nihilii

*cries in Armageddon+Fury procced AoE Eagle's Claw* The pain was almost gone, WHY'D YOU HAVE TO REMIND ME

DP/SR is much better than DP/Regen IMHO. Simply because SR is absurdly good on Sentinels.

I think ideally you want */bio/soul, and one of the highest ST damage and ideally energy-dealing damage for the primary. /shield is also a good alternate with its layered survivability covering all and making for a strong base. The big hurdles in soloing "everything": - Ghost Widow's mag100 hold - buffed Lord Recluse, until you can take the towers down. Got to deal enough damage to clear those towers/engineers and survive Recluse. - taking on ~3 AVs at a time in the final LRSF fight; Penelope's unresistable(?) hold - dealing enough DPS for a Goliath War Walker. You likely want a taunt aura, otherwise the buggers consistently walk away and nuke your DPS - dealing enough DPS, having enough defense + energy resistance/regen against +4 Nictus Romulus (if going for +4/x8 ITF; not strictly necessary, but such a standard at this point thanks to Werner 🙂 it's easier to solo a +4/x8 ITF than a STF anyway) The most common answer to these boil down to "deal enough damage to get through it before your luck runs out" (unless you mail yourself insps, at which point your luck can extend more or less indefinitely). If you remove Master requirement from TFs, things also get easier as you can use temp powers. I don't know if Lambda is soloable by a scrapper, unless we count mailed insps. The only recorded success that I can think of was @Dark Bladed on his prenerf TW/Bio using a truckload of mailed T3 reds. Lambda BAB looks easy from the outside, but unless you overpower him with 1500+ DPS it's a different story when you have to manage his jumps and uber resistance at low life with only so many pacifier grenades, on a timer to boot. Heck, even the very first War Walker guarding the elevators can be a hard DPS check, with its heal it's significantly tougher than the Goliath War Walkers in Tin Mage.

I've never been great at TW, only rode the train while it was blatantly overpowered. Still running the old attack chain with old slotting and it still seems to do 600+ DPS. Perhaps @Kanil knows better? I remember he had some thoughts on new TW during the changes.

I'm selfishly happy Kheldians are bad because there is only so much you can do with a Kheldian build. A Peacebringer is going to look like another Peacebringer and a Warshade is going to look like another Warshade, for the most part. Compare that with the average diversity in any AT, with 10+ primaries and 10+ secondaries making for 100+ possible combos and interactions. I wouldn't want for khelds to be so powerful I join a team and see a kheldian everytime, and know that kheldian is going to look and play the same as other khelds I've seen. To an extent, the playerbase congregates around top picks anyway, but even with Blasters which IMHO currently have it the worst with intrabalance, you see much more than just Fire Blast. Plus, playing with forms means not seeing your costume. Kheldians were a fun idea and an interesting part of the lore, and I'm glad the Cryptic devs never shied from experimentation, but I feel history has proven this wasn't the right direction.

You're right on that, mathematically (at least from level 1 to level 20). Damage scale doesn't fully kick in at the low levels. And on top of that our powers are less likely to be fully slotted (even now that SOs are obtainable early on). At level 1, a Brute essentially does 250% of the damage of any other AT. I'm assuming 75 Fury. Then it gradually decreases. Especially as the damage scale of origin powers takes a while to adjust, too. A 75 Fury origin power deals, I think, something like 40-50 damage at level 1? Brutes are also the only AT with access to their full damage cap as soon as level 1. So if you enjoy chomping on insps, you can do truly obscene things with an early Brute. Fury taking care of damage means you can allocate all your slots to Accuracy, End Reduction and Recharge, while other ATs must balance the few slots we get with Damage on top. The Brute early leveling experience is undoubtedly easier than anything else.

Admittedly I haven't played the ITF since the bugfix. But I remember soloing the ITF just fine on Live. Although probably not regularly on +4. But even on +4, I see no reason the problem couldn't be solved through the tactical or the strategical approach. Tactical: don't let romans clump up. Use knockback, repel. Jump away. Aggressively kill them one by one before they're all in melee. Dispatch most of the minions at once with a strong AoE opening. There's options there. Strategical: slot for accuracy and tohit. We complain about power creep, but a large reason of that power creep is builds being increasingly optimized and *greedy*. Shooting for barely 95% chance to hit against undefended +4s. Procs procs procs. A build slotting full sets, with meaty accuracy bonuses, running a mix of Tactics, Kismet, Focused Accuracy, and with Build Up or Aim also taking a full set, is going to be fine most of the time. TBH, I have a feeling even a "greedy" 2021 build would be OK just popping Build Up/Aim and killing minions during those 10 seconds. Focusing on lieutenants/bosses during the ~20s of recharge.

