity and stifling of experimentation. I can do so much with any other archetype, because the simple nature of their inherents being inherent, rather than an active power, gives me a world of flexibility. Dominators lack that flexibility. They may have primaries and secondaries which are thematically alike, but they're not actually complementary of one another in play style. There's no real synergy between dominator primaries and secondaries. And Domination has become less an inherent and more a burden, a necessity to build for and around, creating unnecessary restrictions on variation within the archetype. I've played a defender who eschewed her secondary set and used pool melee attacks instead, all the way to 50, post-ED and GDN, just to prove it could be done. I played a TA/A to 50, solo so no-one could accuse me of leaching or power leveling, before the Issue 7 buffs and bug fixes to those sets. I play without travel powers. If I wanted to (and i have been tempted), I could play a petless mastermind to 50, rapidly and with great ease. I'm very, very good with numbers and mechanics, and using what I know to make "impossible" characters work well. But I don't play a dominator. For me not to want to touch something, that's notable. Decouple the primaries from being duplicates of controller primaries, and make all of the powers usable mid-combat, as PBAoEs or critter-targeted AoEs rather than location AoEs, so survivability is more under the player's control. Streamline and focus the secondaries so there's a complementary style of play with the primaries which is encouraged, or at least, made possible, and so you're not leveling up and shaking your head because you have to wait until the next power unlock to get something useful. And make Domination more inherent, less of a defining click power for the archetype and more of a secondary effect like other inherents.

Safety first.

Firbolg in Croatoa standing near payphones - "This item, it speaks to me!" "Ring ring!" "Quiet, you!" Freakshow in Brickstown when a female character aggros them - "Beat it, princess!"

Go big. Level 53 TO.

Random SO, if I recall.

Can't log in to check the in-game description, but the text in Mids' states: "You spray a concentrated torrent of water toward your target that causes High Cold and Smashing damage as well as reducing your target's movement speed. If you have 2 or less Tidal Power, you will gain a stack of Tidal Power. If you have 3 Tidal Power and you activate this power, it will have an enhanced effect causing Water Jet to cast slightly faster and immediately reset the recharge of Water Jet. Water Jet's enhanced effect can be used once every 15 seconds."

My standard approach is to scream incoherently for several minutes. It doesn't help, but your experience may be better than mine.

The Ouroboros portal is right on the tram platform in Echo: Atlas Park, if memory serves.

No description, but in Mids', right-click the relevant power to lock it, then toggle Combo Level 3 while watching the Info panel. It'll display damage, endurance cost, animation time changes, etc. when the combo is active. The Effects panel shows other effects, like the mag 3 stun becoming present in Geyser.

The Mechanics. Also, Mike. Presuming the attacks are coded in the same way as Staff Melee, there should be no requirement beyond having activated the necessary combo level, and no additional restrictions. Again, that's based on the presumption that they recycled the combo code into multiple sets (which was historically their approach, and makes sense from a design perspective). Bear in mind, though, my experience with combos is limited to Staff Melee, which only has two attacks offering different effects when combo level 3 is achieved, and animation times at or above 2 seconds (i include Arcanatime in all of my attack chain calculations) for all but the tier 1 attack (which i don't have), so I can't assemble a sub-5s attack chain to test for you. I can say with absolute certainty that there's no unmentioned, invisible 10s cooldown timer on Staff Melee combos, as I frequently activate CL3 at the 5.3s mark and have never run into a timer or restriction.

Yes. Oil Slick Oil and Oil Slick Target. Oil Slick Target is flagged immune to all effects and has mega-capped Resistance (9999%) to every damage type except Fire and Energy. As @parabola said, Oil Slick Fire, the burn patch, isn't summoned until and unless Oil Slick Target is defeated. Oil Slick Fire is the pseudo-pet with the targeted AoE attack. Since the pseudo-pet doesn't exist until Oil Slick Target is defeated, it can't defeat Oil Slick Target via procs.

