Luminara

Luna in Ouroboros sells top end inspirations for threads. Shards can be converted to threads.

PB and AD aren't inherents. How many times do you have to click Defiance in order to activate T1/T2 attacks through mez? What? None? Well, it would seem that status protection isn't the defining factor for determining that something should have a cast time, wouldn't it. Faintly, but not fully. It's been itching in my mind for me for four years, but it's because of that constant niggling that I started looking at it more closely. Why does it bother me? I've built all of my dominators so well that Domination recharges in ~67s, so I have plenty of leeway for it to activate, but it still gets under my skin. Why? Because it forces the player to watch the UI, to pay attention to the icon, not to the game. And the cast time is the root of that, because it's the cast time that necessitates monitoring the UI. There's no tray with one slot that we can float next to the character's head so we don't have to look at an edge of the screen (yes, i tried a tray set to maximum transparency, and in different configurations, it was still extremely distracting). There's no middle-of-screen warning that Domination is about to expire (not quite as likely to set me off as the tip notification spam did, but it would definitely put me on the warpath sooner or later). There's no chat message, no unique sound at 10s... the only ways the game notifies the player that Domination is about to drop is the tiny blinking icon in the status window, and Domination being recharged, and if you're not staring at one or the other, you have no idea when to give Domination that 1.32s to activate. When I build an attack chain, my goal is to set the game up so I can press keys without having to look at the icons. Press 1, press 2 while 1 is activating, press 3 while 2 is activating, et cetera. The UI is what I use to interface with the game, but it's not the part of the game I want to see. The game is what's happening in the middle of the screen, not at the top, not at the right edge, not on the bottom edge, not on the left edge. Watching my character's animations play. Watching the graphical effects. Watching enemy reactions. Immersing myself in the game. Domination breaks that by forcing my attention away from the center, by focusing my attention on the UI instead of the game. I have to watch the Domination icon so I know when to react to that, rather than watching the Master of Death so I know when to react to him. I have to watch the timer so I know when to interrupt my immersion, rather than watching my characters do their things and enjoying my immersion. Yes, losing Domination because I scrapperlocked irritates me, but that's only my reaction to the problem, not the problem itself. The problem is that the cast time on Domination mandates attention to the UI, not to the game. It's contrary to the design of every other inherent (even Vulnerability, which has a giant fucking reticle that disappears when it expires, immediately informing the player of that expiration without requiring him/her to look at the UI), and it's contrary to the design of the game itself (we're supposed to be looking at our characters and the NPCs to know what's going on, that's why we have graphical effects like shields with downward chevrons to indicate Defense Debuffs and blackish-yellow stars circling for ToHit debuffs). That 1.32s is where the problem hinges. If it weren't there, the dominator archetype would be as immersive as all of the others. But over and over again, no matter how well I build my dominators, I'm playing fucking UI Bingo instead of City of *. The cast time isn't a balance point, it's a design failure, and it needs to be removed.

Domination's recharge time isn't affected by teammates. Dominators receive a Rage bonus when teamed so they can build Domination faster, but the power can't be activated until the recharge time has elapsed, even if the bar is full.

Removing the cast time wouldn't make it an auto power, or remove the ability to select when to activate it. It would still be a click with a 90s duration and 200s recharge time.

Which is balanced by a 90s duration and 200s recharge time.

Powers with cast times can't activate while another power is animating, even if they're set to auto.

Are you implying that Domination's recharge time is balanced by distracting the player from the game? Because that would imply that any power's recharge time could be fairly balanced by having a cat who wants attention, or needing a drink of water, or having to go to the bathroom. And that would be... stupid.

When was the last time a blaster had to pause to activate Defiance? How frequently does a stalker have to interrupt his/her attack chain and wait while Assassination activates? At what time has a tanker had to stop to turn on Gauntlet, or brute Fury? Does Scourge require a break in activity before it's functional? Hell, the only other manually activated inherent in the game is Vulnerability, and that doesn't have a cast time. Set Domination's cast time to 0, like every other archetype's inherent. 1.32s wasted activating Domination every 60-200s isn't balancing the power, it's not giving NPCs a tactical advantage that they can leverage, it's just making the archetype more annoying to play and distracting the player from the game itself, forcing him/her to stare at an icon instead of everything else happening. We build attack chains so we don't have to stare at icons, so we can just press keys and watch the pretty, pretty light show. Watching the UI instead of the game is boring. Losing Domination because we were playing the game is infuriating. Penalizing players for playing is counter-productive and counter-intuitive. So get rid of the cast time. Burn it. It's bad.