This is key, IMHO. If I were in the devs' shoes, I would make the rewards better somehow. There's a balance point to be found, where rewards increase by X while difficulty increases by a multiple of X. This way you don't penalize players who can't hack it in the harder content, running old content at old difficulties would still be optimal. But at the same time you give a carrot and ensuing satisfaction with running harder contents. But if that is not an option either... I'd tie badges to the hard content. As in, a truckload of badges. Think hundreds of them rather than dozens, for every silly little action you take in that new hard difficult content. No imbalance to the game economy/progression, but something to acknowledge the effort.

I'll happily die on the hill comparing endurance per power is a largely irrelevant metric, if we don't consider damage as well. The speed at which you can drain your endurance bar using powers in a vacuum matters little compared to the speed at which you can defeat things; or, to put it another way, using 5 attacks costing 5 endurance (5 * 5 = 25 endurance spent) each to kill a lieutenant is not better than using 2 attacks costing 12.5 endurance (2 * 12.5 = 25 endurance spent) each to kill that same lieutenant. Most powersets that "feel" light on end turn out to do so because they're light damage. Which, in practice, often makes them end heavier. It takes longer to defeat things -> toggles spend more time "draining" endurance. EM is an even more special case because it has ET and its 0 end cost. There is simply no substitute, EM is the most end efficient powerset right now. If you spam ET on a 4 second enhanced recharge, it doesn't matter how many Total Focus you throw in between. You will end up spending less end than on any other powerset. The impact on end management is even more extreme than a naive analysis based on the above could show. As long as you've got your health in check through other means, ET is basically Brawl. It means you can spend most of your endurance bar with no worry, knowing that the moment you get low, you can fallback on using ET and ET exclusively, to deal decent damage still and be endurance positive no matter what.

I've never ERPed in Pocket D.

Yomo probably has better advice than I could ever give. But as a lover of absolute lowest effort for reward strategies, here's something that has worked for me for the past two years: - buy ATO, either through Super Packs or for 5-7M on the market - convert it to an ATO that currently has less than 10 for sale, even better if less than 5, ideally 0 - list it for 10M. Can push it to 15M if 0 for sale I find it's almost a guarantee you will find buyers, even at those price points. It might take weeks, but they will move eventually. I've even had success cranking my prices to >15M at <10 for sale and >20M at 0. Blaster and Brute are almost always in high demand.

I'll ask for the Shield nerf, then: take DDR away from Active Defense, and stick it in Grant Cover. Pros: - no more need to use AD as much as possible, cutting into animation time - removes a somewhat obscure mechanic to more casual players (let's be honest, many don't even know DDR is a thing) - Grant Cover now gives twice as much DDR to teammates, from ~+17% to ~+38%. This turns the number from something hardly anyone will notice to something that can genuinely cut into enemy debuffing Cons: - less maximum DDR, from 87% to 65% on Tankers, 70% to 53% on punier ATs - removes part of the functionality of AD, may be upsetting to builds who skip Grant Cover. I think the pros would outweigh the cons here; the cons being, even, desirable (one should not skip Grant Cover 😄). It moves Shield towards its special role of team buffer/protector, and away from stepping on SR's toes. Would you all be happy with such a solution, or find it unacceptable?

Edit: on second thought, I can't phrase this diplomatically and I don't see the point in antagonizing people.

