ZekeStenzland

Debt works the same way it always has, as far as I know. Half of all xp earned goes toward paying off debt, until it is all paid off. All the rest (or all of it if you have no debt) goes toward leveling. If you use the 2xp booster, or are playing on servers with intrinsic xp boosts (like indomitable), or we’re doing lots of mapserver stuff, you might not have noticed on account of how quickly debt was paid off. Also, patrol xp pays off debt as well, if you had any. As I recall.

What’s actually happening is that people found a way to get outside the base rooms while editing the base. Once there, you can place base items as usual as long as the center point of the item is above or below a room. You can also move your base entry point outside as well so that folks enter your base directly in this much larger space.

Check out Dacy’s base building guides in the base forum. There are step by step videos for how to build outside the base rooms which will give you what you’re looking for.

I rolled.... 60 15 59 stalker dark/rad 80 13 01 warbringer 96 54 84 widow night widow Not excited about warbringer. Just finished getting my night widow to 50 about a month ago. I have a lot of stalkers, but not one with dark melee, or radiation armor. Guess that's the one!

Has it always been just 3 weeks? I thought we had the whole month…

No comments on the outfit. I am aesthetically challenged. Some practical thoughts about ninjitsu vs willpower… Ninjitsu is mostly positional defenses and is relatively easy to softcap. Everything else is a click power, including its status protection. You may find some click powers more skippable than others. Willpower is more mixed mitigation — some defense, resistance, healing and a self rez. Most of it is toggles, but has a couple clicks. It’s a lot harder to softcap, but on the other hand if your defenses go away you still have the other forms of mitigation. Because I usually want ninjitsu’s status protection on auto, I try to avoid pairing it with attack sets that have gimmicks related to chaining attacks within a short window, such as water blast, dual blades, street justice, or titan weapons. YMMV on this. Otherwise I think both sets are fine on a stalker.

I have an Archery/Ninja Sentinel, Eleusis, who is a Rogue, but is really an undercover agent pretending to be his twin brother. He is trying to get deep intel on what Arachnos’ latest plans are, and if possible, trying to stop them. I’ve had the character for a few years and he’s high 30s I think. His Praetorian counterpart is Bone Arrow, an Archery/TacArrow blaster who seems to be a Loyalist, but is secretly feeding intel to the Resistance. He’s only level 8 or so and I just made him this month. Neither one particularly likes the activities they must undertake to maintain their cover, but understand that how personal ethics must sometimes give way to higher concerns.

La la la, I can’t hear you. The Fortuna Mistresses are all female, but the Fortuna Beta Dudes are all male and the Fortuna Alpha Dudebros are all HUGE! You cannot sway my opinion with mere facts!

I do wish you could just start the VEAT characters with the 2 extra sub roles available at level 1 until you (eventually, probably) commit.

I’m pretty sure all the NPC VEATs come in female, male and huge varieties now, although the soldiers are more commonly male/huge and the widows are more commonly female.

Probably not. However, in my defense, I just yesterday got my Night Widow (created in 2022) up to 50 yesterday. I’ll be playing him some for the next week. Also in my queue is leveling my “mace only” Bane Spider. I do enjoy playing my VEATs though.

On the whole, the costume creator is amazing. Not as good as CO, but still good. I still have fond memories of first time running the game, had friends online in game waiting for me… and I lost 1.5 hours in the costume screen. Things I would like to see better… Skin Patterns as a separate thing rather than as part of some costume pieces. Mostly affects legs, but chest and gloves too Better alignment of belts with pants. Can be tough trying to get them to line up Better alignment of chest details with chest pieces. Not all symbols will fit on a tank top and will bleed onto skin Seems like there’s more, but drawing a blank right now.

Looks like the instanced mother ship raid used to be 35-50 only, and is now 1-50, just like the zone event. I assume, like any other (team or league) leader that puts a group together, you're well within your rights to limit who is allowed in the group and who isn't. You're free to limit it to only peacebringers and masterminds, only T4'd level 50s, only villains, or whatever. And the game still allows you to do this. I'm not sure what the problem is. Is it just that you don't want L1-34 people in the raid, but don't want to take responsibility for your choices? Too much of a hassle to check people's level before inviting them?