That. Tap a number twice, maxed. Also, salvage can be sorted by amount in the salvage window. Bottom right corner.

Put out a bowl of food and some fresh water, make sure there's a clean place for them to go boom-boom, leave something for them to entertain themselves with while you're away. You know, an automated laser pointer, some string hanging from a ceiling fan set on low speed, a crate of grenades, fun stuff that they can play with. They'll be okay for a while

Am not, and I'll fight anyone who says otherwise.

Captress - Dominator (Darkness Control) Haunt (Ice 2).mxd Slightly different approach with this variation. Maneuvers is gone, Combat Teleport is in. Misdirection is out, too, and Masterful Throw back in the build. Those changes free up a couple of slots, which I put into Frozen Armor. Instead of trying to replace the Defense lost when Maneuvers was removed, this leans into the extra Resistance provided by Frozen Armor. You lose about 7% Fire/Cold/Psi Defense, less than 3% Energy/Negative Defense, but gain ~12% Fire Resistance ~37% Cold Resistance and ~8% Smashing/Lethal Defense. I think it's a net gain in mitigation. You're more vulnerable to Slows, but with 200% global +Recharge, you'd have to be ignoring a couple of stacked Snow Storms or something similar for perma-Domination to lapse. It also loses 1.8 Max Endurance, but the endurance consumption is slightly lower (0.8/s versus 0.84/s). The Apocalypse: Acc/Rchg in Explosive Shuriken is also changed to Apocalypse: Damage, which bumps up the proc chance by 9%. More importantly, even if both the empowerment station buff and Offensive Amplifier are lost, the attack is recharging in 3.71s. The animation time for Thunder/Spinning/Trick is 3.696s. The 0.014s difference will be swallowed up by network latency, client response and server response, so the chain will still be perfect under less than optimal conditions. Now, if you want to use Masterful Throw in the chain, you'll have to replace Spinning Kick with Dragon's Tail, and your chain will be Thunder/Dragon's/Trick/Explosive/Masterful. And it'll fold if you don't have both the empowerment station buff and Offensive Amplifier. Move the End/Def IO in Tough over to Frozen Armor, that'll add another ~2.5% Cold Resistance and ~1% Fire Resistance. You could also replace one of the Ribosomes with a Cytoskeleton, for a net gain of ~3% Smashing/Lethal Defense at the cost of ~1.25% Cold Resistance and ~0.75% Fire Resistance. The more I poke this build, the more I like it.

I considered trying that, but Tar Patch has 0.5s pulses, whereas Combat Attrib updates are every... what, 2s? 3s? Even with the occasional lucky overlap when Tar Patch dropped for half a second and the loss of -Res was displayed, it still wouldn't indicate whether or not Tar Patch was properly inheriting caster boosts and buffs. The margin of error caused by that 1.5-2.5s discrepancy is too large to derive a falsifiable result.

Nope. I had it for 29 or 30 respecs, and no matter how hard I tried to make it work, it was just a problem. Everything in /Martial is fast, except Masterful Throw's recharge time. Chaining a bunch of attacks with fast animations and one with a slow recharge time creates a whole lot of headaches. Replacing it with Explosive Shuriken was the best change I've ever made to the build. You can sub it in where Misdirection is, if it's important to you.

I have my first edition copy of Shadowrun right next to me.

The cannibal wants to know if that was a menu or just the daily specials.

Captress - Dominator (Darkness Control) Haunt (Ice).mxd That's the /Ice Mastery build I'm contemplating for my Dark/Martial. It trades soft-capping for reliance on the stun and healing up/capping HP with Hoarfrost. With the +Recharge and +Recovery empowerment station buffs (Mids' doesn't include the +Recovery buff in the Temporary Powers group, and the group can't be edited. i edited the +Perception power on the older database i'm using, adding the +Recharge/Recovery buffs to that, which is why it's in the build), this build pegs 200% +Recharge and 4.24/s recovery. Added Envenomed Blades for the +ToHit, might be better with Caltrops to further restrict enemy movement while Sleet is active. Have to test it, but I'm focused on my Elec/Rad dom right now.

I think everyone will easily work around the increased endurance costs, since almost all endurance management problems are the result of under-slotted click powers, not toggles, and leverage the increased mitigation to blitz through content even faster and safer with less reliance on support and control archetypes. I also think any idea rooted in the concept of taking things away from others for the sole purpose of enriching a few is repugnant.