Your original choice of a SD/RAD tanker is probably, overall, the most powerful character in the current iteration of CoH. Shield covers all the critical survivability needs: maxHP, defense, defense debuff resistance, resistance, slow resistance, full mez protection, slow resistance. It also shares some of that defense to close teammates through Grant Cover. It lacks a heal. But Rad Melee offers a reliable heal. It lacks endurance management. One can always manage end through amplifiers, recovery serum, heavy end reduction slotting, endurance procs, epics, incarnates. Rad Melee does tremendous DPS if proc slotted. This is very endurance intensive and not necessarily the way you want to go. For a more balanced build, slot Irradiated Ground with 4 damage procs and the 2 -RES procs. If one of these damage procs is the Armageddon purple damage proc, you will see that Irradiated Ground can take down level 54 bosses in a minute or two, without any input on your end. So, you procslot IG, and you're free to do with the rest of the attacks as you wish. Which leaves you ample room to either go defense, balanced, or full offense. The only downside that I can see to this combo (that I'm willing to accept others see, to me it's not truly a downside) is you have to wait until level 28 to get Irradiated Ground. Before that, all you have for AoE is Proton Sweep, which is a poor cone I wouldn't bother with. Personally, I don't see it as a problem. Rad Melee's contamination effect does some work turning your single target attacks into small AoEs, and the average character spends much more time at combat levels 23-50 than at combat levels 1-22 (once exemplared, you keep powers 5 levels above you).

New EM is king of the orangey. ET has the highest damage scale and does full energy damage now, so it's one meaty 4 digits number that is hardly ever resisted. Granted, a combo level 3 Crushing Uppercut critting is also a sight to behold. Watching a chunk of an archvillain's health bar evaporate into nothing. I'd choose EM simply because you get two big hitters that will reliably hit big. + Whirling Hands is a decent AoE now. StJ just has the one, and no AoE to speak of. Both sets basically fill up the need for big bang well, so the performance boost for playing EM is high enough to make that choice appealing.

SR is a trap in that it's incredibly good on Tankers. Bigger HP pool + scaling RES + Tanker ATOs being about RES all scale beautifully. It's good as soon as early game, too. I feel too many players are trapped in old habits from back when SR was only a Scrapper set. Consider this level 12 build: 44.46% melee and ranged defense, 26.1% AoE defense. Think Skulls or Trolls stand a chance against this? Spoiler alert: they don't. You can solo +0/x8 with ease starting from the teens as a SR Tanker, using unslotted attacks and P2W powers (just remember to slot up on Recovery Serums as well). (Also, word of advice... Don't actually slot CJ, even while leveling. You don't even need to pick the power. Instead, get yourself 8 hours of P2W Amplifiers at level 1. It costs 24k influence at that level, and it boosts your ~40%ish defenses to 45%+. By the time your Amplifiers run out, you'll likely have at least Tough for the +3def uniques, and/or CJ, and/or Weave) At high level, SR can be built to reach 90% S/L res when lightly damaged on top of 59% def and capped DDR. That's near invincibility against the most common damage type of the game. Stack a heal on top of that, manage your endurance somehow, and you're golden.

Following what Sancerre said, I'd go Barrier rather than Ageless Radial with /nin. - your native end click gives you much more than Ageless - Barrier's defense acts as buffer against defense debuffs - Barrier's resistance stacks with your own Scrapper /nin is very nice. It's only "limited" by animation times, and the inevitable comparison with Shield who also gets an aggro aura on top.

April 2019: "surely, trying out this City of Heroes private server won't suck up all my time away from work. It's been years, I've moved on. I just need to hop in for nostalgia's sake. Won't play more than a couple hours a day for a week or two."

Tankers got a damage buff from 0.8 base to 0.95 base. So about 18.75% more damage than before. This benefits every Tanker equally. When it comes to Tankers vs Brutes, powersets with native damage buffing tend to be more advantageous on Tankers than powersets with less damage buffing; because relatively, Brutes rely on their own damage buffing with Fury, and so Brutes get less out of damage buffs. Example with numbers. A normal Brute has 0.75 base damage. Enhancements add +95% to that. A Fury bar at 80 adds +160% to that. Brute Total = 0.75 * 3.55 = 2.6625 A normal Tanker has 0.95 base damage. Enhancements add +95% to that. Tanker Total = 0.95 * 1.95 = 1.8525 In this scenario, the Brute does (2.6625 - 1.8525) / 1.8525 = 43% more damage than the Tanker. - Now if we take the poster child for self damage buffing: Super Strength and double-stacked Rage. Brute has 0.75 base, +95% from enhancements, +160% from 80 Fury, +160% from 2x Rage. Brute Total = 0.75 * 5.15 = 3.8625 Tanker has 0.95 base, +95% from enhancements, +160% from 2x Rage. Tanker Total = 0.95 * 3.55 = 3.3725 In that scenario, the Brute does (3.8625 - 3.3725) / 3.3725 = 14.5% more damage than the Tanker. As the difference starts getting that low, some players feel it's a price worth paying for the significantly higher survivability on a Tanker. Some may even feel the extra survivability on a Tanker allows them to focus more intensely on damage output, and end up outdamaging the Brute in a practical setting. Lots of "ifs" and "buts", but bottomline: the more damage buffing in your secondary, the more you can ask yourself the question "should I make this Brute a Tanker instead". Finally, Tankers also have +50% larger AoE radiuses and caps. A +50% larger PBAoE is 2.25x the surface area, so this is another significant advantage in convenience.