Every set IO is potentially worth whatever the highest selling IO of comparable level range happens to be at any given moment. Ignoring the existence of that potential revenue is certainly a choice individual players can make, but it's not something which can be dismissed in an examination of income sources and their relation to any given activity. It's relevant to the overall community, even if it isn't for some players.

Dig up the pre-change recipe sales data. It's going to be scattered among posts, but shouldn't be difficult to collate if you're serious about knowing what the difference is (check the market sub-forum). Take the average value of each rarity tier (uncommon, rare, very rare, etc.) in a recipe category (ranged damage, universal travel, accurate tohit debuff, etc.), multiply it by the average drop rate, then multiply the result by the average number of drops per run shown in @AboveTheChemist's data dump. That will give you an estimated income value of any recipe rarity in a category before the change. Then do the same math with current sales prices to determine the current income value of the same recipes. Compare the pre-change total to the post-change total and you have your answer. It won't be as precise as actual records of each recipe's sale price over the last six months, but it will be accurate enough. It's worth noting, though, that crafted enhancements contribute an order of magnitude more income value in the above data, so it may be better to do the math for crafted enhancements, rather than raw recipes.

That's what I expect as well. Every farmer will have his/her own approach to farming, but that approach will be a routine, and as such, have a generally non-variable run time which should generate an estimable income rate in the same way, so the math will be applicable across the board. Then let's set the average time at 1 hour. Time spent collecting booty after the run is still time spent. 11 minutes and 17 seconds of extra run time per hour to achieve pre-change daily income. Breaking that down further, on a 5 map run, each map required 8 minutes and 12 seconds average time to complete. A single extra map would be sufficient to accomplish the same goal, leaving a few minutes afterward to manage sales. So we now know that "double inf" was functionally ~20% extra inf, and that the additional time required to make up the difference is comparatively minimal, ~11 minutes of additional time per hour spent farming.

The first conclusion we can reach is that the misconception of "double inf*" has been proven to be just that, misconception. Worst case, according to your data, is a ~25% income differential, presuming atrocious drop luck, whereas luckier farmers are experiencing only ~11% less raw income than before the change. ~20% average might sting, but it's a very long way from 50%, and considering the rate of gain, not the catastrophic situation that has been portrayed by some. The second conclusion I can draw is that 3 extra runs would've placed you at the same income you could've gained before the change. I expect a similar situation for all farming approaches, so the time invested is a relevant factor. If you happen to have an average run time for your tests, that would let us know approximately how much extra time farmers have had to invest to compensate for the change. As an example, if your average run time were 30 minutes, then that would equate to an additional 5 minutes and 37.5 seconds of farming every day in order to match your previous income. If your runs were as long as 60 minutes, an additional 11 minutes and 17 seconds daily would make up the difference. Et cetera. The third conclusion is that there's some headroom for some farmers. The ones who vendor or sell everything for minimum price, never craft, etc., can recoup some of the lost 20%. Even using your methodology, @AboveTheChemist, there could be some additional income to be garnered. Crafting every set IO recipe and dedicating even one merit to potentially enhance the value could net a sizable income increase. But that's minutia, and I certainly don't expect you to replicate this test with a new methodology. You've done enough to give us some serious discussion points, and your work is greatly appreciated. ❤️ That's either a heart, or an upside-down bloody scrotum, whichever you like more, and it's all yours. 🙂