They did. Toggles were mutually exclusive at launch. But with multiple damage types in each spawn, an overabundance of status effects, graphical or audio cues being little more than animations or flashes of light which were impossible to see in the middle of combat, and an animation system which wasn't designed to support reactive gameplay, toggle mutual exclusivity wasn't viable without forced teaming and specific team compositions, which directly opposed Jack's fundamental vision of the game, so toggle mutual exclusivity was removed.

My Dark/Martial dominator originally started as a nod to Batgirl. The Haunt shades are named Jason and Todd.

CoD says it does, but... it's not verifiable in-game. I spent several minutes monitoring a chat tab, with all of the Pet channels, doing nothing but standing there with Darkest Night active and re-applying Tar Patch every time it recharged (49ish seconds), and the only message (in Pet Combat) was that Tar Patch was used ( Tar Patch: You reduce the running speed and damage resistance of Seneschal with a Tar Patch! ). This character had 45% +Acc and no active +ToHit during the test, and testing was against -1 foes (Portal Corp parking lot), so it wasn't a perfect test, but I spawned Tar Patch six or seven times, a miss roll should have happened at least a few times. A second test with Domination active failed to show the Domination graphic on the Tar Patch pseudo-pet, and I know Domination graphics show on pseudo-pets because I've spend the last few weeks watching the little rainbow bubbles moving around when I was leveling up my Elec/Rad dominator. I did hear the Domination drop sound when Tar Patch expired, so there's at least that evidence that it's properly inheriting caster boosts and buffs... but without hit roll info, there's no way to be certain. Have to agree with the proposal. If Tar Patch's -Res were higher than the alternatives, a hit check would be a sensible balance point. But it isn't, and the hit check whittles down the -Res over time to a lower value. 180s recharge time, 3.3s animation and less -Res? Might as well just rename it Turd Patch and call it done.

captress.mbd This build really only needs Darkest Night in conjunction with the Defense I've accumulated, or Heart of Darkness. Either will neuter spawns. I like to have a lot of knives in the toolbox, though, and more places to squeeze in global +Recharge. No, it's not loaded with procs. I'm too lazy to play Whack-a-Mole with Hasten and Ageless and a bunch of other crap. I play to relax, not to work. The latest version of Mids' is, as usual, rife with database errors. In this case, Darkest Night's not showing a toggle cost (it's 0.37 with that slotting), or the correct -ToHit (it's 19.06%). Ice may be a better APP if you go with Heart instead of soft-capping, but the potential for KB resulting from KD stacking has kept me from trying it. Haunt isn't integral, I mostly use it as a distraction. Like Gremlins, the shades about as dangerous as a cheesecake, and only slightly more durable. That's okay, there's more where they came from. Dumped the dog, couldn't stand the noise. Standard approach is to open with Haunt, toggle on Darkest Night, drop Tar Patch and run in screaming. I'm trying to figure out how to fit the Teleportation pool in so I can Combat Teleport into a spawn, Heart of Darkness, then Tar Patch and start kicking things in the face, but I can't thread the +Recharge needle yet. Still looking. Tried using Fearsome Stare for seven or eight respecs, problem with that is when something runs, it spends an extra half-minute standing in one spot before it starts running again, so it takes even longer to finish runners. Also tried World of Confusion for about a year (the character was modeled after Batgirl/Huntress, and i thought a PBAoE Confuse would be really good for emulating the chaos that the fear of those supers would cause), but the soap bubble was driving me up a wall. Soul Consumption is bad, but 7.5% global +Recharge is good. Carry blues. Or use the Survival Amplifier. Even with the empowerment station +Recovery buff, I go through endurance almost as fast as I go through spawns. That's /Martial Assault, though. Fast animations mean fast endurance burn. Caltrops is just a filler. Replace it with whatever's interesting to you. Hell, with this build, you could throw Envenomed Blades in and have it almost perma with a 50+5 Recharge in the default slot. It doesn't add any appreciable damage, but the ToHit buff might be helpful when you're facing one of those damned all-ghosts CoT spawns, or dealing with Carnies. One of these days, I'll find a way to squeeze the Teleportation pool in and take it to the next level. Just have to figure out how to thread the +Recharge needle.

The cannibal, the apostate, the queen, the elemental, the avatar, the soldier, the shaman, the ensorcelled.

I'm too poor to pay taxes. I can afford KB enhancements, though. You're on Excelsior, don't worry, I'll find you.