Right here ^ is the easy answer to some of the recent... let's say, "enquiries for enlightenment framed in a questionable way". It takes maybe 30 minutes tops to tune up a Fire or Mind Dominator with Power Boost on the Test Server from scratch, and test this out against an AV.

Which makes it pretty cynical the most renowned heroes earned their fame on the marketplace. Capitalism, ho!

Stone/Rad is possibly the sturdiest thing, stacking the Radiation Siphon heal on Stone's absurd mitigation. Previously, the movement penalties were a severe hinderance in incarnate content with autohit damage patches; but nowadays, you can dodge and jump back in with ease thanks to Combat Teleport. Not as good as proper kiting but certainly improved the Stone situation tenfold. Shield/Rad is another strong contender for that extra mobility. Shield can be build to softcap everything with leeway + beefy resistances, potentially hardcapped with some sort of OwtS / Melee Hybrid / Rune of Protection rotation.

Rad/Claws = Tanker all the way. Higher Spin radius and target cap is a thing of beauty. Easy 90% res to most damage types, without Meltdown/Hybrid. Slower recharge / higher damaging Claws power (this is shared with Brutes, Tankers just get the other above neat things on top). Follow Up +DAM works better with Tanker's higher base damage and lower buffed damage than for Brutes. I honestly don't know if this is the most efficient. There are some Claws scrapper builds pushing monster DPS out there. And DPS is king. But... if you're looking for fun? It's hard to top VERY HIGH RESISTANCES and LARGE RADIUS AOEs WITH HIGH TARGET CAP, in my opinion. Both aspects that are very high in fun factor. Watching enemies hit those low digits. Then drop all the minions in one AoE. The large Tanker HP pool also makes all this resistance-building (and the regeneration in Rad powers) even more fun.

Got a new laptop after years of living with outdated hardware. What better way to celebrate than by finally running a Trapdoor test with my fav scrapper? (rad/bio/soul) 4:22 🙂 Can't say I'm surprised. This gal performs great everywhere. But...! I used Hybrid and Judgement liberally, as this is how I play my character normally (and I didn't even think to check for rules). So this isn't comparable to other times ITT. I have to say, I'm not sure how sensible it is to restrict Hybrid and Judgement. The fastest times ITT so far are 4 minutes and above, so one experiences a full Hybrid cycle downtime. And Judgement is a regular tool in our toolbox every 90 seconds... Certainly, I might build some of my characters differently if Judgement wasn't available in regular gameplay. Ignoring Judgement for the purpose of this test might create an artificial gap between heavy AoE builds and light AoE builds, a gap that would be partially filled by Judgement in real gameplay. So I might just be a pain in the butt and post times with Hybrid/Judgement here, much like in the Pylon thread. 😉 But I'll make sure to always mention it. -- Edit: but this got me thinking, how much difference does it make? A LOT! Second try with same character, no Hybrid/Judgement = 5:13. Not being able to instantly wipe most of a group ~3 times significantly changes things, especially with having to chase runners on the edges. And that's on a character fairly well equipped for AoE, what with fully procced Irradiated Ground and Critical Strikes-enabled Atom Smasher and its 10 feet range... I shudder to think about my poor StJ/Bio without Judgement. She relies on a procced out DNA Siphon as her only AoE.

There's some neat tricks tied to the way IG works. Procs proc twice as much as in a regular damage aura. This makes it an excellent candidate for both -RES procs and damage procs. IG patches will still be dropped while you're phased/intangible, damaging enemies in the process. Take that, Longbow Ballistas.