Yup, you are right. I didn’t read the fine print close enough. The diversity badge is 5 different roles, no AT restrictions. The duplication badge is 4+ of the same AT. It would have been a cool loophole otherwise. Sigh…

So, if you made a team with 2 Warshades and 2 Arachnos Soldiers, they both count as Ranged Damage. They also, between the two of them, cover all 5 roles. Anyone know if you get both role badges in the same run? Still wrapping my head around the idea of two Warshades, but it could happen!

Yep. I agree. Maybe I just run too many itrials where almost everything including the minions are big sacks of HP? I almost never run into mobs that I can just one-shot with Lotus Drops even if a %dam went off. And it's just so glorious to run into a group of mobs, Smoke Flash >> Lotus Drops >> Inferno for about 975 damage at -50% damRes if all the procs go off. I dunno. At least the %-damRes procs I'm using now (one of each) aren't needed for set bonuses and I could easily unslot them for %dam and see if there's a noticeable difference.

I graciously tip my hat towards your superior testing methodology! Still, I'll have you know I spent well over 5 minutes -- nay, over 10 minutes! -- obliterating arresting hellions and prisoners and combing my combat logs for information. The idea of me being wrong, on the internet, at such a loud volume, after such extensive testing should have been inconceivable! I reserve the right to be grumpy that there's a secret additional to hit check for procs though.

I ran around attacking single hellions and prisoners with fireball (positron's blast %dam + annihilation %-res) and lotus drops (achilles heel %-res and fury of the gladiator %-res), watching my combat log. The damage was the same, regardless of whether Achilles Heel procced or not. So it looks like the instant attack damage does not gain the benefit of lowered damage resistance. Later damage (the fire dot of fireball on prisoners) does benefit. I see rolls to hit for the attack. I see 1 notice each time the posi %dam proc goes off. I see 6 notices each time one of the %-res procs goes off. For lotus drops, I see either 0, 6, or 12 notices in the log. At no point is a "to hit roll" mentioned for any of the procs. AFAICT, if the attack hits and the proc goes off, then the proc hits as well. This might only apply to procs in attacks. Not sure if there's a to hit roll for abilities that are autohit for some aspects and have a tohit roll for others. IMO, this just seems like an unrealistic analysis. All you need to do to capitalize on %-res is attack in the 10sec window. That's it. It's no different than capitalizing on Aim or Build Up. Just like for %dam procs, the %-res proc does not appear to need a separate to hit roll. So items #1 & #2 are just as much drawbacks for %dam as they are for %-res. What you want to compare is how much extra damage you expect on average to get from the %damage proc vs how much extra damage you expect on average while the %-res proc is up. That's it. I'm a fire/ninja blaster. If I swap out Achilles Heel on Lotus Drops for the Lady Grey %dam proc, Mids says my damage should go from ~217 to ~252. On average. The 35pt difference means the proc is going off about 50% of the time. Sweet! Of course, if I'd had Achilles Heel in there instead, also going off about 50% of the time, how much bonus damage should I expect? Well, in 10seconds, I can reasonably expect to dish out maybe 2000 damage? 20% extra on 2000 damage from the -damRes is about 400 damage, take off 50% because the proc doesn't go off all the time, so... I can reasonably expect the Achilles Heel to give me ~200 pts extra damage vs Positrons Blast ~35 pts extra damage. As for #3, yep, they do have to be within 10secs. Unless I'm at -40% recharge because Lady Winter's unresistable slows have everything including brawl, kick, and ghost slaying axe on cooldown, finding attacks to throw in that 10sec window is not an issue. Yeah, under the 30sec malta stun I do not have a seamless T1/T2 attack chain. Not something I worry about. As for #4, meh. Between enhancements, set bonuses, kismet, tactics, etc, I normally run at 95% chance to hit unless I'm fighting piles of Ring Mistresses, Death Mages, and Dark Servants. That's what range is for. As for #5... %-damRes doesn't need to be applied continuously. If it falls off, it's no big deal. It's probably better if you aren't keeping it up continuously, tbh. If you're trying to keep it up all the time, that means you're attempting to proc it again while the debuff is still up. If you do that, it means you didn't gain the full benefit of the previous -damRes. There's lots of room for nuance and edge cases here. Depending on the exact mob you're fighting slotting a 50dam IO is a better choice than either, or moving that slot to another power is better. The breakpoints change if you're using a VR %dam -- more PPM and more damage. Since the debuff updates when it procs by anyone, there's less value if you're playing on a team where lots of other people have slotted it as well. But if you're on a team, you get to include the bonus damage from other players as to whether it was worth it. You won't see much benefit if you proc Achilles Heel and then spend the next 10 seconds on healing aura, putting up force fields, clicking glowies, resting, or /em boombox. But my quick, off the cuff, YMMV opinion is that yes, slotting one Achilles Heel is not likely to be a dps loss. I haven't really looked into other -damRes powers, like Weaken Resolve or Surveillance.