Try Grant Invisibility instead of Stealth. Both TA and Archery have fast animation times. None of them are over 2 seconds, most are 1.3 seconds or less. So despite the lack of toggles in either set, they still lead to heavy endurance usage, and with limited slotting availability (due to SOs being used instead of IOs) in conjunction with pool toggles, you're going to need all of the endurance you can scrounge. Cutting out one 0.33/s toggle, Stealth, will help enormously. Grant Invisibility has a high up-front endurance cost, but you can easily recover that on the way to the mission, or the next spawn, and with a duration of 2 minutes, you won't need to worry about burning excess endurance during a fight, or a sudden lapse of mitigation. The +Def is identical, in strength and functionality (half is lost when you engage foes (which does not include using Flash Arrow, that's flagged as a no aggro power and doesn't break Stealth/Invis)), but the perception reduction is almost twice as strong as Stealth, so even if you do land in the middle of a spawn, you won't have delayed aggro as you're high-tailing it out of there (which occurs with all forms of Stealth (pool, IO, Cloaking Device, Superspeed, etc)). With Flash Arrow and Maneuvers from both of you, plus CJ and Grant Invis/Stealth, you'll both be sitting at ~38.5% hit reduction to every type and position (presuming all powers are slotted with 3 SOs for -ToHit or +Def). Some of that, in the Defense portion, will be reduced when you're fighting lieutenants, bosses and +X critters (the more +s, the lower your final Defense value), but double-stacked PGA will definitely take the sting out of anything that does hit you. I don't recommend focusing on the control aspects of TA. You can play the control aspects up, but based on my own experiences (past and present), I suspect you'll realize that you don't need to double Ice Arrow every boss and EMP Arrow every spawn. The double Sleeps from PGA will neuter every spawn, from that point, soft controls (Glue and OSA, and random KB from Explosive) tend to be enough. Especially if you're rolling with a pile of -ToHit and +Def. I ran my TA/A in Issue 5 with a fraction of that projected Defense total, hit checks on Flash Arrow, pernicious bugs in OSA, PGA working entirely differently (one hit check on cast, no persistent patch with a pulsing Sleep or -Dam), and double (or more) the current animation times, and I dumped Ice Arrow on a respec, and almost never used EMP Arrow, when I was in the mid-30s. Today's TA is much more effective, and PGA itself is more mitigation than the entire set had at release, and still better than it had even after several bug fixes and changes to animation times. The change made to PGA, in and of itself, is more vitalizing to the set as a whole, than anything else that was done with any other power in it (except resolving the failure to ignite OSA... that was the most important fix. ever. in any set). With two at your disposal, and the -ToHit and +Def totals you'll be sporting, very little below EB rank will be a threat (robots... damn robots don't like naps...). Even the critters you can't put to Sleep, like robots, aren't going to be hitting you hard after you've debuffed their damage by ~47%, if they hit you at all. Rather than repeat your Force Fields experience, use only enough mitigation (double Flash Arrow, double PGA and one Glue) to open, then debuff their resistance and arrest them until they can't walk upright. It will be much faster, and not unreasonably unsafe. Especially when you acquire OSA (drop Glue from the opening volley, it won't be necessary once OSA is available), and again when you obtain RoA. And remember that Acid has a melee PBAoE radius, 8', so they'll be more effective used on different targets (stack them on bosses, otherwise, spread the pain). Also, Disruption has a 10 target limit, so choose your difficulty setting appropriately.

Double PGA will Sleep bosses. Double EMP Arrow will hold... God. And everyone nearby. Don't try to stack OSA. Double Knockdown will turn into Knockback, and the frequency of OSA's pulses makes that a distinct possibility. Double Glue Arrow won't be necessary unless you're fighting Crey tanks, Warwolves or other critters with significant +Movement. Double Flash Arrow slotted for maximal -ToHit, stacked with double Maneuvers slotted for maximal +Def, brings your mitigation up to ~30.5%. For a natural travel power approach, I recommend slotting Hurdle with 3 Jump SOs. You'll be hopping along at ~49 mph (at level 50). Take Combat Jumping for maneuverability, and a bit more +Def, but don't slot it for +Jump. It only increases height, not speed, and the higher you leap, the slower you actually travel (when using Hurdle as a travel power). Sprint adds nothing to jumping speed, either, and only a minute amount to height (0.5' at level 50). That's the fastest method of movement without taking an actual travel power, using Ninja/Beast Run, or using a temp travel power. When you're more accustomed to bouncing around, you can practice without CJ, if using it violates your definition of Natural. But you really need it if you haven't played like that before. Without CJ, you're incapable of altering your direction until you touch a horizontal surface (even a tiny one, like trim on a building), and you'll find yourself barreling into spawns. Play it safe until you're comfortable with Hurdle. You can try Sprint, but even with +3 SOs, 3 in both Sprint and Swift, you'll be limited to ~45.5 mph. It's an inefficient use of slots, and working with SOs, those 4 extra slots would be better spent elsewhere. Take and use Fistful of Arrows and Explosive Arrow. You're going to take Rain of Arrows, and TA is an AoE set, so make the most of your AoE potential. Put at least 1 Range enhancement in Fistful. 2 would be preferable. The greater the range, the wider the mouth of the cone, and the further you are from being stabbed in the face. With both of you pumping out AoE from Fistful and Explosive, you'll tear things apart quickly, and waiting for RoA won't feel nearly as rough. Skip Stunning Shot. Both of you. It doesn't stack with Ice Arrow (stuns vs holds), and you won't need more control than you have with PGA, Ice, Emp and soft controls like Explosive's chance for KB, Glue's Avoid and OSA's KD. If you have specific questions, ask. I played travel power-less TAs on the original servers for 7 years. And I'm playing more travel power-less characters, and TAs, here.