City of Data has all the actual technical details to pretty much every power, enhancement and effect in the game. You should check it out. See the Tools forum for a direct link to it. And… Duration is 10 seconds CoD doesn’t say. Although powers that deal delayed damage during the 10s window would be definitely be affected.

Sorry, don’t have a dance dance revolution pad. Apropos of nothing: anyone know how to connect a Samba de Amigo maracas controller to a PC?

It’s not unusual for me to tell someone I like their name or their bio. Alas, I have the fashion sense of a … well, software developer. Plus it’s often hard to see the costume under all the stealth, floaty geoids, etc. But I’ll see what I can do. I’ll try not to become an accessory to a fashion crime.

Well, it’s not like they’re gonna see the word “Stalker” until after the Assassin Strike goes off…

While I agree that marketing, generous SGs and sugar alts are useful, I’m going to take a slightly different approach. Back in the day, before IOs were a thing, when dinosaurs roamed Atlas Park, keeping your character slotted was kind of challenging. My strategy was to be kitted out in TOs no later than L12, in DOs no later than L22, and SOs no later than L32. That was roughly the curve where income matched upgrade expenses. Where things are easier now is that you additionally get salvage and recipes that didn’t used to drop. You can sell those on the AH for extra cash. Merits are also now a thing that you can convert to something else and sell on AH. See the marketing guides others have posted. I think some things are working against you now. You’re encouraged to get SOs now at L10. They are so much more expensive than TOs. Also (haven’t verified this yet) my gut tells me it’s far more expensive to use The Convenient Enhancement Upgrade Button every level than it is to just upgrade manually every five levels. Additionally, the +50% and +100% xp bonuses on some servers means you are leveling faster — and therefore your gearing costs are going up faster. But you aren’t getting similarly increased inf and drops. So you’re relatively worse off than someone on a +0% xp server. So, your original idea of turning off xp in order to get inf is great. But I don’t think farming zone mobs is the way to go. I’d do mission arcs and the like. Not only do you get merit rewards, but you get bonus drops for mission completion. I turn off xp all the time for my own nefarious purposes. It’s not a big deal. Assuming you’re blue side, when you look at all the more well-known things to do from say 1-15, there’s… DFB up to 4 times for badges and buffs Habashy >> Thierry in AP Twinshot’s 3 arcs at 5, 10, 15 3 safeguard missions and the radio missions to unlock each of them Shauna Stockwell >> Eagle Eye in KR 4 Hollows mission arcs Task Forces Posi1&2 and Synapse That’s more than enough content there to take 3 or 4 characters from 1-15, let alone one. (You might need to check the wiki so you don’t outlevel a contact or mission.) On my latest toon, I started Twinshot’s arc at L6. When I hit L7, I turned off xp and finished the arc. Turned xp back on, ran a Hollows arc until I hit L8, xp off, finished the arc. Etc. Had more than enough inf to kit myself out in glorious DOs early on. It’s a strategy that works. So anyway, those are my thoughts on old school ways of how you can afford to kit out a starting character from nothing. There might be other reasons you’re not as effective as you would like to be (wrong powers, wrong slotting choices, mismatch between how you’ve built the toon vs how you play him, etc), but a build forum would be a better place to discuss that probably.

I knew the ambush was triggered by getting close to the door, and always tried to be very careful clearing the spawns nearby. Then a couple months ago I ran with someone who suggested clearing the spawns before rescuing the 4th hero. So much easier! Except when running with folks who can’t be bothered to listen to team chat 😜

I’m guessing I run about 70% blue, 25% red, 5% gold. But do I feel like rolling a new toon? That’s the question… Last weekend I put about 15 toons on the chopping block to make room for more. But I’m not sure I’m ready for new guys yet. We’ll see…