Before anything, speak to the P2W vendor, revoke the Throwing Knives origin attack and take either Apprentice Charm or Taser Dart. Both of you. If you don't, you'll have to use Blazing Arrow to ignite OSA. That would deprive both of you of your best single-target attacks, and as TA/A characters, that's not a luxury you can afford, even for concept.

What if it meant buttering oneself? Mmm... buttered heroine...

LV-426.

A reward for repetitive clicking, so some people can try to obtain a sense of self-validation by "impressing" others, and other people can flaunt what they have and say, "I have this and you don't, so I'm better than you are." No.

Some of what he's doing isn't as taxing as it appears, if we take his physiology into account. That tank might weigh a few dozen tons, but it weighs a tenth as much to him because he's a heavy-worlder. Still needs more than sheer muscle to lift it, but not as much muscle as a human would require. His pew-pew eye lasers aren't really drawing power from him, they're refocusing incoming IR via a mechanism similar to the tapetum lucidum in various species of animals. But, you're right. Even if that tank "only" weighs a few tons for him, comparatively, it's still too heavy to lift. There has to be something enabling his special abilities. It can't be photosynthesis and complex hydrocarbon chains (sugars and starches). So where does that extra oomph come from, and what does he do with the sunshine his body accumulates? In many species of animals, small clusters of magnetic particles are embedded in specific cellular structures (the human nose, for example). Seemingly unrelated, there are elements which react with sunlight in various ways (photoelectric effect is relevant to this discussion). If we reach a little and assume that kryptonite is a yet-to-be-discovered radioactive element, we can also assume that various "colors" of kryptonite are, in fact, isotopes. One of those isotopes, blue kryptonite, is depicted as providing Superman with significant benefits (makes him stronger, for example). Putting those together, what if Superman's extraordinary capabilities were the result of blue kryptonite particles in his musculature and nervous system, reacting with sunlight, massively enhancing his native strength (resulting from his heavy-worlder anatomy) and granting him other, more peculiar abilities, such as partial gravitic inversion (flight)? Of course, that still doesn't solve the power storage problem. Nor can I hypothesize a reasonable, scientifically acceptable means of such. This is where the comics depart from reality completely... unless kryptonite also has the capability to store energy like elements used in batteries (cadmium, lithium, etc.), but if that were the case, it would be incredibly unstable, prone to explosive release and couldn't exist in nature in more than trace amounts (and those fist-sized pieces depicted in the comics would blow up, Tsar Bomba style, on exposure to sunlight). It also doesn't explain how Superman can be unharmed by radioactive decay, a process which we know to be hazardous, in all forms, to everything. If anyone had nodules of radioactive material in their bodies, they'd be tumors with legs, presuming they lived for more than a few weeks after birth. That's the real conundrum. If we can resolve the energy storage issue, we can explain Superman. I can't. Everything else, I can see being workable within the laws of physics, but not the energy storage. Or, not the energy storage without every form of cancer imaginable, and a tendency to explode.